The Sinking Of the Laconia

Franka Potente first came to the attention of British film goers when played the eponymous heroine of Run Lola Run. She followed this role up with another German lead in The Princess and The Warrior, once again demonstrating her ability to dominate each scene she was in simply by acting everybody else off the screen. Potente was then lured to Hollywood where she appeared in The Bourne trilogy as Maria Kreutz.

The Sinking of the Laconia was a three hour drama written by Alan Bleasdale based on the true story of that ships sinking by a U-Boat in 1942 off the coast of West Africa and its aftermath. In it Potente played Hilda Smith, a German woman with a small baby who manages to get aboard the Laconia using a British passport. Her real identity is discovered by an officer of the ship moments before the ship is torpedoed, it's a small sub-plot that adds to the drama. It turns out that all her family have been killed in Germany and that she is in fact half-British. She is escaping what she calls the 'dark side of what was once the sunny side of the mountain'.

The story of the sinking has been overshadowed by other stories of courage that occurred during the war yet it remains one of the most enduring tales of human aggression and compassion. Six hundred miles from the coast of Africa, in September 1942, German U-Boat (U-156) sank the British troopship Laconia. Laconia was carryung approximately 1,800 Italian POW's. 100 Free Poles, 270 British soldiers and around 80 British civilians. The commander of U-156 was Werner Hartenstein who once he realised that the ship had POW's and civilians on-board decided to try and rescue as many of those who were oin the water as possible.

The U-boat surfaced and Hartenstein instructed his men to save as many of the shipwrecked survivors as they can. Over three nights and three few days 400 had been saved, 200 of those saved were taken on board the submarine whilst a further 200 were towed behind the submarine in lifeboats. Hartenstein then issued what was in effect a mayday signal for the Allies to come and get the prisoners from the boat.

Heading to a rendezvous with a Vichy French ship whilst displaying Red Cross insignia the U-boat was attacked by the U.S Army in the guise of a B-24 'Liberator'. The attack changed the approach of both the Germans and the Americans to submarine warfare. Germany abandoned the policy of trying to rescue civilian survivors under what became known as Admiral Donitz "Laconia Order," and the Americans adopted what is now regarded as unrestricted submarine warfare. The controversy following the sinking and subsequent rescue changing the protection offered by military forces towards non-combatants during warfare.

Unrestricted warfare means the targeting and sinking of military ships by submarines without warning. It was officially recognised as occurring only four times during the 20th Century, by Germany during WW1 against Britain, during the Battle of The Atlantic (1939-1945), by Germany against Russia in 1941 and 1942 and by the Americans against Japan in the Pacific during 1942.

The B-24 had flown from Ascenscion Island and there still remains a mystery as to why the Americans actually had a base on the island in the first place, official British Government papers on the incident remain closed, apparently due to pressure from the American Government.