by Sean Longden
Back in St Nazaire, men continued to find a passage home. Still naked, and unconcerned about his nudity, shipwreck survivor Joe Sweeney headed towards a bar. What he saw before him seemed to characterize the chaos of the BEF’s final days in France: ‘I felt I had entered the anteroom to Hades. The bar and eating areas were chock-a-block with troops. Most were standing, packs still on backs, rifles still slung. Some sang; some shouted; some screeched; some swore. Of course, all were drinking. They were drowning their sorrows . . . All were well aware that the morrow would settle their fates, up to heaven, down to hell, home to Britain or to “lagers” in Deutschland.’16
In the back room of the bar he met the owner, who gave him some cigarettes and a half-bottle of brandy, then sent him on his way. He met a teenage girl who kindly went to fetch clothes for him, handing him a flannel shirt and a pair of riding breeches that belonged to her brother. In this curious apparel, that he had to tear open to get to fit him, he was directed towards the harbour by an officer of the Royal Navy, who advised him there might still be a chance of getting home. Eventually he was able to board a collier, and the next day he arrived safely in Plymouth. As he finally left the boat, he was struck by the contrast between his own ridiculous outfit and the splendour of the band of the Royal Marines who were playing at the quayside. He also realized that the assembled crowds were laughing and clapping at his comical appearance. Sweeney was not alone in reaching England in a pitiful state – nearly all of the survivors of the Lancastria’s sinking disembarked barefoot.
Outside Falmouth, the boat Fred Goddard was sailing on ran aground, having to be pulled off to refloat and reach the harbour. Goddard and the rest of the soldiers on board weren’t worried; all they were cared about was that they were home. The journey had been scary, sitting on the deck: ‘So it was a relief to see the coastline of Britain – but it wasn’t a relief a few days later when I was back in camp and saw the physical instructor. He started getting us back into shape! You can imagine what shape we were in after that march. It took a month to get us fit again. Then they sent us straight out to Egypt!’
Sergeant Coates, the small-arms instructor who had been so appalled by the behaviour of the British soldiers around St Nazaire, recalled arriving at Liverpool and watching a perfectly turned-out section of Guards arrive at the quayside to take some of the British soldiers into detention. The reaction from the troops was immediate. From the deck of the Georgic, which had been at St Nazaire at the same time as the ill-fated Lancastria, they began pelting the Guardsmen with whatever came to hand – bottles, tins and all types of rubbish. Under the hail of missiles the Guards were forced to retreat. Such encounters with officialdom were not unusual; some soldiers even reported not being allowed to disembark until Customs and Excise officers had checked them. Fred Goddard remembered hearing soldiers shouting and swearing at the customs man who seemed embarrassed once he discovered where the troops had come from.
Despite the dreadful scenes in St Nazaire when the Lancastria went down, her fate had not marked the end of the story. Evacuations from the port continued throughout the next day with 23,000 soldiers sailing for Plymouth on the morning of the 18th. News of more troops converging on the port meant further boats had to be rushed there to take away anyone left, with 2,000 Polish soldiers leaving later on the 18th. That day also saw the departure of some 10,000 soldiers from the nearby French naval base of La Pallice. The next day a further 4,000 Polish troops were also rescued from the base. Despite the French surrender the Royal Navy continued to send craft in search of stragglers, finding more Czechs and Poles in the days that followed. The final troopship sailed on 25 June – twenty-one days after the Dunkirk evacuation had drawn to a close. Operation Aerial had seen a total of 144,171 British and nearly 50,000 Allied soldiers evacuated from France.
As the soldiers arrived back home, there was little time to celebrate their return; instead they were hastily packed off to camps across the country to rejoin their units. For some it was a strange time, arriving back at empty barracks that had once housed comrades who had been killed, wounded or were simply, like so many thousands, missing. One battalion that had formed part of Beauforce recorded just one officer and twenty-six other ranks returning after the campaign. In the days that followed the arrival home there was a terrible realization among some of the returning units that many of their comrades had been lost when the Lancastria had sunk. The gunners of the 17th Field Regiment realized that the first groups to depart from Nantes must have been on board the stricken liner when she went under.
Others returned with a feeling of frustration. Unlike the Dunkirk arrivals, who had come home to a wave of public adulation, the later evacuees found themselves unacknowledged. Some reported being treated with disdain, despite the fact that their fight had continued for weeks after the Dunkirk men had arrived home. Arriving at depots they were annoyed to find quartermasters demanding they hand over their divisional insignia, as if erasing the history of who they were and where they had been.
That was not all that was erased during the final days of June 1940. The terrible loss of life when the Lancastria went down was not revealed to the British public for many years. The news of what had really happened in the BEF’s final hectic days was considered too depressing for public consumption. Somehow, it seemed to sour the sense of joy that had accompanied the escape from Dunkirk. Having grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat, it was too soon to allow another defeat to darken the horizon. Instead the official news was that the later evacuations had been a great success, allowing thousands more men to return home to continue the war.
Yet there were some for whom there was no joy in the return of the army from France. Evacuated soldiers later reported seeing women waiting at ports to see whether their own husbands, sons and boyfriends were among those returning. Clutching photographs of their men, they waited patiently for the ships, then scoured the crowds of soldiers as they disembarked, always hoping their loved ones would be there. In between handing out food to the returning men, they pressed forward with their photographs, eagerly asking the soldiers if they knew their man – just desperate that someone could give them some news. For some it would be many months before the news they had been waiting for finally came. For others, the return of the ships marked the last hope they ever had of their men returning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Long Way Home
At this camp we were made to work, carrying stones etc., and those who fell behind were lashed with thorns and sticks.
Testimony of a British officer interned in the concentration camp at Miranda, Spain1
As the 40,000 POWs settled down to contemplate life in captivity, there was another group of survivors of the BEF who had escaped neither via Dunkirk nor the western French ports. Scattered across France were small groups of soldiers who had somehow missed the boats home yet had also managed to avoid capture. Throughout 1940, these ‘evaders’ faced up to the realities of their situation as they attempted to either settle into life in France or to make their way home. As the British embassy in Spain later reported, these evaders had refused to accept captivity in German hands and had gone through incredible hardships, with a singular purpose: ‘to get home to England, not to see their families, but to begin to fight again against the Germans’.2
Some of those at large in France and Belgium were men who had been wounded and left behind as their units retreated. Bypassed by the enemy, they treated their wounds as best they could and attempted to find shelter, many being taken into local homes and hidden by civilians. Others were men who had escaped from the columns of prisoners by jumping into ditches and hiding. John Forbes Christie, the bus conductor from Aberdeen, later wrote of his escape: ‘We chose a spot on a slight rise on a right-hand bend in the road. Telling our fellow POWs around us that we were going, they closed in on the corn, which was growing right down to the edge of the roadway . . . There were whispered “Good Lucks” from the lads as we crouched low and entered the chest-high c
orn.’3 Accompanied by his mate Arthur, Christie darted into the field and began an adventure that would eventually take him to North Africa.
Some were simply men who were lost and alone, having somehow been missed by the advancing enemy and never having received orders to retreat. Discovering they could not reach Dunkirk without breaking through the enemy lines, they made their way cross-country and survived by pinching and plundering from the homes, shops and fields of France. They tried milking cows or dug up vegetables to cook on the stoves of abandoned homes. They picked spring greens and ate them raw, which had the effect of increasing their thirst.
Few of the evaders could have reached safety had it not been for the courage of the French civilians who fed them, housed them, gave them clothing, false papers and transported them from safe-house to safe-house. Many of the French people had good reason to help the stranded British soldiers; after all many French sons were also away from home. Parents could but wish that someone, somewhere, would offer similar kindness to their sons. These eager French civilians formed the basis of the eventual escape routes that developed in the following years, spiriting numerous Allied airmen away to safety. The routes through France took in a bewildering range of buildings. Some evaders found sanctuary in churches and convents, while others preferred the anonymity provided by brothels whose madams had a long-established tradition of asking no questions of their guests. A few found shelter with noble families who were able to house the evaders in palatial splendour, while the majority were more accustomed to the barns and cowsheds of poor French farmers.
However, not all encounters with civilians were encouraging. One group of evaders encountered the mayor of a French town who insisted they should hand over their weapons before continuing on their way. Despite stealing civilian clothes to disguise themselves, they were soon captured.
Another group who were captured by an enemy tank crew were simply told to follow the tank. At the first opportunity they darted off into cover, returning to the Allied lines a few days later. Two tank officers rejoined the Allied lines after disguising themselves as Belgian refugees. At one point they were captured by Germans, who failed to search them properly for weapons. The two officers waited for an opportunity then shot the Germans and escaped again. One group took a lift in a civilian car, replacing their military headgear with civilian caps in case they encountered any Germans. One officer who listened to the accounts of such evaders described the antics of the men who sneaked cross-country to rejoin the BEF as ‘boy scouting’.
Most of these evaders were alone or in twos and threes. Only a few remained as cohesive units. One such unit was a group of eight Seaforth Highlanders who had managed to slip through the enemy lines at St Valery. With an officer in command of seven men from his platoon, they soon became known to their French hosts as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. The problem for larger groups was keeping together when sneaking through the countryside. One group contained a soldier whose hearing had been damaged in the battle at St Valery. As a result he kept going missing since he could hardly hear instructions.
There were many hurdles for these evaders, not least of which were the rivers that lay between them and their planned journeys to safety. Since the Germans guarded all bridges that had not been destroyed during the Allied retreat, there was no way for the evaders to cross without getting their feet wet. Some were lucky to secure rowing boats, but often the men chose to avoid boats since that meant entering villages where they could not be certain of avoiding the enemy. Where possible, men built rafts from barn doors or improvised ropes from webbing straps to help the non-swimmer. Soldiers needed to get their clothes to the opposite bank but it was dangerous to swim fully dressed in heavy wool. So they swam rivers pushing their boots and uniforms ahead of them, bundled up on makeshift floats. Unfortunate men who lost their uniforms during these river crossings were forced to raid civilian homes to find replacements.
Among the most optimistic of these evaders were the men who decided that the simplest way to reach safety would be to make their way to the coast, steal a boat and head north across the Channel to home. One British officer reached the coast opposite Jersey, only to hear the frustrating news that it had been occupied just three days before. For John Christie and his mate Arthur the first few days of their journey were spent in a state of confusion. Wearing overalls they had found during the march, they travelled by night, attempting to use the stars to guide them. In the darkness they almost stumbled into an enemy flak battery, but were fortunate to spot it as it opened fire on a British plane. Each day, they called at houses to find food, sizing up the occupants and only telling them their true identity if they appeared trustworthy. They soon realized they would need plenty of luck if they were ever to reach safety. Reaching the coast near Hardelot they, like so many others, discovered there was little chance of finding a boat and decided to head inland to find an alternative route home. The decision was taken to head to St Pol, where Christie had made friends earlier in the year when his unit was based in the area. There they waited until it appeared safe to move on.
Another officer with the same idea at least got near a boat. Captain Guy Lowden was a veteran of the Great War who, prior to the collapse of the BEF, had been based at the vast British depot in Rouen. While at Rouen he had witnessed many lost and lonely soldiers arriving at his base, all hoping to rejoin their units. Captain Lowden was captured on 8 June, only to escape from one of the marching columns five days later. He had then attempted to find a boat to cross the Channel and fallen in with a group of British soldiers who promised Lowden they knew where to find boats and had an escape plan. What followed was farcical:
The boat house, lavishly described by the troops as full of the most magnificent craft and stocked with every conceivable marine requirement, proved to be rather a tumbledown affair, well above high tide, and containing only some flashy racing cockleshells, all badly holed. Of a number of boats drawn well above high water and all too heavy for us to shift, the motor craft had no motors, the sailing craft no sails, and in short the grand stories of these ridiculous chaps were so much baloney! . . . Served us right for taking the troops’ word for everything – bless their stupid hearts.4
Now he was among the lost and lonely, hiding in the woods with a fellow British officer. While in hiding he wrote a succession of letters to his wife that he hid in the hope that they might one day reach her. In his second letter the captain wrote of his experiences in his early days as an evader:
I think we’ve done all the traditional things – hidden in barns (all escapers do this, right through history); lain and trembled while the enemy rummaged about the sheds where we lay, miraculously missing the one place where we were; stumbled suddenly on enemy sentries in villages or air fields on the downs, and beaten a panic-stricken retreat. At one place there was even a pretty girl who brought us food – rich and delicious food, in plenty, with great hunks of fresh white bread in a basket. Yes, I think all conventions have been honoured.5
Still hoping to find a way back to England, Lowden and his comrade travelled by night, keeping to the woods to avoid the farms whose dogs were prone to howling when disturbed. By day they hid in barns, sometimes with the acquiescence of the owners, or simply concealed themselves anywhere they could stay warm and dry. One day saw them hidden in a vegetable pile while farm labourers worked around them. Lowden and his fellow escapee soon recognized they were not the only soldiers in hiding in the Pas de Calais. As he noted, every wandering labourer clad in blue overalls seemed to recoil when addressed in French, thus revealing himself as a British evader. The soldiers spent their spare time either sleeping, scavenging for food, or searching for fellow Britons who had resided in the area since the Great War. Some were even hidden by British men who had deserted during the Great War and had been living under an assumed identity ever since.
For the men in hiding, certain factors played havoc with their morale. All picked up bits of news about the course of the war but seldom w
as this anything more than rumour. With no access to regular information channels they had no way of verifying what they heard. When news was seemingly good they felt a brief lifting of spirits only to be depressed once the news proved to be untrue. Derrick Peterson, in hiding with a group of over twenty fellow soldiers, recorded the news he received on 30 May: ‘The simply terrific news that Italy, Turkey and America were in the war against Germany!’ The following day he wrote: ‘Further news was that Dunkirk had been completely destroyed and Calais taken – that London had been completely evacuated and that the Germans were within five kilometres of Paris.’ The bad news kept coming and on 9 June he recorded the rumour that King George had been taken prisoner and Chamberlain was dead. More rumours fed their see-sawing spirits: ‘News of Russia having attacked Germany and taken over all of Poland! Turkey smashing up Italy! British apparently retook Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne!’6 A week later Peterson even heard that the Americans had supposedly landed at Brest with two motorized divisions.
Those who received their news direct from civilians with access to radio sets soon realized that Britain was in a perilous situation. Should they risk everything to attempt to reach home, or simply sit out the war in hiding? For some the question of trying to find a route home was irrelevant – what difference did it make where they were, if the Germans would soon be occupying Britain anyway?
Others remained certain that it was their duty – or indeed their destiny – to report home to rejoin the war as soon as possible. One of those who never gave up hope of returning home was Captain Guy Lowden. After spending the early summer of 1940 sneaking around northern France attempting to steal a boat, Lowden was captured by the Gestapo in August while hiding in the northern city of Lille. At first they threatened to execute him as a spy since he was wearing civilian clothing. Instead of carrying out their threats, the Gestapo threw him into a cell where he was detained in solitary confinement until February 1941.