On 25 June, the Cabinet War Room Report noted: ‘The armistice between France and Germany came into effect at 0035 hours BST today when hostilities ceased. The Bordeaux Government signed an armistice with Italy at 1815 hours BST on 24th June. There is nothing further of importance to record on this front.’4
The evacuation was not quite finished, however. There were still 2500 French and British troops left on Ouessant Island off the north-west coast of France. They were shipped to Britain in the following weeks, before a German naval party took possession of the island.
On 20 July, the War Cabinet was told that 16,000 men had surrendered or were missing in France. Among them were those who died on the Lancastria, though the official reports made no mention of them.
St-Nazaire went on to have a rough war. The day after the French signed the armistice with Germany, British planes launched their first raid on the port. The harbour facilities were important berths for German battleships while its submarine pens were strategically placed for U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. These made it a prime target, so air attacks continued for the rest of the war.
In March 1942, British commandos landed to try to knock out the submarine bases, sailing in over the wreck of the Lancastria. Crossing the flatland by the sea, one of the officers looked back at the estuary and saw the liner’s masts poking out of the water at low tide. The raid put a big dry dock out of commission, but most of the attackers were killed.
An Allied air assault in early 1943 destroyed 60 per cent of the houses in the town, and made another 20 per cent uninhabitable. Visiting St-Nazaire, the German naval commander, Admiral Dönitz, remarked that there was ‘not a cat, nor a dog left; nothing left except for the submarine shelters’. Later, German troops in the St-Nazaire pocket were among the last to hold out. When the war ended, only 100 of the original 8000 houses in the town were standing.
On 8 October 1940, the London Gazette announced the award of OBEs to Captain Sharp, Harry Grattidge and the Lancastria’s chief engineer, James Dunbar. Three other crew members were also decorated, as were three men from the Cambridgeshire, though an administrative mix-up meant that this did not take place until 1942.
Grattidge, who was due £50 from Cunard in compensation for his possessions and clothes lost on the Lancastria, felt the pain of the disaster for weeks. ‘A seaman is cut to the heart when an accident befalls his ship,’ he wrote.5 ‘But something dies inside him for ever if he loses her.’
The Chief Officer dreamed of the brooding silence before the bombs hit. When he woke, he would be trembling and sweating, though he felt cold at the same time. He went to his home town of Stafford, and tried to forget his experience in a round of parties. Then a cousin took him to a house where he cut himself off from the world in his bedroom. After three days, Harry found he could sleep properly once more, though he remained a little deaf as a result of the explosions.
He went back to work as an officer on a ship carrying planes from the United States to Britain. Surviving the war, he rose to become Chief Captain of the Cunard line and Captain of the Queen Mary.
Rudolph Sharp, whose compensation as a captain amounted to £100, was not so fortunate. In 1941, he was put in charge of the Laconia, another Cunard liner which had been turned into a troopship. One voyage took her to South Africa – also on board for the outward voyage was another Lancastria survivor, Harry Pack of the RASC.
On the way back to Britain, the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Sharp stayed on board as she sank, with the First Officer, George Steel. As the last men left on the final lifeboat, Sharp asked them for a cigarette, and they saw its glow as they pulled away. The death toll of 1614 on the Laconia was the second worst of any single boat in the war, after the Lancastria.
Among the other boats that took men from St-Nazaire, the John Holt was sunk by a submarine off Africa. The City of Mobile was bombed and went under while plying from Glasgow to Liverpool. The KG30 Luftwaffe wing took part in the Battle of Britain. Peter Stahl was awarded the German Gold Cross in 1942 for his war services.
CHAPTER 14
The Memory
SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER the sinking of the Lancastria, a dozen survivors sailed out from St-Nazaire on a pilgrimage to the scene of the disaster. The weather was fine, bright and sunny with a blue sky and a slight breeze. The 75-strong party, which also included descendants of those who had been on the liner, made its way to the site on a French passenger ship. Another eight French vessels joined them in circling the scene of the wreck – the crew of a minesweeper stood to attention ranged along the deck. Claude Gourio, who had fished bodies from the sea, watched from a lifeboat. Harry Harding, Fred Coe and other survivors stared down at the water.
As the circle of boats passed round the marker buoy, a service was held and wreaths were dropped into the sea. The Last Post and Reveille sounded with a minute’s silence between them. The survivors and the relatives raised three cheers for the French Navy. As some noted bitterly, no Royal Navy ship was present.
On land, memorial services were held at cemeteries where dead from the Lancastria lie. French officials joined in. The Mayor of Pornic, where bodies had been brought ashore, offered a lunch for everybody at a restaurant by the harbour, attended by the local member of the National Assembly who made a speech in honour of those who died on 17 June 1940. In La Baule, the municipality decided to rename a street as the Esplanade Lancastria.
At a similar pilgrimage five years earlier, Michael Sheehan, the Canadian helmsman from 1940, cast the first wreath of red poppies on to the sea. A piper played a lament. A soldier recited a prayer starting, ‘There are no roses on a sailor’s grave; Nor wreaths upon the storm-tossed waves.’ As the survivors paid their respects to the dead, a dolphin suddenly jumped out of the sea, executed a turn and swam away.
Below the pilgrims on the boats, undisturbed by anything but the tides, lay the wreck of the liner from which they had escaped six decades earlier. The once-proud Cunarder is seventy-two feet down on the seabed. Ships travelling in the estuary steer clear of her, using the buoy as a navigation aid.
Strong currents make diving dangerous, so the Lancastria has been undisturbed. One diver who went down after the war was said to have reported glimpsing skulls behind the portholes, but some local people think that was a matter of poetic licence. Another who dived in 2000 said the water was so dirty that he could not see anything. As the tide changes, the water around the wreck grows cloudy from the mud and debris on the seabed, and a dark stream rises towards the surface.
The Lancastria has been designated a maritime monument by the French, meaning that it cannot be moved or interfered with. In St-Nazaire, a stone memorial on the seafront looks out at the site of the wreck, dedicated to ‘more than 4,000 who died’.
On the Sunday nearest to the anniversary date, a special service is held in St Katherine Cree Church in the City of London, which has a link with seamen. Fred Coe leaves his pew and goes to the rear of the church. Straight-backed in a dark suit, white gloves and a beret, he carries the standard of the Lancastria Association on a long wooden staff down the aisle. The banner is blue and black with the name of the liner in gold. When Coe reaches the altar steps, the Association’s chaplain takes the banner from him, and places it against the wall. Fred goes to sit in the front row, beside Denis Maloney, who had been in charge of the boat that saved him.
To their right, a panel in a stained-glass window shows a lifeboat pulling away from the stricken ship below an image of Christ walking on the water. The words on a brass plaque declare: ‘TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN PROUD MEMORY OF MORE THAN 4,000 PEOPLE WHO DIED WITH THE TROOPSHIP LANCASTRIA AND TO HONOUR ALL WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORK OF RESCUE’, followed by a list of the eighteen British rescue ships and the French fishing boat, the Saint-Michel, on which Joan Rodes crossed the bay on 17 June.
After a hymn and prayers, the Chairman of the Survivors’ Association reads the passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes that proclaims the glory of humble men. W
hen the sound of the singing dies away, Fred Coe steps forward again, adjusts the leather harness round his neck and shoulder, and goes back to the altar steps. Three survivors accompany the priest in the blessing of a painting of the Lancastria in peacetime. A wreath is laid.
Coe lowers the tip of the standard till the banner unfurls on the floor as an army trumpeter sounds the Last Post. The congregation stands in silence, the only sounds coming from a ticking clock at the back of the knave. Then the trumpeter blows Reveille, and Coe lifts the standard back to the vertical position.
The ‘Marseillaise’ is sung, the choir and congregation intoning the French words as strongly as if it was their own anthem. Then comes ‘God Save the Queen’, after which the chaplain offers a final prayer: ‘Lord support us all the day long of this troublous life. Till the shades lengthen, the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done; then Lord in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.’
The survivors gather at the altar for a group photograph. Then they go into a side room with relatives of those who were on board the liner for sandwiches, cakes and tea.
Denis Maloney recounts how he went straight on from the rescue at St-Nazaire to serve on ships hunting U-boats in the Atlantic and on commando raids in the Middle East before sailing to China where he saw the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949.
Stan Flowers tells how the wallet he lost when he shed his trousers in the sea was found and returned to him in 1950; it must have been washed ashore quickly because he could still read the concert party programme tucked inside.
Alec Cuthbert, his eyes twinkling, recalls how he floated in the water for three hours with a man he did not know hanging on to his life jacket. Fred Coe says he did not dwell on the disaster after getting back to England because ‘life goes on’.
Coincidences bring survivors together. Two met in the gentlemen’s toilet of the Savoy Hotel while attending a marriage there. When Harry Pettit opened his garden for charity, a visitor recognised a photograph of the Havelock in his bungalow – he turned out to be the man who, as a 19-year-old, had fished Harry from the water on to a rescue raft.
Returning from a trip to Australia by sea, Morris Lashbrook fell into conversation with a woman who was coming to Europe. She said one object of her trip was to visit St-Nazaire. Her husband had been among the RAF men who had died on 17 June. She asked Morris if he knew about the disaster. He told her the story of what had happened; she was very grateful as all she knew was from an Air Ministry telegram telling her that her husband was missing.
The Lancastria Association has 300 members, most of them relatives of those who were on board on 17 June 1940, and wish to honour their memory – or celebrate their survival. Established in 1980, it is the second such organisation, succeeding one set up after the war. Around 100 survivors are thought to be alive, some in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and North America. On Remembrance Sunday, a group of a dozen men from the Association joins the march past the Cenotaph. Regional get-togethers are held. An annual service is also organised at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, where a plot is dedicated to the liner and its dead.
Survivors visit the graves of those who died on the liner. In 1990, Harry Pettit walked through the cemetery at La Baule and saw a stone with no name but S147653 engraved on it. He recognised it as the service number of a friend with whom he had jumped from the Lancastria fifty years earlier.
Former sapper Norman Driver went back to the forest where he and his Royal Engineers unit had been building a railway line when they were told to head off for St-Nazaire. The dirt track they had used had been tarred, and new bungalows had been built. He asked about the farmer’s son who had sat and watched the soldiers at work – Norman had always regretted having been marched off from the forest without having had time to say goodbye to the boy.
A house was pointed out to him. When a man opened the door, Driver said, ‘Monsieur Couedel?’ The man replied ‘Oui.’ Driver told him who he was. In English, the Frenchman replied: ‘You dead! You dead!’
Driver explained how he had survived the sinking of the Lancastria. When he left, Laurent Couedel presented him with two bottles of wine and a chisel he had found from the Royal Engineers workshop.
In 2005, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, Christine Grahame, took up the cause of gaining proper recognition for what happened on 17 June 1940, lodging a motion urging the government to recognise the sacrifice of the victims and survivors. But there was little reaction from Westminster. Why the loss of the liner remains so little known is a mystery: it is as if some jinx hangs over the memory of the ship which changed its name. In the summer of 1940, the silence had said much about the national mood. After Dunkirk, the battle for Britain was looming, with a German invasion force poised across the Channel. The country sensed the need to keep morale high in the face of the all-conquering enemy who encapsulated evil. Nobody wanted to hear of a disaster in which thousands of defenceless people died, or to be told that Dunkirk had not drawn the final line under the retreat from France. There was no desire to be told that 150,000 men had been left behind, most of them not dashing fighters of the kind who would fly in the Battle of Britain but the support troops who keep an army going – repair workers, carpenters, communications staff, ground crews, bakers and cooks and NAAFI store men.
Unlike Dunkirk, which was converted in the British imagination from a desperate retreat into a monument to the national spirit, the afternoon of 17 June in St-Nazaire could not be turned from defeat into a semblance of victory. Lying helpless in the estuary as the Luftwaffe swooped, the liner could all too easily have become a symbol for the island that was about to be pummelled from the air. For all their valour and defiance, the men singing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ had been powerless to ward off disaster. Their country was set on avoiding such an outcome.
The fate of those who died on the Lancastria or in the oily sea, and of those who survived, was a human story, not a military one – and many of those who got away preferred to move on to other things as soon as they could. They did not dwell on what had happened, but joined their units to continue the war against Hitler. As Fred Coe said, ‘Life goes on.’
Still, at the lowest estimate, 2500 people died that day. An Admiralty report said 2823 had been lost, and Churchill wrote of a toll of ‘upwards of 3,000 men’. Both figures may well be underestimates given that several reports set the number on board at more than 6000, and those saved were put at 2500. If that sounds high, another liner took 6000 off from Brest during the Operation Aerial evacuation, and some survivors from the Lancastria have talked of as many as 8000–9000 having been on board.
Whatever the estimate, the loss of the liner was the worst maritime disaster to a single ship in British history, even if it was relegated to a footnote in the impending battle for national survival. The size of the death toll was all the more shocking because it could so easily have been much lower, or perhaps avoided altogether.
The Lancastria was the only big ship hit in the second evacuation from France. If embarkation had stopped when 5,000 had come aboard, the dead would have been significantly fewer. One or two thousand soldiers and RAF men might have been taken to another of the rescue ships in the estuary. If those caught in the holds had not been sent below for safety, their chances of escape would have been much greater. The amount of oil in the tanks increased the choking slick that spread out from the dying ship. The failure to tell men how to enter the water if they were wearing a life jacket resulted in many broken necks. Had Captain Sharp followed the instructions from the naval commander, the liner would have been at sea when the Junkers swooped. He was worried about submarines, but none of the ships returning to England from St-Nazaire was attacked by a U-boat.
That collection of ‘ifs’ may make the tragedy an example of how an accumulation of factors can come together to cause a disaster. Sti
ll the heroism and fortitude shown by those who found themselves in the water as the liner went down reflects the spirit of 1940. Some gave in to despair, yet the overriding image is one of men, and the few women who were on board, refusing to succumb. If evocations of stiff upper lips have become unfashionable, this was what was in evidence that June day, from the men standing on the hull singing patriotic songs to the people refusing to abandon hope in the oil-slicked sea. With breathtaking suddenness, four bombs had turned pleasure at having reached such a fine, solid ship into the worst experience of their lives. Whether helping one another in the sea or singing on the sinking hull, they reacted in a way hard to imagine today.
If only for that, the plaque by the seafront in St-Nazaire proclaims: ‘We have not forgotten.’
NOTES
Prologue
1. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 2, p. 194
2. Ibid., p. 194
Chapter 1: Friday, 14 June 1940
1. Grattidge, Captain of the Queens, p. 150
2. Horne, To Lose a Battle, pp. 519–23
3. Cadogan, Diaries, 2 June 1940
4. Booth, European Spring, p. 293
5. Cadogan, Diaries, 2 June 1940
6. Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, pp. 138–59
7. For account of Briare see Spears, pp. 138–59; Jenkins, Churchill, pp. 613–616; Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, pp. 483–9
8. Defence Committee, London, 8 June 1940: Jenkins, p. 611; Spears, p. 149
9. Churchill, p. 162
10. Cadogan, Diaries, 2 June 1940
11. For account of Tours, see Spears, pp. 198–220; Cadogan, Diaries, 13 June 1940; Jenkins, pp. 617–18; Churchill, pp. 157–67
12. CAB 65/7
13. Jackson, The Fall of France, p. 97
14. Karslake, 1940, The Last Act, pp. 262–3. Karslake’s report on pp. 253–3 summarises his view of the debacle and French policy towards British forces.
The Sinking of the Lancastria Page 21