An ill-equipped scratch force known as the Beauman Division, from the name of its commander, was put together from various British units to help defend the Norman capital of Rouen on the River Seine. Thinly stretched over a fifty-mile front, it was told to destroy bridges, and lay anti-tank mines. A sergeant with the division noted in his diary that, as they moved to the front, they passed a stream of French refugees who put their thumbs up, ‘even the kids’. In villages, girls blew them kisses. But they were soon swept back by the Panzer advance – in all, the division had just twenty anti-tank guns.
Further forward, the 1st Armoured Division, which had been sent to France in the spring, had never had time to organise itself properly. One brigade only got its equipment a day or two before crossing the Channel. Bicycles for messengers were still in their wrappings. None of the men had been trained to fire an anti-tank gun.17
The divisional commander, Roger Evans, decided to make a stand on the railway east of Rouen. Weygand told him that the struggle for the city would be decisive. Since the French could not produce any more troops for their Tenth Army in the sector, the outcome would depend on the 1st Armoured, he added.
Evans pointed out the extreme weakness of his force which faced far heavier and more numerous German tanks. Weygand replied that, if the British could not stop the enemy with its armoured vehicles, they ‘must stop him with bare hands and bite him like a dog’.
As the Tenth Army disintegrated, Evans prepared to retreat across the Seine. He watched French soldiers pouring to the rear, and looked in vain for any spirit of resistance. ‘No defences were prepared,’ a British report read. ‘No wire or anti-tank mines were sited and no trenches were dug. Nor was there apparently any offensive spirit among commanders or troops . . . it is not too much to say that an atmosphere of inevitable defeat was growing.’
In adversity, relations between senior officers in the Allied armies grew frayed. A French general accused Beauman of cowardice, and dismissed his soldiers as ‘a thoroughly undisciplined rabble’. Another said Victor Fortune was guilty of treachery, and should be court-martialled. Karslake concluded that this was part of ‘a definite policy instigated by General Weygand’, presumably to find a scapegoat for the reverses suffered by his own forces.
In a bid to raise French morale, a Canadian division left Britain to cross the Channel. Landing at Brest, it moved through the Breton capital of Rennes and headed for the city of Laval on the line of the German advance. But, at the same time, Operation Cycle was launched to move more than 12,000 troops by sea from the big port of Le Havre in Normandy to the greater safety of Cherbourg on the peninsula sticking out into the Channel. Sixty-seven merchant ships and 140 small craft were drafted in for the task. The nature and pace of the German campaign made military planning difficult, and Churchill said the British forces should no longer accept orders from the French ‘who had let us down badly’. But, while the front-line soldiers were either evacuated or captured, more than 100,000 of their comrades were still forgotten in France.
Some of them followed the progress of the war by listening to the radio or picking up copies of the Continental Daily Mail they found in shops in towns near their bases before the occupation of Paris. Alec Cuthbert, a carpenter from Holbeach in Lincolnshire serving with a vehicle repair unit outside Nantes, heard of the German advance on the BBC, but still ‘hadn’t a clue about what was going on’.
Many remained in the dark about the progress of the fighting or depended on the rumour mill. Some had not even heard about the evacuation from Dunkirk. ‘My time in France was nothing but retreat, anxiety, lack of knowledge of what was going on, communications were almost non-existent, fighter control as such had vanished,’ an RAF fighter pilot recalled.
Writing in a black-covered copy of the Stockfeeder’s Diary, wireless operator Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones noted:
June 9. War news grave. Germans in Sessions [Soissons]. Sent 10/-note home on 5th of June to Darling Nan.
June 10. Bought Daily Mail. Up at 7am. Extremely hot today. Germans nearing Rouen. Italy coming in on German side.
June 12. Went for a bath. Changed socks. Stayed in Barracks. Went over to Canteen. No letters today. Rather a dull day.
June 13. Return of washing. Changed clothes. Wrote to my Darling also Dad and Mam.
June 14. Two loving letters from my Darling – all is well. Little Michael doing well. Good news. Paid 50 fr.18
Neville Chesterton, a 19-year-old former railway clerk from Wednesbury in Staffordshire, who found France very flat and uninteresting, sensed that nobody knew where his fifty-strong Royal Engineers unit was going or what it was meant to be doing. As the men headed westwards towards the Atlantic coast, they heard rumours that the fighting was going badly, though the word ‘Dunkirk’ was not mentioned. Eventually they reached a camp thirty miles from the port of St-Nazaire where they practised rifle shooting and undertook guard duties. German planes flew very high overhead from time to time, but they saw no RAF aircraft. ‘This is a most peculiar war,’ Lance Corporal Chesterton thought, ‘nothing seems to be happening.’
On the other side of the country, a few RAF units were still operating in eastern France, and men gathered at one airfield to see off the New Zealander ace, ‘Cobber’ Kain, a glamorous figure who had chalked up seventeen ‘kills’ of enemy planes and was engaged to a well-known actress. He was heading back to England for leave. Before departing, he gave a flying display in his Hurricane. As he made a low roll, the tip of one wing hit the ground, the plane crashed and Kain was killed – not having heard the news, men on the hull of the Lancastria would call desperately for him to fly in to shoot down the German planes strafing them.
Some of those fleeing the enemy were caught in streams of refugees that were attacked by German dive bombers, their sirens sending out terrifying banshee screams as they swooped. A British dispatch rider found himself in a traffic jam at a village crossroads when the planes attacked. Swept from his motorcycle by the impact of the explosions, he landed beside a boy of about five whose legs had been blown off and who had been blinded in one eye. Taking the child in his arms, the soldier could see that he was dying in terrible pain; so he drew his revolver and shot him – the memory drove him mad.
Many of the British troops moving from the east of France to greater safety in the west were in organised convoys of vehicles, or were put on trains. But some went freelance. A sergeant from an RAOC Light Aid Detachment stole a bicycle and rode across France from Lille; on the way, he saw a group of men from the Pioneer Corps attacking German tanks with their picks and shovels.
At the wheel of his wireless truck, 21-year-old Leonard Forde became separated from his convoy as it headed out of eastern France. Strafing attacks forced him to jump repeatedly from the cab on his lorry, known in service slang as a ‘gin palace’. With his crew, he took to small roads to escape enemy attention. Life became a game of hide-and-seek. Reaching Le Mans, he began to operate the truck’s wireless monitoring gear. As his radio chattered away in high speed Morse code, he noticed that the strong signals all had German call signs. It was time to move further west.
Wilfred Oldham’s Royal Signals unit had been sent to the Champagne town of Bouzy-sur-Marne to work with RAF detachments posted to eastern France before the German advance. He and his colleagues were housed in the premises of the Moët et Chandon wine firm: Wilf’s office was above the grape presses. Across the road was the headquarters of another great champagne house, Veuve Clicquot. The British bought champagne for nine pence a bottle.
At the end of May, the unit was ordered to withdraw. Under the command of an Australian major, the men took a dozen new American-made lorries from an abandoned air force base, filling the tanks with petrol and arming themselves with a dozen Lewis guns. Having no idea of where to head, they wandered round northern France. On the way, they ran into some French troops who told them about Dunkirk. After reaching Le Mans, their commander suggested driving to St-Nazaire. Their improvised journey to the west
was typical of the independent British units seeking a way out of France, ultimately taking them to the last escape hatch left.
William Philip Knight, who would be so frightened by the sight of a man disappearing in flames below the oily sea off St-Nazaire, was a sergeant in a General Construction Company of the Royal Engineers and an explosives expert. At the Dunkirk evacuation, his six-man group was detailed to patrol the perimeter of a British position in a lorry loaded with explosives to use against the advancing enemy. On 1 June, they staged an ambush for German tanks and motorcyclists. But their rifles were no match for the tanks, and they were forced to retreat, abandoning their lorry when it broke down.
Missing the evacuation from the beaches, they found themselves in a village which came under German attack. The six men dived into a cellar of a demolished house. They discussed whether to surrender, but decided to stay where they were. Early the next morning, Knight climbed the stairs from the cellar to see what was happening outside. The sky was black with planes dropping bombs. Looking down to the harbour, he saw clouds of dust and smoke, flying bricks and debris. For the first time in his life, he felt afraid, realising that only an Act of God would save them.
Just then, Knight heard a scurry of feet. Two civilians covered in muck and dust practically fell on him at the top of the stairs. The three of them went down into the cellar. Then one of the Frenchmen, who spoke quite good English, guided them to safety through back lanes and small holdings; at one point, they crossed a canal by climbing over trucks which had been tipped into the water.
The next morning, the men got back to their lorry which they repaired. They drove off towards the inland town of Hesdin, turning off the road in the evening, intending to spend the night hidden in a wood. At that moment, they heard the noise of engines coming down the road – a procession of captured French and British trucks driven by Germans.
Counting on being taken for part of the convoy to get through the lines, the British joined up as the last vehicle. They drove for about forty miles without lights, and passed the enemy sentry posts. Nobody challenged them – the darkness hid their uniforms.
Having got to temporary safety, they peeled off from the convoy and went west, their lorry still carrying its load of explosives. Bypassing Abbeville where the battle was raging, they got over the River Somme. Then they headed cross-country to Normandy, using small country roads to avoid the Germans. On one occasion, their progress blocked by the destruction of a bridge, they cut down trees to enable them to get across a small river. Along the way, they met soldiers from the 51st Highland Division en route for St-Valéry, but decided to go off on their own rather than heading there.
French and Belgian stragglers joined the party to swell it to about thirty. One day, coming round a corner, they saw tanks, and German troops grouped round the armoured vehicles. Getting as close as they could, they threw hand grenades and fired their guns at the enemy. One man clambered up on a tank, and dropped a grenade inside. Then William Knight and his comrades retreated with three Germans prisoners, whom they handed over to a group of French soldiers having lunch in a field on a table set with a cloth.
Moving further west, Knight’s unit ran into more German armoured vehicles and motor cyclists with machine guns who took them captive. They were ordered to sit on the side of the narrow road while the armoured cars drove off, leaving two motorcyclists to watch the prisoners.
Knight shouted out insults about Germans in English to test whether the guards spoke his language. There was no response, so he told the others that he was going to jump a guard, and that they should deal with the second man. Taking out his cigarette case, he tried to lure the first guard close to him by offering him a cigarette; but the German did not smoke. Then Knight indicated that he wanted to defecate. The guard signalled his agreement. Going to a bush, Knight started to undo his trousers. The guard came across to watch him. Knight leaped at the man, and got his arm round his throat. The rest of the unit jumped on the other guard, battering him to death.
As Knight put his weight on top of the first man’s gun, the German drew a trench knife from his boot. The blade went through the Englishman’s hand, and into his chin. Fighting for his life, Knight found the guard’s jugular, and pressed it till he passed out.
The party got into its truck, drove to the main road and turned left towards Rouen. His companions wrapped field dressings round Knight’s bleeding wounds. On the way, the truck sped past advancing Germans, and got across a bridge over the Seine to join British troops south of the river.
Not wanting to be caught there, they headed off again, aiming for the ancient town of Beauvais. Hearing that the Germans had taken it, they went south towards Compiègne. However, that, too, was about to fall, so they drove to the walled city of Senlis where they handed some of their explosives to the French army to help blow up a house that would impede the defenders’ field of fire. In return, they were given a lot of nasty wine.
They debated trying to get to Switzerland, but decided to drive the fifty miles to Paris, instead. On 11 June, on the way to the capital, Knight passed his thirtieth birthday. That night, they were put up in a farmhouse where they enjoyed a bath and a good hot dinner. Two days later, they got to the suburbs of Paris – just as the Germans were entering the city from the other side. So they decided to go west, reaching Le Mans on 14 June, and staying the night at a big British army dump that had been set up on the motor race track, the first part of their escape from Dunkirk completed.
For some British units, the retreat was eased with the local wines or stronger alcohol. Military canteens and NAAFI stores had been left open, and men were taking what they could find. The driver of one air force lorry got so drunk that he could not stand up even after his head was held under a cold water tap. More soberly, others crammed sweets and cigarettes from Salvation Army shops into their kitbags. A Royal Engineers unit found a radio in one abandoned store, and got its first news of Dunkirk by listening to Churchill’s speech announcing that the BEF had been successfully evacuated from France.
Outside Orléans, Sergeant Macpherson, who would share his life jacket with a man who could not swim as they escaped from the sinking Lancastria, was posted to an RAF base on a tributary to the River Loire at the village of Olivet. He and his colleagues regularly crossed the Loiret in a dinghy to what he recalled as ‘a road house with a funny English name’ to eat and drink white wine. Returning one night, Macpherson took up the stance of a Viking figurehead at the front of the little boat, brandishing two litre wine bottles; when his companions rocked the dinghy, he fell into the water.
As the Germans advanced towards Orléans, most of the RAF men headed west. Left behind to burn the unit’s papers, Macpherson crossed the Loiret for the last time on his own in the dinghy to eat two pâté de foie gras sandwiches at the roadhouse, washed down by white wine. He finished off with liqueurs, each glass costing him the equivalent of three pence.
While eating his sandwiches, he got into conversation with an American woman who had worked in a British servicemen’s club in Paris. She told him how bad the military situation was. Leaving her, Macpherson rowed back across the river to burn more documents. Then he borrowed a bicycle to go to a nearby village to collect food and drink. The road was crowded with refugees; at one point, a car knocked him off his bicycle.
Macpherson drank more wine in the village, and then rode back to join the remaining members of his unit whom he found at the base eating enormous doorstep sandwiches of corned beef, and sharing huge mugs of strong, scalding tea. Feeling rather ill, he got into the back of a big French army lorry where he found a large armchair, in which he sat down to rest.
Further west, life was uneventful for British troops stationed in and around Nantes, a major port sitting astride the wide River Loire, forty miles from the sea with elegant avenues and squares of eighteenth-century houses built on the proceeds of the slave trade. Jack Ratcliffe, of the Royal Ordnance Corps, who worked as a clerk in a warehouse, recalled
that the daily routine consisted of ‘drill, breakfast, drill, parade to depot, lunch, parade back, until 5.30 p.m., march back for mug of tea, bread and cheese, fill in sandbags to defend the city, working until dark’. On Sunday, they went to the Protestant church. Generally, they were ‘having fun, all men together’.
Major Fred Hahn passed his time watching tennis at the city’s university stadium. A First World War veteran from Cheadle in Lancashire and commander of a divisional ordnance workshop, Hahn made contact with the local fraternity of Masons, and joined them in a group photograph, the Mayor sitting in the middle of the front row.
Though the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, had warned that the British camps in Nantes would be bombed, there was no sign of the enemy. French newspapers and the radio reproduced optimistic military communiqués or simply told readers, ‘Rien à signaler’ – ‘Nothing to report.’ Everybody believed that the great Maginot defensive line along the traditional German invasion route would hold the enemy back with its huge concrete emplacements, heavy guns and underground railways. In Nantes, the British met at their club as usual, and life was calm.
Then the refugees started to arrive on trains and down the roads along the Loire. The first, from Belgium, were no particular cause for concern – everybody knew fighting was going on there. But, before long, people began to come from northern France, and, one resident recalled, ‘horror of horrors from Paris’. Fifth columnists stirred up anxiety, and German planes flew over the city.
Donald Draycott, the RAF ground crewman from Derbyshire who was to be surprised at how calm he felt as he watched people jumping off the sinking Lancastria, sensed some hostility from the local people when he visited the main theatre in Nantes. Also, ‘when a bus came along and the bus was pretty well full, they’d push you out of the queue and get on themselves,’ he recalled. But then, he reflected: ‘I think it’s part of the French characteristics, they did it to others as well.’
The Sinking of the Lancastria Page 4