MARION - At age 81, former 2nd Lt. William F. Thompson speaks modestly about the heroic actions that earned him a Bronze Star during one of the most disastrous military blunders of World War II.

The blunder, which was covered up for years by the American and British governments, cost the lives of more than 800 American soldiers on Christmas Eve 1944.

After 60 years, Thompson has forgiven his own government for its part in the botched operation and for hiding the truth about how so many young men died needlessly.

Thompson, at age 21, was called to active duty during his junior year at Clemson University to serve as a platoon leader in the U.S. 66th Infantry Division.

Several of his close friends also were called to duty, including Roddy Martin, against whom Thompson played in high school basketball during the late 1930s.

“We were all sent to OCS (Officer Candidate School) at Fort Benning (Ga.) and then to Camp Rucker (Ala.) for infantry training,” Thompson recalled. “After we were through with training, I was assigned to E Company 262nd Infantry as a platoon officer.

“We shipped out from upstate New York and landed in the port of Southampton in England, where we stayed for a short while before we were to be sent to France as replacements for the guys who had been fighting the Battle of the Bulge. A lot of them had been fighting there since D-Day, (June 6, 1944).”

The convoy that left the port of Southampton bound for the port of Cherbourg, France, that fateful Christmas Eve included the Belgian Congo troopship the S.S. Leopoldville. Thompson and Martin were aboard that vessel.

The S.S. Leopoldville and the other troopship in the convoy, the S.S. Cheshire, were unarmed and carrying more than 4,000 American soldiers, which made both of them targets for German U-boats, the torpedo submarines that still prowled the English Channel despite Allied advancements on mainland Europe.

Moment of impact

The nine-hour voyage was almost over. Soldiers could see the lights of Cherbourg as the convoy came within a few miles from port.

Thompson recalls it was shortly after 5 p.m. and the North Sea sky was pitch black when he felt the blow from the torpedo as it tore into the right rear portion of the ship’s hull.

“I was lying in my bunk already dressed because we were only 15 or 20 minutes from shore when I heard it and felt it shake the ship,” he said. “We were told to go to our stations. The officers’ bunks were above the ship’s water line, so we (officers) were able to get on deck OK, but there were men below the water line who were trapped.”

Thompson said water was pouring in and drowning men who weren’t killed from the blast.

“Some of us tried to go back down to help them, but the steps were only made out of wood and were destroyed for the most part,” he said. “Some of us even tried to swim down to get them because they were floating around and calling for help. I don’t know how many of them made it up, though. That’s something that was hard to see.”

Distress signals from the vessel went out to American naval rescue units in Cherbourg and British rescue units in England.

Initially, Thompson said he remained calm, thinking that help was on the way.

An hour and a half had passed. No rescue vessels came.

The Belgian Congo captain and crew apparently knew their distress had fallen on deaf ears, but could not or did not communicate this to the American soldiers. The crew boarded all of the lifeboats during the chaos and abandoned the Americans.

Thompson recalled the desperate anger, fear and frustration of many soldiers as they were unable to figure out how to detach the inflatable life rafts from the side of the ship with no crew members left on board to show them how to do so.

The S.S. Cheshire soon began circling the sinking ship in an attempt to rescue those men who had decided to take a chance on trying to board her.

It is not known how many boarded the S.S. Cheshire, because many of the men who jumped overboard from the S.S. Leopoldville were either sucked down under the sinking vessel’s current or were sucked under the S.S. Cheshire’s current as they swam toward it.

‘It was every man for himself’

With time running out, Thompson sensed the S.S. Leopoldville was about to go under.

It was more his experiences from childhood than his Army training that helped him survive the incident.

“Growing up, I spent my summers at my grandfather’s place at Murrells Inlet, so I had been around boats my whole life,” he said. “I knew the ship was at the point where it was going to go under because of the way it was tilted.

“When it first happened we were so close to shore that I wasn’t too worried. I just knew we were going to be towed in, but after an hour and a half no help arrived. I crawled down the escape net on the side of the boat that went down about 25 feet to the water line. I jumped in and swam as hard as I could because I didn’t want to get sucked down by the current of the Leopoldville as it was sinking, and I didn’t want to get caught up in the current of the Cheshire, either. I swam as hard as I could because at that point it was every man for himself. I swam until I found a wooden raft that someone had thrown in, and some men were already hanging on to it.”

Thompson said he remembers vividly the moment the ship went under.

“Since it was hit in the starboard stern, it filled up with water from the back, and I remember the Cheshire was shining a spotlight on it and you could see the front end of the Leopoldville sticking straight up toward the sky and then disappear under the water.”

During the time Thompson was clinging to the wooden raft, he took it upon himself to scout for fellow comrades who were treading freezing waters and desperately calling for help.

He remembers saving the lives of at least 10 men by retrieving them from the open waters and bringing them to the raft. His Bronze Star citation written by a company officer, however, credits him with saving 15 men.

A passage from the official citation submitted on record to the War Department reads: “... Lieutenant Thompson, with unbounded heroism, swam out from a raft he had located to assist and direct others to the raft who were tossing about helplessly in the turbulent sea. With complete disregard for his own personal safety, he repeatedly swam from the safety of the raft to locate survivors in the icy waters and return them to it. He was instrumental in saving the lives of 15 men aboard the raft with him ...”

Thompson again helped save the survivors from near disaster, because he was the only one in the group carrying a flashlight.

“A short while later, a French fishing boat came by because I guess they picked up on the distress signal,” he said. “It was dark, and you couldn’t see anything, and it was headed close toward us, so I signaled to it with my flashlight to let them know where we were. I was the only one on the raft who had a flashlight. They spotted our signal, and we motioned for them to move away from us because we could have easily gotten sucked up under its propeller.”

It was an American Coast Guard boat stationed nearby that brought Thompson’s group from the freezing waters and delivered them to waiting ambulances in Cherbourg, which took them to a French hospital.

Thompson vividly remembers his stay at the medical facility.

“I was lucky because I didn’t have hypothermia and pneumonia like a lot of the other men who survived, so in a couple of days I was up walking around,” he said. “That was the first time I got to see some of the soldiers who had been at the Bulge. Some had their legs and feet cut off, and that really bothered me.”

Thompson learned about this time that his close friend and comrade from Mullins had died during the sinking.

When Thompson returned to his company, he found out about half of them also had perished.

“There were about 200 men in my company when we started out, but when I got back to it I found out that we lost about half of them, and they were replaced by new men I had never seen before,” he said.

As a company officer, Thompson was ordered not to divulge to the public any information about the ordeal, and to censor all letters written home by the men under his command that mentioned anything about the sinking.

During wartime, such ac-tions are common practice in order to keep information from the enemy.

The cover-up

The truth about the S.S. Leopoldville, however, was not made public for about 50 years.

Many sources say the cover-up remained in place because it was politically embarrassing to American military leaders, such as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later was elected president.

The families of the confirmed dead were told their loved ones were missing in action.

Some military historians and novelists argue the sinking of the S.S. Leopoldville was the single most costly wartime blunder in American history.

During the past half-century, evidence of why help didn’t arrive in time to save so many soldiers has been revealed.

Several books, film documentaries and Internet sites conclude the reason the ship’s distress signals were never picked up by American rescue units in Cherbourg was because no one was on duty that night.

It was Christmas Eve, and key military personnel were either attending church services or out partying and visiting French bordellos, according to Larry Bond, producer of a documentary about the cover-up that aired on the History Channel.

The disaster was equally embarrassing for the British government, which was responsible for the troopship’s security.

“They didn’t protect them, and when they got five miles away from port, they got hit and everybody was out partying, the Americans were all partying in Cherbourg that night. The British were responsible for all the security on the boat, and Belgians were the crew. The Belgians immediately abandoned ship,” Bond said in an interview published on the History Channel Web site. “The British messed up from day one. They offered no support, no air support, nothing. And the Americans were all out in the bordellos. All the boys were either in church or they were partying.”

Thompson said no one forgets living through a tragedy like the S.S. Leopoldville, but over the last six decades his ill feelings about the way the government handled the sinking and failing to notify the families of the lost soldiers has mellowed.

“I think it was handled very poorly, and in the beginning I was very concerned,” he said. “Thinking back though, and as time has gone on over the past 60 years, I’ve let it go.”

In 1996, the American government officially recognized the sinking of the S.S. Leopoldville. That year, a monument was dedicated at Fort Benning, Ga., to honor the men who died that fateful night Dec. 24, 1944.

Let us know what you think of this story | Send us a letter to the editor