A Brief History
On June 17, 1940, the British passenger liner converted to wartime duty, the RMS Lancastria, was sunk off the coast of France by German Junkers Ju 88 bombers as she headed to England with military and civilian evacuees from mainland Europe. The death toll was massive, with 3,000 to 7,000 dead. Incredibly, 2,477 people survived the sinking, one of the largest number of survivors from any shipwreck ever.
Digging Deeper
Stories of ships sinking usually focus on the number of lives lost, but seldom are the number of survivors celebrated. Some instances of huge numbers of people surviving a major shipwreck include:
USS Lexington, an American aircraft carrier so heavily damaged that she was abandoned and scuttled after the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, and although 216 crewmen were lost, 2,735 survived.
In 1956, ocean liner Andrea Doria was rammed by the Stockholm and sunk, with the loss of 46 lives, although 1,660 people were saved.
Note: The sinking of the Lancastria was the worst British maritime disaster by loss of life in history. Trying to find the sinking with the most survivors has proven to be difficult, so if you know of any that top the Lancastria or Lexington, let us know.
We did not include the 2012 grounding of the Costa Concordia in which 32 people perished and 4200+ survived because the ship did not actually sink and was later refloated and towed away.
Question for students (and subscribers): What shipwreck do you believe had the most survivors? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Fenby, Jonathan. The Sinking of the Lancastria: The Twentieth Century’s Deadliest Naval Disaster and Churchill’s Plot to Make It Disappear. Da Capo Press, 2009.
Moscow, Alvin. Collision Course: The Classic Story of the Collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Open Road Media, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Rodhullandemu, of a plaque to those of the HMT Lancastria who died due to enemy action at St Nazaire on 17th June 1940, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.