Raising The Memory Of The SS Leopoldville

By Nancy K. Crevier

“Follow me and you will be saved.” Pfc Warren Pinckney, 19 years old, heard the voice, followed it, and was saved.

He is alive today to tell the story of a harrowing Christmas Eve 65 years ago, when cold, afraid, and in danger of being left behind on a sinking ship, he heeded a voice in the darkness and leaped to safety between two ships bouncing on ice cold waves in the English Channel.

“I don’t know to this day if it was someone on ship, or if it was an angel. I think it was an angel. Another minute longer and I would have missed the ship pulling away and landed in the water. I landed on the tail end of the ship, kind of hard. A British sailor took me below deck and gave me a cup of tea and a cigarette. That was the first time I ever smoked, ever,” recalled the Sandy Hook World War II decorated veteran.

More than 2,200 troops were on board the SS Leopoldville December 24, 1944, headed for port in Cherbourg, France, on their way to relieve troops struggling in what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. By the time dawn would break on Christmas Day, 800 of the young Army men would be dead, victims of a German submarine torpedo attack or frozen to death in the brutal winter waters of the channel.

A member of the 66th Infantry Division, 264th Regiment, Company B, Warren Pinckney was a mortar gunner in the US Army during World War II. At age 18 he had signed up for the Army Specialized Training Program, an accelerated college program for which he qualified, in hopes of earning his engineering degree. Following basic training he was sent to the University of Missouri to study, but the program was shut down when all Army personnel were pulled into the infantry to assist the war effort. By Thanksgiving of 1944, the young New Yorker was stationed in England awaiting orders. The order to move out came on Christmas Eve as holiday festivities were underway.

“It was mass confusion the day of loading the Leopoldville,” said Mr Pinckney. “First the wrong unit was loaded on board, then unloaded, then our 66th Division was finally loaded.” It was just the beginning of a series of what would become fatal mistakes for the men on the SS Leopoldville.

The Belgian crew gave no instructions to any of the soldiers as they got underway. “There were no drills, and not enough life preservers for everyone. My company ended up in the hold, more like a storage compartment, in the bottom of the ship. There was just this one wooden staircase leading down into it,” Mr Pinckney said.

To the young men of the 66th Division, this was merely another uncomfortable Army maneuver. They were unafraid, even though they knew that there had been U boats (German submarines) in the English Channel. Plus, they were being escorted by four destroyers from the British Navy.

What they did not know was that the Germans had newer submarine technology, the snorkel tool, enabling the underwater boat to stay submerged and undetected for longer periods of time. Nor did they know that no air support followed them or that in the port of Cherbourg, where they were headed, both American and French troops were caught up in Christmas celebrations that took them away from their posts.

Panic In The Hold

The German torpedo hit the SS Leopoldville just five miles from shore, smashing into the compartment adjacent to the one in which Warren Pinckney and some of his buddies were traveling. “All of the lights went out, the ship was shaking, our hammocks and our equipment was falling all over onto the floor. We didn’t know what happened. We thought maybe a mine,” he said. Chaos erupted. “There was a panic. Everyone was running to that one staircase.”

He could have died below decks had not one of the soldiers begun singing “Silent Night,” said Mr Pinckney. “Everyone joined in and it quieted down. We were able to move in an orderly fashion, singing, up the staircase.”

That calm did not last long once the men were on deck, though. Word went out that the ship had taken a torpedo. They watched in dismay as the Belgian crew members with all of their belongings lowered the life boats and departed, leaving everyone else behind. Some of the soldiers tried to lower the remaining life rafts, but the boats were too tangled, too few, and the men too inexperienced to do so.

“Now we were really scared. We were all praying,” Mr Pinckney said.

Meanwhile, one of the Leopoldville’s escort ships, the British destroyer Brilliant, began tracking the U boat, not realizing that the Leopoldville had been torpedoed. Later Mr Pinckney found out, the commander of the Brilliant had not even been told that the Leopoldville carried troops. “He thought we were just a cargo ship,” said Mr Pinckney.

Failing to overtake the U boat, the Brilliant returned to the area and through a code of blinking lights, signaled across the waves for the Leopoldville to drop anchor — another deadly mistake. Had tugboats on shore been alerted and gone out to the crippled ship, they would not have been able to move the anchored boat. With no power, the Leopoldville was unable to raise the anchor.

Transmissions to the American Navy and Coast Guard were delayed. Once the commander of the Brilliant realized the situation, a coded transmission was sent to the English base, which had to pass on the communication to the American base in England, which then transmitted the communication back to France to the American Navy and Coast Guard.

It was more than an hour, estimated Mr Pinckney, before the Brilliant was able to sidle up somewhat to the listing Leopoldville and begin taking men off. “I was standing back from the railing. It was dark out. They put cables between the ships, but with the waves rocking the ships, they were smashing into each other and pulling back and forth. Guys had to judge when to jump between the ships. I saw guys crushed or falling into the water when they misjudged the jump. I got down on my knees and prayed,” Mr Pinckney said.

It was then that he heard the voice, rushed to the railing, and leaped as the Brilliant pulled away.

On shore, fishermen and troops finally alerted to the disaster began to send out boats, but too much time had passed. Many of the young soldiers who had landed in the water had perished from the cold; others were trapped on board with no way to escape flooded compartments. Too few boats were on hand to assist the remaining soldiers. The SS Leopoldville cracked in half and sank to the bottom of the English Channel.

The survivors of the sinking were given shelter by the troops stationed in Cherbourg, and after the initial days of retrieving bodies and identifying who they could, what remained of the division was gathered and eventually sent down to assist in protecting the coast of France near St Nazaire. Mr Pinckney fought as a gunner there until the end of the war in Europe in April 1945. It was then that injuries he had sustained in the leap from the Leopoldville to the Brilliant flared up and he was shipped out, operated upon in England on VE-Day, and then flown to a hospital in Massachusetts to recover.

Details Quickly Classified

There was little talk about what had happened on the Leopoldville, and unlike many other survivors, Mr Pinckney said that he was never actually told not to talk about the horrific experience. “But right after, I was just taking one day at a time and worried about who was shooting at me. We were all just thankful to be alive. We knew a lot of guys had died [in the sinking of the Leopoldville]; I had seen them die, but we didn’t know how many,” he said.

The sinking of the SS Leopoldville was considered by both the American and British armed forces to be the culmination of an embarrassing number of errors. Under orders from commanders as high up as General Dwight Eisenhower, it was decided that the event would remain classified information. Nor did the commanders want the Germans to know the damage that had been inflicted by the attack, said Mr Pinckney. Officers interviewed for a History Channel special about the Leopoldville disaster expressed that they were told explicitly to not speak of the event. Families who sought answers to the question of what had killed their husbands and sons were politely told next to nothing.

In retrospect, Mr Pinckney does not find it highly unusual that the sinking of the ship was classified and that the families of those who died were merely told that the men were missing or killed in action. A few families received sketchy information about heroic acts performed at the time of the accident, but the extent of the disaster was not made clear.

 “Everything was censored then. We didn’t question it,” Mr Pinckney said. Following his release from the hospital, he said, he even told his experience to news reporters at a hotel in New York City to which veterans had been invited. “I mentioned the Leopoldville, but it never came out in the papers,” said Mr Pinckney. “It didn’t surprise me that there were so many who didn’t know [about the accident]. There were a lot of disasters during the war.”

People back then were not as apt to pursue what appeared to be a cover-up, he said, nor was it as easy then to do so. Families were more accepting of bad news with few details. Only once after he was released from the service was he contacted for information about the disaster. The sister of a buddy who had died aboard the Leopoldville reached out to him for more information. “She wasn’t angry with the government, I don’t think. She was just happy to talk to me, to find out what had happened to her brother,” Mr Pinckney said.

For other families, it was more than 50 years before the British declassified the documents about the Leopoldville event, and they found out the sad series of events that led to so many deaths.

Mr Pinckney eventually earned his engineering degree from Pratt in Brooklyn and had a successful career, and a happy family life with his wife, Sheila, and their two sons, Dave and Bob. “You kind of put it all behind you,” he said of his war experiences. But the sinking of the Leopoldville remains vivid to him still. “I break down every Christmas Eve, especially when I hear ‘Silent Night’ being sung,” said Mr Pinckney. “If it hadn’t been for that song, I never would have gotten out of [the hold]. I think of so many of my friends who went down with the ship.”

In 1984, Dr Clive Cussler, a bestselling author and founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and his crew identified the coordinates of the resting spot of the SS Leopoldville in the English Channel, according to his article “North Sea and the English Channel Hunt” at numa.net. His novel Cyclops is dedicated to the men of the SS Leopoldville who lost their lives that Christmas Eve, reading in part, “Forgotten by many, remembered by few.”

Warren Pinckney is one who remembers. And his story, he believes, will ensure that the 800 young men are not forgotten.

In 1997, the 66th Infantry Division Monument was erected at Fort Benning, Ga., in honor of the men of the SS Leopoldville. A second memorial was erected in Veterans Memorial Park in Titusville, Fla., in 2005.