The Truth Behind a 1941 Giant Squid Attack

In 1941, the SS Britannia was en route from the UK to Bombay when it was attacked by a German warship and sunk. Almost half the passengers and crew were lost. Several of the survivors were picked up five days later clinging to a raft. Among them was Second Lieutenant R.E.G. Cox of the Indian Army, who had some strange wounds. Were they a result of an attack by a giant squid? 

In 1960, Cox's story was published in the book Kingdom of the Octopus as a warning of the danger of cephalopod attacks. It was aired on TV in 1980 in an episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. And it has been retold as fact ever since. But giant squids don't come to the surface to feed. Historian Jonathan Dyer looked into the story, and traced it back to an account by Cox in 1960, in which he first identified the attacker as a giant squid. In a newspaper article from only seven months after the 1941 attack, Cox's story was quite lurid- he was attacked by a stinging octopus, while a shark bit another man clinging to the life raft, then that man was eaten by a manta ray. Another newspaper account told quite a different story. Read what really caused Cox's wounds, and how the tale grew bigger and stranger over the years, at the Public Domain Review. -via Strange Company