Sinking of the Zam Zam
Diary of James W. Stewart with the British American Ambulance Corps
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“Captain Jaeger… pointed out we would be fools to attempt to capture his ship, especially since we had women and children aboard. He said that below quantities of dynamite waited but the pressing of a button to send the ship down at once. He had no idea that he would ever be called upon to accommodate such a number of “shipwrecked” people. He didn't have much food or water, the quarters would not be good, but he would do the best he could for us and he expected us to do the best we could for ourselves. The outlook was certainly bleak and we went below for our first night depressed and heavy-hearted.” James Stewart on the first night as a prisoner on the ship Dresden, supply ship of the German Raider Atlantis. The groups of singers I speak of were the German soldiers. When they marched, and they seemed to be doing this continually, they sang. Hundreds of them marching and singing at the top of their lungs, not as if they were forced to but as though they enjoyed it. They sang all the parts; tenor, bass and alto and showed excellent training. Every department of the German Army is a Glee Club in itself. Their battle songs and marching songs are inspirational and are sung by the men with all the strength and feeling that an excellent glee club could give them. Two week’s time in this place. I have just been reading avidly Time April 7th page 19 regarding the sinking of ships in American ports. It says that, “875 officers and crew members were detained.” I wonder what has been done with these men now. This happened before we were sunk and I think we are a fine group to hold in order to make a good exchange. How much would one guess the State Department really wants us turned loose? I believe Germany can drive a hard bargain if that is what they are detaining us for. A good catch we‘d be called, I think. The issue also says Germans were, at the time and had been, fleeing home and newspaper men were preparing to leave Berlin. Such straws in the mind that long ago, throw an interesting and different light on our situation. “This was war and we were escaped prisoners. This was the real business, not hide and seek. What about the result of our escape on the other fellows? Or suppose we found them already in Vichy by comfortable train while we had slogged through the crops by dark? Suppose we had upset all the efforts being made by diplomatic circles to get us out? Oh hell! Hell and damnation!” James Stewart after he and Thomas Greenough had slipped from a train in Poitier, France, while being transported to Berlin as German prisoners while Germany was deciding what to do with these Americans.
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About the Book
“ Thursday, April 17th, 1941 at 5:55 in the morning a peculiar and outlandish new noise was heard by those on board… A vicious howling hissing sound I shall never forget and yet seem never quite able to remember… With a horrible rending explosive crunch the first shells came aboard.” James Stewart.
March 1941, James W. Stewart of Oneonta, New York, was on his way to Africa as a member of the British American Ambulance Corps sailing from New York City on the SS Zam Zam. The BAAC was making the voyage to Mombasa, Kenya, and then overland to Lake Chad to support General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in French Equatorial Africa with much needed ambulances. The United States had not yet become embroiled in World War II; Pearl Harbor was still months away. The men of the BAAC had volunteered because they strongly believed the US needed to come to the aid of Europe; their country needed to defeat the fascist regime being forced on Europe by Germany and the Nazi Party. This was a way they could help the cause.
Along with the twenty-four BAAC members on board the Zam Zam, were 171 other passengers; missionaries and their families from the US, a group of French Canadian Catholic Brothers, tobacco businessmen from the South, and others just needing a way to return to Europe and Africa, taking the safe route on this neutral ship. Safe until April 17th, when their intended route across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope was abruptly interrupted and they were thrown into the center of an international incident between Germany and the United States. This book, James Stewart’s Diary, Sinking of the Zam Zam, is his first hand account of the adventure of their lives.
About the Author
Sinking of the Zam Zam was written in 1941 by James W. Stewart. He was a member of the British American Ambulance Corps on their way to Africa in aid to the Free French troops of General Charles de Gaulle when their ship was shelled and sunk by the German Raider Atlantis in April, 1941. Briefly, some background about James Stewart’s life prior to his voyage on the Zam Zam: James William Stewart was born in Oneonta, NY, August 7, 1904. His early years were spent in Vermont, where his father, William Becker Stewart, was a doctor in the town of Bennington. Dr. Stewart passed away at age thirty-three when James was seven and his sister, Clara, five. James, sister Clara and their mother, Clarissa Arnold Stewart, lived in Unadilla until 1915, when Clarissa married Harrison Beatty of Bainbridge, NY, and moved there with her children. Mr. Beatty lived only four years and then Clarissa again returned to Unadilla with her family. James attended Union College in Schenectady, NY, and in 1925 married Helen Morris of Milford Center, NY. They had two sons while living in Unadilla; William Morris born in 1927, followed by David Arnold in 1930. In 1932, James opened a manufacturing business, Stewart Ice, Inc., in Oneonta. In 1936 the family moved to Oneonta and after living there only a few years the marriage failed, James and Helen separated, and he lived a life apart from his family. After only half completing the draft of this book to the period of relaxed house detention in Biarritz, he embarked for Burma in mid-November 1941, having volunteered to help keep truck traffic rolling along the Burma Road to China. Pearl Harbor interrupted this plan on December 7th, and he was set ashore in Australia. Following service with the American Red Cross and the US Office of War Information during the war, James married an Australian girl, fathered two children, Matthew and Clarissa, and remained in Australia until his death in 1958 at age 54.