The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  ‘You would never think there was any war on,’ he recalled. ‘We might have been going down on a cruise. It seemed very pleasant.’ But then, when the ship sailed on in the cool, bright dawn, he saw smoke from fires on the shore. Standing on the bridge in the dawning light, Harry Grattidge could hear the throbbing of planes not far away.

  As well as the Lancastria, thirty or so evacuation boats had gathered in the bay. Among them were two destroyers, the Havelock and the Highlander, which had taken part in the evacuation from Norway earlier in the month, and the Cambridgeshire, an armoured trawler from Grimsby with a single 1.47 gun. The convoy of six ships that had come down the Bristol Channel included a smart new freighter, the John Holt. There was also a converted pleasure boat previously used by the Wills tobacco company, with marketing slogans still written on the walls of her main cabin.

  The estuary outside St-Nazaire is broad but shallow, and subject to strong tides. Only the smaller boats of the flotilla could get into the harbour; and even they had only a window of three hours on each side of high tide in which to pick up men.

  Captain Sharp anchored the Lancastria four miles out in the Charpentier Roads, opposite the Pointe de St-Gildas where legend had it that an ancient holy man had left the imprint of his foot and staff in the rocks. A British hospital ship lay nearby, filled with patients and medical personnel. The sea at that point was twelve fathoms deep.

  At around 5 a.m., a British naval transport officer came out to make arrangements with Sharp. The Captain said the Lancastria could accommodate 3000 people.

  ‘You will have to try and take as many as possible,’ he was told.1

  ‘Is this another capitulation,’ Grattidge asked, remembering Norway.

  The officer looked shocked.

  ‘Don’t even mention the word,’ he said. ‘It’s merely a temporary movement of troops.’

  If the officer deceived himself, Grattidge wrote later, he deceived nobody else.

  On shore, the French harbour authorities delayed the start of the embarkation by refusing to open the gates of a lock. British naval officers concluded that ‘the worm of defeat was already evident’. After much argument, the gates were opened and troops were taken out into the bay on destroyers, tugs, fishing boats and other small craft. When Frank Brogden finished his watch and went down to his berth at 6.30 a.m., men were starting to arrive.

  It was no simple matter to manoeuvre from the harbour. The boats had to leave stern first, turn round a buoy and then point themselves out into the estuary. This was made more complicated by the cross tide and the presence of so many small craft.

  The captain of HMS Havelock, Barry Stevens, who was in charge of the naval flotilla, was so tired that he handed over command to a first lieutenant who misjudged the turn out of the dock, and wrapped the buoy’s mooring cable round the destroyer’s starboard propeller shaft. With 500 men on board, the Havelock was a sitting target for German bombers.

  The first French tug it hailed to give assistance sailed on by. A second dragged her out into the estuary, the buoy and its cable putting one propeller out of action. Captain Stevens transferred to another destroyer, the Highlander, which was also taking men out to the Lancastria.

  As it came alongside, Harry Grattidge recognised the Highlander from the Norwegian evacuation. An officer on the destroyer shouted across to ask for a hawser with which to tie up to the troopship. Grattidge said he could supply one, but would want a receipt. The officer gave a cynical laugh. ‘You can have the receipt,’ he said. ‘You’ll be lucky if you get home.’

  Denise Petit from the Banque de France recognised a British captain she had got to know lining up his men outside the Port Office. The distress on his face brought tears to her eyes. Despite his own sadness, he tried to comfort her. But neither of them could find the right words, and he went off. ‘Will I ever hear from him?’ she asked in her diary.

  Vic Flowers, the RAF wireless operator who had seen ‘Cobber’ Kain crash to his death and had then avoided being dragooned into flying himself, arrived in St-Nazaire with a group of other ground crewmen and some officers very early in the morning of 17 June. They marched through streets strewn with masses of discarded uniforms, webbing and kitbags. Here and there, rifles had been left propped against walls.

  They crossed a narrow bridge to the main embarkation point, a 380-yard long dock called the Forme Joubert where the great transatlantic liner, the Normandie, had been built. A fleet of small boats was waiting. Flowers thought at first that they were going to take them all the way back to England, and was surprised at how small they were. Men crowded together on board like sheep called out ‘Baa, Baa.’ They explained to Flowers and his comrades that the boat was just going to ferry them to a big ship waiting in the estuary, the Lancastria.

  At the airfield outside St-Nazaire, several units were ordered to move off between 2.30 and 3 a.m. – marching under cover of night to avoid the attention of German aircraft. The transport workers from St-Etienne-de-Montluc sheltered under hayricks when the Luftwaffe flew overhead. Some First World War veterans on the road shot their rifles up in the air. Fred Coe’s company of the Royal Army Service Corps fired at one plane, but missed. During the three-hour march to the docks, Coe recalled, the men were in good spirits: they were going home at last.

  The men from St-Etienne-de-Montluc found their journey slowed down by an RAF contingent which had left just before them. The airmen were carrying so many suitcases and bags that ‘they could hardly crawl,’ the unit’s report recorded.3 They stopped to rest every half-mile, but would not let the mechanics go ahead of them.

  Reaching the docks, the Motor Transport commander stationed a guard to make sure that no other units jumped the queue. His men still had to wait for ninety minutes while the RAF group embarked on a tug, their cases hampering their progress as they negotiated a difficult gangway. In contrast, the army report noted with satisfaction, the Motor Transport men made it on to their boat in half an hour. But, arriving at the Lancastria, they had to wait again while the RAF ‘struggled on board’.

  Other army units resented the way the airmen had moved ahead of them down the middle of the quay while the soldiers were kept to the sides. Tom Beattie of the RAF heard a trooper saying, ‘The Brylcreem boys are going on first.’ For everybody, the imperative was to board a boat for the big liner lying out in the bay.

  Arriving at 4.30 a.m., Wing Commander Macfadyen ordered his men to spread out on the docks to prevent other units jumping the queue. A German air attack could have mown down the crowd of stationary men.

  Edwin Quittenton of the Royal Engineers spent eighteen hours hiding in fields from strafing attacks or sleeping in a car with two majors and a captain. At 3.30 a.m. on 17 June, the four men were woken by a shout – it was time to get ready to move down to the port. Half an hour later, they set off, on foot. Quittenton rejoiced. ‘We were going home!’

  On one of the piers, four chaplains sat on a stack of luggage. They wore khaki uniforms with clerical collars. They were weeping.

  The destroyer, HMS Havelock, pulled into the quay, and lowered a gangplank. ‘Are you buggers coming?’ a marine shouted to the chaplains. ‘We can’t come back again and we can’t take any bloody luggage.’ When the churchmen did not move, the boat pulled 100 yards away from the dockside.

  Further along the pier, Joe Sweeney and another man found four bottles of rum abandoned on steps leading down to the sea. The two of them emptied their water bottles and filled them – and their mugs – with the alcohol. Then they walked back.

  Sweeney, the fair-haired Scot from Newcastle who had driven a Humber Snipe staff car to St-Nazaire, offered a mug of rum to one of the weeping chaplains. The clergyman sipped at the liquor, and nearly choked. He held out his mug to another of the chaplains, who also had trouble getting the drink down. But the other two clergymen emptied the mugs they were offered in one gulp without saying anything, and stopped weeping.

  Despite what the marine had said, the Havelock did
come back. It lowered its gangplank again, and the marine screamed at the chaplains to come on board to be taken to the Lancastria. This time they did so, leaving their luggage behind. One called out to Sweeney and the men round him: ‘Take what you like from the luggage, but when you get back to England give the stuff to the first church you see: it doesn’t matter whether it is Roman Catholic or Church of England.’

  There was an immediate rush to get at the luggage. Sweeney opened a briefcase. Inside was a portable altar. The men snatched at its pieces; Sweeney slipped a miniature diamond-studded chalice into a trouser pocket – to make room for it, he threw away a tin of cigarettes. He intended to hand it in to the first church he came across once he was back in England.

  Orders were issued that men could board with only one kitbag or case, plus what they could carry by hand. A sergeant in the Pay Corps sat on the quay emptying two haversacks stuffed with clocks, watches and other souvenirs he had collected. Sergeant Macpherson of the RAF had ‘a rare old sort out and regretfully jettisoned some nice and risqué Parisian magazines’.

  Some got round the instruction, or interpreted it liberally. Sergeant George Youngs held on to his chromium-plated French bicycle, with dynamo lighting and a musical horn; there were complaints about the space it took up, but nobody made him abandon it. An army padre took a pale blue Lilo with him. Despite quarantine regulations, two or three men carried dogs, and one an angora rabbit.

  Following the orders to destroy what could not be removed, an RAF driver set the motor of his Dodge lorry going, jumped out and watched it tip over the quay into the sea. Dispatch riders did the same with their motorcycles.

  But Captain Griggs, who had sampled the wares of bistros while driving to St-Nazaire, got four suitcases out of his blue Vauxhall saloon, and persuaded a quartet of sappers to carry one each on board. Then he located some petrol, had the car’s tank filled and handed the keys to his French interpreter.

  Somewhere in the sky above, a small plane was flying alone up the west coast of France. On board were the British general, Edward Spears, and Charles de Gaulle, who looked fixedly ahead. Soon after leaving Bordeaux, they had passed over a French passenger ship, the Champlain, which had been sunk by the Germans and was lying on her side, surrounded by hundreds of men in the water. Whether they looked down at the evacuation armada assembled in the Loire estuary is not recorded, but, over Brittany, Spears saw great palls of smoke rising from burning fuel dumps.

  Landing in Jersey, the British general asked de Gaulle if he wanted something to drink. The Frenchman asked for coffee. When it came, he sipped it and said, ‘Very good tea.’ No, Spears told him, this was English coffee.

  As they flew on to London, Marshal Pétain went on the radio to tell the nation that, thirty-eight days after the German attack, hostilities must cease and France must open negotiations for an armistice. (When the speech was rebroadcast later in the day, that passage was changed to ‘We must try to cease hostilities’, but the semantics meant nothing.)

  ‘It is with a heavy heart that I say we must cease to fight,’ the Marshal went on in his high, reedy voice. ‘I have applied to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to sign with us, as between soldiers after the fight and in honour, a means to put an end to hostilities. Let all Frenchmen group themselves around the government over which I preside during this painful trial and affirm once more their faith in the destiny of our country.’ As the Marshal spoke, Rommel’s Panzers were advancing 150 miles in a single day to reach the port of Cherbourg, while other German units were pressing towards the estuary of the Loire.

  At his ‘Wolf’s Gorge’ headquarters in Belgium, Hitler threw out his arms, laughed and slapped his thigh in delight when told that France was seeking an armistice, jerking up one knee in an involuntary jump for joy. With one of his two main adversaries dropping out of the conflict, and his eastern front secured by the non-aggression pact reached with the Soviet Union the previous year, it seemed only a matter of time before Britain, too, would fall.

  Across the Channel, the War Cabinet assembled in London at 11 a.m. One topic for discussions was whether the BEF commander, Alan Brooke, should remain in France. Churchill said he hoped the General would stay so long as his presence could be of value to ‘the difficult withdrawal’ the British troops faced.

  Brooke was at his headquarters in the town of Redon, north of St-Nazaire, when he learned of the French decision to seek an armistice. A French liaison officer came to see him with the news, collapsing in tears as he did so.

  ‘This renders the situation very critical lest negotiations should lead to the internment of British troops in France!’ the trim, moustachioed British Commander noted in his diary. ‘It is essential for us to get away early.’4 His mission was ending as badly as he had foreseen.

  He telephoned London, trying to speak to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. But Sir John Dill was not available. When Brooke tried again forty-five minutes later, he was told that communications with London had been cut.

  So he got into his car and was driven towards St-Nazaire to go home with the last of his troops. In a letter to his wife, he noted that he was ‘feeling wonderfully fit’.

  The small boats ferrying men out to the Lancastria took three to four hours for the round trip. Most carried 500 or so men. They were often machine-gunned by German planes, but none appears to have been hit. Mines dropped by the Luftwaffe were another hazard though, again, none of the tenders was damaged.

  On the way out, there were some private moments. Joe Saxton of the Sherwood Forester did not have a wallet, and had given a photograph of his girlfriend, Lily, to another soldier, who did, for safe keeping. Now, in one of the tenders going to the Lancastria, he asked to have a look. Gazing at the picture, he said: ‘Well, sweetheart it won’t be long now, we shall soon be together.’ Then he handed it back.

  After the weeks of uncertainty and retreat across France, the Lancastria offered the prospect of security, and a safe way home. Tired as the men coming on board were, the ship’s electrician, Frank Brogden, detected a special look in their eyes. ‘We’ve made it,’ it said. ‘We’re going home.’ They felt as if they were back in Britain. Some kissed the deck. A civilian woman told one of the ship’s waiters, Joe O’Brien, that she ‘felt so safe on an English ship’.

  Many of them had never been outside Britain before being posted to France, or been on a ship, let alone one like the Lancastria. They were awed by her size. ‘It was the first big ship I had been on in my life,’ Fred Coe remarked. ‘I’d never seen so many people.’

  An RAF man, Peter Walker Vinicombe, who had spent the night with his unit sitting in the street, recalled it as ‘a great hulk . . . a gigantic ship as far as we were concerned’. When his tender came alongside and he joined others climbing up nets hung down the hull, the liner’s sides seemed to just go straight up into the sky.

  Seeing how enormous the Lancastria was, Stan Flowers concluded that she had been sent to take them on a long voyage, maybe to the Far East. Another soldier thought she looked ‘as solid as the Strand Palace Hotel’.

  Early arrivals stepping through the doors on the ship’s side were met by two stewards in white uniforms with gold buttons. One steward noted down each man’s name, regiment and unit, while the other handed out small cards marked with the number of a cabin or berth, and a ticket for the dining room. They asked the men not to damage the walls or the furniture. As they moved into the ship, some of the troops picked up life jackets from a pile on the deck, thinking they would come in useful as pillows during the voyage.

  While the soldiers and RAF men were anxious to get on board and find a place to rest, there was no sense of urgency. A chaplain who had been taken down to the docks in his car by a driver noted that those going aboard were doing so in what appeared to be ‘a very leisurely manner’. No one seemed to think there was any hurry. As he stood on the deck watching the troops, the chaplain remarked to a man beside him: ‘It looks as though we have all day.’
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  As the thirty civilians from the Fairey aircraft factory came on board, soldiers handed the children English coins. The men were allocated a cabin to share between them; wives and children were given one for each family.

  Roger Legroux felt very excited – ‘eleven years old, getting on a big ship and going across the ocean to another country’. When his parents took him to the dining room, he was overcome by its opulence, and had his first taste of a yellow, round fruit he had never seen before – a grapefruit.

  For some, the first priority was to find a bathroom for a wash and shave. Others headed for the barber’s shop. Men feeling ill checked in to the sickbay.

  Two friends, Sid Keenan and John Broadbent, struggled through the crush of men, and went below in search of a bathroom. At the foot of a staircase, they spotted a door marked ‘Officers Only’. Disregarding the instruction, they looked inside and saw a large bath. They went in, and bolted the door. John ran a bath, took off his clothes and got into the water, while Sid shaved.

  Sapper Norman Driver, of the Royal Engineers, located a cabin with two toilets and a wash bowl. With him were three friends – Cal Beal from Sheffield, Burt Cunliffe from Warrington, and George Watling from London who always carried a piece of his girlfriend’s dress with him. As he washed and shaved, Driver thought that he was getting ‘ready for Blighty’.

  Sergeant George Youngs left his gleaming bicycle in a safe place on the deck to go for a shave. Padre Captain Charles McMenemy took time to do the same, and then lay down on the floor of his cabin on his pale blue Lilo to get some sleep. Major Scott-Bowden, the officer who carried bottles of Johnny Walker and Vichy water in a pair of rubber boots strung round his neck, found seven officers already in the four-bunk cabin he had been allocated. He went to see the ship’s purser, who told him, ‘Sorry, Sir, but that’s the best I can do.’ So he had a warm bath of sea water, and, returning to his cabin, made room on a bunk to have a rest.