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 Gaulles 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 Stewarts 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 Stewarts 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.
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