Read The Sinking of the Lancastria Online
Authors: Jonathan Fenby
Heading for evacuation from St-Nazaire, Horace Lumsden heard news of the unity proposal on the radio. He and his fellow soldiers approved, but they realised they were caught up in ‘a major disaster’. What particularly struck Lumsden
was the blank expression on the faces of the French people crowding the roads. It was, he thought, as if they did not understand what was going on and, if they did, could not grasp it.
When he arrived at the airfield outside St-Nazaire, Lance Corporal Morris Lashbrook and his friend, Alan ‘Chippy’ Moore, scouted round to see the lie of the land. They were both very hungry after the drive from St-Etienne-de-Montluc. They found a field kitchen, and plenty of wood. The only food to hand was bully beef, potatoes and margarine. They cooked it up, and helped the meal down with Scotch from a bottle provided by one of their officers. Then they were ordered to set out on foot for the docks.
Feeling bored in a Royal Engineers camp some thirty miles from the coast, Neville Chesterton, the former railway clerk from Staffordshire whose unit had wandered apparently aimlessly across France, decided to go to a cinema in a local town with a friend called Derek. They thought the trip would pass the time though neither would understand the French dialogue.
They were let into the cinema without paying. There were only half a dozen other people inside
. As the film went on, Chesterton and Derek heard excited chattering round them, and the audience began to slip out. By the time the film had finished, the hall was empty. The French had left after hearing rumours that their government had surrendered.
British troops in St-Nazaire began to embark on the first evacuation boats that had arrived during the afternoon of 16 June. Two big troopships, the
Georgic
and the
Duchess of York
, lay well off the coast in Quiberon Bay together with two Polish vessels, the
Batory
and the
Sobieski
. They had no protection against German planes or submarines, but were not attacked. In St-Nazaire, a hospital ship pulled into the harbour and, shouting through a megaphone, the captain offered to take men on board if they left their weapons behind to enable the boat to keep its noncombatant status – their commanders refused.
Some of the rescue ships had sailed in haste without time to prepare. One was so short of food that the captain and crew went ashore to grab a wooden case that had been dumped on the quayside – it turned out to contain only biscuits. Wanting something more varied, the officers put up 400 francs, and two of them went to buy oranges, potatoes and carrots.
Most of the men on the quays concentrated on getting on to a ship, abandoning their equipment. Noticing cases loaded on lorries left on the docks, the commander of a unit of the 6th Royal Sussex regiment ordered them to be opened. Inside were Bren guns in mint condition, along with ammunition. The officer told his men to grab as many as they could, and they used them subsequently to fire from their rescue ship at attacking German planes.
The weather was balmy. ‘The sea is calm and blue, singing on her way to break on the golden shore,’ wrote a local newspaper, the
Courrier de St-Nazaire et de la
Région
.
4
‘The summer’s gentle wind carries with it the perfume of the flowers.’
But the mass of soldiers on the boulevard by the sea acted
as an unwelcome reminder of the reality of war. ‘Why this deployment of British forces here?’ the newspaper asked. ‘It is said that our allies are going back to England. We don’t want to believe it and yet, it is true.’ It went on:
On the open sea, big boats are at anchor, waiting for the order to enter the harbour. The presence of these soldiers and boats, which already has brought upon us the nocturnal visits of the German planes, is again going to attract them, day and night in our skies.
A little before midday, we perceive the distant noise of an airplane, and immediately afterwards, the tragic screeching of the sirens pierces the quiet air. Everybody rushes towards the nearest shelter.
The sounding of the all clear meant that people could go home safely through the streets to lunch. But, at about 4 p.m., a lone German aircraft flew over slowly at low altitude. British soldiers strolling on the boulevard threw themselves to the ground as a small round white cloud rose from the ground where the plane’s bombs had landed.
‘The British are boarding!’ a local woman noted in a memoir for her sister, who was in England.
They fill the whole boulevard, assembled by companies and regiments. It is hot, the weather is close and stormy; they are thirsty. The German planes are above us.
During mass, the air-raid sirens ring out. I am coming back via the boulevard but, to avoid the projectiles, I have to rush under a big porch near the rue Fernand Gasnier. Many British soldiers have also taken refuge there.
This day has been most painful and harrowing. You
can guess our feelings of helplessness and abandonment; it was terrible, and these rumours of a separate armistice which were causing the departure of the English, what a disgrace!
A British doctor who had taken a bedroom in her house came to say farewell on the Sunday evening. ‘Mummy and I were crying. We were so sad. But the doctor tried to cheer us up. “We will be back,” he said. “All is not lost.” Yet I had a foreboding of all the sufferings we would have to endure, of how long and hard the struggle was going to be and of the numerous pitfalls and stumbling blocks that would face us. Would we ever
see happier times again?’
5
In Nantes, the British manager of a wood factory which had made panelling for Atlantic liners was driving back from his plant when German planes flew in to bomb the city. Alfred Edwin Duggan, a First World War veteran, had lived in Nantes since 1920, though he kept up his English habits down to porridge at breakfast. Now, he drove to the British club to see if there was any information there about what was happening. The building was virtually empty; a padre told him British troops had been instructed to evacuate.
Duggan went on to the British consulate where he barged into a meeting between the Consul and the Port Admiral. He insisted on being told what was going on. A British naval attaché advised him to head immediately for St-Nazaire and the rescue fleet waiting there.
Going to his home in the rue de Rennes in the north of the city, Duggan told his wife, his 15-year-old daughter and his 13-year-old son to pack. They filled four suitcases, numbered
1 to 4 – the last, carried by the youngest member of the family, John, was to be abandoned first, if necessary.
Duggan telephoned other British inhabitants of Nantes, only to find that some had already left. Two families joined the Duggans in a three-car convoy which headed towards St-Nazaire. Before setting out, they agreed that, if any car broke down, it would be abandoned. The vital thing was to get to the coast and sail away.
It was, John Duggan recalled, an exciting episode for a teenage boy. The weather was beautiful. He had with him his Bedlington terrier of which he was particularly fond. The road was clogged, and, as they passed through French villages, people cheered them.
The route west from Nantes divides at the town of Savenay, one fork going to St-Nazaire and the other north-west towards Brest. Eddie Duggan looked up the right-hand fork and saw the road was empty. So he decided to take it, giving up the idea of going to St-Nazaire and heading instead for Brest.
One car’s fan belt gave way as they passed through a deserted village, where the road became a hard, dusty track. Ignoring their agreement to abandon any vehicle that broke down, the men forced open garages to find a replacement. As they did so, they kept a watch on the road, half expecting to see German tanks driving towards them. John Duggan stood by a water trough, with his terrier. Behind him, he heard a skylark.
German planes were attacking at will across France. The last RAF units had been withdrawn to the Channel Islands. The French air force was largely ineffective.
From the base outside Louvain in Belgium, the KG30 Diving Eagle unit of JU-88s was ordered to bomb Tours. Though the government had left for the greater safety of Bordeaux, the city was still a major point on the refugee route.
Using their usual tactic of flying in with the sun behind them to blind the defenders, the planes dived on a bridge crossing the river. The pilot, Peter Stahl, waited until a red mark on the Plexiglas panel in the nose passed the target. Then he pulled the level that sent his plane into its steep dive. As he hurtled down, an anti-aircraft shell hit the panel, and Stahl pulled the plane upwards. Regaining height, he put the Junkers into a second dive, and, this time, hit the bridge – a few days later, the damage was to prove a hindrance to Wehrmacht troops as they came to cross the Loire.
Back in Belgium, the crews had what Stahl’s diary called ‘a good serious drinking session with many speeches in the nearby village. The wine is good and our hosts in the local
inn are most pleasant.’
6
France’s new capital of Bordeaux was crammed with half a million refugees. People clamoured for rooms in the lobbies of smart hotels, or slept in private homes that were turned into dormitories. The correspondent of
The Times
described the city as being in ‘bedlam’, with ‘ladies bent on saving their lapdogs, refugees of all kinds, French and foreigners [and] a
ceaseless maelstrom of cars’.
7
Government leaders set up in official buildings: Paul Reynaud chose the military commander’s residence as a sign of his intention to keep a grip on the conduct of the war. In the late afternoon of 16 June, Churchill’s military liaison
officer, General Edward Spears, and the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, called on the Premier with a message from London saying that, if France did seek armistice terms, Britain expected to be consulted.
Then the telephone rang. Reynaud picked up the receiver. The next moment, Spears recorded, ‘his eyebrows went up so far they became indistinguishable from his neatly brushed hair; one eyebrow to each
side of the parting’.
8
‘One moment,’ the Premier said. ‘I must take it down.’
The caller was de Gaulle with the terms of the British declaration on union between the two countries.
Grasping a sheet of foolscap paper on the table in front of him, Reynaud began to write in a scrawl, using a short gold pencil with an enormous lead. He repeated each word as he went along, getting more and more excited. Spears held the paper to stop it sliding across the slippery surface. As each sheet was filled, the General handed Reynaud a new one. The Premier’s pencil gave out, so the British general handed him his.
Finally, Reynaud said into the mouthpiece, ‘Does he agree to this? Did Churchill give you this personally?’
There was a moment’s pause. Then Churchill came on the line.
Reynaud started to speak in English. He pledged to defend the union proposal to the death. He would take the appeasers by surprise at the Cabinet meeting that evening. As Spears gathered up the scrawled sheets to carry them to secretaries in the next room to be typed, he glimpsed Reynaud’s face ‘transfigured with joy . . . happy with a great happiness in the belief that France would now remain in the war’.
The two Prime Ministers agreed to meet the following day in the Breton port of Concarneau. To mark the historic
nature of what was happening, Churchill decided to take the senior figures from the Labour and Liberal parties with him, as well as the Chiefs of Staff. He also dropped the demand for the French fleet to sail to British harbours.
Still, the Prime Minister rebuffed a final appeal by de Gaulle to send troops to France: the union had not yet taken shape, and he was not going to abandon his policy of harbouring reserves to defend Britain. A report from a British general on the spot said that the Tenth Army in northern France was in full retreat. Any forces sent across the Channel might well be chewed up by the Wehrmacht. According to Churchill’s account, de Gaulle paused as he left the room, took a couple of steps back and said, in English, ‘I think you are quite right.’ Then he boarded a plane to fly to Bordeaux with the text of the unity declaration.
What neither Churchill nor Reynaud nor de Gaulle knew was that the French Premier’s telephone was being tapped – by agents working for France’s Commander-in-Chief. They had recorded de Gaulle’s call at noon, and his subsequent conversation with Reynaud at 4 p.m. They also noted a call the Premier made at 4.40 p.m. to President Lebrun asking for a private meeting before the Cabinet session.
That was not all. When Spears took the scrawled sheets to be typed up, Reynaud’s mistress, Hélène de Portes, had barged into the secretaries’ room. It may have been by chance though, quite possibly, she had been alerted that something big was going on by her lover’s excitement after the earlier calls from de Gaulle.
As Spears handed the sheets of paper to a typist, the short, domineering Countess scanned them over the male secretary’s shoulder. ‘It was difficult to tell from her expression whether rage or amazement prevailed,’ the British
general, who loathed her, wrote. ‘
Both feelings were apparent.’
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Spears told the secretary to get on with the job, but the Countess went on delaying him to read Reynaud’s scrawl. She was used to exploiting her position. She had been known to take secret documents from the Premier’s desk – one was found in her bed. In league with two of the leading pro-armistice politicians in the government, she could now tell them what she had learned by leaning over the secretary’s shoulder.
Though London hoped that the union proposal would bolster French morale, it would have no effect on the immediate situation on the battlefield. So the order went out to continue to remove or destroy military equipment to prevent it falling into German hands. Having done all they could, soldiers were then to head for the last escape point at St-Nazaire.
‘We wrecked everything we could,’ recalled Lance Corporal Fred Coe, who had joined the army as a boy cadet at the age of nine after his mother’s death. His Royal Army Service Corps unit put hundreds of vehicles out of commission before moving out of their base near Nantes.