The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  Setting out again, the trio met a group of Belgian refugees who handed them civilian clothes. Stealing bicycles, they headed for the coast, but were stopped by German troops, and taken to the commander. Hanley said they were Belgian, though he had no papers. The German officer, who did not speak French, believed him. So they got away again, reaching the Channel coast. There, they pretended to be beachcombers, rolling up their trousers and walking about with seaweed draped over their shoulders while they decided what to do next.

  Two girls they ran into told them of a rowing boat abandoned in a garage by a doctor who had joined the refugee exodus. The boat was white, which the soldiers thought too conspicuous. So they got hold of some black paint, and used it to darken the craft. The girls gave them food to take with them, as well as a Union Jack and corks with which to plug holes from machine-gunning if they were strafed. Rowing through the night, they became extremely seasick, but got home in the end.

  In Nantes, Major Fred Hahn, the First World War veteran from Lancashire who had passed his time watching tennis and meeting local Masons, was put in charge of ensuring food supplies for the British troops camped on the racecourse, where French recruits practised driving two-men Hotchkiss tanks.

  It was a tough assignment because rations were nonexistent. Bread was scarce. What provisions Hahn could find were old and mouldy. Stores had been abandoned and, in some cases, looted. The Major was more in his element when he and a few others were given the job of salvaging equipment, including secret radar parts, after the main body of troops moved off to St-Nazaire. Guards with Bren guns were posted round the workshop as Hahn went to work dismantling equipment and loading it on to lorries.

  Another transport detachment posted behind a network of trenches outside Nantes had got an idea of the way things were going when its women ATS staff had been taken back to Britain on 12 June. In their absence, the men found office work extremely difficult. As a defence against the Germans, they stretched steel wire at a 45 degree angle across nearby roads: they reckoned it could pitch a light tank into the ditch. They also formed a ‘flying column’ of a truck mounted with a Bren gun and two lorries carrying twenty men each to deal with any German parachutists who might drop on them.

  At 1 p.m. on 15 June, the men were called to the parade ground to be told they would be leaving. They began to pack up their machine tools and stores, and to dismantle big pieces of equipment. French civilians working at the base were sent to remote parts of the facility so that they should not see what was going on. At 6 p.m., the first convoy left for St-Nazaire with lathes and drilling machines.

  Lieutenant Colonel Norman de Coudray Tronson, the 64-year-old Boer War veteran who would fire a Bren gun at the attacking planes from the deck of the Lancastria, reached the end of his exodus across France in La Baule. He had fought in India and South Africa as well as in the First World War when he was gassed and wounded. He had been sent to Dieppe to supervise hospital facilities and a medical depot. The Norman port became the target of heavy raids by German aircraft whose crews took no notice of the big red crosses painted on the roofs of medical centres. The house where Tronson was staying was hit three times, destroying most of his possessions. Two British hospital ships were bombed. One, the Maid of Kent, keeled over, and set fire to a train drawn up alongside containing 580 wounded men. The planes came back, and began machine-gunning. ‘That’s when the real horror began,’ said an army major at the scene.

  After the raid, Tronson sent medical stores to the west, and then left at the head of a convoy of six cars at midnight. In the morning, he stopped in the town of Alençon, in southern Normandy, for breakfast and a haircut. There was no sign of the other five cars, but he did not wait. On the way west, he met up with a train carrying members of his staff from Dieppe. They headed for La Baule, with its luxury hotels behind the wide, three-mile-long beach converted into military hospitals to treat men brought in from across northern France. When the evacuation order was transmitted on 15 June dozen of military ambulances lined up outside to carry the wounded to St-Nazaire.

  Some of the retreating foreigners did not behave so well. One British soldier carried a valise crammed with leather shoe soles; another filled his map pocket with hundred franc notes he collected along the way. A sergeant carried two haversacks stuffed with clocks, watches and other souvenirs of France. A driver known as ‘Matey’, with a headquarters unit of the Royal Engineers, made off with an album of beautifully drawn and coloured pornographic illustrations he came across. After showing them round, he tucked them into his uniform jacket to take home. They would go down with him on the Lancastria.

  In Nantes, a newspaper reported an incident at a farmhouse in the region. Two foreign soldiers had asked the farmer’s wife for food, which she gave them. As they were eating, a delivery man arrived with a package. To pay him, the woman went to a cupboard to get money stored there. The next day, while she was out, the money was stolen, along with savings books kept in the cupboard. The report left no doubt that it was the foreign soldiers who were responsible. Whether they were British was not specified.

  A handful of civilians were also trying to get out through St-Nazaire. Among them were members of the YMCA and the Church Army – a convoy carrying two of its sisters called Trott and Chamley was attacked five times by German planes.

  In La Baule, an Englishwoman from London, Mrs Jory, had stayed on with three of her children in their family villa on the calculation that London might be bombed and that a resort in western France would be safer. As she watched the army ambulances lining up outside the hotel-hospitals to take the wounded to be evacuated, she realised that it was time to go. She got a pass for the Lancastria, but did not manage to obtain one for her young sons and daughter. The family’s large Austin car did not have enough petrol to drive to St-Nazaire. So the family stayed in La Baule, and the children stood on the beach watching German planes flying in to bomb the ships in the bay – at the end of 1940, they were arrested by the Germans and the French police, and held in several camps before being freed in 1944.

  Most of the civilians who did get to St-Nazaire came from an aircraft factory operated by the Fairey Aviation Company near Charleroi in Belgium. The plant had been bombed at the start of the German offensive in May, and the firm decided to evacuate its management and their families to France. With them, they carried plans for aircraft construction that the British did not want to fall into enemy hands.

  Among those in the Fairey party were 13-year-old Emilie Legroux and her brother, Roger, eleven, three-year-old Claudine Freeman and a baby, Jacqueline Tillyer, aged two. The women and children set off by car, the men by tram.

  They found a train that took them across the French border to Valenciennes where it was stopped by a heavy bombing raid – the men lay on top of the children to protect them. After the planes had gone, the children complained loudly about having been crushed. One of the mothers knocked their heads together, telling them, ‘We have enough wars as it is.’

  Another train got them to within twenty miles of Paris, but it stopped there, and the party spent the night in a field. In the morning, they boarded another train thinking it was for the French capital. Instead, it went south, and they ended up near Bordeaux, where they moved into an inn that offered baths as well as food.

  From there, they contacted the Fairey head office in Hayes, Middlesex, and were instructed to get to England. So they made their way up the west coast of France by rail to find a route to Britain.

  As the Fairey group was heading for Nantes and St-Nazaire, the Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30) unit of the Luftwaffe was settling into its new base outside Louvain, east of Brussels. It had been allocated an abandoned airfield that was little more than a harvested field from which to mount sorties against France.

  Kampfgeschwader 30 was an elite group, flying the new Junkers JU-88 bombers, with the unit’s symbol of a diving eagle emblazoned on their noses. The twin-engined planes were among the most destructive and frightening elements in
the Nazi attack, diving at almost 300 miles an hour to release their bombs as their siren hooters set up a banshee wail to frighten people below.

  No sooner had they arrived in Belgium than the Diving Eagles were sent to attack France. On the way, they landed to take on fuel at an abandoned RAF airfield outside Amiens where one of the Germans found a big box of English sweets left behind by the retreating airmen. From Amiens, the JU-88s flew west, diving through anti-aircraft fire to attack the port at Cherbourg from which British troops were being evacuated. One of the fliers, a newly married, former civilian test pilot called Peter Stahl, was struck by the desolation below him on the way. He noted the numbers of cows lying dead in the fields, and the crush of people on the roads.

  The Diving Eagles did not attack the refugees; that was a job for smaller aircraft. They were after larger prey, strategic bridges, communications points and ships – one of their main training exercises had been to swoop on an old battleship to gain experience of attacking big naval targets.

  At 9.30 in the evening of 15 June, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, told him the latest bad news from France as they went in to dinner at the Prime Minister’s official residence at Chequers in Buckinghamshire. Churchill became very depressed, so the meal began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The Prime Minister ate quickly and greedily, his face almost down in the plate. As well as Colville, his scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindeman, was present, eating a special vegetarian menu. The Prime Minister’s eldest daughter, Diana, and her husband, the politician, Duncan Sandys, completed the party.

  Champagne, brandy and cigars lightened Churchill’s mood, and the group became talkative, ‘even garrulous’, Colville recorded in his diary.8

  ‘The war is bound to become a bloody one for us now,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘But our people will stand up to bombing.’ He was particularly concerned that, if France gave up, its fleet should not fall into German hands. ‘If they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but . . . if they surrender without consulting us, we shall never forgive,’ he declared. ‘We shall blacken their name for a thousand years.’

  Churchill and Sandys stepped into the garden, walking in the moonlight as they discussed the latest events. In the distance, sentries with fixed bayonets watched over them.

  Returning to the house, Churchill recited some poetry, and said he and Hitler had only one thing in common, their hatred of whistling. Then he began to murmur:

  Bang, Bang, Bang goes the farmer’s gun,

  Run, rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.

  The American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, telephoned, and Colville heard Churchill speaking forcefully about how the United States could save civilisation.

  By then, Captain Sharp had received his sailing orders in Plymouth, and the Lancastria was heading for France in the company of another big liner, the Franconia, which had been the flagship of the evacuation fleet from Norway.

  As they set their course across the western end of the Channel, the Prime Minister lay on a sofa and told dirty stories while his guests stood in the central hallway of the house listening. At 1.30 a.m., he got to his feet. ‘Goodnight, my children,’ he said as he went up the stairs to bed.

  While Churchill slept in Buckinghamshire, the Lancastria steamed towards Brest to take off British troops. Nobody knew how many men would be waiting, but, to make sure the soldiers would be fed on the voyage back, the ship’s bakery set to work making as much bread as possible.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sunday, 16 June 1940

  APPROACHING THE FORTIFIED PORT and naval centre of Brest on the Brittany peninsula, the Lancastria’s crew saw great columns of smoke rising into the sky from oil tanks set on fire to prevent the fuel being used by the Germans when they arrived. Chief Officer Harry Grattidge described the pall as looking like rich black velvet. French troops formed two defensive lines outside the fortified city, but the burning of the fuel dumps showed how little confidence the defenders had in holding their positions.

  Nine hundred tons of gold bullion from the Bank of France was being put on ships to be taken to safety in colonial possessions in Africa. The Strathaird, a former P&O liner converted into a troopship, was loading men; she would sail home with 6500 the next day.

  Luftwaffe dive bombers had just attacked a French cruiser, the Richelieu, moored in the harbour, without, however, scoring any hits. They also dropped magnetic mines in the roads leading to the harbour. Given the danger, Captain Sharp decided not to try to sail the Lancastria into Brest; instead, he set a southerly course down the coast towards the Bay of Quiberon. The Canadian helmsman, Michael Sheehan, heard him say they were heading for St-Nazaire.

  The Franconia, the other big liner which had left Plymouth the previous day, accompanied the Lancastria. A destroyer, HMS Wolverine, on patrol duty outside Brest, acted as escort, and a French trawler guided them through the twisting channels between the Quiberon peninsula and the island of Belle Île, some 100 miles south of Brest.

  Suddenly, a German plane came screaming out of the hazy sky. Sheehan heard the noise of machine-gunning. Then there was silence for an hour. After that, German planes returned to drop bombs between the two liners, sending up a white jet of water. Neither ship was hit, but the force of the explosions was so great that one of the Franconia’s engines was knocked out of line and her plates were so badly buckled that she risked becoming unseaworthy. So, her captain decided to stop to make what repairs he could on the spot, and then limped back to England: water was washing over the Franconia’s footplates when she pulled into Liverpool.

  The Wolverine returned to her patrol station off Brest, leaving the Lancastria alone. The skipper of a passing French trawler warned Sharp that the Luftwaffe had been conducting heavy raids in the bay. In the distance, a convoy of seven British merchant ships from South Wales came into sight, sailing in single file, led by the John Holt, from the Blue Funnel line, which specialised in carrying fruit from Africa. On board was an admiral who acted as naval commodore. Under thick clouds, the convoy was heading at full speed for St-Nazaire. As night fell, Sharp joined it.

  At St-Etienne-de-Montluc, outside Nantes, the men of the Number One Heavy Repair Shop were called on to the parade ground as usual in the morning of 16 June. But, this time, they received new orders; they were to head home, though not quite yet. There was still no sense of urgency. It was only later in the day that they began to smash up vehicles and equipment, disabling engines, breaking axles and slashing tyres. The chimney of a porcelain factory they had used as a workshop was brought down by the Royal Engineers, the debris strewn across a railway track. A diesel engine was run into buffers at full speed to wreck it.

  Stan Flowers took a big hammer to a machine he had much prized, a big crankshaft grinder which had been brought to St-Etienne and bedded down in concrete to repair vehicles. What he was doing broke his heart. But he got on with the job, and then climbed into the cab of a lorry to cause as much damage as he could there, too. Behind the driver’s seat was a plaque reading:

  Look after me and keep me well,

  And together we will serve our country and we will

  survive.

  After reading the words, Stan smashed it.

  He and his colleagues burned their kit in the field which housed their latrines. They would have preferred to have left their gear for the French inhabitants of the town who had been so friendly. But orders were orders. The burning completed, they formed up and set off in trucks for the coast. As they went, French people stood along the street, crying. The soldiers were watchful as they moved off, having heard rumours of Germans dressed in British uniforms sending convoys the wrong way. When planes swooped on them, several jumped from the lorries into a roadside cesspit for shelter.

  As the day drew on, the crush of men moving into St-Nazaire grew by the hour. Most came along the hedge-lined road from Nantes, across flat countryside past one-storey farmhouses and tall steepled churches. Outside the port, they were dir
ected to the half-completed airfield, which was being used as a rallying point. The traffic was so dense that progress was very slow.

  Conditions soon became chaotic under the weight of numbers flooding in. Some of the men were accompanied by French girls wheeling bicycles. Others dropped by a NAAFI store that had been opened up, and took what they pleased – Stan Flowers grabbed a pair of sports shoes, only discovering later that they were for the same foot.

  An RAF officer, Wing Commander Macfadyen, estimated that 10,000 men were milling around. They would have been sitting targets for German bombers, but no enemy planes appeared. Macfadyen’s unit of nine officers and 210 men found itself caught up in a three-mile traffic jam as it moved from Nantes towards the airfield. Others abandoned their lorries to make progress on foot through the throng. At the wheel of his Humber Snipe staff car, Joe Sweeney edged through the crowd. When he reached the airfield, a French civilian thrust 5000 francs into his hand, got into the car and drove it away – he was stopped at the gate by a military policeman, taken out of the car and handed over to the French police.

  At the airfield, there were no orders. When Macfadyen grew annoyed at this, he was told he could head for the harbour. The scene there was equally confused, with men packed tightly together as they inched forward to French tenders that would take them to ships moored in the estuary. The queue in front of Macfadyen stretched for at least half a mile along the quay.

  Captain Clem Stott, the accountant from Wales who would use his army boots to kick himself free of a man threatening to drag him under the water, got to St-Nazaire with his fifty-strong Pay Corps unit during the afternoon of 16 June. Exhausted, filthy and hungry, they were given tins of fruit and chocolate bars from the NAAFI. Behind them, a detachment of RAF men arrived, looking as fresh and smart as if they were on parade.