The Sinking of the Lancastria (13 page)

On the beach, there was a huge pile of NAAFI supplies, including cigarettes. Forde and several other men tried to get at them, but military policemen waved them away. When the soldiers insisted, the police drew revolvers, so they retreated.

Soon afterwards, German dive bombers swooped, apparently mistaking the pile of supplies for a petrol or military dump. Forde and his companions threw themselves on the ground. There was a tremendous explosion, and thousands of cigarettes were blown sky-high. Some of the men managed to grab a handful.

‘A very good feeling was evident in the local inhabitants,’ the British garrison report noted of
the people of St-Nazaire.
¹⁵
Women plied Joe Sweeney’s unit with sandwiches and wine as they marched into the town; children were sent after the men to collect the empty glasses.

Still, there were some signs of hostility. Pipe-smoking Donald Draycott, who had worked in a ground crew for Fairey bombers before joining the move west, heard windows opening, and French people shouting curses at the British because they were leaving. Some locals threw things at the troops. Draycott could not see what they were in the dark, but thought they sounded like household utensils. On the quay, a French soldier spat at the feet of a British officer who had bade him farewell.

To begin with, local inhabitants thought the British had come to help defend the town, but soon realised that they were heading home. On his way to the docks, a French-speaking sergeant saw an old woman looking from a window.

‘
Ah, vous anglais vous allez partir
?’ – ‘Ah, are you English leaving?’ – she said.

‘
Oui, Madame, [mais] nous reviendrons
,’ – ‘Yes, Madame, [but] we will return’ – he replied.

‘
Non, non, tout est fini
!’ – ‘No, no, it’s all over.’ – she said emphatically.

Sergeant Macpherson of the RAF recalled hearing local people saying ‘
Pauvres enfants
’ – ‘Poor young things’ – as they passed.

On the outskirts of St-Nazaire, a shopkeeper refused to sell food to Wilfred Oldham of the Royal Signals until the soldier pointed his rifle at him. Later, wandering on the beach at nightfall, Oldham met a Belgian girl who told him of a house where he could sleep on the floor. He found twenty-eight women there, all refugees. In the morning, he went back to the beach. There, he heard a voice calling ‘Vilfred.’ It was the Belgian girl. She handed him a slice of bread spread with marmalade.

CHAPTER 4

Monday, 17 June 1940

THE
LANCASTRIA
ENTERED
the wide estuary of the Loire off St-Nazaire in the early hours of 17 June to join the evacuation of Operation Aerial. Frank Brogden, an electrician from Bolton who had signed up for the Merchant Navy at the age of thirteen and had looked after the loudspeakers and the sound equipment for the ship’s cinema in peacetime, was on the midnight to 4 a.m. watch. He remembered the sea as being very calm under a full moon.

‘You would never think there was any war on,’ he recalled. ‘We might have been going down on a cruise. It seemed very pleasant.’ But then, when the ship sailed on in the cool, bright dawn, he saw smoke from fires on the shore. Standing on the bridge in the dawning light, Harry Grattidge could hear the throbbing of planes not far away.

As well as the
Lancastria
, thirty or so evacuation boats had
gathered in the bay. Among them were two destroyers, the
Havelock
and the
Highlander
, which had taken part in the evacuation from Norway earlier in the month, and the
Cambridgeshire
, an armoured trawler from Grimsby with a single 1.47 gun. The convoy of six ships that had come down the Bristol Channel included a smart new freighter, the
John Holt
. There was also a converted pleasure boat previously used by the Wills tobacco company, with marketing slogans still written on the walls of her main cabin.

The estuary outside St-Nazaire is broad but shallow, and subject to strong tides. Only the smaller boats of the flotilla could get into the harbour; and even they had only a window of three hours on each side of high tide in which to pick up men.

Captain Sharp anchored the
Lancastria
four miles out in the Charpentier Roads, opposite the Pointe de St-Gildas where legend had it that an ancient holy man had left the imprint of his foot and staff in the rocks. A British hospital ship lay nearby, filled with patients and medical personnel. The sea at that point was twelve fathoms deep.

At around 5 a.m., a British naval transport officer came out to make arrangements with Sharp. The Captain said the
Lancastria
could accommodate 3000 people.

‘You will have to try and take as many as
possible,’ he was told.
¹

‘Is this another capitulation,’ Grattidge asked, remembering Norway.

The officer looked shocked.

‘Don’t even mention the word,’ he said. ‘It’s merely a temporary movement of troops.’

If the officer deceived himself, Grattidge wrote later, he deceived nobody else.

On shore, the French harbour authorities delayed the start of the embarkation by refusing to open the gates of a lock. British naval officers concluded that ‘the worm of defeat was already evident’. After much argument, the gates were opened and troops were taken out into the bay on destroyers, tugs, fishing boats and other small craft. When Frank Brogden finished his watch and went down to his berth at 6.30 a.m., men were starting to arrive.

It was no simple matter to manoeuvre from the harbour. The boats had to leave stern first, turn round a buoy and then point themselves out into the estuary. This was made more complicated by the cross tide and the presence of so many small craft.

The captain of HMS
Havelock
, Barry Stevens, who was in charge of the naval flotilla, was so tired that he handed over command to a first lieutenant who misjudged the turn out of the dock, and wrapped the buoy’s mooring cable round the destroyer’s starboard propeller shaft. With 500 men on board, the
Havelock
was a sitting target for German bombers.

The first French tug it hailed to give assistance sailed on by. A second dragged her out into the estuary, the buoy and its cable putting one propeller out of action. Captain Stevens transferred to another destroyer, the
Highlander
, which was also taking men out to the
Lancastria
.

As it came alongside, Harry Grattidge recognised the
Highlander
from the Norwegian evacuation. An officer on the destroyer shouted across to ask for a hawser with which to tie up to the troopship. Grattidge said he could supply one, but
would want a receipt. The officer gave a cynical laugh. ‘You can have the receipt,’ he said. ‘You’ll be lucky if you get home.’

Denise Petit from the Banque de France recognised a British captain she had got to know lining up his men outside the Port Office. The distress on his face brought tears to her eyes. Despite his own sadness, he tried to comfort her. But neither of them could find the right words, and he went off. ‘Will I ever hear from him?’ she asked in her diary.

Vic Flowers, the RAF wireless operator who had seen ‘Cobber’ Kain crash to his death and had then avoided being dragooned into flying himself, arrived in St-Nazaire with a group of other ground crewmen and some officers very early in the morning of 17 June. They marched through streets strewn with masses of discarded uniforms, webbing and kitbags. Here and there, rifles had been left propped against walls.

They crossed a narrow bridge to the main embarkation point, a 380-yard long dock called the Forme Joubert where the great transatlantic liner, the
Normandie
, had been built. A fleet of small boats was waiting. Flowers thought at first that they were going to take them all the way back to England, and was surprised at how small they were. Men crowded together on board like sheep called out ‘Baa, Baa.’ They explained to Flowers and his comrades that the boat was just going to ferry them to a big ship waiting in the estuary, the
Lancastria
.

At the airfield outside St-Nazaire, several units were ordered to move off between 2.30 and 3 a.m. – marching under cover of night to avoid the attention of German aircraft. The transport workers from St-Etienne-de-Montluc sheltered under hayricks when the Luftwaffe flew overhead. Some First World War veterans on the road shot their rifles up in the air. Fred Coe’s company of the Royal Army Service Corps fired at one plane, but missed. During the three-hour march to the docks, Coe recalled, the men were in good spirits: they were going home at last.

The men from St-Etienne-de-Montluc found their journey slowed down by an RAF contingent which had left just before them. The airmen were carrying so many suitcases and bags that ‘they could hardly crawl,’ the
unit’s report recorded.
³
They stopped to rest every half-mile, but would not let the mechanics go ahead of them.

Reaching the docks, the Motor Transport commander stationed a guard to make sure that no other units jumped the queue. His men still had to wait for ninety minutes while the RAF group embarked on a tug, their cases hampering their progress as they negotiated a difficult gangway. In contrast, the army report noted with satisfaction, the Motor Transport men made it on to their boat in half an hour. But, arriving at the
Lancastria
, they had to wait again while the RAF ‘struggled on board’.

Other army units resented the way the airmen had moved ahead of them down the middle of the quay while the soldiers were kept to the sides. Tom Beattie of the RAF heard a trooper saying, ‘The Brylcreem boys are going on first.’ For everybody, the imperative was to board a boat for the big liner lying out in the bay.

Arriving at 4.30 a.m., Wing Commander Macfadyen
ordered his men to spread out on the docks to prevent other units jumping the queue. A German air attack could have mown down the crowd of stationary men.

Edwin Quittenton of the Royal Engineers spent eighteen hours hiding in fields from strafing attacks or sleeping in a car with two majors and a captain. At 3.30 a.m. on 17 June, the four men were woken by a shout – it was time to get ready to move down to the port. Half an hour later, they set off, on foot. Quittenton rejoiced. ‘We were going home!’

On one of the piers, four chaplains sat on a stack of luggage. They wore khaki uniforms with clerical collars. They were weeping.

The destroyer, HMS
Havelock
, pulled into the quay, and lowered a gangplank. ‘Are you buggers coming?’ a marine shouted to the chaplains. ‘We can’t come back again and we can’t take any bloody luggage.’ When the churchmen did not move, the boat pulled 100 yards away from the dockside.

Further along the pier, Joe Sweeney and another man found four bottles of rum abandoned on steps leading down to the sea. The two of them emptied their water bottles and filled them – and their mugs – with the alcohol. Then they walked back.

Sweeney, the fair-haired Scot from Newcastle who had driven a Humber Snipe staff car to St-Nazaire, offered a mug of rum to one of the weeping chaplains. The clergyman sipped at the liquor, and nearly choked. He held out his mug to another of the chaplains, who also had trouble getting the drink down. But the other two clergymen emptied the
mugs they were offered in one gulp without saying anything, and stopped weeping.

Despite what the marine had said, the
Havelock
did come back. It lowered its gangplank again, and the marine screamed at the chaplains to come on board to be taken to the
Lancastria
. This time they did so, leaving their luggage behind. One called out to Sweeney and the men round him: ‘Take what you like from the luggage, but when you get back to England give the stuff to the first church you see: it doesn’t matter whether it is Roman Catholic or Church of England.’

There was an immediate rush to get at the luggage. Sweeney opened a briefcase. Inside was a portable altar. The men snatched at its pieces; Sweeney slipped a miniature diamond-studded chalice into a trouser pocket – to make room for it, he threw away a tin of cigarettes. He intended to hand it in to the first church he came across once he was back in England.

Orders were issued that men could board with only one kitbag or case, plus what they could carry by hand. A sergeant in the Pay Corps sat on the quay emptying two haversacks stuffed with clocks, watches and other souvenirs he had collected. Sergeant Macpherson of the RAF had ‘a rare old sort out and regretfully jettisoned some nice and risqué Parisian magazines’.

Some got round the instruction, or interpreted it liberally. Sergeant George Youngs held on to his chromium-plated French bicycle, with dynamo lighting and a musical horn; there were complaints about the space it took up, but nobody made him abandon it. An army padre took a pale blue Lilo
with him. Despite quarantine regulations, two or three men carried dogs, and one an angora rabbit.

Following the orders to destroy what could not be removed, an RAF driver set the motor of his Dodge lorry going, jumped out and watched it tip over the quay into the sea. Dispatch riders did the same with their motorcycles.