Merchant Naval Seaman Christopher Tulitt

	Joining the Merchant Navy - the sinking of the City of Athens.
	This page: the sinking of the City of Canton and audio clip.
	The sinking of the City of Adelaide and inventory.

TO PRINT THIS ARTICLE ... ... click on print-friendly pdf which opens in a new tab/window. To open PDFs you will need Acrobat Reader. Most computers will already have the Reader but if not there is a free download here

Chris and the crew returned to Liverpool on November and he waited at home until April 1943 before joining the City of Canton at Birkenhead. The previous month the family had suffered the loss of Chris' cousin Gordon, a Midshipman in the Royal Navy, when his ship, HMS Harvester as part of a North Atlantic convoy, rammed a U-boat and was then torpedoed. Having arrived in South Africa, Chris' eventful Merchant Navy career was about to take another dramatic turn:

We left Beira bound north for Mombassa with a few potatoes as cargo. At 1.00am on the 16^th July I was turned in when there was a great explosion which shot me out of my bunk and onto the deck. I grabbed my life jacket and made for my boat station below the bridge on the starboard side. The moon was out and the sea was rough. The torpedo had hit the engine room stockhole and the ship was obviously going to sink.

We waited for the ship to lose way in the water and then started to abandon ship. We lowered our lifeboat into the water but when I got down into it I realised the bung had not been shipped and the lifeboat was rapidly filling with water. I managed to find the bung and ship it but just then a second torpedo hit the ship on the port side and our lifeboat surged forward to a point under one of the life rafts secured to the foremast shrouds. The torpedo explosion must have loosened the raft as it came crashing down on to our lifeboat and I took one look at the life raft on its way down and dived over the side. I swam away from the ship and watched fascinated in the moonlight as the ship broke her back. The stem and the stern met in mid-air and she slipped quietly under the waves. I swam around for a little while in the relatively warm water until I was found by the Second Mate's motor lifeboat and hauled out of the sea by the seat of my pyjama trousers, which disappeared in the process. It later transpired that the Captain and the Storekeeper climbed from the damaged lifeboat on to the life raft and were to drift for six days before being picked up by the French Cruiser Suffren. They were in poor condition having had very little water or food on the raft although were recovering well when we went to see them later in hospital in Durban. Meanwhile the lifeboats were attempting to sort themselves out and pick up those of us who had abandoned the damaged lifeboat. Inevitably the lifeboats got separated in the rough sea.

Christopher Tulitt Audio Clip:
The sinking of the City of Canton in the Mozambique Channel in July 1943

Audio Clip Requires Real Player - free download here

Transcript of Audio Clip

Well I was turned in, because the torpedo struck about, it must have been about, 1 o'clock in the morning I suppose and I was shot out of my bunk and grabbed my lifejacket and went straight to my boat station, and again we had to wait for the way, to get off the ship. It was a fairly rough sea running at the time, and that's when I went down one of the ropes, we got the life boat down into the water OK and I went down one of the ropes, shinned down one of the ropes and found somebody hadn't put the plug in, the bung in and so I scrabbled round in the bottom and shoved the plug in and just as that happened the second torpedo hit the ship. It was bright moonlight by the way, it was a lovely night but it was rough and we had drifted a little bit forward under one of the life-rafts and the next thing I saw was this life-raft coming down after the second torpedo hit, whether somebody had fiddled about with it or whether the second torpedo . . . but I didn't wait to see. I went straight over the side and swam around and in fact watched the ship break in two, it was when the bow and stern meet in mid-air and she slid gracefully below, so I swam round for a while and was picked up by one of the other lifeboats. I got dragged out by the seat of, I only had a pair of pyjama trousers on but they didn't last long, so I was dragged out into the lifeboat and it was the Second Mate's lifeboat, he'd been on watch and he'd got his uniform on and then in no time at all, out of the moonlight came the U-boat on the surface.

The next thing we knew in the Second Mate's lifeboat was the ghostly appearance of the U-boat (U178) in the moonlight and a demand from the conning tower to come alongside. This we eventually did with difficulty as we were still under oars, not having as yet got the lifeboats engine going, and we were criticised by the German giving the orders to the effect that 'You English could never row'. We could hardly argue as there was a chap manning a machine gun on the aft end of the conning tower. I was sitting on the lifeboat thwart next to the Second Mate who was fully dressed in tropical whites as he had been on watch when the ship was sunk. The German realised that Roberts, the Second Mate, was an Officer and called him aboard the U-boat and it was then that we could see that they already had someone else on board. (The Second Mate was landed in the Andaman Islands and handed over to the Japanese as a Prisoner of War. I never heard if he survived). The 'someone' turned out to be the Chief Steward who had been taken out of one of the other lifeboats but when the Germans realised who they had got aboard they decided they wanted a Navigating Officer instead. The next thing we knew was the Chief Steward being shot down off the U-boat into our lifeboat! The German told him he could go and he told us we were only fifty miles from the nearest land to the West - as if we didn't know! The Germans had asked the Chief Steward why we were late, presumably having been advised of our sailing by the German Embassy in Beira. The U-boat disappeared into the darkness on the surface.

There was no sign of the other lifeboats and having got the engine going we headed west for the coast with the Third Mate in charge. Dawn came and although the sea was rough the sun was out and it was warm. By mid-afternoon the coast was in sight and the problem of making a safe landfall presented itself. At first all we could see were breakers but then we spotted an opening with what appeared to be sheltered water beyond. We were lucky to have found a protected bay with a shelving sandy beach which turned out to be quite deserted with no sign of man or beast - although we learned later that there were plenty of lions in that area. We hauled the lifeboat up onto the beach and settled down for the night having decided to push off the next morning and sail south down the coast. This we did at first light and around noon came to Baixe Pinda lighthouse, where we landed, to be greeted by the Portuguese Lighthouse Keeper and his family. In my state of undress in just my pyjama trousers with the seat torn out the Keeper was good enough to give me one of his buff and purple striped 'Palm Beach' suits which since he was a big chap hung on me like a tent! It certainly covered me. The Keeper and his wife fed and watered us and we enjoyed a good goat stew.

During a tape-recorded interview with the Director of the Centre, Dr Peter Liddle in May 2001, Chris recalled gorging himself on tins of condensed milk, which had been sewn up in canvas, while he was in the lifeboat. In this sinking some men were lost who had been in the engine room at the time of the torpedo attack. Chris also advised Dr Liddle of the items usually to be found in a lifeboat's lockers, including charts, Horlicks tablets, biscuits, a bottle of Brandy and flares. The five charts he collected from the lockers of the City of Canton lifeboat lockers stayed with Chris through the rest of the war and are now proudly held with his papers at the Second World War Experience Centre.

	Joining the Merchant Navy - the sinking of the City of Athens.
	This page: the sinking of the City of Canton and audio clip.
	The sinking of the City of Adelaide and inventory.