Unsinkable Sam: The Cat Who Survived Three WWII Shipwrecks

The Bismarck — May 27, 1941

The story, as it was told, begins on the German battleship Bismarck. The Bismarck was one of the largest warships ever built, and it went down on May 27, 1941, with more than 2,000 men aboard after a battle with the British fleet. A small black-and-white cat, it was later claimed, was one of the few survivors pulled from the water.

Historians have debated this part. There is no contemporaneous record confirming a cat was aboard the Bismarck, and the ship's survivors were few and their accounts occupied with other things. What is certain is what came next.

HMS Cossack — October 23, 1941

When the British destroyer HMS Cossack was torpedoed in the North Atlantic, a small black-and-white cat was rescued from the water by the crew. They named him Oscar, after the naval signal flag for the letter O, which is flown when a man goes overboard.

Two weeks later, Oscar was transferred to HMS Ark Royal, one of Britain's most important aircraft carriers. On November 14, 1941, Ark Royal was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine off Gibraltar and sank.

Oscar was found floating on a wooden board in the Mediterranean. A sailor who saw him wrote that he appeared "quite indifferent to the loss of his ship." Another added that he looked angry. He was physically unharmed.

Ashore

The Royal Navy made the reasonable decision to keep him on land after that. He was taken to Gibraltar Naval Base, then briefly assigned to HMS Legion, and eventually sent to a sailors' rest home in Belfast, where he lived out the remainder of his life.

He died there in 1955. A pastel portrait painted of him in 1942 by the artist Georgina Shaw-Baker, titled Oscar the Survivor, still exists and hangs at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In the painting, he looks extremely unhappy about something. Given the context, that seems fair.

By the time he died, the sailors had settled on a different name for him. Not Oscar. Unsinkable Sam.

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Sources

• Royal Navy records, HMS Cossack and HMS Ark Royal, 1941.
• Shaw-Baker, Georgina. Oscar the Survivor (1942), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
• Churchill, Winston. The Second World War, Vol. 3 (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

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