SS City of Benares was a British steam turbine ocean liner, built for Ellerman Lines by Barclay, Curle & Co of Glasgow in 1936.

[7] When war was declared on Germany by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on 3 September 1939, Benares was on her way to England, having just finished her usual cruise to India.

There, all passengers disembarked, the ship was fitted out with a stern deck gun (for defensive purposes), and she was painted naval grey to camouflage her from enemy U-boats.

Mrs. Maud Hillman, 44, an infant teacher; Mr. Michael Rennie, 23, who felt a calling to the church and was going to go into theology after the trip; Reverend William Henry King, 28, an Anglican cleric; and Father Roderick (Rory) O'Sullivan, 32, a Roman Catholic priest.

[13] One of the passengers, Mrs. Amelie von Ingersleben, a German baroness and author, had managed to cleverly escape from a concentration camp.

[9][14] Among the paying passengers, ten of whom were the young sons and daughters of civilians, were the British Parliamentarian, Colonel James Baldwin-Webb, on his way to Canada to help with the Red Cross.

[9] Rudolf Olden, a German author, was forced to sail to North America, as he had been exiled from Germany for criticizing Hitler in his newspaper.

[9] Monika Lanyi, daughter of the famed German writer Thomas Mann (who had also been exiled from Germany) was traveling with her husband, Jeno.

[11] They were leaving their home in Bognor Regis, while their father, Emil, would stay in London to continue his Danish porcelain business.

[9] Lawrence and Patricia Croasdaile, two and nine, were traveling with their mother Florence, an American woman, to live with their grandmother in Canada because their father had been captured by the Nazis when his ship was torpedoed and they were waiting for news about him.

[11] Colin Richardson, eleven, was traveling alone, as his mother and father (who was an air raid warden) were staying in England with his brother, Julian, who was only five.

[16] Late in the evening of 17 September, City of Benares was sighted by U-48, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt, who fired two torpedoes at her at 10:00 PM.

They spent eight days adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, before being sighted by a RAF Short Sunderland, piloted by Australian Bill Garing, and then rescued by convoy escort HMS Anthony.

[22] The directors of the CORB were hopeful that the programme could be continued, and presented a report into the sinking which made recommendations for future operations, which included the use of faster transports and escorts on the North Atlantic routes, and the concentration of the evacuation programme on routes to Australia, India and South Africa, where the weather was better and there were felt to be fewer enemy submarines.

[23] The Admiralty pointed out that there were too few fast escorts and ships available, and public opinion was opposed to the continuation of overseas evacuation, fearing further tragedies.

[24] The government announced the cancellation of the CORB programme, and all children who were currently preparing to sail were ordered to disembark and return home.

"[26] The full story is told in Children of the Benares, A War Crime and its Victims by Ralph Barker, published by Methuen London, 1987.

Elizabeth Hawkins wrote Sea of Peril (Published 1995), a fictional account of a boy being sent aboard Benares; when the ship is torpedoed, he ends up in Lifeboat 12.

The poet George Sutherland Fraser, who served in World War II, wrote a poem, "S.S. City of Benares (drowned refugee children, 1940)", about the sinking.

The play Lifeboat by Nicola McCartney tells the story of Bess Walder and Beth Cummings, two survivors of City of Benares.

Tom Nagorski wrote Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack (Hyperion Books: New York, 2006.

ISBN 1-4013-0871-6) collecting eyewitness accounts about the people and events connected with the attack and sinking of the liner SS City of Benares.

There is a memorial to Michael Rennie, an escort who died of exhaustion after rescuing several evacuee children, in the Church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London NW11.

The sinking reportedly inspired actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr to develop and patent a system of spread spectrum radio as a means to guide anti-ship torpedoes.

[30] The book September 17 by Amanda West Lewis (published 2013), tells the story of three children, Bess Walder, Kenneth Sparks, and Sonia Bech, using real events, but fictional conversations.