For the first time in narrative, here is the true story of the World War II tragedy of the SS City of Benares, which remains to this day the worst ever sea disaster involving British children. More than half of all those on board this ship full of evacuees were lost after the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in September 1940. Of ninety very young 'seavacuee' children escaping the bombing in Britain to safety in Canada, seventy-seven died.  Those who survived tell stories of towering seas and near-miraculous escapes clinging to rafts and wreckage for nineteen hours before rescue. One group of children managed to keep going for eight days drifting in an open boat in the north Atlantic. In this moving narrative the child survivors tell their story for the first time directly in their own words. .