Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack

On September seventeen, 1940, at a little after ten at night, a German submarine torpedoed the passenger liner S.S. City of Benares in the North Atlantic. There were 406 people on board, but the ship's prized passengers were ninety children whose parents had elected to send their boys and girls away from Great Britain to Canada to escape the ravages of World War II.

The Benares sank in half an hour, in a gale that sent several of her lifeboats pitching into the frigid sea. They were more than five hundred miles from land, three hundred miles from the nearest rescue vessel.

Miracles on the Water tells the astonishing story of the survivors—not one of whom had any reasonable hope of rescue as the ship went down. The initial "miracle" involves one British destroyer's race to the scene, against time and against the elements; the second is the story of Lifeboat twelve, missed by the destroyer and left out on the water, forty-six people jammed in a craft built and stocked for thirty. Those people lasted eight days on little food and tiny rations of drinking water. The survivors have grappled ever since with questions about the ordeal.

Based on first-hand accounts from the child survivors and other passengers, including the author's great-uncle, Miracles on the Water brings us the story of the attack on the Benares and the extraordinary events that followed.

"Recounts the disaster and imperfect rescue mission with probing research and crisp prose." — Entertainment Weekly