Among the many ship models on display at London’s Imperial War Museum is that of the oil tanker, San Demetrio. The model is one of several constructed for the Ealing Studios wartime propaganda picture San Demetrio London, released in 1943. The film tells the story of a tanker abandoned by her crew in the mid-Atlantic after being shelled by the German pocket battleship Admiral Sheer during the raider’s attack on convoy HX84 on 5th November 1940. After being adrift at sea for many hours, the crew of one of the tanker’s lifeboats discover the San Demetrio still afloat. The crew manage to re-board their ship, where they have to battle fire and fumes, leaks, damaged machinery, physical injuries, and rough seas in order to steer her back safely to port. The film’s closing credits state that the story is ‘based on fact’, and that most of its characters are ‘portrayed from life.’ This essay explores the story of the San Demetrio from a broader context and assesses how closely the film mirrored real-life events.
The film’s title indicates the ship name and its registered home port. The San Demetrio was a Clyde-built ship, having been launched at the Blythswood Ship Building Company yard at Scotstoun on 11th October 1938. Attentive audiences may have spotted the name of the company for which this ship had been built in the opening credits. The Eagle Oil and Shipping Company (EOSC) was a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. The company had been founded in 1912 by British industrialist Weetman Pearson in order to transport oil products between the Gulf of Mexico and the UK. All of the company’s tankers carried the Hispanicized names of Christian saints. The San Demetrio was named after Saint Demetrious of Thessaloniki, a 4th century Christian martyr ‘run through with spears’ during the persecutions carried out by Roman Emperor Galerius.
The San Demetrio belonged to a class of 8,000-ton diesel-powered tankers constructed for the company at various UK yards in the late 1930s. Outwardly, these ships followed the standard tanker design of the era; the machinery being located aft and the navigating house and officer quarters amidships. A raised gangway over the oil-storage holds linked these two sections of the superstructure with a raised forecastle. As of 1935, there were roughly 9 million tons of tanker vessels in commission worldwide, six times the tonnage of 20 years earlier, reflecting oil’s increasing importance to the global economy.
The EOSC had lost several of its ships to enemy action during the Great War. By the time San Demetrio put to sea on 9th September 1940, two more company tankers had already been sunk; the San Calisto and San Tiburcio striking mines in the Thames Estuary and Moray Firth respectively. Even in peacetime, transporting oil at sea was a dangerous endeavour, as explained in a pre-war shipping magazine:
‘Gasoline, petrol, or the other highly volatile derivatives of crude oil comprise the most difficult and dangerous cargoes of all. They are explosive, and a fire in a petrol-carrying ship is fatal. Even when a tank has been pumped dry and the air in it has been changed, there is the ever-present danger of a lurking gas pocket.’ (Shipping Wonders of the World, pt. 23, 14th July 1936)
Despite this combustible cargo, San Demetrio was an armed vessel. As one of Britain’s 3,400 Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships (DEMS), she carried a 4.7-inch gun at her stern for anti-submarine purposes and two smaller calibre weapons for defence against air attack. Gunners had to be especially trained or recruited, a fact alluded to in an early scene in the Ealing film where the captain reminds his two gunnery-schooled seamen that it will be up to them to save the ship and crew, and, should they ‘run into any trouble’, the captain himself. In fact, a merchant ship’s greatest defence during the Battle of the Atlantic, as events would prove, was to sail as part of a convoy and to run away from any potential surface engagement.
The San Demetrio’s place of departure is not clearly indicated in the film, although a pigeon that accidentally comes aboard off Southend suggests it was London.[1] Her destination, however, is signalled with a geographic subtitle; Galveston, Texas. It was here that she was loaded with 11,000 tons of aviation fuel vital for RAF operations during ‘The Battle of Britain’. Also in Galveston, Captain Waite recruited two more crew members, one of them a naturalised American named Oswald Preston (played by Canadian actor Robert Beatty). As is made clear in the film, Americans were prohibited from serving on belligerent ships, but being shorthanded, the tanker captain accepted Preston’s claim that he was a Canadian, even though his comrades mockingly named him ‘Yank’.
For the return voyage to Avonmouth, the San Demetrio joined Convoy HX84. The majority of vessels in this convoy had departed Halifax on 28th October. The San Demetrio was among several ships to have assembled at Bermuda (BHX84) before merging with the larger group in the North Atlantic. As merged, Convoy HX84 totalled 38 merchant ships. These were escorted by a pair of vintage US Navy destroyers then operated by the Royal Canadian Navy, the Columbia and St Francis, and the 14,000-ton Armed Merchant Cruiser (AMC) HMS Jervis Bay; a former White Star passenger liner armed with seven six-inch guns. Collectively, these ships offered very limited protection from German U-boat ‘wolf-packs’ and surface raiders. A year earlier, another AMC HMS Rawalpindi had been sunk in only 40 minutes after running into the German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, earning the type the epithet ‘Admiralty-Made Coffins’.
In the Ealing film, an officer on the bridge of the Jervis Bay jokes to his captain that there’ll be ‘no fireworks this year’ as the convoy travels east in the afternoon of 5th November. Unbeknown to all, the convoy was being stalked by the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Sheer. This powerful raider had broken out into the Atlantic without detection by British intelligence six days earlier. Having located the convoy through radio intercepts and using her Arado Ar 196 scout plane, the Sheer moved in for the kill.
The courageous actions of the Jervis Bay, like those of the Rawalpindi, have become part of Royal Navy folklore. Despite being hopelessly out-gunned and out of range, the AMC immediately sought to engage the raider, steering directly towards the enemy, while ordering the rest of the convoy to ‘scatter’. The advancing Jervis Bay was straddled by the Sheer’s 11-inch guns with her fifth salvo, and in a matter of only 22 minutes was reduced to a burning wreck. In the film, the officers and crew of the San Demetrio are shown watching the final seconds of the Jervis Bay, and commending the bravery of her crew. This seems an unlikely scenario, although the AMC’s destruction was evidently witnessed by some of those aboard the Swedish merchantman Stureholm, which later returned to pick up 60 survivors, a further 200 of her crew having perished.
[1] The establishing shots, which show Clydebank’s distinctive ‘Titan’ crane, falsely suggest it had departed from the Clyde.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 