The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  He could hear men talking behind him ‘in all kinds of babble’, and he called for them to help him. Pushing together, they soon had the door open. Below lay the sea. Quittenton could not swim, but he saw a dangling rope, and launched himself into the air to grab it. Going under after jumping from the hull, he swallowed too much water for comfort. But, coming to the surface, he saw a lifeboat only a few feet away and got to it by kicking out.

  Joe O’Brien, the teenage waiter on the Lancastria who had been called back from the pub in Liverpool three days earlier, was in the dining room when the bombs hit. Using his knowledge of the liner’s lay-out and her passageways, he got up to the promenade deck, bypassing corridors full of men screaming as boiling water sprayed on them from broken pipes.

  Reaching the top of the ship, Joe found himself jammed up against a deck rail by the press from behind him. He climbed over, and held on the outside. Beside him, he saw the big figure of the liner’s chef, Joe Pearse, who had promised his father to look after him. A steward, Johnny Rock, from Glasgow, was also there. They all had life jackets.

  ‘Come on, Joe, get in,’ Rock shouted, giving the youth a push.

  The trip down to the sea was, O’Brien recalled, ‘like coming down from the Empire State Building’. He remembered the drill for the cork and canvas life jackets. ‘When you hit the sea, the jacket stops, but your body goes on falling. So you risk having your neck broken. To prevent that, put your knees up and tug the jacket down.’

  By applying the drill, O’Brien saved himself from joining those who had not been told it and died as a result. Dropping below the surface, he thought he would never come up. But then he shot out, and swam away as strongly as he could. His protector, Joe Pearse, failed to follow the drill, and broke his neck. Johnny Rock survived.

  The two Church Army sisters, who had seen the bomber flying down on the Lancastria like a black cloud, got into a lifeboat. While it was being lowered, it tilted as the liner keeled over. One end lodged against the hull, and then hit a porthole. Hearing soldiers calling for help, the sisters handed over their life belts. Then, their boat swung free, and went down the rest of the way, the great bulk of the Lancastria looming above them.

  Captain Brooke of the Pay Corps slipped into the sea though he had never learned to swim. But he vowed that Hitler was not going to deprive his wife and family of his company, nor stop him enjoying the pension he had earned with service stretching back more than twenty-one years. Once in the water, he found, to his surprise, that he could swim after all.

  J. H. Drummond of the RAF had been lying down after a ‘lovely hot bath’ when the bulkhead in front of him erupted in a huge sheet of flame, and he was blown upside down against a wall. He felt his hair on fire – his face had also been flashburned though he did not realise this immediately.

  In utter darkness, Drummond struggled to his feet. He could not breathe; the blast had blown all the oxygen out of the room. He stretched his mouth to its limit as he gasped to get air in his lungs. Eventually he succeeded.

  He lost his bearings in the dark, but heard someone grunting and sobbing nearby. Reaching the other man, he asked if there was a way out.

  ‘Please push me up,’ the man said.

  Drummond did so, and someone behind them said there was an escape ahead. Drummond tried to climb up, himself; but all he could feel in front of him was a huge flat sheet of metal.

  Sinking down, utterly exhausted, he felt he was finished. Everything was quiet. He could not hear anybody else near him. He thought of his father, who had been killed in the First World War, and of the tough life his mother had had as a war widow. That must not happen to his wife, Marjorie, he decided.

  ‘Then I thought, if I had unwittingly harmed anybody, now it is up to God to decide,’ he recalled.

  All of a sudden, a voice behind him asked: ‘Is there any way out?’

  ‘Yes, give me a push up,’ Drummond replied.

  As he went up, he could feel the edge of the sheet of metal. A very faint glimmer came from far above. Crawling on, he got to some stairs. Ahead, along a corridor, a dim light filtered from a broken-down cabin door. Behind it was a mass of wire like a huge spider’s web.

  Despite the danger of electrocution, Drummond dived through the wire. He ran along a corridor, seeing daylight at the end. Water began to run down the floor. Two men who had got out of the hold before him were trying to escape through a porthole. He did not stop to join them, rushing on wildly towards the daylight coming through an open loading port. Reaching his destination, he found a warrant officer standing there. The man gave Drummond a cigarette and a light, and he stood staring silently into the sea. Then the warrant officer said, ‘Better get in lad – there’s a lot of stuff on the top deck will be toppling over soon.’ Drummond jumped.

  Amid the chaos, some kept calm, taking off their uniforms, and folding them neatly before leaping into the sea. The blast blew all the clothes off one man, leaving him in his boots and socks. Two men with badly burned arms took off their clothes, but put on tin helmets to protect their heads from the strafing. An interpreter stripped down to a pair of blue silk swimming trunks which he had bought in La Baule.

  John Broadbent, who had been in the ‘Officers Only’ bath when the bombs fell, did not bother to put on his clothes before running out and jumping into the sea. Padre McMenemy gave his blue Lilo to two soldiers who did not know how to swim. On the top deck, a lance corporal came across a second lieutenant and four men crying. They had no life jackets, and could not swim. So the lance corporal helped to tear up some wooden boxes to give them something to cling on to when they went into the water.

  Sitting on the side of the liner as she listed more and more steeply, Alec Cuthbert found himself sliding down the hull as far as the propeller – he had never realised how huge it was, ‘as big as a house’. He waited till the water reached his feet, and then walked out into the sea.

  Peter Vinicombe, the RAF man from the Scottish Borders who had been so impressed by the size of the Lancastria that morning, had been blown off his feet by the blast that came up through a hatch to the deck space by the funnel where he was standing. He landed in the lap of an army officer sitting nearby with several other soldiers. Another explosion went off, and the officer and his men ran away, kicking Vinicombe in the face as they did so.

  Army kit was scattered all round him. People hurtled down the deck and over the rails. Unable to swim, Vinicombe scrambled for a safer place on the ship, watching as the masts came down parallel to the water. Men were walking before jumping. Seeing the propellers sticking up in the air, Vinicombe realised that the liner was now upside down, and that he was sitting on the keel.

  As a big oily wave washed towards him, he grabbed at a rope, losing his footing and falling into the sea. When he came to the surface, he took hold of two floating kitbags, and then found an oar from a lifeboat. With the oar between his legs and a kitbag under each arm, he floated free of the liner.

  Lieutenant Colonel Norman de Coudray Tronson, the veteran of three wars, got out on to the fore deck and helped fire a Bren gun at the German planes. As the liner sank deeper, a wave washed him overboard.

  Ginger-haired Stanley Rimmer, whose life had been saved by the advice from his naval brother not to stay below, clung on to a pipe as the ship listed, though its heat burned his hands. Getting into the water without a life belt, he ducked repeatedly below the surface to avoid bullets from German planes. Then he saw two corpses wearing life jackets. He put an arm over each body and floated between them. As he did so, a man wearing a greatcoat jumped from the deck and landed beside him, calling out ‘Mother! Mother!’

  Men from the Motor Transport detachment, which had been delayed boarding by the overloaded RAF contingent, had set up three Bren guns on the boat deck as soon as they had got on the ship. Because it was a warm day, they were in short sleeves. Their unit’s report said that they were ‘the only ones complete with tripods ammunition etc’.2

  It was hard t
o see the German planes flying in out of the sun. One of the guns, manned by Lance Corporal Fred Coe, the former boy soldier from Bury St Edmunds, was hit and damaged by machine-gun fire from a plane. ‘The aircraft were very noisy,’ he recalled. ‘By the time you sighted them they were gone; they were so quick – bombed from low level, just a few hundred feet.’

  Looking down the deck, Coe saw a screaming, bleeding soldier running to the side and taking off his helmet before he jumped into the sea. He heard Harry Grattidge’s instruction to run to the other side to balance the ship. Then a sergeant told him ‘Take your boots off, boy’ – which he did, handing his damaged Bren gun to the other man as he unlaced them. But he could see that it was useless – the ship was going to go down.

  So Fred and a friend decided it was time to leave. As they walked to the side, they saw five soldiers crying as they stood up to their knees in water. They could not swim. Coe and his colleague fetched a wooden box for them, then swam off the ship over the submerged rail.

  On the top deck, Morris Lashbrook and his friend, ‘Chippy’ Moore, were manning another Bren gun as the bombs landed. When Morris recovered from the blast, the gun was gone. An officer in a black beret told them to go to the other side of the ship to join in the attempt to balance her. When that proved fruitless, the officer told them: ‘I think you chaps had better get off down the side.’ So they stripped and climbed down ropes to the sea.

  One of the Bren gunners was killed, his finger still on the trigger. Another had his arm blown off. An army private grabbed a gun and fired at the planes until a lump of flying debris hit him on the head and knocked him out. Revived by a corporal, the private refused to leave, continuing to fire as the sea lapped at his feet. By 4.08, the gunners were shin deep in water, and the angle of the deck made it impossible to keep the Bren guns in position. So they took to the sea, singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

  As the liner dropped ever lower in the water, surrounded by whirlpools that dragged down men and debris, Sergeant Major Picken of the RASC watched one of his men, a private who had got married just before going to France, standing transfixed, staring down at the sea. Picken tried to get him to move, but the young man just stood still and sobbed.

  Picken, who had sheltered from German planes the previous night in a barrel in St-Nazaire, could not swim, and hesitated to leave the ship. But a corporal from his unit persuaded him that he might as well take his chance in the sea as stay where he was. So Picken and the corporal took off their jackets, trousers, shoes, socks and underpants, ready to go into the water. At that moment, an army nurse came up from a companionway. Embarrassed, Picken turned away from her. ‘No need for modesty at a time like this,’ she said with a firm smile.

  Picken folded his clothes into a neat pile. He and the corporal stood facing one another.

  ‘Good luck,’ said the Sergeant Major.

  ‘Same to you,’ the other man replied.

  They shook hands.

  Behind them a cockney soldier said: ‘That’s all right. It ain’t far to land. Only about a mile – straight down.’

  The two men clutched a rope.

  ‘Good luck,’ they each cried as they slid down, the rope ripping the skin from their hands and legs as they went.

  In the water Picken found a big floating duffel bag, and tucked it under his arm. He paddled and kicked with his feet to get away from the Lancastria, but the duffel bag was becoming waterlogged, and would soon sink.

  He watched the planes coming in low over the sea, and the destroyer, Highlander, circling with its guns blazing up into the sky. Over his shoulder, Picken looked back at the liner, her keel covered with figures – like black dots or flies, said another man. Her stern rose higher in the air. The water had put out most of the fires on board, but there was still a pall of smoke over her. An officer stood on the hull calmly smoking a cigarette. The propeller screws jutting up against the sky began to dip. About fifty men still clung to them. They were singing, too:

  There’ll always be an England

  Where there’s a country lane

  As long as there’s a cottage small

  Beside a field of grain.

  At their base in Belgium, the Diving Eagle crews heard of France’s capitulation. They were, Peter Stahl wrote, ‘over the moon with joy’.3 The local Belgians seemed to feel the same because they believed this meant that the war was over.

  The Luftwaffe pilots staged a celebration that night, but, as the first impact of the French surrender wore off, their rejoicing was dampened by uncertainty about what would come next. Was the war now over, or would Britain go on fighting alone? What would that mean for Germany and its air force, which Hitler was counting on to shatter resistance across the Channel?

  What did the Führer plan to do?

  On the bridge of the Lancastria, Captain Sharp turned to his Chief Officer, and said: ‘It’s time now, Harry. I’m going to swim for the after-end.’

  There was only one life belt to hand. Grattidge was a strong swimmer – he had won medals in races as a schoolboy in Stafford. Knowing that the Captain was a poor swimmer, the Chief Officer insisted that he take it.

  ‘Good luck, Sir,’ he said as Sharp did so.

  The Captain dropped away into the water.

  The sea was now very close, lapping like bathwater. Leaving behind the clothes in his cabin, his personal sextant, his camera, diaries, letters from his mother, a collection of penguins made of porcelain, metal and glass, and a copy of one of his favourite books, H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, the Chief Officer waited till the floor of the bridge reached the surface. The great liner quaked once, as if in a final gesture of farewell. In his gold-braided Cunard Line uniform and a tin helmet, Harry Grattidge walked out into the sea.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Sea

  THE LANCASTRIA’S STERN STOOD OUT against the sky like a sharp rock. Floating in the sea, John Broadbent saw a face behind a porthole. The terror-stricken man tried to smash the glass, but it was too thick. Before long, the porthole slid beneath the water.

  The Canadian, William Tilley, who had jumped feet first, was passed by a man who told him, ‘This will be worth a pint at my local when I get back to Wigan.’

  A Hurricane fighter flew in with the sun behind it to attack a German plane machine-gunning men in the water. John Edwards, the interpreter who had dived into the sea in his blue swimming trunks, saw the British pilot waving as he swooped to 100 feet above the surface. Having hit the enemy aircraft, the Hurricane flew off – its pilot is believed to have been a 26-year-old Scot, George Berry, who would die in the Battle of Britain.

  A survivor reported seeing the Luftwaffe plane floating in the water fifty yards from him. The crew stood on the wing as men from the Lancastria shouted ‘Murder the bastards!’ But one of the Germans brandished a Luger pistol, and the British kept away until he was picked up by a Royal Navy destroyer.

  After the planes had gone, everything went quiet. Somebody said, ‘It’s a lovely day tomorrow.’ A man asked Alec Cuthbert if he could hang on to his life jacket, adding: ‘I don’t think I’ll last much longer.’ Cuthbert gestured to him to do so, and they drifted together on the strong tide towards the mouth of the Loire.

  Looking back at the liner on which he had served, Joe O’Brien thought she resembled a giant whale covered with khaki, air force blue and white jackets. On the keel, the men kept on singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Several survivors said they sang ‘lustily’. Then the sound of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ came across the water, and a hymn ‘To Our Returning Home’. An officer pushed men into the water to make them abandon the dying ship. In the sea, they joked about it being a nice day for a swim. A Royal Engineers corporal on the hull removed his clothes, took a flag and wrapped it round his body before jumping off.

  The oil that spread across the water was almost as thick as tar. It coated the eyes of those in the sea, and went down their throats to choke them. Their arms and bodies became so slippery that they
could not be hauled on to the rafts and upturned lifeboats.

  Captain Sharp, who floated away from the Lancastria in the kapok life jacket Harry Grattidge had given him, had asked for the surplus fuel to be taken off before leaving Britain, but there had been no time to do so. Later, he would put the high death toll down equally to the lack of life jackets and to the oil which, he wrote, ‘proved to be fatal in the end’.1

  Feeling the fuel creeping across his body like cold black syrup, Grattidge swam for clean water. As he did so, he saw the exhausted, staring face of a man beside him. Spitting out oil from his mouth, the Chief Officer grasped at the man’s hair to drag him to safety. When they reached a clear patch, he saw that what he was holding was a severed head.

  A little later, Grattidge’s vision went, and he was afraid that he had been hit in the head by a strafing bullet. Then he realised his tin helmet had tipped forward to cover his eyes.

  He made his way to a small man swimming nearby, and asked him how he was getting on. The man was completely naked. He glanced at the gold braid on the arm of the Chief Officer’s uniform, and gave a look of disgust as he replied in a cockney accent: ‘What’s the good of hanging on under conditions like this. Eh? What’s the good? I tell you I’m so fed up I’ve got a perishing good mind to sink.’ When Grattidge urged him to hang on, the little fellow said that, if his mother had known before he was born that he was going to suffer like this, she would have drunk more gin.

  At 4.12 p.m., less than twenty minutes after being hit, the Lancastria disappeared below the sea for good. The estuary was relatively shallow – twelve fathoms, or seventy-two feet – and she soon came to lie on the bottom. Her last resting place was at latitude 47.09N, longitude 2.20W.