Born: Unknown, United Kingdom
Died: 7 April 1945
Country most active: International
Also known as: Lorraine Elizabeth Gleeson. Died 7th April 1945, birth unknown
The following is excerpted from a conversation with Dr Nina Baker about her book, Supposed Killed or Drowned by Enemy Action at Sea, about Scottish Merchant Navy women who died as a result of enemy action in the First and Second World Wars.
So she was a Scots woman. And although she was born in Glasgow, she ended up in Australia at some point in her life. But at the point that she went to sea, she was living in Australia, her husband was away with the services, and she became a stewardess on a ship called the SS Nanking. Now the Nanking is notorious, there are several books written about it, because the people who were on the Nanking had a really horrendous experience. So what happened was that the ship was en route from Australia to India, when it was attacked by a German marauder
called the Thor. Now the Thor was the Germans’ most successful deep sea raider. This ship just roamed the oceans, shooting at Allied ships. It was very, very successful. So they were attacked in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And to begin with, it was believed that the Nanking had been sunk. And in the newspaper reports, it was believed that the Nanking had been lost with all hands, because some attack in the middle of the Indian Ocean, what possible help could there be for anybody? They weren’t with a convoy escort or anything like that. So this was on the 10th of May 1942, in a very empty part of the Indian Ocean, not near any of the island groups. And they were attacked both by a plane and by the Thor. I’m quoting now, “believing the ship doomed and concerned for the safety of the women and children on board” – so there were quite a lot of families that were being taken to India from Australia to meet up with their husbands and so on – “the captain ordered everybody to take to the lifeboats. The crew disabled the engines, they thought, and tried to sink the ship by opening the seawater valves.” However, the Germans quickly realised what was going on and put some of their own people on board and stopped that. They sailed the ship to Tokyo Bay, to the Japanese. And the Nanking remained there until some years later, it was sunk by an explosion that happened in the harbour.
But the people on board, the men, women and children, were passed from one German ship to another across the Indian Ocean, until they also eventually ended up in Japan at Yokohama in July. So this is like two whole months later. They’d been passed from one ship to another across the Indian Ocean. And the Germans wanted to have the Japanese take them on as prisoners of war. Now, the Japanese were not particularly keen to do this because these weren’t the normal kinds of prisoners of war, your soldiers or whatever, that they could just put into a normal prison camp. But the Germans agreed to fund the feeding, the costs of this exercise. And they were taken to a former monastery in a place called Fukushima, where the women and children were segregated in one part and the men in another part. And they remained there. So this is 1942. They remained there until 1945, after the victory in Japan.
Elizabeth Gleeson was not the only stewardess who was captured. A Dutch stewardess from a Greek-owned ship, a woman called Caroline Dimitrakopouloy, was also in the camp. Neither of them survived their captivity. Now, you’ve probably read about the prisoners of war in the sort of more normal types of Japanese prisoners of war camp. This was pretty similar, or even though it was civilians, and even though the women and children were involved, this was pretty tough living. In 1944, Elizabeth Gleeson got an infected finger. Her whole arm became infected. And although amputation was attempted, and she seemed to be recovering, eventually she died in April 1945, after three years in captivity. But she never stopped being a stewardess during that time, and feeling that it was her continuing responsibility to look after the passengers, even though they were now in this camp. Only three months after she died were they rescued, 1945. And she’s buried in Japan, in the Yokohama Allied Cemetery there. So this was a woman who took her stewardessing responsibilities very seriously, even though she hadn’t been a lifelong stewardess like some of the others.