December 11, 2025

Unsinkable Sam: The Ship’s Cat Who Survived Three Sinkings and the Photo Everyone Gets Wrong

The real story of Oscar, the WWII cat who lived through the loss of Bismarck, HMS Cossack, and HMS Ark Royal, and why the famous photo shared online isn’t him.

If you’ve seen the story of Unsinkable Sam circulating online, you’ve probably also seen the same black-and-white cat photo attached to it: a tuxedo cat looking dignified in a tiny Royal Navy collar.

It’s a wonderful image. It’s also not Sam.

This famous photo is Simon, the ship’s cat of HMS Amethyst, and the only cat ever awarded the Dickin Medal. His collar tag “HMS Amethyst 1949” is right there in the picture. But over time, the internet folded Simon into Sam’s legend, and the two cats became tangled in the same mythology.

Sam’s actual story doesn’t need borrowed photos. It’s extraordinary on its own.

Unsinkable Sam

Unsinkable Sam, also known as Oscar or Oskar, was a ship’s cat during the Second World War whose survival record borders on folklore. The accounts that survive, scattered across wartime newspapers and naval reports, tell the story of a cat who lived through three major sinkings in 1941, beginning with one of the most dramatic naval battles of the war.

Bismarck: Where the legend begins

In May 1941, after the Battle of the Denmark Strait and days of pursuit, the German battleship Bismarck was hit repeatedly, crippled, and ultimately sunk in the Atlantic. Out of more than 2,200 crew members, only 114 survived.

And, if the accounts are correct, one cat.

HMS Cossack, among the destroyers searching for survivors, found a small black-and-white cat drifting on a piece of wreckage. Sailors pulled him aboard, dried him off, and named him Oscar, the signal code word for “man overboard.” As was tradition, a rescued animal quickly became a crew member.

Oscar settled in. He patrolled the decks, accepted rations, and lived what passed for a normal ship’s cat life.

HMS Cossack: The second sinking

For five months, Oscar sailed with the Cossack as she escorted convoys between Gibraltar and the UK. But in October 1941, she was hit by a torpedo from German submarine U-563. One hundred 159 crew members were killed. The ship was taken under tow but sank in a storm two days later.

Oscar survived again.

He was transferred to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which had taken part in the hunt for Bismarck months earlier. The crew began calling him by a new name: Unsinkable Sam.

HMS Ark Royal: The third and final loss

Barely three weeks later, in November 1941, Ark Royal was struck by a torpedo from U-81 while returning from Malta. Despite extensive efforts to save her, the carrier capsized and sank near Gibraltar.

Only one crew member died in the attack. Sam survived that sinking, too, found clinging to a floating plank, “angry but unharmed,” according to author William Jameson.

Three ships. Three sinkings. One cat.

A quiet retirement

Sam’s seafaring days ended after the loss of Ark Royal. He briefly lived in the governor of Gibraltar’s offices, then was moved to Belfast, where he spent the remainder of the war at the Home for Sailors, a retirement home for naval veterans.

He died in 1955.

That much, the rescues, the transfers, the retirement, appears in period newspapers and wartime notes, though the story has inevitably acquired the embellishments of sea lore.

What Sam did not have: a famous portrait

Despite his notoriety, there is no widely accepted photograph of Unsinkable Sam. So we went back to the British newspaper archives from 1941.

One article from the Belfast Telegraph (Dec. 9, 1941) published a small image of a black-and-white cat identified as “Oscar,” living at a Sailors’ Rest. It is one of the few contemporary photos associated with his story, grainy, authentic, ordinary.

The much-circulated crisp portrait online? The one with the collar? That’s Simon of HMS Amethyst, a completely different cat with a completely different history.

A legend without a face

Unsinkable Sam’s story persists not because of a dramatic photo, but because it fits a long tradition of seafaring tales, small truths surviving inside larger myths. A wartime cat rescued from wreckage, carried between ships, and remembered long after the men who found him wrote their reports.

Sometimes history arrives in fragments: a report, a newspaper clipping, a sailor’s memory. Sometimes the picture everyone uses turns out to be wrong. And sometimes the story remains remarkable anyway.

Unsinkable Sam, or Oscar, wherever myth and reality meet, still earns his name.

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