The Sinking of the Lancastria (10 page)

The American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, telephoned, and Colville heard Churchill speaking forcefully about how the United States could save civilisation.

By then, Captain Sharp had received his sailing orders in Plymouth, and the
Lancastria
was heading for France in the company of another big liner, the
Franconia
, which had been the flagship of the evacuation fleet from Norway.

As they set their course across the western end of the Channel, the Prime Minister lay on a sofa and told dirty stories while his guests stood in the central hallway of the house listening. At 1.30 a.m., he got to his feet. ‘Goodnight, my children,’ he said as he went up the stairs to bed.

While Churchill slept in Buckinghamshire, the
Lancastria
steamed towards Brest to take off British troops. Nobody knew how many men would be waiting, but, to make sure the soldiers would be fed on the voyage back, the ship’s bakery set to work making as much bread as possible.

CHAPTER 3

Sunday, 16 June 1940

APPROACHING THE FORTIFIED PORT
and naval centre of Brest on the Brittany peninsula, the
Lancastria
’s crew saw great columns of smoke rising into the sky from oil tanks set on fire to prevent the fuel being used by the Germans when they arrived. Chief Officer Harry Grattidge described the pall as looking like rich black velvet. French troops formed two defensive lines outside the fortified city, but the burning of the fuel dumps showed how little confidence the defenders had in holding their positions.

Nine hundred tons of gold bullion from the Bank of France was being put on ships to be taken to safety in colonial possessions in Africa. The
Strathaird
, a former P&O liner converted into a troopship, was loading men; she would sail home with 6500 the next day.

Luftwaffe dive bombers had just attacked a French cruiser, the
Richelieu
, moored in the harbour, without, however,
scoring any hits. They also dropped magnetic mines in the roads leading to the harbour. Given the danger, Captain Sharp decided not to try to sail the
Lancastria
into Brest; instead, he set a southerly course down the coast towards the Bay of Quiberon. The Canadian helmsman, Michael Sheehan, heard him say they were heading for St-Nazaire.

The
Franconia
, the other big liner which had left Plymouth the previous day, accompanied the
Lancastria
. A destroyer, HMS
Wolverine
, on patrol duty outside Brest, acted as escort, and a French trawler guided them through the twisting channels between the Quiberon peninsula and the island of Belle Île, some 100 miles south of Brest.

Suddenly, a German plane came screaming out of the hazy sky. Sheehan heard the noise of machine-gunning. Then there was silence for an hour. After that, German planes returned to drop bombs between the two liners, sending up a white jet of water. Neither ship was hit, but the force of the explosions was so great that one of the
Franconia
’s engines was knocked out of line and her plates were so badly buckled that she risked becoming unseaworthy. So, her captain decided to stop to make what repairs he could on the spot, and then limped back to England: water was washing over the
Franconia
’s footplates when she pulled into Liverpool.

The
Wolverine
returned to her patrol station off Brest, leaving the
Lancastria
alone. The skipper of a passing French trawler warned Sharp that the Luftwaffe had been conducting heavy raids in the bay. In the distance, a convoy of seven British merchant ships from South Wales came into sight, sailing in single file, led by the
John Holt
, from the Blue Funnel line, which specialised in carrying fruit from Africa. On board was an admiral who acted as naval commodore.
Under thick clouds, the convoy was heading at full speed for St-Nazaire. As night fell, Sharp joined it.

At St-Etienne-de-Montluc, outside Nantes, the men of the Number One Heavy Repair Shop were called on to the parade ground as usual in the morning of 16 June. But, this time, they received new orders; they were to head home, though not quite yet. There was still no sense of urgency. It was only later in the day that they began to smash up vehicles and equipment, disabling engines, breaking axles and slashing tyres. The chimney of a porcelain factory they had used as a workshop was brought down by the Royal Engineers, the debris strewn across a railway track. A diesel engine was run into buffers at full speed to wreck it.

Stan Flowers took a big hammer to a machine he had much prized, a big crankshaft grinder which had been brought to St-Etienne and bedded down in concrete to repair vehicles. What he was doing broke his heart. But he got on with the job, and then climbed into the cab of a lorry to cause as much damage as he could there, too. Behind the driver’s seat was a plaque reading:

After reading the words, Stan smashed it.

He and his colleagues burned their kit in the field which housed their latrines. They would have preferred to have left their gear for the French inhabitants of the town who had been so friendly. But orders were orders. The burning completed,
they formed up and set off in trucks for the coast. As they went, French people stood along the street, crying. The soldiers were watchful as they moved off, having heard rumours of Germans dressed in British uniforms sending convoys the wrong way. When planes swooped on them, several jumped from the lorries into a roadside cesspit for shelter.

As the day drew on, the crush of men moving into St-Nazaire grew by the hour. Most came along the hedge-lined road from Nantes, across flat countryside past one-storey farmhouses and tall steepled churches. Outside the port, they were directed to the half-completed airfield, which was being used as a rallying point. The traffic was so dense that progress was very slow.

Conditions soon became chaotic under the weight of numbers flooding in. Some of the men were accompanied by French girls wheeling bicycles. Others dropped by a NAAFI store that had been opened up, and took what they pleased – Stan Flowers grabbed a pair of sports shoes, only discovering later that they were for the same foot.

An RAF officer, Wing Commander Macfadyen, estimated that 10,000 men were milling around. They would have been sitting targets for German bombers, but no enemy planes appeared. Macfadyen’s unit of nine officers and 210 men found itself caught up in a three-mile traffic jam as it moved from Nantes towards the airfield. Others abandoned their lorries to make progress on foot through the throng. At the wheel of his Humber Snipe staff car, Joe Sweeney edged through the crowd. When he reached the airfield, a French civilian thrust 5000 francs into his hand, got into the car and drove it away – he was stopped at the gate by a military
policeman, taken out of the car and handed over to the French police.

At the airfield, there were no orders. When Macfadyen grew annoyed at this, he was told he could head for the harbour. The scene there was equally confused, with men packed tightly together as they inched forward to French tenders that would take them to ships moored in the estuary. The queue in front of Macfadyen stretched for at least half a mile along the quay.

Captain Clem Stott, the accountant from Wales who would use his army boots to kick himself free of a man threatening to drag him under the water, got to St-Nazaire with his fifty-strong Pay Corps unit during the afternoon of 16 June. Exhausted, filthy and hungry, they were given tins of fruit and chocolate bars from the NAAFI. Behind them, a detachment of RAF men arrived, looking as fresh and smart as if they were on parade.

Another Pay Corps unit stationed near the coast was told to form up in full marching order outside the town hall after breakfast that morning. Their commanding officer told them that the Germans were approaching, and that the local Mayor had said they had to leave within an hour. So he ordered them to set off towards St-Nazaire. They had not been told of the evacuation, and simply hoped they would be able to pick up a boat to get home.

Suddenly there was a shout of ‘Take cover!’ The soldiers dived into ditches as a German plane flew over very low. But it did not fire. A little while later, the same shout went up, and the plane flew over once more, again not firing. It must have been on a reconnaissance mission.

In Britain, that Sunday had been declared a day of prayer for France. At his official country residence, Churchill lay in bed, reading the latest news of war developments brought by a dispatch rider from London. The Prime Minister’s secretary, John Colville, thought he looked ‘just like a rather nice pig clad
in a silk vest’.
¹
Having finished the reports, Churchill ruminated for a while before deciding to return to London and call a Cabinet meeting for 10.30. There, it was decided to tell the French that they could investigate German armistice terms on condition that their fleet immediately set sail for British harbours. Without the fleet, Britain would continue to hold Paul Reynaud to the agreement not to seek a separate peace.

As Churchill was reading the latest news in bed at Chequers, the French ambassador, Charles Corbin, was on his way to the Hyde Park Hotel with an eminent French international official and banker, Jean Monnet, who had been sent to try to use his contacts in London to get reinforcements for France. The previous day, over lunch at the Conservative Party stronghold of the Carlton Club, Corbin had discussed an audacious idea with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and other high British figures. What evolved was the notion of forming a union between their two countries as a means of keeping France in the war. On Sunday morning, Corbin and Monnet decided to put the scheme to Charles de Gaulle.

The future leader of the Free French was shaving when two visitors called. Monnet spoke of the value of binding Britain and France together in a political, military and economic union. Though the difficulties of the scheme were evident, de Gaulle agreed. So did other French officials in London who were consulted.

De Gaulle was already showing the mettle and bravado that would mark his long career. Despite having no authority to do so, he had just issued an order for a French merchant ship loaded with arms and ammunition to put into a British port rather than sailing to his country’s occupied northern coast. Shortly after noon, the General telephoned Paul Reynaud in Bordeaux to tell him that ‘something stupendous’ was being prepared. Though the British government had not yet formally considered the idea, de Gaulle said bluntly that ‘Churchill proposes the establishment of a
single Franco-British government’.
²
Then he added a most unlikely carrot, suggesting that Reynaud might become head of a joint War Cabinet. Having set the ball rolling, he went to meet Churchill for lunch at the Carlton Club.

At 3 p.m., the War Cabinet met in Whitehall to discuss the proposal. After harbouring initial doubts, Churchill concluded that ‘some dramatic announcement was clearly necessary to keep the French going’. De Gaulle and Corbin sat outside the Cabinet Room, officials coming out from time to time to consult them. At 4 p.m., the General made another telephone call to Reynaud to say that there was going to be ‘a sensational declaration’. The French Premier warned that he must have it before his Cabinet met that evening if he was to head off the defeatists.

After two hours of discussion, the War Cabinet approved a declaration that France and Great Britain ‘shall no longer be two nations but one Franco-British Union’. The two countries, it said, were joined indissolubly in their ‘unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves’. They would have joint defence, foreign, financial and economic policy organs, and a single War
Cabinet during the conflict in charge of all their forces. The two parliaments would be formally associated. And thus, the declaration concluded: ‘We shall conquer.’

It was an amazing leap of faith for a government which included its fair share of hard-headed realists, and a sign of how desperate the situation had become. Despite having flirted at one point with the idea of trying to open negotiations with Hitler, Lord Halifax backed the scheme. So did the two Labour Party members of the Cabinet, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood. On the French side, his later unshakable defence of French sovereignty gave an ironic tinge to de Gaulle’s involvement though, as the future ‘Father of Europe’ and promoter of the original Common Market, Jean Monnet was acting entirely in character.

‘
Nous sommes d’accord
,’ Churchill cried as he emerged from the Cabinet Room, launching into an impromptu speech while ministers clapped de Gaulle on the back and told him he would become Commander-in-Chief. ‘
Je l’arrangerai,
’ Churchill broke in. The Prime Minister’s private secretary wondered if the General was a new Napoleon. ‘From what I hear, it seems a lot of people think so,’
Colville added in his diary.
³
‘He treats Reynaud (whom he called
ce poisson gelé
) like dirt.’ What nobody in London seems to have taken into account was the danger that the proposal would make those in Bordeaux intent on reaching an armistice even more determined to take the final steps to end France’s war.