The brief intersection of these two lives — the submarine commander who fired the torpedoes and the mess steward who survived the sinking — is not a story of direct personal confrontation or rivalry. Emmermann almost certainly did not know that anyone from the Benlomond had survived, let alone survived for one hundred and thirty-three days. The U-boat’s log would have recorded the sinking and the confirmation of the kill; whatever happened afterward, in the debris field that Poon Lim picked his way through to reach the floating raft, was not something that U-172 observed or recorded.
The historical record places Emmermann in the position of having commanded the weapon that killed fifty-three people and set one man adrift in the South Atlantic. What Emmermann knew, thought, or felt about this is not available in the sources consulted for this article. The moral accounting of submarine warfare in the Second World War, in which combatants engaged civilian vessels under military orders within a legal framework that has been extensively analyzed and debated since 1945, is a question that exceeds the scope of this article and cannot be settled by reference to a single incident.
What is specific and documented is the sinking. What followed from it — for Poon Lim, for the dead, for their families — belongs to the history that wartime command decisions produce.
## The American Recognition
The United States Navy’s response to Poon Lim’s survival story went beyond the incorporation of his techniques into survival training. Multiple sources report that the Navy commissioned a reconstruction of his raft — a physical replica of the Carley float and the improvised survival tools he had built on it — for purposes of documentation and training. Some accounts attribute the specific commission for this reconstruction to interest at high levels of the American government, including a reference to President Truman’s interest in the case.