On the top deck, crew members were pushing through hundreds of soldiers to try to lower the lifeboats. Some men had already climbed into one boat, and sat there as if expecting it to lower itself automatically to the sea. Soon, the craft was so crowded that there was only room to stand.
The chaplain, who had counselled calm in the lounge, took charge of the men round him on the deck. He told them to remove their boots, puttees and heavy clothing, and then to go over the side. Some leaped into the air; others slid down the side of the liner as it came up out of the water. The chaplain waited till they had all gone, then tried to follow. But the angle of the deck had become so acute that he could not make his way to the rail. He called to the last man on the rail to stick out his leg, grasped it and pulled himself up and over, sliding down into the sea.
Richard Newlove of the RASC was shaking hands with two friends before jumping into the sea when he heard a detonation behind him, and felt something rubbing against his back. He turned, and saw the body of a young officer who had just shot himself. A second young officer bent down, picked up the revolver and killed himself, too.
An elderly sailor and an RAF man lashed a rope on to a stanchion near the stern, and threw one end over the side. ‘Down you go and when you reach the bottom put your feet to the side of the ship and give a good kick outwards,’ they told the men around them. Percy Braxton nodded at the old man to go ahead of him, but he replied, ‘No, ye go laddie.’ So Braxton took off his boots, threw his tin helmet on the deck and climbed down the rope. He watched the propellers rising in the sky above him, kicked off the side of the ship and fell into the water.
Stan Flowers and his fellow townsman from Faversham, Wally Smith, from the transport unit at St-Etienne-de-Montluc, had been in a hold when the bombs exploded. Aged twenty and twenty-one respectively, they managed to get up to the deck though the rail of the stairway they used collapsed under them. At first, there was panic. Then they calmed down as they found themselves on the high part of the ship, with a long drop down to the sea. They removed their boots, putting them down neatly one beside the other. Shaking hands, they grabbed ropes hanging over the side. As they slid down, the chaffing badly burned their hands.
Both went under the surface, but they came up together and swam more vigorously than they ever had in their lives to get away from the sinking liner. Finding two floating deck chairs, they draped themselves over them. There were massive jellyfish in the water round them. From time to time, they shouted abuse up at the German planes. But the movement of the water separated the two men, and they were too tired to be able to make the effort to keep together. They never saw one another again.
When soldiers came to the bridge, Captain Sharp tried to reassure them, but he knew that there were only 2000 life belts on board for three times that many men. Signallers called into the intercom to tell the dozen men in the engine room to evacuate. Despite the shock of the bombing, the electrician, Frank Brodgen, who was on duty there, recalled that they took their time to leave, getting their things together and checking that everybody was present before they went up through the hatch, urging soldiers they saw to follow them.
Grattidge and Sharp looked at one another, saying nothing. The Chief Officer felt as if he was at a deathbed. But he had to take action. Picking up a megaphone, he called out: ‘Clear away the boats now. Your attention, please . . . clear away the boats.’
When the liner listed to starboard, Grattidge shouted through the megaphone for men on the deck to go over to the port side to try to balance her. As he issued his order, he saw the ship’s Second Officer standing in front of him with a sheaf of papers in one hand while he tugged up his trousers with the other – he had been dressing when the bombs landed. Despite the death and chaos all around, Grattidge could not stop himself laughing.
The Chief Officer’s instruction had a temporary effect in righting the ship. But then she listed too far to port, her deck dropping towards the water, her stern rising in the air. At the very back of the liner, Captain Field sat ‘perched like a bird’ watching the crowd below him struggling to release the ropes holding the lifeboats. Sailors were throwing everything that floated over the side for those already in the water, but the tide carried most of it away.
Field saw ‘bodies and oil, bodies some with their life jackets on.’ Good swimmers forged through the water, one still wearing his helmet. Closer at hand, ‘decks were packed with soldiers laden with rifles and equipment, just waiting for a miracle to happen’. A man dived from the deck clad only in his underpants.
‘Off with your boots, and over the side!’ Harry Grattidge called. Men sat down on the listing deck to do so; some stripped completely to make swimming easier. Thomas Hutchison, a 19-year-old soldier from the Number One Heavy Repair Shop, started to comply with the Chief Officer’s order, but he could not undo the laces on one boot. So he jumped into the water still wearing it. He lay on his back in the sea as German planes came in to strafe. Deciding that, if he was going to be killed, he was not going to watch it happen, he rolled on to his side. The bullets missed him by inches.
A Welsh soldier, Peter Lawrence, who had been burned on his face and arms, took a life jacket from a corpse and jumped when the deck was six feet from the surface of the sea. ‘Goodbye,’ a friend called out. ‘See you later, best of luck.’ Lawrence turned on to his back, and flapped his arms to get himself moving away from the liner.
More German planes swept in to drop flares and to strafe the ship, their bullets crackling like hail. Captain Field decided it was time to leave his vantage point at the end of the stern where he risked being sucked down with the ship. Before making the seventy-foot drop into the sea, he took all his money out of the pocket of his trousers and lodged it behind a hatch cover. It was, he later reflected, ‘a sign of how we go a bit mad under the strain’.
From the cliffs overlooking the estuary, the air force wireless operator, Vic Flowers, and the other two RAF men, who had got back across the gangway of the tender in the harbour, saw German aircraft skimming over their heads. Then they heard explosions on the sea below. Smoke soon obscured their view of the sinking of the ship they had refused to board. Flowers was later told that thirty-seven of his ground crew group died on the Lancastria.
On the ship, survival could be a matter of chance or of where you were – those on the top deck had the best chance. Those down below who were fortunate enough to be near portholes or hold doors scrambled through them – one sergeant pushed a little brown dog out in front of him.
Having a life jacket could be a double-edged privilege. Men jumping into the water wearing one were strangled or had their necks broken by the stiff cork collars. The place you chose to sit could make the difference between life and death. As the bombs hit, the Sherwood Forester, G. Skelton, was turning to talk to his friend, Joe Saxton, for whom he was looking after the picture of his girlfriend. Joe simply wasn’t there any more: he had been blown away by the blast. Skelton was only wounded in the right shoulder.
Just before the attack, a sergeant major from the RASC had returned to the stateroom where he was billeted and told his colleagues of the excellent ‘posh feed’ lunch he had just enjoyed in the dining room. The others hurried off to eat. It was the last he saw of them.
Another RASC soldier was sent by his cabin mates to fetch beer. While he was waiting in line to be served, the first bombs fell outside the ship. Water and fish flowed in through the open porthole. Still, the soldier went ahead and bought three bottles of Bass, returning to his cabin. The beer drunk, he went out on to the deck to put the bottles in a refuse bin. He was not harmed when the bombs exploded in the lower part of the ship.
Down below, one man walked on a carpet of the dead in the passages as he sought an escape route. Reaching the top of the ship, he linked up with another soldier, and they slid together down the almost vertical deck, stood on the rail and walked off into the water. They never saw one another again.
In the lounge, the weight of men str
uggling to get up from the lower decks broke the rail of the main stairway, sending dozens falling down on those below. Then the whole stairway collapsed, cutting off escape.
Sid Keenan and his friend, John Broadbent, who had gone into a bathroom marked ‘Officers Only’, were shaving and washing when the alarm sounded for the second attack. They heard a terrible crash, and everything seemed to shudder. ‘I bet nobody ever left a bath quicker than I,’ Broadbent recalled. ‘When Sid and I got back on deck, it was a case of every man for himself.’
Major Scott-Bowden was resting in his cabin when the bombs hit. He picked up his rubber boots containing the bottles of whisky and mineral water and linked by a piece of string. He hung them round his neck, and went on to the deck in his bare feet. As the ship tilted, he grabbed the handle of a door which opened – on the other side, he saw iron staircases coming up from the engine room full of climbing men. He took the bottles from his boots, put them down and pulled on the boots before jumping into the sea.
Norman Driver was in a toilet. Burning timber fell on him. His pal, Cal Beal from Sheffield, shouted from an adjoining lavatory, ‘I’ve been hit. There’s blood on my leg.’ In fact, he had not been injured, but had pulled up his trousers so fast in the shock of the explosions that he had wet them and, in the panic of the moment, had taken the stain for blood. Opening the toilet door, Driver looked at the spot where another of his group, Londoner George Watling, had been having a wash and shave. There was a hole in the floor. Watling was not seen again.
With Beal holding on to him, Driver made his way up a gangway to a loading bay running the full width of the ship. Men and their kit were sliding down the sharply tilting deck. Seeing light from the doors above, Norman and Cal scrambled out on to the deck. Beal put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it – and then they both jumped into the sea. As they went under the water, they lost contact with one another. When he came up, Cal tried to puff at his sodden cigarette. Norman hit his head on a life raft as he surfaced, but managed to swim to a lifeboat and was pulled on board.
Men from the Church Army and YMCA kneeled on the deck in prayer before getting up to help non-swimmers. One young padre holding a Bible went below to comfort men. A sailor warned him of the danger. ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘But those men need God. They are my people.’ He did not survive.
The padre, Charles McMenemy, who had served as Catholic chaplain at Wormwood Scrubs prison before the war, also went below and led a group of men to a loading port six feet above the water. He gave his life belt to a sergeant major who could not swim, waiting till all the men were in the water before he jumped.
In the passageways, men cleared a path for Mrs Tillyer and her two-year-old daughter. As the mother and child passed, they stood back, delaying their own escape until they saw the pair was safely out on deck.
In his cabin, Clement Stott was awakened from his postprandial nap by the bombs. The door flew open, and a man covered in blood fell through it. Getting outside, the Captain saw a dignified grey-haired woman sliding down the deck, screaming as she went.
As an accountant steeped in the importance of numbers, Stott tried to carry out a roll call of his unit. This proved difficult in the circumstances. When he called the names of two corporals, he was told that they had been killed. Stott instructed his men that they would be safer staying with him than jumping into the sea. The steepness of the ship’s list meant that people leaping from the superstructure were crashing into the hull or hitting the edges of portholes, screaming as they died in a mass of blood and broken heads.
Stott took off his pince-nez, and put it in its case. ‘I knew I should need my glasses when I got ashore,’ he recalled. ‘But I knew even more that it would have a good steadying effect if the men could see I wasn’t in a panic.’
Then he stood to attention, and called out as if on a parade ground: ‘Detachment, 67th Company. Detachment! Abandon ship! Follow me, boys, and good luck!’
‘Good luck, Sir!’ the soldiers shouted back.
The Captain climbed the deck rail, stepped on to the side of the ship and moved towards the sea, followed by his men. Water was lapping over the hull. Stott asked a ship’s officer if he should remove his boots. Yes, the man shouted. So the Captain sat down, and began to undo the laces. But then he thought that he would need his boots when he got to dry land, just as he would need his pince-nez. Though they might hamper him in the water, he decided to keep them on.
As he sat on the hull, Stott saw a man trying to squeeze through a porthole, but he was wearing so much webbing equipment that he was stuck.
‘Cut your straps!’ Stott shouted to him. A wave hit the porthole, and the man disappeared. Another soldier dived through it, naked except for his army identity tags.
Suddenly Stott found himself sinking beneath the sea. As he rose back to the surface, he found that a man was hanging on to his feet.
‘I realised I had to get rid of him quick, or we’d both drown,’ the Captain recalled. ‘I kicked hard and struggled free of him. Sticking to heavy army boots had paid off already!’
Fernande Tips tried to keep with her family as they fled from the dining room. But they became separated as they went up the stairway to the deck. Clifford Tillyer saw his wife and daughter into a lifeboat, and soldiers pushed him in after them. As the boat was lowered, its ropes jammed in the davits. It tilted over, throwing the occupants into the water and separating the Tillyers. A man holding on to a piece of wood gave it to Mrs Tillyer and Jacqueline. As they floated away, the mother kept calling out ‘Baby here,’ ‘Baby here.’ After a while Jacqueline picked up the two words, and repeated the sounds until she became too weak to make any noise.
The Fairey manager, Legroux, took his 13-year-old daughter, Emilie, by the hand while Madame Legroux led their 11-year-old son, Roger, towards the lifeboats. They were all wearing life jackets.
‘The stairs weren’t straight as they should be,’ Roger remembered. ‘There was panic on board, people were shrieking and shouting, guns were firing at German planes, it was chaos.’
When they got to a lifeboat, it was packed. People were jumping all over the place. His mother and sister got in. His father threw Roger into the boat; then climbed in himself.
As they waited for the boat to be lowered, soldiers jumped in and the craft became unbalanced. One side tilted. Everybody fell out. As he dropped, Roger was holding his father by the hand. On the way down, he let go.
The boy sank below the oil-covered water. When he came back to the surface, his mother was next to him. Roger clung to her and to Fernande Tips, who had ended up in the water near the Legroux family. Around him, he saw soldiers all over the place, and heard hundreds of voices singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Then Roger passed out because of the amount of water and oil he had swallowed. The two women kept his head above the sea.
His sister was floating in a different part of the sea. Emilie was worried because she had lost a pair of wonderful red shoes her father had bought for her. Soon, she found herself riding on a man’s back. She thought he was her father. She ran her hands over him, and she may have screamed when she realised he was a stranger.
Some soldiers passing by on a raft took the girl on board. From there, she saw her mother and brother about a hundred yards away. Three members of the Legroux family were safe, but their father was lost for ever.
Michael Sheehan, of the Lancastria crew, was thrown along a passageway by the force of the first bombs that missed the liner. He got up on deck by the time of the second attack. Reaching the fore deck, he pulled off all his clothes, and dived into the sea, where he found a hatch board. Two soldiers were already hanging on to it. Together, they struck out from the sinking ship, but both soldiers were killed by strafing, and Sheehan was left alone, covered with oil.
Joe Sweeney was lying down in a smoking room when the bombs exploded. Going to the door, he saw a demented soldier swinging his rifle round and round over his head, cursing and swearing. After the butt of the gun hit somebody
on the head, a man rugby-tackled the crazed figure.
The lights went out; the uproar grew louder. Water began to trickle down the companionway, and then gushed on the stairs. Bells clanged amid the screams. Some people began to sing military, religious and patriotic airs.
Sweeney got out on the deck, took off his jacket, and hopped over the deck rail. He left behind the chalice from the clergyman’s briefcase and his cache of Players cigarettes he had stowed behind a ventilator vent.
The tilt of the ship meant he landed on the side of the hull, bruising and scratching himself. For a while, he sat there, smoking a cigarette handed to him by an old soldier. The two men discussed if it was better to be clothed or naked to survive in the sea. Sweeney removed his trousers, and slid into the water.
He went under. As he rose to the surface, he was grabbed round the neck by somebody shouting ‘I can’t swim’ and pulling them both under again. Struggling free from the other man’s grasp, Sweeney rose to the surface again and clung on to a plank with two other men – a fourth person lay across it. Together they floated away from the Lancastria.
In the chaos and darkness below decks, Edwin Quittenton groped along a wall. Suddenly, he felt a flap in the wall beside him give way, letting in a streak of light. He pushed at the flap, and got a glimpse of an empty open porthole. Followed by other men, he began to climb through it, but got stuck.
He felt as if he was in the jaws of a trap, the water immediately beneath him, men shouting from behind for him to get through the opening. When he did not move, they started to push him, but the more pressure they exerted, the tighter his body became rammed in the porthole.
‘I can’t move!’ Quittenton shouted. ‘Pull me back inside.’
At last they did so, and slimmer men swarmed through the porthole as fast as they could. Quittenton saw another porthole, and opened it to let in more light. Looking round, he spotted a wooden door which might provide an escape route. It was locked, so he kicked it down. On the other side lay an iron door in the hull. He unscrewed the bolts on it, but the 45 degree angle at which the Lancastria was listing made it impossible to lift the door open on his own.
The Sinking of the Lancastria Page 13