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Leading on from the trunk thread, and the things this generation has never (thankfully) had to experience.... A patient I met yesterday - a proper old seadog (ex-Navy gunner) & fantastic gent - was telling me about this most unfortunate incident. It's a WWII story I'd never heard before:
[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Curacoa_(D41) ]The Curacoa sank in six minutes, about 100 yards from the Queen Mary. Due to the risk of U-boat attacks, the Queen Mary did not assist in rescue operations and instead steamed onward with a damaged bow.[/url]
Must have been grim watching that from on board the Queen Mary.
How weird, I was only reading about that today. There is a fascinating, if slighly goulish list on Wiki about mass loss of lives, of which this is but one of many. From what I have read, it seems it was actually quite common for survivors to be abandoned due to the U-boat threat.
It lead me to this [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary ]Wiki gem[/url]:
[i]During the war, Queen Mary carried British Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic for meetings with fellow Allied forces officials on several occasions. He would be listed on the passenger manifest as "Colonel Warden", and he insisted that the lifeboat assigned to him be fitted with a .303 machine gun so that he could "resist capture at all costs".[/i]
Knew it was somewhere...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_of_the_United_Kingdom_and_preceding_states
Because that list excludes acts of war, it misses this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lancastria