One of the men who helped crack the German Enigma cipher drowned within reach of Menorca, and almost no one knew. When the French liner Lamoricière went down in a Mediterranean gale on January 9, 1942, the passenger list included Jerzy Różycki, a Polish mathematician whose quiet work in the 1930s had helped pry open the most important secret of the coming war. He was thirty-two. His body was never found, and the sea off the Balearics kept his story, along with those of nearly three hundred others, for the better part of a lifetime.
The Lamoricière was built for gentler times. Launched from the Swan Hunter yards on the Tyne at Newcastle in 1920, she was an oil-burning steamer of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, named for the French general Louis Juchault de Lamoricière, and she plied the run between Algiers and Marseille with room for passengers in everything from third-class berths to six deluxe suites. War aged her quickly. In 1940, fuel shortages forced her conversion from oil to coal, which cut her speed from a brisk seventeen knots to a labored ten. By 1942 she was a slow ship burning poor fuel on a sea that had grown very dangerous.
She left Algiers at five o'clock on the evening of January 6, 1942, bound for Marseille with 272 passengers, 88 of them military personnel, and 122 crew, her holds packed with 330 tonnes of cargo, mostly vegetables. The Mediterranean turned on her. A rising storm built to Force 7 on the Beaufort scale, and the aging liner, already short of good coal, began to struggle. She had diverted to help a French freighter, the Jumièges, only to arrive too late; the ship had already gone down with all twenty of her crew. As the gale worsened, the Lamoricière's stokers resorted to feeding the ship's own furniture into the boilers to keep her limping forward.
Menorca lay achingly close, the nearest land, but the dying ship could not reach it. She took on a list; seawater poured through her portholes, flooded the engine rooms by evening, and by nine o'clock had drowned the generators and pumps. Efforts to shift the deck cargo and right her failed. When at last the order came to abandon ship, the list was so severe that the starboard lifeboats could not be launched at all. One of the first boats away was snagged and capsized, spilling its passengers into the freezing sea. Among them were sixteen children from the Centre Guynemer and two Red Cross nurses. Only two of the children survived. At 12:35 the Lamoricière slipped under.
Of the nearly four hundred souls aboard, only ninety-three lived, pulled from the waves by the ships Gueydon, Chanzy, and Impétueuse. Captain Joseph Milliasseau, who had commanded the Lamoricière since 1937, went down with her. Among the dead were three cryptologists of Poland's prewar Cipher Bureau: Jerzy Różycki, Piotr Smoleński, and Captain Jan Graliński, traveling with a French officer, Captain François Lane. Their loss was a secret catastrophe. Różycki had devised the 'clock' method that helped Polish mathematicians read Enigma traffic in the 1930s, groundwork that Britain would later build upon at Bletchley Park. Three men who had helped unlock the war's greatest cipher died in a storm off Menorca, their achievement still far too secret to mourn in public.
The disaster left two legacies, one legal and one physical. A lawsuit in the 1950s ruled that the sinking was four-fifths the fault of the storm and one-fifth the ship's own unseaworthiness, an apportioning of blame stated so cleanly that it entered maritime law as the 'Lamoricière Principle.' The ship herself stayed lost until 2008, when a team of Spanish and Italian divers found her remains on the seabed, 156 meters down, about ten kilometers northeast of Menorca. She lies there still, a war grave in deep water, holding the memory of the children, the crew, and the codebreakers whose secret the sea kept longest of all.
The Lamoricière lies on the seabed at roughly 40.00°N, 4.37°E, about 10 km northeast of Menorca in some 156 meters of water, an open-sea position off the island's northeast coast around 20 km north-northeast of Menorca Airport (LEMH). There is nothing to see on the surface; the visual reference is the open Mediterranean beyond Cap de Favàritx, whose black-and-white lighthouse marks the nearest point of land to the southwest. From 2,000-4,000 feet in clear weather the empty sea stretches to the horizon where the liner went down in the 1942 storm.