The Royal Navy destroyer Cossack rescued a cat in the aftermath of the Bismarck sinking. The feline, who became known as Unsinkable Sam, is said to have survived two more sinkings before he was retired to a sedate life of relative luxury.
[Wikimedia]

One of the epic sea battles of the Second World War, the Battle of the Denmark Strait, was over. HMS Hood was at the bottom of the sea; a wounded HMS Prince of Wales was limping back to port. The German battleship Bismarck, disabled by a relentless barrage from British ships and aircraft, had been scuttled and sunk.

It was May 27, 1941, and after eight days and multiple torpedo strikes from Swordfish biplanes of the Fleet Air Arm, along with more then 400 hits from Royal Navy guns, just 114 of Bismarck’s 2,200-plus crewmen would survive.

One hundred 14, that is, and a cat.

HMS Cossack, a Tribal-class destroyer that had joined the hunt for Bismarck during the battle’s preliminaries, was now, in its aftermath, hunting for German survivors to rescue. They found none, but for a lone, soggy cat afloat on a wooden board.

As is convention of wartime sailors, soldiers and aircrew, the swabbies aboard Cossack rescued the frayed feline, adopted him and named him Oscar—derived from the International Code of Signals designation for the letter ‘O,’ code for “Man Overboard.”

Oscar—or the German “Oskar,” as some prefer—sailed with Cossack’s crew on convoy duty between Gibraltar and the United Kingdom for five months until the destroyer was torpedoed by U-563, a German U-boat skippered by Klaus Bargsten.

Taken under tow by a tug out of Gibraltar, the heavily damaged ship sank in a storm two days later; 159 of its 190 crew died. Oscar survived and became Unsinkable Sam, the black-and-white ship’s cat of the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal.

The relationship didn’t last long.

Just two-and-a-half weeks later, the big flat-top was sailing for Malta when it was torpedoed and sunk near Gibraltar by U-81 under Oberleutnant zur See Friedrich Guggenberger. One sailor was killed, by the explosion of the single torpedo.

Sam would be found by a motor launch clinging to a floating plank. Described by author William Jameson in his book Ark Royal: The Life of an Aircraft Carrier at War 1939-41 as “angry but quite unharmed,” the cat with at least three lives was eventually taken aboard HMS Legion, which happened to have been the same ship that rescued the Cossack survivors.

A pastel portrait of Unsinkable Sam, created by artist Georgina Shaw-Baker (1860-1951), is currently in the possession of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.
[Royal Museums Greenwich]

Or so the story goes.

Some authorities have questioned whether Sam’s adventurous saga might be the stuff of sea stories, in the genre of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, or the tales passed down by the storytellers that populate naval and merchant vessels the world over—shreds of truth laced with fiction.

The skeptics point to the fact there are pictures of two different cats identified as Sam—or Oscar, as the case may be.

One, says the Royal Museums Greenwich, shows “a tabby claimed to be him and the other a black-and-white cat but clearly wearing a collar tag with the inscription ‘HMS Amethyst 1949’ (which would make that cat ‘Simon’ not ‘Oscar’).

“Allowing a degree of confusion, however, there is no suggestion ‘Oscar’ was an official mascot on ‘Bismarck’ (so possibly aboard as an illicit crew pet) and no reason for the artist to have done this portrait if he was not.”

Simon, by the way, became ship’s cat aboard HMS Amethyst, a sloop-of-war, after he was found wandering the dockyards of Hong Kong in March 1948 by a 17-year-old ordinary seaman, George Hickinbottom.

Simon was awarded the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals’ Dickin Medal for gallantry (known as the animal Victoria Cross) in April 1949 after he was wounded by shrapnel from an artillery shell during the Yangtze Incident, in which Communist rebels blocked Royal Navy access to China’s Yangtze River during the Chinese Civil War and opened fire.

One of the first rounds tore through the captain’s cabin, seriously wounding Simon and mortally wounding his skipper, Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, who died soon after.

Simon managed to climb out of the cabin wreckage onto the ship’s deck where, despite the fact 22 crew had been killed and 31 wounded, he was picked up and taken to the medical bay. Staff cleaned his burns and removed four pieces of shrapnel.

The cat was not expected to last the night. Simon nevertheless survived, raised shipboard morale, and killed off a rat infestation—which was the primary role of ship’s cats, generally, since forever.

Photographs purporting to show Sam are inevitably Simon, the highly decorated ship’s cat aboard HMS Amethyst. The medallion around the cat’s neck says so. [Wikimedia]

Sam, who was actually Simon. 
[Wikimedia]

Simon became an instant celebrity, lauded in newspapers around the world and was the only feline ever to earn the Dickin.

He was also awarded a Blue Cross Medal, an animal charity award for courage usually bestowed on horses and dogs, including Juliana, a great Dane who apparently disabled a bomb by urinating on it.

Simon was bestowed the Naval General Service Medal (a general campaign decoration) and given the fanciful rank of Able Seacat after disposing of a particularly vicious rat known as “Mao Tse-tung” (Mao Zedong).

He received thousands of letters—so many that a lieutenant, Stewart Hett, was appointed “cat officer” to deal with the demand. Simon was honoured at every port of call during Amethyst’s journey home, and a special welcome was made for him upon the ship’s arrival at Plymouth in November.

Alas, as was protocol, Simon had to serve time in quarantine at an animal centre in Surrey, where he contracted a wound-related virus and died. Hundreds, including Amethyst’s entire crew, attended his funeral at the PDSA Ilford Animal Cemetery in East London.

His tombstone declares that “throughout the Yangste Incident, his behaviour was of the highest order.”

There is apparently no such tribute to or record of Unsinkable Sam. Official documents of the day make no mention of what one would assume to be a newsworthy story. Ludovic Kennedy, a war correspondent who delivered a comprehensive account of the Bismarck sinking, makes no mention of a cat.

The convictions of avowed cat people notwithstanding, the fact that U-boats were known to be lurking after the Battle of the Denmark Strait, forcing Allied vessels to cut short their rescue efforts, casts some further questions as to whether the Cossack crew would have taken the risk, time and effort to save a cat.

Convoy naps in his hammock aboard HMS Hermione. The cat died along with 87 crewmates when the light cruiser was torpedoed and sunk in June 1942.
[Wikimedia]

• “Tom,” a grey and black tabby, was ship’s cat aboard the USS Maine in 1898. The ship was sunk in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898, sparking the Spanish-American War; 266 sailors, a pug mascot, and two of three ship’s cats died. Wounded, Tom survived and was adopted by Maine’s executive officer, Commander Richard Wainwright. The cat would be featured in animal rights-related materials by the ASPCA and other humane societies, who lauded the navy’s treatment of ships’ cats as well cared-for, working companion animals.
• “Jenny” was ship’s cat aboard the doomed RMS Titanic, mentioned in the accounts of several crew who survived the ocean liner’s doomed maiden voyage in 1912. She had been transferred from Titanic’s sister ship Olympic and given birth shortly before Titanic left Southampton. Jenny and her kittens resided in the galley, living off kitchen scraps. Stewardess Violet Jessop, who survived the sinkings of both the Titanic and as a nurse four years later aboard its sister ship, HMHS Britannic, wrote in her memoir that, as Titanic foundered, the cat “laid her family near Jim, the scullion, whose approval she always sought and who always gave her warm devotion.”
• An orange tabby, “Emmy,” was ship’s cat on RMS Empress of Ireland just before the outbreak of the First World War. She never missed a voyage. Until May 28, 1914, that is. Emmy jumped ship while in port at Quebec City. The crew returned her to the ship, but she left again, leaving her kittens behind. Empress of Ireland sailed without her, which was regarded as a bad omen. Early the next morning, the ocean liner was struck by the cargo vessel Storstad in fog near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and rapidly sank; more than 1,000 passengers and crew died.
• “Mrs Chippy” was a male tabby who accompanied Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-15 Antarctic expedition aboard Endurance. He was renowned among the crew for his ability to walk the ship’s narrow rails in even the roughest seas. Captain Frank Worsley’s diary describes Mrs Chippy climbing the rigging “exactly after the manner of a seaman going aloft.” The cat survived a 10-minute plunge into the Southern Ocean, only to be shot with several of the crew’s sled dogs after the expedition became stranded in ice.
• A five-year-old grey-and-white long-haired tom name “Aussie” was the last ship’s cat of RMS Niagara, a 1930s-era transpacific liner. His mother was Niagara’s cat before him, his father a Persian in Vancouver. Aussie was born in Fiji. Niagara hit a mine off New Zealand in 1940. Aussie was put in a lifeboat, but he jumped back aboard the ship. Days later, residents of Horahora, Whangarei, claimed a cat matching Aussie’s description came ashore on a piece of driftwood. A villager took him in, but the cat ran off and vanished.
• “Blackie” was ship’s cat aboard HMS Prince of Wales. He achieved worldwide fame during WW II after the ship brought Prime Minister Winston Churchill to secretly meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the U.S. naval station in Argentia, Nfld., in August 1941. As Churchill prepared to step off the ship, Blackie approached. The bulldog PM was photographed stooping to bid farewell to the cat, who was subsequently renamed “Churchill.” The cat survived the sinking of Prince of Wales by Japanese naval aircraft months later and was taken to Singapore with the survivors. He could not be found when Singapore was evacuated the following year.
• “Convoy” sailed, well, in convoys aboard HMS Hermione, a light cruiser that saw plenty of action in WW II, including the pursuit and sinking of Bismarck. Convoy was listed in the ship’s book and provided with a full kit, including a tiny hammock in which he slept. He was killed along with 87 of his crew mates when Hermione was torpedoed and sunk in June 1942 by U-205.
• “Camouflage,” ship’s cat aboard a U.S. Coast Guard LST in the Pacific theatre during WW II, was known for chasing enemy tracer rounds across the deck. As a kitten, another feline was rescued from a Japanese pillbox by U.S. Coast Guardsmen during the 1943 Battle of Tarawa. “Tarawa” the cat became a mascot aboard an LST but did not get along with the vessel’s other mascot, a dog named Kodiak, and jumped ship ashore.
• “Chibley” was rescued from an animal shelter to serve as ship’s cat aboard the three-masted barque Picton Castle, a 1928-built trawler, minesweeper, freighter and, ultimately, training vessel based in Lunenburg, N.S. The cat circumnavigated the globe five times, becoming widely known and encountered by many. Chibley died Nov. 10, 2011, in Lunenburg, having travelled more than 180,000 nautical miles (330,000 kilometres) at sea.

Mrs Chippy perches on the shoulder of stowaway-turned-crewman Perce Blackborow aboard Endurance during Ernest Shackelton’s 1914-15 Antarctic expedition.
[N/A]

Churchill bids farewell to Blackie on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales prior to meeting Roosevelt at Argentia, Nfld., in August 1941. The cat survived the ship’s sinking a few months later.
[Wikimedia]

The 96-year-old barque Picton Castle still sails out of Lunenburg, N.S., and still keeps a ship’s cat.
[Province of Nova Scotia]