The mighty ship the Titanic is sinking into the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean
in the early morning of April 12, 1912.
Of the 2,224 people on board, more than half of them will die.
They will drown or freeze in the ocean a way off the coast of Newfoundland.
Still on board though there is a hero, the second officer of the ship.
He’s shouting to the passengers, “Women and Children First!” as he ushers them into
lifeboats.
He is acutely aware that there aren’t enough boats and many people will perish that frosty
morning.
He was right about that, but his heart would go on.
His own survival was nothing short of miraculous.
His name was Charles Lightoller and this is his story.
A moody German philosopher once said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” or
something to that effect.
Quite a few people that have lived in this world personify that saying, and one of them
was the man we are talking about today.
He was born in 1874 in the industrial north of England.
Moments after he entered this world, as the black smog from the abundant textile mills
obscured the blue skies, his mother died.
His father took off to the country of New Zealand when Charles was just 10, leaving
the young man parent-less.
Extended family took care of the young “lad” after that.
Looking around him in that mostly poor part of England, Charles didn’t see many options
for himself.
When he was 13 years old he witnessed most of the other kids his age leave school and
get jobs in the textile industry: spinning cotton, dyeing wool, doing some kind of hard
labor in those, “Satanic Mills.”
Charles wanted nothing more than to escape that humdrum existence, so what better than
to sail the high seas.
At age 13 he began a seafaring apprenticeship which would take him to small-pox ridden parts
of South America, to uninhabited islands in the Indian ocean, and long after his training
finished, to that frosty morning when the Titanic went down in the North Atlantic.
He earned his stripes, soon becoming a second mate after preventing an entire ship from
going up in flames when in India.
At 21 he’d already achieved a lot and was awarded his first mate’s certificate.
He set off to sail around Africa, which almost killed him after he contracted malaria.
Having already had a couple of lives, the young man tried out some new ventures.
He prospected for gold in the Yukon territories, but that didn’t work out for him.
He later became a cowboy in Alberta, and after giving that up he just hit the road and became
a hobo.
After many months he finally made it back to England without a penny to his name.
He gained his master’s certificate when he was 26 and started sailing around the world
again.
It would be years before he heard the name RMS Titanic, but he would become a first officer
on that ill-starred ship when it was in its trial period.
No icebergs were hurt during those trials.
Then came the historic night.
Lightoller’s watch had ended, but he gave the order to look out for small icebergs that
were in the ship’s vicinity.
He told the ship’s quartermaster to make sure the ship’s drinking water wasn’t
freezing, and then once he knew things were safe and sound he retired to his warm bed.
Lightoller then heard the collision, which sounded like a painful grinding as the ship
was forced upon the iceberg.
He got out of bed and went to the deck still dressed in his PJs.
After talking with the other officers he believed that the vibration he and they had heard was
not a great cause for concern.
It was merely a scratch, and so he returned to his cabin.
There was a cause for concern though; water was flooding into the ship.
One of the officers raced to Lightoller’s cabin and in a panicked voice said, “Sir,
the water is up to the F Deck in the Mail Room.”
Lightoller got dressed and headed to the deck.
The ship was making a terrible noise due to all the steam coming from the safety valves.
The vessel was in trouble, but at this point in time Lightoller was not aware of the extent
of that trouble.
He didn’t know the ship was going down, like, down to the bottom of the ocean.
It was so noisy he couldn’t communicate commands with his voice, so he used hand signals.
He now realized he had to move fast.
He started getting women and children on to those lifeboats.
People rushed around in a state of utter shock.
The women and kids got onto those boats and the men stayed behind, some of them would
die and never see their loved ones again.
He ushered some people into lifeboat six, and one of them was named Molly Brown, aka,
the unsinkable Molly Brown.
She would go down in history as the woman who threatened to throw the quartermaster
out of that lifeboat if he didn’t go back and look for people in the freezing water.
He had at first discouraged that, fearing those in the water would grab the boat and
capsize it.
Then everyone would die.
Back on board and Lightoller was getting more people into those lifeboats and making sure
the boats made it into the water.
The officers remained on board and one of them later handed Lightoller a gun.
He told him, “You might need this.”
It was total chaos.
Something was happening on Lifeboat 2.
Men were trying to take it over.
Lightoller jumped into it and with that gun pointed at the men, he ordered them to get
out.
“WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!”
At around 2 am all the lifeboats were in the water, but there were still plenty of people
on board.
There were four more boats, but those were collapsible canvas sided boats.
At one point only 15 more women could be found, so Lightoller finally gave the command for
men to get in the boats.
Then to his surprise an officer turned up with more women.
This time the men dutifully got out of the boat and gave their seats to those women.
For most of them it was a life for a life.
Lightoller was told by the First Officer that he should get in one of the collapsibles.
He replied, “Not bloody likely.”
He wasn’t going anywhere.
There was still hope, though, even at the end, since Collapsible B had space for him.
Water flooded the deck and lightoller managed to get on top of the officers’ quarters,
ready to get into that boat.
This never happened.
While he was on that roof trying to cut the ropes holding the last boat, the Titanic plunged
into the water.
Lightoller knew where he was heading.
He stared hard at that rising water and just dived in.
He swam with all the strength he had to get to the surface, but as bad luck would have
it, he was suddenly sucked in by one of the ventilator shafts.
He was stuck and going down with the ship.
But then God, or whatever he believed in, shone down on him, because a boiler blew up
and the force knocked Lightoller away from that shaft.
He was now in the water with other men, and there was Lifeboat B, albeit overturned.
Officers and crew were around that boat in their numbers.
Other men swam towards it, but when the officers saw that they ordered everyone to swim with
the boat in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, not everyone could get on.
The sheer weight would have sunk it.
As they waited for rescue on that overturned boat three men died in the bitterly cold water.
Lightoller wasn’t one of them.
He was rescued.
And that’s where we come to the second part of this story.
In the first world war some years later his heroics would start again and he’d be handed
medals for his actions in taking out a German Zeppelin.
As the war was coming to an end, he was the captain of a destroyer and that sunk.
Again he was in the water awaiting rescue, and it was almost six years to the day after
the calamity of the Titanic.
Not long after that, his own ship took out the German U-Boat UB-110.
This became a matter of controversy, since a German captain later wrote that his men
ended up swimming for their lives in the ocean.
Even in war, the ethical thing to do would have been to rescue those men and capture
them.
The German captain said Lightoller gave the order to start shooting the Germans in the
water.
Wasn’t that a war crime?
Years later, Lightoller commented about his actions, saying he didn’t believe in “all
that hands up in the air business.”
He said after facing constant German attacks how could anyone have the audacity to think
they could just surrender.
He despised those submarines, lurking under the water, not fighting one on one.
He called them, “an abomination, polluting the clean sea.”
Lightoller retired shortly after the war, mainly because he found it hard to get work.
Even though he’d successfully defended what had happened on the Titanic, getting a job
wasn’t easy.
Despite his heroics, his name would forever be tainted with the sinking of that ship.
But he was by no means done with sailing… or wars.
At the time the second world war started, Lightoller was living a quiet life as a chicken
farmer.
He still loved the ocean and owned a small yacht.
He named it the Sundowner.
In 1940, Lightoller’s role in the campaign that was his life would be reversed.
That’s because the rescued man would become the rescuer.
The Germans had surprised everyone and “blitzkrieged” their way through Europe, which ended up with
the entire British Expeditionary Force being stranded on the French Belgium border at the
port of Dunkirk.
400,000 men were sitting like ducks in a barrel on the coast as German planes dropped bombs
on them.
German tanks were moving in on land, only about 10 miles way.
Thankfully those tanks didn’t move that fast.
The event has gone down in history, and that’s because 338,000 of those men were not slaughtered
as some expected.
The British had a plan, and that was to use everyone possible to go get those men.
That included civilian boats, and guess who owned one of them?
The British got Lightoller on the telephone and told him they needed his beloved Sundowner.
Lightoller replied, saying, “If anyone’s taking that boat, it’s me.”
On June 1, 1940, the 66-year old Lightoller took his son and his son’s friend to Dunkirk
in that yacht.
They arrived safely and managed to get 130 men on the yacht, despite the fact it had
never had more than 30 people on it before.
Some of those men had been pulled from small boats as well as from the water.
German planes fired at them as they sailed back to England, but they never got hit.
There was some typical British humor on the trip home, even as they faced being blown
out of the water.
One of the soldiers discovered that Lightoller, their captain now, had been an officer on
the Titanic.
“Bloody hell,” the man said, “I should jump over right now before he sinks this thing.”
The men laughed, and one said if Lightoller had survived that, then he could survive this.
In just 12 hours the mission was over.
Lightoller’s two sons fought in that war.
His youngest son became a Royal Air Force pilot and was killed in action early in the
war.
His eldest son joined the Royal Navy and was killed close to the end of the war while he
was in charge of a Torpedo Boat.
Lightoller lost two out of his five kids.
By the 8th of December 1952, London was suffering from severe air-pollution, something that
was called the Great Smog.
It’s thought that the smog and Lightoller’s fondness of his pipe led to his death from
heart disease.
He died aged 78.
Lightoller has since been depicted in many movies, with the latest depiction being the
guy from the movie “Dunkirk” who takes his son to rescue those stranded soldiers.
If you think Mr. Lightoller was a man with many lives who was fortunate to escape an
early death, then listen to these harrowing tales of survival, “How I Survived Actual
Military Warzone” and “I Was Lost At Sea For 76 Days With Sharks Circling.”