Private - 100th Aero Squadron

Where were you………….

               When the ‘Tuscania went down?

 

By Frank Hagen

Staff Writer, West Palm Beach Post-Times

June 11, 1940 - The answer came booming back today from Charles D. Arendell, 723 So. Sapodilla Avenue, who is believed to be the only survivor in West Palm Beach of the ill-fated British vessel, torpedoed off the Irish coast in the dusk of February 5^th, 1918.

   

“When the Tuscania went down, I was a half a mile away and had been picked up by a British destroyer,” said the former soldier of the 100^th Aero Squadron, who has been a West Palm Beach resident since 1935.

 

As veterans do, he slipped easily back into the World War days and its reminder of a major sea disaster that claimed 400 lives of the 2400-strong crew and passenger list of the transport. “All day long we followed behind the Baltic, the flagship of the convoy. Just at dusk we’d fallen behind,” he recalled. “Two torpedoes missed. The third caught us amidships. It opened a hole at the water line a box car might have entered." 

 

“We had some hard-boiled babes in the 100^th Aero, but there wasn’t one that didn’t pray as the Tuscania settled. If you fall in a plane you know eventually the ground will stop you. When a torpedoed boat starts down there’s nothing but awful emptiness beneath you." 

 

 When no one reported at the lifeboat assigned to him on the Tuscania’s upper deck, soldier Arendell cut the lashings with a small pocketknife. At the third slash the lashing were severed and the blade broke and fell into the sea. The boat swung downward crowded with passengers, by the time it reached the water.

 

“The ‘Mosquito’, a destroyer, picked us up 90 minutes later. Before I went below, I turned and looked at the Tuscania”, he remembers. Her emergency lights went out, there was a black blur, and then the Tuscania went down."

 

The destroyer landed the Americans at Londonderry, Ireland, after putting out to sea for the night because of the presents of submarines. They moved over to Winchester, England, then to the Cambridge area. In August 1918, almost a year after Mr. Arendell enlisted in Atlanta, Ga., the 100^th Aero, once more in possession of duplicate records and equipment lost with the Tuscania, shipped across to Le Havre.

 

The squadron was in France for 9 months, close behind the lines of the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensive.  Then those that were left came home.

     

Some six years ago, (1936) according to Mr. Arendell, the U-boat commander who had sunk the Tuscania syndicated a description of the event. “He mentioned," said Mr. Arendell, “that he had been following us all day. It’s a good thing we didn’t know it then."

 

Editor’s note: The staff member (Frank Hogan) who talked with Mr. Arendell, crossed the English channel in a Chinese cattle boat in March, 1918. Some of the Tuscania survivors were among the hundreds of soldiers packed in the hold of the makeshift transport. Just at dawn the Chinese dropped anchor outside Le Havre to await the change of tide. As the anchor rattled overboard, the Tuscania survivors rose to a man and surged toward the lone companionway. They were still acutely aware of their torpedoing only a few weeks before.

2000 INFORMATION SOURCE: 

Transcribed by Luther Arendell

Submitted by Luther Arendell, Date: May 17, 2000

West Palm Beach Post Times; "Where were you when the Tuscania went down?" June 1940.