The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  In one large hall, men were given coffee or tea, laced with brandy, rum or whisky. There were twenty bathtubs of hot water, with two or three men using each.

  ‘It was a case of first one leg in the bath, then the other, then the arms and the head,’ Bill Slater, of the Pay Corps, recalled. ‘Then the back. Each man had to take turns in washing the back of the other. He cleaned mine and then I cleaned his. When there was more diesel oil in the bath than water, or when the water was too cold, two ladies took it away and came back with more.’

  With much of the oil removed, the men dressed from a pile of old clothes. Slater picked up a vest, and a pair of trousers which had belonged to a man whose stomach was five inches bigger than his but whose legs were five inches shorter. He also got a blanket, but no shoes or socks. Then he and others who had been cleaned up were driven back to the dock in an ambulance. On the way, Slater was violently sick from the mixture of coffee, brandy, rum and diesel oil which he had swallowed. ‘I felt terrible, but it was all for the best,’ he added. ‘It helped to clear the stomach.’

  When Denise Petit of the Banque de France arrived at her home that night, she saw a van stopping in the street outside. Men got out. Were they really men, she wondered. They were filthy, naked and shivering. Some were wrapped in blankets. Having unloaded them, the van driver headed back for the docks.

  There had been an ambulance post beside her house, but it had been moved, and there was nobody to look after the men. So Denise called her mother and neighbours and passers-by. They took the men inside their homes, washed them, and gave them clean clothes and hot alcohol. A British lieutenant called the roll.

  Denise could see that the men were suffering all over their bodies, and in their eyes and noses where the oil had penetrated. They found it difficult to breathe, but none complained. As soon as they were ready, those who could went back to the docks to re-embark, having heard rumours that the Germans were already in Nantes. Denise and her mother nursed others through the night as German planes swirled overhead.

  Joe Sweeney was brought ashore after being picked up by a lifeboat and put on a French trawler. He was naked, having taken off all his clothes to enable him to swim more easily.

  Walking carefully because of his bare feet, he crossed the road at the docks and went into a bar filled with raucous soldiers. All he wanted was peace and quiet. Noticing a hatch door below the bar, he scrambled through it into a dark back room. The patronne strode in, not realising in the darkness that the French-speaking Sweeney was naked. He told her what had happened to him on the Lancastria.

  ‘Wait here,’ she shouted. A minute later, she returned with a half-full bottle of brandy, a packet of Gauloises and a box of matches. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw he had no clothes on.

  ‘Go on! Get out! Now,’ she said, showing him through the back door, and then adding in a whisper, ‘Bonne chance, gamin.’

  Thanking her, Sweeney went out into the night. He crossed the road to sit on the pavement, sipping the brandy. It made him feel warmer. Euphoria overcame him as he smoked one cigarette after another, and fantasised about escaping to Spain.

  When a teenage girl walked by, Sweeney got up to greet her. She asked if he was hurt.

  ‘No, I’m all right; just frozen stiff,’ he replied. They sat down and she asked him about the Lancastria. Suddenly a flare lit up overhead and she saw that he was naked.

  ‘Good Lord! You’ve got no clothes on,’ she cried, jumping up.

  Then she added, ‘Pauvre homme!’ and told him to wait.

  A few minutes later, she returned with a pair of her brother’s riding breeches and a flannel shirt. The breeches were too small – Joe had to rip the seams to get them on. The shirt was too small, too, so he and the girl tore the neck and sleeves. She also produced a little bottle of cognac, more cigarettes and matches. They chatted some more. Then she left saying, ‘Au revoir et bonne chance.’

  Sweeney sat down again on the pavement feeling elated. An ambulance picked him up. Inside, he passed his bottles round to the other passengers. They were dropped by a coal ship on which they sailed from St-Nazaire. The boat was so crowded that Joe slept standing up.

  An English-speaking nun in a convent hospital warned a sergeant from the Buffs of rumours – false as it turned out – that the Germans were on the outskirts of the town. Clad in only a blanket, the soldier made his way to the quay where he found a uniform abandoned by an officer. Wearing the jacket and trousers of a lieutenant colonel, he got on board the cargo ship, John Holt. He was one of the more fortunate ones on the cargo boat. The ship’s captain sent a signal to Britain that he was ‘returning with 829 survivors from Lancastria, many without clothing’.

  Signalman Leonard Forde, who had driven his wireless truck across France and then failed to get on a tender taking men out to the Lancastria, was stuck on the quay till after night fell. Losing patience, he and a couple of dozen men waded out to a rowing boat floating off the docks, and steered it to one of the remaining rescue ships. He was too tired to ask what its name was.

  British troops were still arriving in St-Nazaire to join the final exodus from France. Orders were to get out as many men as possible, and the British were clearly in no state to withstand the Germans if they reached the far west. Still, Major Fred Hahn thought he should do all he could to get valuable equipment home. So he put together a seventy-eight-vehicle convoy from Nantes with materiel from a workshop. When it reached the airfield outside St-Nazaire, he was told that no more vehicles were being allowed into the town. Everything was to be dumped at the airfield and set alight. All that mattered was to save as many men as possible, and to leave nothing for the enemy.

  Refusing to accept this, Hahn and a colonel accompanying him instructed the convoy to head south with a guard of twenty infantrymen. They hoped it might reach Bordeaux, where there could be sea transport back to Britain for the equipment which included secret radar parts. Having seen the convoy off, Hahn and the colonel went back with some of their men to liaise with the last remaining British staff at their headquarters in Château Douet Garnier outside Nantes.

  There, they breakfasted in the basement of a large house with a major who had been in charge of the first line of British defence of Nantes. Half a dozen French people were also in the room, including two French women, whom Hahn described as ‘youngish’ and ‘both very much in negligé.’1

  It was a very hot day and the lady on Hahn’s right was ‘wearing only a diaphanous pale blue nightie which did little to conceal her superb figure’. Sitting pressed hard up against her, even in the dim light of the basement, Hahn could not help noticing how the silky sheen ‘moulded and embellished her perfectly formed breasts’. Under different circumstances, he acknowledged, he might have been ‘very interested in her. She was about 30 years old and in perfect shape.’ But he had not slept for two days or eaten for more than twelve hours, and had urgent business to attend to. So he concentrated on military matters.

  The major had a plan of the British line of defence in the sector, but he said his men had already left for St-Nazaire, and he was going to follow them after breakfast. Finishing his meal, Hahn went to the British General Headquarters where he found a general and his aide-de-camp.

  ‘Where do you keep your whisky?’ Hahn asked.

  ‘Plenty in the cupboard,’ the ADC replied. ‘Help yourself.’

  Next, Hahn went back to Douet Garnier for a battle conference. Another participant, Colonel Shorthouse, of the South Staffordshire Regiment, wanted to try to hold the Germans on the road from Le Mans to give more time for the evacuation from St-Nazaire. But he only had two tanks, which had been damaged and then repaired. Hahn lent him twenty of his men who set out on the road with the two tanks – ‘the last rearguard in France,’ as Hahn wrote later.2 However, the tanks broke down, and they did not meet any Germans.

  Hahn and a colonel called Suggate, set off in a Humber Snipe staff car to catch up with the convoy they had sent towards
Bordeaux. Before long, they came across one truck blazing by the roadside. Then they found the other lorries also on fire. The packing cases loaded on to them had been smashed open. Petrol had been poured over the contents.

  There was no sign of any soldiers. A dispatch rider had ridden up to the convoy with an order from the embarkation officer in St-Nazaire for them to destroy the trucks and equipment, and get to the ships. Hahn’s driver looked at the flaming vehicles and said, ‘The bastards!’

  They drove to St-Nazaire. When they reached the perimeter of the airfield outside the town, an officer told them to ditch their car in a field, and to burst open the petrol tank. Hahn said they planned to return to Nantes, so they would keep the vehicle. In the distance they heard the sound of bombing. Somebody told them a ship had been hit. Hahn reckoned that the bombs did not sound very heavy, and would not do much damage to a big boat.

  Despite the instructions not to do so, they drove on towards St-Nazaire. But the jam of men on the road was so great that they left the Humber, and walked. As they got into the town, Hahn heard a cry of ‘Freddie’ from a grimy, oil-bespattered man coming up a flight of steps. It was a soldier he knew, Major Leslie Bradbury, who had been on the Lancastria and had got back ashore. Bradbury said he had 400 of his men with him but ‘the Frenchies won’t let us have any grub. They say they have not enough for themselves.’

  Hahn offered to drive back to Nantes to get food. First, he and Colonel Suggate went into a café where French people were breakfasting on rolls and coffee.

  ‘For us, the war is ended,’ a man at the bar said as the Englishmen came in. ‘Soon Hitler will conquer England.’

  Hahn replied that the British were leaving now, but would be back. He bought rolls and coffee and took them to a table.

  The man at the bar called him back, and offered Hahn and Suggate cognacs.

  The two British officers drove back to Nantes, and made sure no men had been left behind there. They had a good dinner at La Coupole restaurant. After which, they motored in the Humber to St-Nazaire through a clear night under a bright moon.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Way Back

  THE FIRST MENTION of the disaster in the British Naval War Diary for 17 June came in a single succinct sentence which stated that, ‘The number of casualties is not yet known.’1 A second entry added optimistically that 3733 of 5500 on board had been rescued. A third reported: ‘Had on board 5200 troops and a number of women and children, about 2500 saved out of total of about 5500. 70 of crew of 330 lost.’

  Another entry for the same day recorded a signal sent to Alan Brooke as he weighed up his plans. ‘French Army has been ordered to cease fighting.’ A bracketed addition read: ‘(Note it is thought this statement correct.)’ Then somebody wrote ‘in’ in ink in front of ‘correct’. Given Pétain’s broadcast twenty-four hours earlier, the navy seemed to be living in a dream world.

  Reaching St-Nazaire, Brooke’s driver parked their car in a lane that offered concealment from the German planes. A man was sent to find the destroyer aboard which the British commander would leave France for the second time in less than three weeks. He returned with news of the sinking of the Lancastria. No destroyers were available, he added. All were needed to rescue survivors.

  Brooke had a choice of boarding the armoured trawler, the Cambridgeshire, which was leaving that night, or staying to wait for a bigger boat the next day. He picked the first, hoping it was sufficiently small and insignificant not to attract the attention of the German pilots. It had no rafts or life belts, having used them all to save 800 to 900 men from the Lancastria.

  The number of survivors on the adapted trawler would have made her unseaworthy once she got out into the Atlantic. So she landed the seriously wounded at St-Nazaire, and transferred some others to the fruit ship, the John Holt. The cargo boat headed down the estuary, through a minefield and, its captain signalled, ‘going fast for home’.

  Sidney Dunmall, the private from the Pay Corps, was among those transferred. He was told to go into a hold where he lay on a duck board in the dim light. There was not much conversation. One of the other men was wearing only a great coat with the stripes of a wing commander.

  Every part of the John Holt was packed with men. The smoke room had been turned into a hospital, with two men in each bed. Others lay up on the deck. Curtains, tablecloths, bedding were used as clothing. Though it was a warm June night, the heating system was kept on to give comforting heat.

  The Chief Steward went up to the bridge to ask the captain what to do to nourish the survivors. Soup was distributed – it was watery, but ‘tasted lovely’, Morris Lashbrook recalled. One survivor got his in the lid of a tobacco tin. Sidney Dunmall was handed rice, a dry biscuit, and a mug of water. There was also plenty of rum on board – kept for the loaders at African fruit ports when they worked overtime. So the captain told the steward to make buckets of tea, and pour a bottle into each.

  Alan Brooke found the Cambridgeshire covered in sticky oil, ‘an indescribable mess . . . with discarded clothes lying all over the place’. It had soaked into the carpets; and the white walls of the passageways and cabins were, he wrote, ‘covered with impressions of every part of the human anatomy’.2 The smell permeated the boat. The General went to work cleaning his cabin, which had previously been occupied by survivors pulled out of the sea. After half an hour, he gave up, and went to lie on deck. Around him, three air raids hit the port during the night.

  The Cambridgeshire pulled out along the estuary at 3 a.m., passing the huge tomb of the Lancastria lying on the sea bed. As it headed to the high seas, the captain received a signal asking him to provide protection for a group of boats leaving St-Nazaire. He conferred with Brooke, and they agreed to form a convoy to sail round the Brittany peninsula.

  Lying under the stars, Brooke thanked God that he and the remains of the BEF had escaped. Suddenly, a young sailor ran round the deck, screaming, ‘Can’t you see they are all drowning? Why are you not doing anything? Oh, God, we must do something for them.’ He was held, and fed a drink of aspirins ground into milk. Calming down, he slept for a couple of hours; but when he awoke he began raving again, and had to be given more of the liquid.

  When day broke, Brooke posed for a photograph with his staff, the ship’s captain and a French officer. Despite his night on the deck, the General looked as trim as ever. In front of him sat a sailor in a singlet. ‘It is an extraordinary contrast to find oneself sailing along on a lovely day surrounded by a calm sea, with no refugees, no columns of troops, no problems and no decisions to make,’ he noted in his diary. ‘A wonderful enforced rest’.3

  When the sea became choppy in the afternoon, some of the soldiers on the Cambridgeshire could not keep their food down. But Brooke had no difficulty digesting his high tea of sardines and buttered toast.

  Back in St-Nazaire, injured British soldiers and airmen were rushed from their beds to a shelter when air raids came near the hospitals. Then they were brought clothes, and taken to the dock where they found a hostile group of local inhabitants. A French cargo boat tied up on the quay refused to take on any of them.

  A message to London from Brooke that night had warned: ‘Ordinary Frenchmen believe that we evacuated Dunkirk without consulting French and are now doing the same.’ Anti-British feeling was animated by the defeatists who had taken over the government, their local sympathisers and the belief that their ally had lived down to the German warnings that it would prove untrustworthy in the last resort. For most French, the priority now was to end the fighting.

  But anti-British feeling was by no means universal, and was tempered by help and friendship from some. Civilians sent the wounded clothes, and applauded one group as it was moved from a religious to a military hospital.

  A nurse warned a Sherwood Foresters in her hospital that the Germans were coming. He wrapped a blanket round himself, and left, carrying his wallet, money and army pay book. Joining three other men he met in the town, he took a ferry across the riv
er, and hitched a lift in a lorry driven by a young Frenchman, who took them south as far as Bordeaux, where the British consul helped them find passage home.

  After seeing the Lancastria hit in the bay, Vic Flowers, whose premonition had kept him off the liner, climbed down from the cliffs overlooking the estuary with the two other RAF men who had joined him in turning back from the tender. They walked to the road to Nantes, and hailed an army lorry heading for Brest. There, they boarded an evacuation liner, the Strathaird. On board, Flowers was given a kipper sandwich and a mug of hot, very sweet tea.

  Also heading towards Brest, the Duggan family and the other two carloads of British civilians from Nantes had found a fan belt and repaired their broken-down vehicle. Reaching the coast, the convoy was stopped by French troops at a bridge, which they were planning to blow up. The soldiers were clearly very jittery, and it took some discussion before one shouted ‘Allez vite!’ and waved them across. The bridge was never destroyed.

  Eddie Duggan drove to the docks in Brest and negotiated with the crew of an evacuation ship to be allowed on board. In all, thirty civilians were waiting to be taken off – Madame de Gaulle is thought to have been among them. Eventually, they were given permission, and went up the gangplank, young John Duggan cradling his Bedlington terrier in his arms.

  As they climbed on to the ship, two big dogs started fighting on the deck. A sailor shouted that no dogs would be allowed on board. Eddie Duggan grabbed the terrier from John’s arms, ran down the gangplank and handed it to a sentry. ‘Find a home for it, or shoot it,’ he called.

  His son was devastated. He could hear the dog barking for him. Sitting on a bunk of the family’s cabin, he began to sob. Then the door opened. An RAF sergeant came in, and unbuttoned his uniform jacket. Inside was the terrier – the sergeant had jumped down from the ship on to the quayside, taken the dog, stuffed it inside his jacket and come back on board with it.