Extract: The Drowned and the Saved, by Les Wilson

Roberts was exhausted, frozen and in danger that – at just seventeen – he could never have imagined, far less been trained for. If hypothermia didn’t kill him, the mountainous waves could plunge him underwater and hold him there until his lungs flooded with freezing brine. And there was the wreckage. Flung around by the wind and waves, an angry mass of shattered timber was pounding shipwrecked men against the rocks of the Hebridean island of Islay’s gnarled west coast. The experience has been likened, by the current coxswain of Islay’s lifeboat, to being thrust into a meat grinder. By some fluke, or miracle, young Roberts kept his head above water, without being crushed or knocked unconscious, and the crashing waves hurled him onto a rock, frozen, battered, half-drowned, but alive. Hands reached out to him. A boy, hardly older than Roberts himself, was hauling him to safety. Donald McPhee was risking his life. His younger brother, John, had to hold on to Donald’s belt to prevent him being swept out to sea as he dragged the young American ashore.

Roberts was one of nearly five hundred men who had been thrown into the water when a British ship, carrying American soldiers to the trenches of the Western Front, foundered off Islay after a catastrophic collision in a storm. Only twenty-one made it ashore alive, and two of them died shortly afterwards. In the days that followed, hundreds of drowned and battered bodies were washed ashore. The wreck of HMS Otranto was the greatest tragedy in the history of the convoys that took more than a million young American soldiers – doughboys – to the Great War in Europe.

Eight months earlier, Islay had seen another naval disaster off its coast, when the troop transport SS Tuscania – with more than 2,000 US soldiers and nearly 400 British crew aboard – had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. On a pitch-black night in early February, a relentless swell drove overcrowded lifeboats onto the island. Boats were smashed against the rugged shore, tumbling men into the sea. Many were rescued, but 126 bodies were washed ashore for the islanders to gather, attempt to identify, and bury with dignity amid an outpouring of grief.

The sinking of the Tuscania was a symbolically significant milestone in twentieth-century world history – the point when the isolationist USA began to shed blood in Old Europe’s wars. As the official history of the American Red Cross during World War One says: ‘The Tuscania’s dead represented, in a way, the first American casualties in the war . . . the sinking of the Tuscania was, as one might say, a special occasion, like a particular battle.’

To tell the story of the loss of the Tuscania and the Otranto, and of the Hebridean islanders who buried the drowned and tended the saved, I have based the narrative on the words of people who were directly involved wherever possible. These accounts come from letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches and interviews in newspapers, as well as from the records of official inquiries. Inevitably, inconsistencies occur. Even the number of men lost is not certain. It seems likely that 470 men died on the Otranto, 358 of them American soldiers, while the estimated losses of soldiers and crew on the Tuscania varies from 166 to ‘over 200’, 222, 245 and, according the National Tuscania Survivors’ Association, 266. There are also inconsistencies in the reported timescale of events. This is likely to be at least partly due to witnesses having their watches set to three different time zones – American, British and German.

For me, the meeting of David Roberts and the McPhee brothers on a storm-lashed shore – one tiny scene in a huge tragedy, acted out on the stage of Islay and the seas that surround her – is a profoundly moving symbol of humanity amid the terrible Great War. The people of Islay took total strangers into their midst and treated them as their own, tending the wounded, and burying the dead with honour and respect. In America, grieving families responded to that kindness. Beneath the stormclouds of war and tragedy, a sense of shared humanity was felt across the wide and stormy Atlantic Ocean.

Today, these century-old tragedies remain part of the warp and weft of Islay’s lore, tradition and life. Graves are tended. Relatives of the lost American soldiers and British sailors visit the island. Records are requested and examined in the Museum of Islay Life. Pilgrimages are made to the great monument to the American dead, which stands on the Islay peninsula called the Mull of Oa. Stories of the two ships are told, and passed on. Points on the landscape are recognised as being imbued with significance. The men and women who pulled exhausted, frozen survivors from the sea, and fed and comforted them, still have descendants living on the island. Islay’s volunteer Coastguards and Lifeboat crew of today are the spiritual and sometimes the blood-descendants of those whose bravery and kindness saved lives nearly a century ago.

The shockwaves from the Tuscania and Otranto disasters struck many an American community harshly, as men who had enlisted together died together. Of the 60 war dead commemorated on Berrien County’s World War One memorial in Nashville, Georgia, 25 were lost when the Otranto went down. The impact of World War One on Islay was also immense. The island – a community of then just over 6,000 people, scattered among small villages and isolated farms – lost more than 200 of its young men on foreign fields. But with the wreck of the Tuscania and Otranto, the devastation of war came, literally, to Islay’s shores.

If I had been living in my house in Port Charlotte a century ago, I could have looked out of my kitchen window to watch the pipers lead the first Tuscania funeral cortege up Main Street to the freshly dug graves at the edge of the village. The land had been donated by the local Laird, the coffins made by carpenters at an Islay distillery, the carts that carried them were lent by farmers and tradesmen, and the procession of mourners was made up of local folk who did not know the victims, but cared for them nonetheless. They had been unable to bury Islay’s own war dead, who lay in France and beyond, but were determined to honour these fallen strangers and allies.

Last year, when writing the final paragraphs of this book, I walked the fatal coast where Tuscania survivors fought for their lives as their lifeboats were driven against the rocky shores of Islay in the early hours of 6 February 1918. After more than a year of researching and writing, I needed to bring back into focus my motivation for writing it in the first place. When I began it, I expected to confront tragedy aplenty, but what I had not been prepared for was to discover instances of incompetence and accusations of dereliction of duty on the part of British crewmen. They made hard reading, and so, before finishing the book, I needed to remind myself of the countless instances of courage, endurance and humanity that appear in its pages.

I hiked out to the clifftop on the southern coast of Islay’s Oa peninsula and the massive monument that commemorates the American soldiers lost on both ships. I didn’t linger long. A south-south-easterly wind was blowing up and it had reached gale force and was gusting up to nearly 60 mph by the time I returned to the car. It was a reminder – if such was needed – of how wild and dangerous the coast of Islay can be. I had stood in the lee of the monument and watched the ferocious seascape. More than four hundred feet beneath me lay the rocks where – in the pre-dawn morning, 99 years ago to the day – Tuscania men died as their lifeboats were dashed ashore. Close by were the farmhouses where survivors were given sanctuary by kindly islanders. About fifteen miles to the northwest lay Kilchoman Bay, where nearly 500 Otranto men were thrown into the sea and where 19 lived because local people were kind and brave. Three thousand miles to the west of where I stood lay America.

The great and powerful Republic of America . . . and the little island of Islay. Two very different communities forever linked by events that were tragic, but which were shot through with heroism, fortitude, kindness and respect.

The Drowned and the Saved: When War Came to the Hebrides by Les Wilson is published this month by Birlinn (£9.99, paperback) www.birlinn.co.uk