The Sinking of the Lancastria (14 page)

But Captain Griggs, who had sampled the wares of bistros while driving to St-Nazaire, got four suitcases out of his blue Vauxhall saloon, and persuaded a quartet of sappers to carry one each on board. Then he located some petrol, had the car’s tank filled and handed the keys to his French interpreter.

Somewhere in the sky above, a small plane was flying alone up the west coast of France. On board were the British general, Edward Spears, and Charles de Gaulle, who looked fixedly ahead. Soon after leaving Bordeaux, they had passed over a French passenger ship, the
Champlain
, which had been sunk by the Germans and was lying on her side, surrounded by hundreds of men in the water. Whether they looked down at the evacuation armada assembled in the Loire estuary is not recorded, but, over Brittany, Spears saw great palls of smoke rising from burning fuel dumps.

Landing in Jersey, the British general asked de Gaulle if he wanted something to drink. The Frenchman asked for coffee. When it came, he sipped it and said, ‘Very good tea.’ No, Spears told him, this was English coffee.

As they flew on to London, Marshal Pétain went on the radio to tell the nation that, thirty-eight days after the German attack, hostilities must cease and France must open negotiations for an armistice. (When the speech was
rebroadcast later in the day, that passage was changed to ‘We must try to cease hostilities’, but the semantics meant nothing.)

‘It is with a heavy heart that I say we must cease to fight,’ the Marshal went on in his high, reedy voice. ‘I have applied to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to sign with us, as between soldiers after the fight and in honour, a means to put an end to hostilities. Let all Frenchmen group themselves around the government over which I preside during this painful trial and affirm once more their faith in the destiny of our country.’ As the Marshal spoke, Rommel’s Panzers were advancing 150 miles in a single day to reach the port of Cherbourg, while other German units were pressing towards the estuary of the Loire.

At his ‘Wolf’s Gorge’ headquarters in Belgium, Hitler threw out his arms, laughed and slapped his thigh in delight when told that France was seeking an armistice, jerking up one knee in an involuntary jump for joy. With one of his two main adversaries dropping out of the conflict, and his eastern front secured by the non-aggression pact reached with the Soviet Union the previous year, it seemed only a matter of time before Britain, too, would fall.

Across the Channel, the War Cabinet assembled in London at 11 a.m. One topic for discussions was whether the BEF commander, Alan Brooke, should remain in France. Churchill said he hoped the General would stay so long as his presence could be of value to ‘the difficult withdrawal’ the British troops faced.

Brooke was at his headquarters in the town of Redon, north of St-Nazaire, when he learned of the French decision
to seek an armistice. A French liaison officer came to see him with the news, collapsing in tears as he did so.

‘This renders the situation very critical lest negotiations should lead to the internment of British troops in France!’ the trim, moustachioed British Commander noted in his diary. ‘It is essential for us
to get away early.’
⁴
His mission was ending as badly as he had foreseen.

He telephoned London, trying to speak to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. But Sir John Dill was not available. When Brooke tried again forty-five minutes later, he was told that communications with London had been cut.

So he got into his car and was driven towards St-Nazaire to go home with the last of his troops. In a letter to his wife, he noted that he was ‘feeling wonderfully fit’.

The small boats ferrying men out to the
Lancastria
took three to four hours for the round trip. Most carried 500 or so men. They were often machine-gunned by German planes, but none appears to have been hit. Mines dropped by the Luftwaffe were another hazard though, again, none of the tenders was damaged.

On the way out, there were some private moments. Joe Saxton of the Sherwood Forester did not have a wallet, and had given a photograph of his girlfriend, Lily, to another soldier, who did, for safe keeping. Now, in one of the tenders going to the
Lancastria
, he asked to have a look. Gazing at the picture, he said: ‘Well, sweetheart it won’t be long now, we shall soon be together.’ Then he handed it back.

After the weeks of uncertainty and retreat across France, the
Lancastria
offered the prospect of security, and a safe way home. Tired as the men coming on board were, the ship’s
electrician, Frank Brogden, detected a special look in their eyes. ‘We’ve made it,’ it said. ‘We’re going home.’ They felt as if they were back in Britain. Some kissed the deck. A civilian woman told one of the ship’s waiters, Joe O’Brien, that she ‘felt so safe on an English ship’.

Many of them had never been outside Britain before being posted to France, or been on a ship, let alone one like the
Lancastria
. They were awed by her size. ‘It was the first big ship I had been on in my life,’ Fred Coe remarked. ‘I’d never seen so many people.’

An RAF man, Peter Walker Vinicombe, who had spent the night with his unit sitting in the street, recalled it as ‘a great hulk . . . a gigantic ship as far as we were concerned’. When his tender came alongside and he joined others climbing up nets hung down the hull, the liner’s sides seemed to just go straight up into the sky.

Seeing how enormous the
Lancastria
was, Stan Flowers concluded that she had been sent to take them on a long voyage, maybe to the Far East. Another soldier thought she looked ‘as solid as the Strand Palace Hotel’.

Early arrivals stepping through the doors on the ship’s side were met by two stewards in white uniforms with gold buttons. One steward noted down each man’s name, regiment and unit, while the other handed out small cards marked with the number of a cabin or berth, and a ticket for the dining room. They asked the men not to damage the walls or the furniture. As they moved into the ship, some of the troops picked up life jackets from a pile on the deck, thinking they would come in useful as pillows during the voyage.

While the soldiers and RAF men were anxious to get on board and find a place to rest, there was no sense of urgency.
A chaplain who had been taken down to the docks in his car by a driver noted that those going aboard were doing so in what appeared to be ‘a very leisurely manner’. No one seemed to think there was any hurry. As he stood on the deck watching the troops, the chaplain remarked to a man beside him: ‘It looks as though we have all day.’

As the thirty civilians from the Fairey aircraft factory came on board, soldiers handed the children English coins. The men were allocated a cabin to share between them; wives and children were given one for each family.

Roger Legroux felt very excited – ‘eleven years old, getting on a big ship and going across the ocean to another country’. When his parents took him to the dining room, he was overcome by its opulence, and had his first taste of a yellow, round fruit he had never seen before – a grapefruit.

For some, the first priority was to find a bathroom for a wash and shave. Others headed for the barber’s shop. Men feeling ill checked in to the sickbay.

Two friends, Sid Keenan and John Broadbent, struggled through the crush of men, and went below in search of a bathroom. At the foot of a staircase, they spotted a door marked ‘Officers Only’. Disregarding the instruction, they looked inside and saw a large bath. They went in, and bolted the door. John ran a bath, took off his clothes and got into the water, while Sid shaved.

Sapper Norman Driver, of the Royal Engineers, located a cabin with two toilets and a wash bowl. With him were three friends – Cal Beal from Sheffield, Burt Cunliffe from Warrington, and George Watling from London who always carried a piece of his girlfriend’s dress with him. As he washed
and shaved, Driver thought that he was getting ‘ready for Blighty’.

Sergeant George Youngs left his gleaming bicycle in a safe place on the deck to go for a shave. Padre Captain Charles McMenemy took time to do the same, and then lay down on the floor of his cabin on his pale blue Lilo to get some sleep. Major Scott-Bowden, the officer who carried bottles of Johnny Walker and Vichy water in a pair of rubber boots strung round his neck, found seven officers already in the four-bunk cabin he had been allocated. He went to see the ship’s purser, who told him, ‘Sorry, Sir, but that’s the best I can do.’ So he had a warm bath of sea water, and, returning to his cabin, made room on a bunk to have a rest.

An army baker, G. F. Crew, who had not washed for a week, sought out a bathroom, but four or five men were already there, in the tub or sitting on its sides. The newcomer took off his uniform and climbed in. Though he rubbed soap all over his body, he could get no lather from the water which was drawn from the sea. The other men laughed, and told him he was ‘a silly sod’.

After a shower, Joe Sweeney donned a clean shirt and underwear. He put the jewelled chalice from the chaplain’s briefcase into one of his boots, and then stuffed both of them with tins of fifty Players No.3 cigarettes he had removed from a NAAFI store. Having hidden his boots behind a ventilator vent, he went to the dining room for breakfast of sausages, bacon and eggs, and hot buttered toast. Feeling like a new man, he returned to his cabin and dropped off to sleep.

Soon, the crush of men brought out from St-Nazaire was such that it became impossible to register each one individually.
The cabins filled far beyond their usual capacity; men were left to find any place they could.

With German planes flying overhead, some officers considered it safest to move their units to shelter down below. One group of 800 RAF men was told to head for a dimly lit hold where mattresses and palliasses were laid on the floor. Donald Draycott, from a ground crew that had been based in Nantes, thought the hold resembled a morgue. If the
Lancastria
was attacked by submarines or hit a mine on the way home, there would be no chance of getting out. The liner, he noticed, did not have proper working gangways like a purpose-built troopship. So he decided to go up on deck.

A ginger-haired soldier, Stanley Rimmer, also had his doubts. He remembered advice he had been given by his brother, who was in the navy: ‘If you are ever on a troopship, try to avoid going down into the hold.’ So, though he followed orders from his sergeant to go below, he later climbed to an upper deck.

Stan Flowers and 400 men from the transport repair unit at St-Etienne-de-Montluc were sent to a big hold where they sat and waited for the liner to move, some passing the time by playing cards. A detachment of Royal Engineers was directed to the bottom of the ship, aft of the engine room. It was stuffy and warm down there, and they were soon nodding off. After a couple of hours, they woke one another up to eat tinned rations. Then they settled down for another sleep. An air raid had been reported, but that did not bother anyone.

One man decided at the last moment that he did not want to go to the
Lancastria
. As he mounted the gangplank to the tender, Vic Flowers was overcome by an urge to turn back.
Though men were moving up behind him, he suddenly knew that nothing was going to make him leave dry land.

Climbing to the outside of the gangplank, Flowers held on to the rail and got back on shore, his progress eased by his lack of kit. Two other RAF men followed him.

A military policeman shouted at them to get back on to the tender, but they ran off through the crowd on the docks. Walking to cliffs overlooking the harbour, they introduced themselves to one another.

When the
Lancastria
’s electrician, Frank Brogden, went back on duty after sleeping for five hours following his early morning watch, he was amazed at the number of men who had boarded the liner. He had never seen so many troops in his life. They seemed to be everywhere. If there was a two-foot space on the decks, it would immediately be filled.

Like Joe Sweeney, the lucky ones enjoyed a hearty breakfast – bacon, egg and sausages in onion gravy, porridge, grapefruit, toast and marmalade, washed down with tea and coffee.

But some complained that they could not get anything to eat. One man was so hungry that he ate a piece of bread covered with oil and grease which he saw on the deck. Exploring the ship after taking a bath, another found a food store with sides of meat hanging from hooks. He asked a sailor for a piece to chew, but was told it was being kept for a long voyage the liner would be making after it dropped off the evacuees.

Others made do with beer. Joe Saxton and a friend got two bottles each, and went to the upper deck to drink them.
When they had finished, they threw them over the side. ‘That’s a long way to drop,’ Saxton’s friend said as they watched the bottle falling to the sea.

Captain Clement Stott of the Pay Corps was among those who did get breakfast. As he ate in the ‘crowded but beautifully clean and luxurious ship’s dining salon’, he experienced a feeling of exultation at having brought his fifty men out to safety. An RAF officer with a big moustache talked non-stop at his table. Stott did not take in a word until he heard the other man say he was going to get a drink, and ask if Stott wanted to go with him. ‘You bet!’ the accountant replied.

A solid mass of people blocked the path to the bar. The main lounge was so full that the steward could hardly make his way through to serve. With everybody shouting for drinks, he told them to form an orderly queue. Stott and his companion got several glasses. ‘It was somehow like a picnic and an air of intense excitement hung over the crowd,’ he recalled. ‘I recognised and chatted with many men I hadn’t seen for months and all were inquiring about absent friends. “Where’s old so and so?” “Don’t know, he buggered off after Dunkirk.” “And so and so?” “Poor old boy, bought it near Saint-Valéry.’’’

At noon, the lunch service began on tables covered with crisp white tablecloths and gleaming cutlery.

The Fairey manager, Legroux, went from the cabin he was sharing with other men to get his wife and two children in their separate quarters so that they could eat together. Fernande Tips, daughter of the managing director of the Fairey branch in Belgium, sat with her mother, two brothers and a maid, all wearing life belts as they ate. A civilian couple, Clifford and Vera Tillyer, were struck by the calm courtesy and
efficiency of the white-jacketed stewards who served them as though they were oblivious of the air attacks, the firing and the sirens. Sailors came up to their table and adjusted the tapes of the life belt on their 2-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, so that they would not slip down over her shoulders.