Jonathan Fenby is a former editor of the Observer in London and of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, which he steered through the handover of the colony from Britain to China in 1997. He has also worked for The Economist, the Guardian, the Independent and Reuters. His previous books include the acclaimed On the Brink: The Trouble with France and Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost.
Also by Jonathan Fenby
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA: THE FALL AND RISE OF A GREAT POWER
DRAGON THRONE: THE IMPERIAL DYNASTIES OF CHINA
THE SEVENTY WONDERS OF CHINA (ED.) ALLIANCE: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW ROOSEVELT, STALIN AND CHURCHILL WON ONE WAR AND BEGAN ANOTHER
THE SINKING OF THE LANCASTRIA: BRITAIN’S WORST NAVAL DISASTER AND CHURCHILL’S COVER-UP
GENERALISSIMO: CHIANG KAI-SHEK AND THE CHINA HE LOST
DEALING WITH THE DRAGON: A YEAR IN THE NEW HONG KONG
ON THE BRINK: THE TROUBLE WITH FRANCE
THE GENERAL: CHARLES DE GAULLE AND THE FRANCE HE SAVED
TIGER HEAD, SNAKE TAILS: CHINA TODAY, HOW IT GOT THERE AND WHY IT HAS TO CHANGE
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2005
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
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Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Fenby
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of Jonathan Fenby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ebook ISBN: 978-1-47114-296-3
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To the memory of those who died
on the Lancastria – and to those
who survived
CONTENTS
Map
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 Friday, 14 June 1940
2 Saturday, 15 June 1940
3 Sunday, 16 June 1940
4 Monday, 17 June 1940
5 The Bombing
6 The Sinking
7 The Sea
8 The Rescue
9 St-Nazaire
10 The Way Back
11 Home
12 The Bodies
13 Aftermath
14 The Memory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WAS FIRST TOLD about the Lancastria by Tom Wallace, and so owe a prime debt to him and his wife for having put me on the trail that led to this book. It could not have been written without the help of the Lancastria Association, and its compilations of recollections of survivors edited by John L. West and Colin Clarke in 1988 and 1998. I am deeply grateful to the Association for its help, particularly to the Secretary, Rob Miller. Equal thanks goes to survivors for their memories, papers and photographs, in particular to Fred Coe, Stan and Vic Flowers, Harry Harding, Denis Holland, Morris Lashbrook and Joe Sweeney. Another major source was the thirty hours of oral history from survivors recorded by the Imperial War Museum whose staff was especially helpful. I am also grateful for help from the Public Records Office at Kew, Steven Prince of the Naval Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defence, and Allen Packwood of the Churchill Archive at Cambridge.
Warrant Officer David Curry provided material on RAF units involved in the disaster, as well as showing me objects from the Lancastria collected at RAF Digby and letting me read his own work on Operation Aerial. I drew on Harry Grattidge’s memoirs and on Cunard accounts of the liner’s peacetime career. Auriol Stevens provided recollections from Captain Barry Stevens to throw light on the decision not to leave St-Nazaire – for which I am also grateful for the good offices of Hugh Stephenson. John Duggan recounted his family’s exodus and read the manuscript. Jack Altman provided a lead that helped to get the project going. Sally Tagholm provided valuable help with the research and Sara Arguden gave her usual aid and comfort.
In France, Christophe François was an invaluable guide and an unselfish provider of material. I was also grateful for the assistance of Claude Gurio, Emile Bouton, the inhabitants of Les Moutiers, Thérèse Dumont at the Mayor’s office in St-Nazaire, Yannick Bigaud, Mayor of Guémené-Penfao, and Dr Tessier of St-Nazaire. The Naval Archive at Vincennes. The departmental archives at Nantes and the Eco-Musée at St-Nazaire both provided local material including Denise Petit’s account.
André Villeneuve gave useful books and thoughts on the collapse of France, and he and his wife, Lisa, were generous hosts during research in Paris. Annie and the late Luc Besnier supplied a most agreeable haven on trips along the Loire.
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson was his usual supportive self. Andrew Gordon’s encouragement fuelled the writing, and he nudged me to give the story a proper ending. Cassandra Campbell was an ideal editor, and the manuscript benefited from the attentions of Carol Anderson and Samantha Bell.
As always, I am hugely indebted to my wife, in the research in France, in improving the manuscript in many ways, and in her enthusiasm for telling the story of the Lancastria.
The Sinking of the
Lancastria
PROLOGUE
‘THIS IS THE END,’ thought Captain Field, lying on his back in the oily sea. ‘What a place to drown.’
Around him, the sea was covered with the dead and dying. Desperate people were fighting for their lives, grasping hold of planks, chairs, military packs, oars – or one another – as they battled to stay afloat. Behind them, silhouetted against the sky, a throng of soldiers crowded on the upended hull of the great ship which was sinking deeper in the water by the minute. Raging fires inside the hold sent up huge palls of smoke.
A few hours earlier, thousands of soldiers and air crew who had boarded the ship had regarded her as their escape route to England, and safety. They were among the forgotten men of the early summer of 1940.
After the Dunkirk evacuation ended at the beginning of June, Winston Churchill had assured the nation that ‘the British Expeditionary Force has been completely and successfully evacuated from France’. That was a spectacular piece of disinformation. Around 150,000 British troops were left behind, strung out from Champagne to the west coast.
Some trailed across France for two weeks as the German army advanced remorselessly and dive bombers swooped from the clear summer skies. Others stayed put in their bases in the west of France before finally being given the order to head to the coast for evacuation home.
Reaching the last open harbour at St-Nazaire, they had seen the five-decked, 16,243-ton Lancastria lying out in the wide estuary of the River Loire. She was the largest of a fleet sent to save tens of thousands of men crowding into the port town. As they swarmed aboard the former Cunard liner turned into a troopship, some felt it was almost as good as being back in Blighty. One thought the ship looked as solid as the Strand Palace Hotel in London.
In the mid-afternoon of 17 June, four bombs from a German
plane hit the Lancastria, causing her to list sharply and then to turn over in the water.
For those caught in her holds when the bombs exploded inside the ship, she became a death trap of destruction and raging flames. Eight hundred RAF men died when a bomb hit the hold where they were sheltering. Another ripped through the ship’s hospital. Steam escaping from a ruptured boiler horribly scalded stokers.
For others, the sinking hull of the overturned liner became the last place of refuge. At first, they screamed and shouted at the planes swooping down to machine-gun the wide bay. Some called for an RAF ace, ‘Cobber’ Kain, who had shot down seventeen enemy aircraft – not knowing that he had been killed in an accident two weeks earlier. Then they began to sing; first, the pub favourite, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, and, led by a strong tenor voice, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. An immaculately turned-out officer standing on the sinking keel smoked a cigarette as if he was safe on dry land. Looking back while he swam away, a 19-year-old Welsh trooper, Henry Harding, saw figures trying to scramble out of the portholes as flames flared in the hull. He could glimpse hands behind the bodies, either trying to push them out or pull them back. ‘If there’s a Hell, that’s it,’ he said to himself.
For those who jumped into the sea, the priority was to get away before the suction of the fast-sinking vessel dragged them down. Many ripped off their clothes to ease their progress through the water as oil spewed from the ship’s ruptured tanks. Captain Field decided it was time to remove his trousers to make swimming simpler.
Another officer, Captain F. E. Griggs of the Royal Engineers, was moving as fast as he could through the warm, calm water. The previous week, he had been enjoying French food and wine as he drove across the country. Now, he was swimming for his life. Unlike many of those around him, he retained his full uniform with its Sam Browne belt, shoes, tin hat, plus a life belt. Oil coated him from head to foot. A German plane came over to strafe, but its machine-gun bullets missed him. The surface of the sea around him was strewn with dead small fish. ‘I’ve got the oil and the sardines,’ Griggs thought. ‘All I want now is the tins!’
After jumping from the ship, Sergeant Harold Pettit had dropped deep below the surface, and felt he was bound to drown. Then he had come up, but he was suffering from sickness and diarrhoea. He joined a circle of five men, a couple of whom had life jackets. The six of them clung together, occasionally losing their grip because of the slimy oil and their tiredness, though they still had enough spirit to joke about their appearance. Weakening, Pettit thought he was going to go under again. Then, he suddenly heard a voice saying, ‘Don’t go yet, there’s annuvver one ’ere’ – and he was hauled, naked and covered with oil, on to a raft towed by a launch from a British destroyer.
Sidney Dunmall, a private in the Pay Corps who had been among the last to board the Lancastria, dug his nails into a plank thrown down from the ship, hanging on desperately as he tried to get away. But the suction dragged him back, and his plank banged against the side of the liner. Just then, a man wearing a life jacket swam by.
‘I’ll pull you clear, matey, if you promise not to hold on to me,’ he called out.
‘I won’t touch you,’ Dunmall replied. ‘Just pull me clear.’
The man got on top of one end of the plank, and manoeuvred it fifty yards from the hull.
‘Are you all right, matey?’ he asked.
Dunmall thanked him. The man waved, and swam away.
A soldier without a life jacket approached an RAF man, who was wearing one, and said very politely: ‘Good afternoon. I propose to share your life jacket.’ The RAF man, Sergeant Macpherson, took it off, and they used it as a buoy, sculling with their spare arms to move away from the ship.
Some of those in the water went mad, ranting and raving. Others were silent in prayer. Many were choking on the 1400 tons of oil that poured out of the liner’s tanks.
‘My baby, look after my baby,’ a woman shouted.
‘It’s all right ma, we’ve got her,’ came a call, and men swam up holding the child above the water.
‘Baby, baby,’ the mother said repeatedly as she headed with her 2-year-old daughter for a raft.
One of the oldest soldiers on board, a 64-year-old Boer War veteran called Norman de Coudray Tronson, had helped to fire a Bren gun at the attacking planes; but then a wave washed him overboard, and he floated in the sea, looking back at the liner.
Captain Clement Stott had gone under the water after jumping from the ship, having carefully arranged his pince-nez in his breast pocket before launching himself into the air. As he came up, he felt a man hanging on to his feet. Stott realised he had to get rid of him, or they would both drown. So he kicked hard with his army boots, and struggled free.
A 44-year-old father of five from Wales who had brought his fifty men of the Pay Corps safely to St-Nazaire, Stott watched a naked man wearing a green and red identity disc round his neck dive through a porthole into the sea. At first, Stott could not spot anybody alive in the mass of wreckage and burned and blackened bodies, and already counted himself among the dead. But then he noticed a crowd of people, including some men from his unit, and raised his thumb in greeting. As he trod water, he saw they were all pitch black. ‘That’s a funny thing,’ he thought. ‘I didn’t see any Africans aboard.’ Then he became aware of the oil spread over the surface of the sea – his own face was also completely black.
Stott swam towards a raft crowded with men singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. But a voice shouted ‘Get off! Get away!’, and feet in grey army socks kicked him in the face – Stott, 5 feet 5 inches tall and of slight build, was glad that, unlike him, they had taken off their boots.
In places, the thick oil slick caught fire from the German strafing. When a blazing patch threatened a lifeboat, a sailor jumped over the side to try to put it out; as he hit the water, he cried out, and was seen no more.
William Knight, who had fought his way across France after Dunkirk, saw a man swimming past a flaming patch of oil towards the float on which he sat. Suddenly, the man’s hair caught fire. He began to scream. His head went under, and the oil closed over him.
Two soldiers shot one another to avoid drowning. A man was stuck in a porthole, the equipment he wore trapping him; somebody bashed him over the head with a piece of wood to save him from a lingering death as the side of the ship came down to the level of the sea. People who could swim or had life belts found themselves dragged down by those who could not or did not. A 13-year-old girl refugee dropped from the ship to the sea holding her father’s arm; on the way down, she lost her grip and fell alone – she never saw him again. A lifeboat full of people plunged vertically into the water after somebody mistakenly cut its rope. An officer from the liner tried to help a man by pulling him along by his hair: it took him some time to realise that all he had in his hand was a severed head.
Circling the stricken Lancastria in his Hurricane, which had been sent to help defend the evacuation fleet from German planes, Norman Hancock brought his fighter low over the ship, and threw his Mae West life jacket down from the cockpit. People below cheered. Then, his fuel running low, Hancock turned and headed back to the airfield at Nantes.
Sitting on a hatch cover, Donald Draycott, an RAF ground crewman from Derbyshire, was surprised at how calm he felt. A travelling salesman for a tobacco company before joining the air force, he had been one of the first to jump from the ship. As he looked back at the 16,000-ton liner with her grand sweeping decks, Draycott thought: ‘You’ll never see anything like this again.’ He watched people throwing life jackets through portholes and diving after them, only to find that those already in the water had grabbed them. He heard ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ ‘as though it had been sung in an English pub’.
Twenty minutes after the German dive bomber had swooped out of the sky, the Lancastria’s upturned hull came level with the water. Men on the keel were still singing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Enemy fighters came in low, machine-gunning. Then
the ship went under.
News of the disaster reached London as Winston Churchill was sitting in the Cabinet Office looking out at Whitehall bathed in early summer sunshine. He decided that there had been quite enough bad war news for a single day. France was suing for peace with Germany. Hitler and Mussolini were holding a triumphal meeting in Munich. Invasion forces were massing on the other side of the Channel; and the Luftwaffe was about to launch massive bombing raids on British cities. So the Prime Minister ordered that the sinking of the Lancastria was not to be reported in the media for the time being. In the rush of events, as he put it, he forgot to lift the ban.1
Survivors returning to ports in southern England in the following days were told not to talk about their experience. In any case, many of them preferred to try to forget. Giving his recollections more than half a century later, one soldier who supported himself in the water by stretching his arms across corpses wearing life belts, said he had not spoken before to anybody about the disaster, not even to his wife or two sons, because ‘it is still a painful memory’.
The news was published in a newspaper in New York nearly six weeks later, with photographs taken by a sailor who had been on a destroyer in the rescue fleet. As a result, it surfaced in the British press, but only for one day’s editions. After that, the tragedy vanished from public view, becoming a footnote to the history of the Second World War. There would be other, more glorious, events to savour – the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the invasion of Italy, D-Day and the final defeat of Hitler. Though associations of survivors fought to keep alive the memory of what had happened off the coast of France on 17 June 1940, the sinking of the Lancastria disappeared into national amnesia.
The torpedoing of the liner, the Lusitania, in the First World War is well known. The death toll was 1195. The sinking of the Titanic is even more familiar, with its 1522 fatalities. On the lowest count, the death toll when the Lancastria went down off St-Nazaire was well above that of those two other disasters combined.
The Sinking of the Lancastria Page 1