Boris_Godunov t1_j5x2rtc wrote on January 26, 2023 at 3:46 AM

Reply to comment by HalfPointFive in TIL that the civilian ship pilot in Dunkirk is based off a real person - Charles Lightoller, the second officer of the Titanic who sailed his own ship to save 127 servicemen at Dunkirk by flotiste

Weeeeell he’s complicated. He definitely engaged in a few less-than-honorable actions, both relating to the Titanic and his service in WW1…

EDIT: Love the downvotes. Okay, here is some educating on Lightoller:

He refused to allow any male passengers into the lifeboats, despite there being plenty of room for them (many boats went away half-full or less.). At one point, he refused entry into a boat of a 13-year-old boy. The boy's father, Arthur Ryerson, had to shame Lightoller into letting the kid into the boat with his mother and sisters. Lightoller relented, but was clearly unhappy about it, grumbling "no more boys" under his breath. Many, many more passengers lives could have been saved had Lightoller not adopted his senselessly strict rule for who could go.
In his memoir, Lightoller describes how he chased a few crew members away from one of the last lifeboats while waving his revolver at them, threatening to shoot them. In his account, Lightoller makes it a point to note that these men were not "English," and then uses a common ethnic slur to describe them, stating that of course people of such ethnicity would be so cowardly.
Lightoller blatantly lied about the Marconi wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride. This related to the controversy of a iceberg warning that was sent to the Titanic by the SS Mesaba, some two hours before the collision with the iceberg. During his testimony at the U.S. Senate Inquiry into the disaster in 1912, Lightoller had been blindsided while testifying by the revelation of this message, and he got very defensive about it, insisting it had never been delivered to the bridge. Bride, for his part, was adamant that Phillips (who died in the sinking) would have delivered it. Lightoller himself would have been in command of the bridge when the message came in. So in his memoir, written over two decades later, Lightoller suddenly invents the claim that Bride was laying in his bunk and reading/musing over the Mesaba warning, rather than it being taken to the bridge. Even worse, he then invents a tale that after the Titanic sank, while struggling to survive on the back of an capsized lifeboat, Lightoller was next to Phillips, who tearfully confesses to failing to deliver the Mesaba's warning to him. How convenient, eh? Of course, Phillips then had the courtesy to die so no one could actually verify this story, since not a single other witness from that overturned boat (including Bride) ever corroborated this story.
And how about a war crime? During WW1, Lightoller commanded a patrol boat in the English Channel, and at one point rammed and sank a German U-boat. The surviving commander of that U-boat claimed that Lightoller ordered his men to fire on the German survivors as they struggled in the water and were asking for help, killing several of them. Lightoller himself implicitly confirmed this in his memoir, stating that he refused to accept "this hands in the air business." So yeah, war crime.

Anyway, make of all that what you will.

HalfPointFive t1_j63xzwe wrote on January 27, 2023 at 3:25 PM

I don't think you should be downvoted because you make some good points. If you look at him through the lens of someone obviously very chivalrous (in the traditional sense) his actions are more understandable. It's easy to say "more lives could have been saved", however the argument that men would have swamped the ships is also a possibility. At all times, he appears to have been eminently concerned with the welfare of women and children, which I think is quite honorable. This comes at the expense of men, obviously, and also himself. His chivalry also makes the war crime more comprehensible. Having been on the Titanic, he would have experienced a passenger ship sinking with women and children. The idea of a warship (the uboat) sinking passenger and merchant ships probably pissed him off. It's not right of him to kill the uboat survivors, but I feel like if he were ordered to sink ships full of women and children he would refuse the order.

Boris_Godunov t1_j644et3 wrote on January 27, 2023 at 4:06 PM

> It's easy to say "more lives could have been saved", however the argument that men would have swamped the ships is also a possibility.

When the boats were going away half empty, there wasn't any danger of this. The evacuation was quite orderly and without such panic for most of the sinking, it wasn't until near the end that you had the frantic mobs trying to get at the last boats. Lightoller himself indicated that not allowing men in the boats was simply a point of pride for him, not for any such practical reason.

>At all times, he appears to have been eminently concerned with the welfare of women and children, which I think is quite honorable.

Except for Jack Ryerson and other young boys, right?

>The idea of a warship (the uboat) sinking passenger and merchant ships probably pissed him off. It's not right of him to kill the uboat survivors, but I feel like if he were ordered to sink ships full of women and children he would refuse the order.

Women and children were accepted collateral damage of waging war in that era, and Lightoller didn't seem to have any problem with such acts of war, so long as it was his own side doing it. The allied embargo on Germany caused mass starvation of women and children--was that any more "honorable" than sinking ships? Bear in mind that the British sank German merchant ships, too. And of course, once we get to WW2, there was wholesale bombing of civilian cities by all sides, killing millions of innocents.

What Lightoller did was a war crime even in that era, so I can't see any way to skew it as "honorable." He would have known it wasn't.

And if he'd been given a lawful order to sink a German merchant vessel that may have had civilians on it, I'm pretty sure he would have. Bear in mind that merchant vessels were legit targets if they had deck armaments installed.

And not to harp on it, but the blatant lies about Bride and Phillips weren't "honorable," by any definition.