The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 143: Rude Awakenings

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Some said he was cursed, others said he was blessed, but everyone agreed--he was the luckiest kraut in the navy.

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May 26, 1941. Oscar was napping when the torpedo slammed into the side of his ship. It was a rude awakening. The mighty Bismarck, the crown jewel of Hitler's Kriegsmarine, groaned and shuddered, sending Oscar flying from his birth and scrambling for the relative safety of the upper decks. This can't be happening, his crewman yelled. They said our ship was a little bit. unsinkable. The evidence suggested otherwise. The torpedo had disabled Bismarck's rudder,

and now the mighty warship could do nothing but turn in a giant, lumbering circle as half the British Royal Navy steamed in for the kill. The shelling was relentless, and shortly before midnight the captain radioed German command, Bismarck, unmaneuverable. We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Fuhrer. The battle raged through the night, and by morning, the Bismarck had been hit over a thousand times. Now, she was filling with water and listing badly to port. Her gun turrets were gone, and her superstructure was reduced to scrap as fires burned up and down the oil-soaked deck. Oscar looked around and saw hundreds of panicked crewmen abandoning ship as black smoke billowed around them.

They were dead in the water, literally. A rather obvious fact made all the more so when a massive explosion below decks blew hundreds of Germans high into the gray sky, dropping them into the frigid North Atlantic. It was a kind of hell that Oscar had never imagined. All around him, terrified crewman bobbed to the surface, screaming for help. Diesel fuel spewed from the wreckage into the sea and caught fire all around him. Perhaps the Royal Navy would take pity and pluck them from the burning ocean. Then again, perhaps not. Just a few days earlier, in the Straits of Denmark, the Bismarck had sunk the HMS hood,

killing 1,400 British sailors in similar fashion. This was payback, and Oscar had no hope of rescue, as he watched his mighty, ship slowly slip beneath the oily surface. Nearly 2,200 Germans died that day, most of whom were left to drown. With no life preserver, Oscar would have surely been among them, but he got lucky. He found a board large enough to support his weight, scrambled on top and held on for dear life. An hour later, a sharp-eyed lookout on the HMS Cossack spotted him bobbing around in heavy seas. And then, for reasons that Oscar never discussed or tried to explain.

He was rescued, rescued by a pitiless enemy who for some reason chose to take pity on him and hauled him aboard. And just like that, Oscar became a German prisoner of war. He was terrified, understandably, spoke no English, and was utterly at the mercy of his captors. The Brits, however, were inexplicably kind. Not only did they save his life, they afforded him all the courtesies of the Geneva Convention, and then some. In fact, after a brief meeting with the captain, Oscar was given a hot meal and a comfortable birth. He's the luckiest damn crowd in the German Navy, the captain said. Maybe his luck will rub off on us.

For the next five months, it did. From his new surroundings, Oscar watched the war unfold from the British people. perspective. He was aboard the Cossack as they escorted supply ships on their deadly journey across the North Atlantic. He saw the dread on the sailors' faces as torpedoes from German U-boats were fired in their direction, all of which missed their mark, some by a hair's breadth. As the weeks and months went by, the Brits began to see their prisoner as a genuine good luck charm. As such, this P.O.W was allowed to wander the ship with very little supervision. A very lucky kraut, indeed.

October 23rd, 1941, Oscar was napping when the torpedo slammed into the side of the ship. It was a rude awakening. He leapt from his birth and joined the crush of British sailors who frantically scrambled for the relative safety of the upper decks, praying for rescue as their ship fell apart beneath them. There were 190 men aboard the Cossack. Only 32 survived the explosion.

Oscar was among them. Once again, he was found clinging to a piece of floating debris and brought to Gibraltar by another British warship called the Legion, where he would have been imprisoned, or worse, if not for the deep and abiding superstition of British semen. In Gibraltar, the Legion's commander introduced Oscar as the only German to survive shipwrecks on both sides of the war, at which point the captain of the HMS Ark Royal, an aircraft carrier that helped sink the Bismarck six months earlier, eagerly welcomed him aboard.

Perhaps this unsinkable kraut will bring us some luck, he said. Did the captain of the Ark Royal wonder if Oscar's knack for surviving torpedo attacks was in any way offset by his apparent knack for attracting them? Did he ruminate at all on the dichotomy of superstition, the fickle finger of fate, the eternal rotation of Fortuna's wheel? Who knows? All we know for sure is that 1,488 British sailors were on board the Ark Royal, and none of them wanted to die at sea. November 13, 1941. Oscar was napping when the torpedo slammed into the side of his ship. It was a rude awakening. He leapt from his birth and joined hundreds of British sailors who scrambled for the relative safety of the upper decks as the Ark Royal headed for Davy Jones's locker. Miraculously, though, just one sailor died in the sinking.

The rest were rescued, including Oscar, who was once again found clinging desperately to a piece of wreckage. records describe the German as, quote, angry, but quite unharmed. After that, the Brits gave Oscar a new name, unsinkable Sam, though his seafaring days were finished. He never returned to Germany, living out the rest of his long life in Ireland, at the Belfast home for sailors, where he enjoyed a long series of extended naps with no more rude awakenings. Today, his contribution to the war is memorialized in London's National Maritime Museum. There, you'll find his portrait hanging on the wall, next to other famous war heroes,

along with a black and white photo of the luckiest crowd in the Navy, a black and white photo of a black and white face, a photo in the Royal Archives, accompanied by a footnote that reads as follows. Oscar, the Bismarck's cat. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. So the crowd was a cat. See what I did there? Did I fool you? Many people on my Facebook page say, look, that wasn't, that wasn't fair. You cheated. You told us he was a soldier, but did I? Listen to it again, and I dare say you will find that you simply assumed the Kraut was a German soldier. That's the fun of these stories. We call it the sixth sense test. They have to pass that test, and I try hard to make sure all of them do. Sometimes, though, it takes a second listen to confirm.

Feel free to listen twice or thrice, if you like, and feel free to stop by my Facebook page any old time and suggest a topic for the podcast. That's where most of my ideas. has come from. That's where this one came from. In fact, so much obliged for that. Thank you to Chuck Klaus Meyer for keeping me on the rails, producing the podcast. Jade Estrada for doing the dirty job of all the necessary paperwork that surrounds this thing. Isaac Olson for recording me over at the incomparable one union studios in San Francisco. I'll be back next week with another one. Till then, Avita Zane.