The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  On the Highlander, half a dozen men who had been taken for dead when they were pulled from the water were brought round by artificial respiration. After three hours in the sea, the Tillyers and their daughter, Jacqueline, were brought on board. The destroyer’s steward, ‘Ding Dong’ Bell from Dover, took the 2-year-old girl to the captain’s cabin to revive her by dipping her into alternate basins of hot and cold water. Then he rubbed the oil off her body, clothed her in a naval sweater, washed her hair, arranged it with the captain’s brush and comb, and carried her up to the deck wrapped in a blanket. After that he sold a bottle of whisky to one of the survivors who gave some to a naked man who came into the wardroom, and who turned out to be a lieutenant colonel.

  Several rescue boats tried to pick up a Geordie who was so covered with oil that it was impossible to catch hold of him. Eventually, a sailor snared him with a boathook that cut through his underpants into the flesh below. Before leaving Newcastle, he had gone shopping with his wife for a pair of pants. One pair in the shop cost half-a-crown, another only 1s. 11½d. He had bought the cheaper ones: now he wished he had taken the more expensive pair, reckoning that they would have been stronger. But he was saved, at the cost of a big gash in his buttocks.

  At the front of a small boat lowered by the destroyer, the Havelock, stood a giant sailor, completely naked. He scooped men out of the sea, slung them over his shoulder and took them to the back of the craft. The other sailor steering the boat called the huge man ‘Pricky’, and one of those he saved said he appeared to be ‘very aptly named’.

  The Cymbula took on a stream of survivors from smaller boats, including one soldier clutching a small dog which the ship’s mainly Chinese crew held on to and called ‘Fifi’. The Second Radio Officer, Richard Wilkins, handed a Penguin book of English poetry to one soldier, and a vest to another who was naked. Wilkins tried to give artificial respiration to a soldier who had swallowed a lot of water and oil by pressing down on his back with both hands, but had to stop because the man was in such pain.

  Percy Fairfax of the RASC floated for four hours on an inflated cushion with a rope trailing from a raft looped round his shoulder. Then he saw a rowing boat coming towards him. Two French sailors on board were using the oars to move kitbags floating on the sea. The men on the raft cried for help. But the Frenchmen were scavengers, and pushed away those in the water.

  A strong swimmer grabbed Fairfax’s shoulder, breaking the loop of rope. Percy gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow, and, resting on his cushion, managed to reach the raft. When he tried to climb on board, it threatened to sink with his weight. Two men threw him off. He made another attempt. The men held his head under the water for a time. Then one grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to grasp a ring. Fairfax asked the man for his name. ‘There are no heroes or names on this raft,’ he replied. ‘We are all pals, so stick together and all keep quiet.’

  A steamer passed by, and those on the raft called for help. But it did not stop, though its wash turned them round and carried them into clean water. Finally, a French ship stopped to pick them up.

  For the first time, Fairfax let go of his cushion to grasp a rope thrown down to him. But his hands were so coated with oil that it slipped through his fingers like an eel. He went under. Rising to the surface again, he grasped another rope, which he put round his waist. The knot slipped, and he went down again.

  Rising to the surface, Fairfax tried to grab the plaited rope on the side of the French boat. He could not get a grip. Down came another rope. Exhausted and knowing he could not last much longer, Percy took it in his hands, arms and teeth, wrapped it round his body and twice round his right arm, binding the end with his left hand. That was enough to get him hoisted up to the deck, where he passed out.

  Coming round, he found he was lying with his head in the lap of a woman rescuer. He got up and walked to the covered-in part of the deck where men sat silently, drenched in oil. After a while, he asked an officer for the time. It was nine at night – five hours after the Lancastria had gone down.

  The woman in whose lap Percy Fairfax had come round was Joan Rodes, the Englishwoman whose French husband was away at the front and who had organised hospital services in La Baule. She had been offered a place on an evacuation ship, but she decided to stay in France.

  Though she was heavily pregnant, Rodes joined a friend of hers, Michel Luciani, to sail into the bay of St-Nazaire in his fishing smack, dodging mines dropped by German planes. Helped by a prominent local businessman, Pierre Huni, and a Briton living in the area, Henry Boyd, they ferried nineteen badly injured men back to La Baule, where food and drink were laid on. In the Hermitage, the luxury hotel that had been turned into a hospital, Joan prepared beds for the wounded. But they were so badly hurt that it was decided to take them by road to St Joseph’s hospital in St-Nazaire for treatment.

  Huni and Rodes set off again with Luciani in his boat, the Saint Michel, to undertake more rescue work. It was a nightmare journey. On the way, they were strafed. Joan Rodes flung herself on the deck, her face white from the pain of her pregnancy. Among survivors of the Lancastria, she became known as ‘the Angel of St-Nazaire’.

  Huni, a French delegate to the International Red Cross, used his limousine to ferry survivors who had come ashore. He tried to set up a final evacuation for some of the remaining British troops on a French boat, but the captain refused to take them – anyway the ship was waterlogged.

  Getting back to La Baule, Joan Rodes helped to arrange for the burial of bodies from the Lancastria washed up on the wide beach of the resort. A local woman donated a field for the purpose. Broken wine bottles were put at the head of the graves with the men’s identity tags and other personal belongings under the glass. Later the owner of the field put up white crosses, and cultivated flowers round the graves.

  In the following days, a French general and a British destroyer captain both advised Rodes to leave France. Again, she decided to stay to do what she could to help British soldiers to escape. When a party of German officers turned up to take over her hospital, she put up a sign reading ‘Contagious’, telling them she was treating patients suffering from typhus. After the Germans left hurriedly, Rodes recruited a young priest and nuns to remove valuable X-ray equipment to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

  Led by a young officer with a monocle, the Germans came back to have the hospital disinfected. As this was being done, Rodes saw the officer mistreating an elderly woman, and upbraided him.

  ‘You should lower your eyes, and hang your head in shame,’ he shouted, ‘for you forget you were beaten.’2

  ‘Beaten! I am not beaten! I am British!’ Rodes replied, walking off to the dispensary.

  The officer followed her. She told him that her husband was at the front, and that her father-in-law was a general who had lost one eye and one arm in battle.

  ‘You are not afraid?’ the German asked.

  ‘That is not a word in my vocabulary,’ she responded.

  ‘Oh well, the war will soon be ended, and it’s only a matter of time before we invade and conquer England.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ Rodes said. ‘No German will ever set foot on English soil unless as a prisoner.’

  The officer said he saluted her as one soldier to another.

  A few days later, Rodes had a miscarriage. She remained in bed for two years suffering from fever and thrombosis and was then a semi-invalid. Still, she operated a secret radio for the Resistance, and hid British servicemen in the cellars of her family-in-law’s house until they could find an escape route out of France.

  Pierre Huni became a member of the Resistance: in December 1941, he was questioned by the Gestapo who raided the YMCA in Paris while he was visiting it. He was released after two-and-a-half hours. The captain of the fishing smack, Michel Luciani, went on to sabotage German patrol boats on the western coast of France. Their British partner, Henry Boyd, was arrested and died while interned at the American hospital in Paris.

&
nbsp; A 15-year-old French boy, Gaston Noblanc, watched as the German planes swooped on the estuary and the port. He had got to know the British troops while working as a newspaper delivery boy, taking copies of the Daily Mail and Daily Express to camps round St-Nazaire. Now, he joined a relative on a tug that went out to try to save men from the sea, lowering a small boat to pull them from the water. ‘It was Hell,’ he recalled, ‘abominable, the height of horror.’

  Like Rodes and Huni, Gaston Noblanc joined the Resistance. He used his newspaper delivery round to gather information on German military installations, passing it to London through an underground network run by the Mayor of La Baule. He spotted U-boats using the pens at St-Nazaire and informed the British through a clandestine radio. Captured by the Gestapo, he was tortured, and badly burned.

  Captain Sharp was floating, exhausted, in the sea when the Lancastria’s surgeon, Dr Shaw, spotted him and went to help; they were rescued after four hours in the water. Two men from their ship on a rescue boat saw them. ‘Holy smoke,’ one called to the other, ‘there’s the Captain.’

  Sharp was pulled on board with some difficulty given his heavy frame and the slippery oil on his clothes. He was taken to the Havelock, and then transferred with hundreds of others to the damaged liner, the Oronsay, where the first bombing had stopped all the clocks at 1.15. As men crossed a plank between the destroyer and the passenger ship, the rolling sea made some tumble into the water.

  Already on the Oronsay, Harry Grattidge gave Sharp a drink from a brandy flask he had in his pocket. Then the Chief Officer changed his water-sodden Cunard Line uniform with its gold braid for a corporal’s jacket which he put on over his woollen underwear. The liner’s main salon was turned into a sick bay: some of the men were, Grattidge recalled, ‘so burned you could hardly credit that a life survived beneath the raw and weeping tissue’.3

  A French tug pulled alongside with 500 men, who crossed to the liner except for a Belgian who refused to board the British ship and was taken back to St-Nazaire. The men were given blankets which they wrapped round their bodies and heads. Coming to in the semi-darkness after passing out when he was pulled from the sea, Percy Braxton of the RAF thought he was surrounded by a crowd of hooded monks. Others put on torn-up sacks. Some of the injured had to be carried on to the deck, and lay there smoking cigarettes. For a few, it was their last smoke. When they died, they were sewn into hammocks and buried at sea.

  A Salvation Army man and his wife, who had travelled from Paris to St-Nazaire to join the evacuation with nothing more than the clothes they wore and a cache of francs, put up money to buy the survivors cigarettes and drinks; they explained to Grattidge that, though their organisation did not normally encourage use of stimulants, this was a special situation.

  Going down to the sick bay cabin on the Oronsay, Grattidge saw a familiar figure, tending to survivors in his shirt sleeves: Lieutenant Colonel Earle, whom he had met on the liner, Carpathia, twenty-six years before.

  When the Chief Officer hailed him, the other man raised his eyebrows and nodded. He might have been interrupted reading The Times in his club. Grattidge introduced himself, but Earle did not remember him. After the Chief Officer gave some more information about himself, the surgeon said: ‘Oh, really, glad you were picked up. A good show.’ Then he went back to his work. It was, Grattidge reflected in his memoirs, a marvel of British imperturbability – ‘while there were men like Lt-Col. Earle, I thought, there always indeed would be an England.’4

  What he did not mention was that Earle was operating without anaesthetics.

  Wing Commander Macfadyen and Captain Griggs also ended up on the Oronsay after being picked up by overloaded French rescue ships. Seeing men without life jackets arriving, the Captain insisted that they should go. ‘It wasn’t being heroic,’ he remembered. ‘I was too breathless to climb up a ship’s ladder just then.’

  On board, Griggs reached into his jacket pocket and found a packet of twenty Players cigarettes still in its cellophane. The packet was, miraculously, nearly bone dry. He lit one himself and handed round the other nineteen.

  The Captain was handed a shirt, shorts and gym shoes. He went in search of a bathroom. A steward offered him a hip bath full of hot fresh water which, unlike salt water, would remove the oil.

  It was only then that the reaction to the event set in as Griggs suddenly realised how easily he could have been among the dead. ‘The thought had not struck me before,’ he recalled. ‘I had felt no fear on the ship or in the water, only anger.’

  Sitting on the deck, he watched a naked man black with oil from head to foot dive off the side of the ship and swim out to bring survivors back. He saved five men before exhaustion stopped him. Later, Griggs made a point of finding out who he was and reporting his exploit to the War Office, which awarded him the Military Cross.

  The Welsh accountant, Captain Clement Stott, saw a fishing boat close to him. His head felt ‘like a forty shilling pot’ as they said in his part of the country. But it was his last chance of surviving, and he got within reach of one of the tyres hanging from the side of the ship.

  When he stretched out his arm to grab it, his hand slid off, and he swallowed a mouthful of oily water. Then, Stott recalled, ‘a line suddenly came whizzing through the air, my hand caught it; but again I had no grip. I was covered in oil to the last square inch and by now my strength was almost gone. I just floated, unable to move any of my limbs.’

  The swell lifted him away from the boat. The dirty old car tyre on its side seemed a symbol of life. A man on board put his hands to his mouth, and shouted ‘Courage mon vieux!’

  Stott thrust out his left arm. It hit something. He turned to see what it was. A dead body.

  That seemed the end. For the only time in his life, he said to himself, ‘I’ve had it!’ Then, suddenly, he thought of his wife and children. ‘At that terrible moment,’ he recalled, ‘my mind was all at once filled with a life-like picture of them all. It gave me another ounce of strength and a new determination.

  ‘“I will not die.” The words formed in me. I had been a lucky and happy man in my home life, no family sorrow had ever got my dear wife or me down, and I damn well wanted to see them all again – this side of heaven! I would see them again!

  ‘I braced myself and gritted my teeth and made ready for my last attempt. Three seconds I’d give myself. I counted “One! Two!”’

  A big swell flung him on to the fishing boat where he passed out as it took him to St-Nazaire. There, a medical orderly insisted on giving him a new officer’s jacket, covered with blood. Stott was moved to a troop ship, and provided with hot soapy water, but it would not wash off the oil. He was also handed a mug of cocoa which he could hardly keep down. Finally, he was given a big coat. He pictured himself at that moment – ‘A little, middle-aged man in pince-nez and an officer’s overcoat . . . which might have fitted Jack Dempsey.’

  CHAPTER 9

  St-Nazaire

  AT 10 P.M., THE PORT COMMAND in St-Nazaire got round to reporting the sinking of the Lancastria to French naval headquarters. Marked ‘Secret’, the message limited itself to noting: ‘British liner Lancastria carrying evacuated troops hit by German bomb and sank on the Grand Charpentier roads at 1516gmt.’ There was no further entry in French naval records.

  The men who were not taken straight to one of the rescue ships in the estuary were landed on the quayside at St-Nazaire. It was night by now, and there were no lights because of intermittent German air raids.

  The wharf was crowded with survivors. ‘Some was injured,’ the electrician, Frank Brogden, recalled. ‘Some was in a state of shock. Some was clothed. Some wasn’t clothed at all, all black from head to toe with oil fuel.’

  Frenchwomen dug holes in bales of straw on the dockside, and helped men climb inside for shelter. An old lady put a white apron round one soldier, who had lost most of his clothes. A Red Cross unit tended to the wounded as best it could.

  Two Royal Navy officers approached a grou
p of men lying on the straw covered with blankets. They offered a choice – either to stay and be taken to hospital, risking capture by the Germans, or to board one of the freighters still in the harbour. Most chose to go, and spent the night on the ships, which were the targets of unsuccessful bombing, before heading for the open sea at dawn.

  Fleets of ambulances drove those who could not leave, or did not want to do so, to the town’s convent hospital. Nursing nuns met them. The first job was to clean the oil from the soldiers’ bodies.

  Sergeant Miller of the Buffs, who had passed out after being picked up by a fishing boat, came round when nuns threw buckets of hot water over him. As the nurses scrubbed Private Proctor of the RASC, he vomited up oil and was given an injection that made him sleep till the next morning.

  Sergeant Youngs of the RASC was driven by ambulance to a ward that was spotlessly white except for black marks on the walls from the soldiers’ hands. He was put in a children’s area where a boy was coming round from an appendix operation. One of the staff removed his filthy clothes, and he was taken to a bathroom where he was ‘acutely aware’ that it was a nun who scrubbed his body. After which, a doctor gave him a sleeping injection.

  In another religious hospital, there was little soap or hot water, and the nuns handed the men sheets with which to wipe themselves as clean as they could. Then they wrapped them in blankets and took them to lie on palliasses between the beds, telling the men to be quiet so as not to disturb the patients. Local people brought clothes – Frank Brodgen was given a pair of velveteen trousers and a shirt; he looped strips of old carpet round his feet as slippers. The oil had not been scrubbed off, however. ‘What the patients thought in the morning when they woke up and saw a bunch of nigger minstrels between the beds!’ Brodgen wrote later.