The Sinking of the Lancastria (15 page)

Clement Stott and the men with whom he had been drinking found a table, and settled down for their second meal on the
Lancastria
. ‘We ate in such luxury as I hadn’t known since the French hotels during the early weeks of the war,’ the Pay Corps captain recalled.

The menu listed hors d’oeuvre variés, consommé Massena or thick oxtail soup, followed by fried fillet of cod Colbert, crab salad, macaroni au gratin, sauté of oxtail Nohant, minute steak maître d’hôtel, and boiled knuckle of veal with bacon and parsley sauce. The vegetable selection was green lima beans, and baked, jacket or mashed potatoes. The cold buffet had brawn luncheon sausage, ox tongue, beef and lamb with lettuce, tomatoes and beetroot, and there were cheese and biscuits, rusk pudding, apricot flan and ice cream and wafers to round off the meal. How much of this was actually available is open to question. Soldiers spoke of being served stewed beef and cabbage rather than the delicacies on the menu. Some ate soup from tins.

Still, for men who had trudged through France for weeks, the food was like manna. Sergeant Robert Hill of the Royal Engineers recalled tucking in to a lunch of bangers and mash and tea, while the epicurean Captain Griggs enjoyed ‘very good cold meat and salad’ at a table he shared with civilians and Salvation Army people.

Coffee came, and the men lit up their cigarettes and pipes. There was a final call for drinks. Nobody at Griggs’ table, or anyone else as far as he could tell, was truly aware of how
grave the war situation was. ‘England has been in a hole before and we always come through,’ the Captain reflected. ‘So why not again?’

As Captains Stott and Griggs, Sergeant Hill and others on the
Lancastria
enjoyed their lunch, news that France was seeking an armistice reached members of the Luftwaffe’s Diving Eagle squadron at their base near Louvain. Peter Stahl and the other German airmen decided that this called for a celebration, continuing the drinking with which they had marked their bombing of the bridge over the Loire at Tours the previous day.

They had hardly begun when they received instructions for a new raid. In flying suits, fur-lined boots, goggles, gloves and sunglasses, they climbed into their fourteen JU-88s to head west, covering in an hour the distance which the British soldiers and ground crews had taken days or weeks to traverse.

This was their longest flight since joining in the Nazi offensive in May. To conserve fuel for the return, Stahl eased up the engine of his aircraft, and dropped behind the other planes. The approach seemed endlessly long to the former test pilot as the squadron crossed First World War battlefields and then flew over lower Normandy and southern Brittany towards France’s Atlantic coast. Once again, Stahl was struck by the exodus of civilians and troops on the roads below. All he and his colleagues knew about their target was that it was ‘a large concentration of ships in the Loire estuary’.

CHAPTER 5

The Bombing

BY THE BEGINNING
of the afternoon of 17 June, Harry Grattidge reckoned that 5000 men had come on board. Captain Griggs had taken it upon himself to make a round of the various units to try to find out how many were on the
Lancastria
. He got to 4000, but did not cover anything like the whole boat.

As he stepped on to the ship, one man heard a steward say to another: ‘Bloody Hell, that’s six thousand and we were supposed to only take four thousand.’ Another steward told Morris Wooding, from an RASC Heavy Repair Shops unit: ‘God! Six thousand! Never before has the old tub carried so many.’ Still more men went on climbing aboard.

A while later, one of the ship’s officers was heard to say that the stewards had stopped counting at 6000. A late comer, Samuel Valentine Bardell of the Royal Ordnance Corps, saw a steward with a mechanical clicker: when Bardell asked how many he had counted, the steward replied: ‘Oh, we’re well
over six thousand at the moment.’ Another report says a loading officer told a major in the Royal Engineers that he was not going to take any more men as 7000 were already on the liner. Major Fairfax of the RASC recalled hearing one of the ship’s officers saying there were 8000 men on the
Lancastria
.

Around lunchtime, Neville Chesterton, the Royal Engineer whose unit had been delayed on its way to St-Nazaire, got into a small French boat with fifty of his comrades to sail into the estuary. German planes swooped to strafe them as they headed out from the shore – to show their esteem for the bravery of the French crew in keeping going, the soldiers handed them all their cigarettes.

As the tender came alongside the
Lancastria
, an officer appeared in the gangway, and shouted, ‘You can’t come on board. We are full. Go and find another ship.’

‘No more, we’re overloaded,’ a crew member shouted through a loud-hailer at other small boats arriving from St-Nazaire. ‘We’re not taking any more. We are overcrowded.’

Harry Grattidge ordered the doors on the liner’s side to be closed. He refused to take a mooring rope thrown from a destroyer bringing out yet another load of men. In return, there was what the Chief Officer described as ‘a volley of mediaeval curses’ from the bridge of the other ship.

Turned away, the small boats headed for the other liner moored in the bay, the
Oronsay
. Chesterton felt frustrated that the delay in reaching St-Nazaire had prevented him getting on such an imposing vessel as the
Lancastria
. Leonard Forde, the wireless truck driver, was another disappointed man. Stuck at the back of the crowd on the dockside, he felt his heart sinking
as he realised that he would not be able to get on a tender for the
Lancastria
. The men around him groaned at having lost the chance of boarding such a big, fine ship to sail home.

Two of the last who did get on to the liner were a Belgian boy and girl aged about ten, with golden hair and grey eyes. They were on their own except for two dogs, one a pedigree animal, the other a mongrel. Though the children were dirty, they had an air of gravity about them. As they came on to the ship, Harry Grattidge told them that quarantine regulations meant they would have to leave the dogs behind in the tug that had brought them out from St-Nazaire; though a number of soldiers evaded the rules and boarded with their mascot dogs.

Not understanding English, the children looked blankly at him. An elderly woman, described by Grattidge as looking like a vicar’s wife, stepped in as interpreter. When she told the children that the dogs would have to be abandoned, the boy’s face crumpled. His lips trembled. His grey eyes filled with tears. For a moment, he said nothing, just clinging tightly to the retriever’s neck. Then he began to speak, fast and very earnestly, sometimes using the back of his hand to wipe away a tear. Grattidge thought he looked ‘very small and defenceless as he stood there and pleaded for his rights like a man’. His sister hugged
the mongrel and said nothing.
¹

The woman explained to Grattidge that the children had fled all the way from Belgium on foot, leading their dogs. The Chief Officer found that he could not look the boy in the eye – ‘it was like facing up to your own conscience’. So he gave way. Sometimes, the only thing to do with rules was to break them, he reflected. The children boarded with their dogs.

Every square foot of space on the decks, in the cabins and down in the holds was filled with dirty, unkempt, exhausted men. Some slept; others played cards. Many did not bother to take life belts that were offered to them – they were tired and thought they had reached safety.

Alec Cuthbert, who had spent the last two days since leaving St-Etienne-de-Montluc without anything to eat, had been among the last to get on board. After enjoying a meal of sausages and mash, he went up on the promenade deck, where he sat with Harry Pack of the Royal Army Service Corps. After a time, Harry decided to go below to fetch some beer but, seeing the crowd at the bar, he gave up and climbed back up to join Alec. Both had life jackets which they used as pillows as they stretched out as best they could on the crowded deck.

Sidney Dunmall, from the Pay Corps, settled down in the sun by the main mast on the fore deck with his kitbag into which he had stuffed 500 cigarettes from the NAAFI stores and a collection of souvenirs from France. He was starving, but, by the time he got down to the dining room, all that was left was boiled cabbage and potatoes. Dunmall said that would be fine, and ate the vegetables with relish. Then he went back to his place on the deck, watching German planes flying overhead with an occasional appearance by British and French fighters.

‘Why the hell don’t we get cracking and weigh anchor – we’re like a sitting duck here,’ Teddy Perfect of the Royal Engineers said to his comrades lying with their heads on their kitbags on the upper deck.

The danger became even more apparent when a German plane swooped on the two-funnelled
Oronsay
at 1.48 p.m. One of the bombs it dropped destroyed the liner’s bridge, killing several people.

Rudolph Sharp and Harry Grattidge watched the attack from the bridge of the
Lancastria
. Sunlight caught on the wings of the planes with what the Chief Officer described as ‘a fine flash of scintillating light, like
dragonflies cast in silver’.
²
The two men heard the sharp-edged snarl of the bombs – those that missed the other liner sent up huge spouts of spray that landed on the
Lancastria
’s deck like spring rain. ‘At least there’s one comfort,’ Grattidge said to the Captain. ‘We’ve only got one funnel. They seem to think that because she’s got two she’s a choicer target.’

The crewman, Michael Sheehan, who had been counting the men coming aboard, went back to his station at the wheel on the bridge, expecting that the liner would be moving off. But Sharp insisted on waiting for an escort. So Sheridan made his way back down the deck, threading a path between the troops lying there, apparently oblivious to the planes attacking the evacuation fleet.

A signal from the commander of the destroyer force, Barry Stevens, was received, saying that, since the
Lancastria
was full, she could leave. Watching the attack on the
Oronsay
, Sharp considered what to do.

Harry Grattidge recalled that the Captain had ‘a horror of war and all that it meant’. Also, ‘his nerves were more on edge than should happen to any good conscientious seaman who has never thought about death’. There were thousands of men aboard, and the
Lancastria
had only one 4-inch gun as armament, plus a few Bren guns the soldiers had brought with them. She was a sitting duck for the German planes, but leaving the estuary could be equally risky. Sharp had no chart for the area, and there might be German submarines lying in wait out at sea.

Weighing up his options, the Captain sent a message back to the destroyer, asking if he could get protection from a warship. There was no reply.

According to Barry Stevens’ recollections, the
Lancastria
signalled that she was out of drinking water, and must
take on some before sailing.
²
Stevens replied that it would only take eighteen hours to reach Plymouth, so she should leave immediately and not bother about the water. He was unequivocal about where the responsibility for not leaving lay. The
Lancastria
, Stevens wrote, ‘had not obeyed the order to sail’.

‘I think,’ Sharp told Grattidge at last, dragging out his words, ‘that we’ll do better to wait for the
Oronsay
and go together. What do you think?’

‘I think we should stay, sir,’ the Chief Officer replied.

So they sent a signal to that effect to the destroyers. As a precaution, Sharp ordered the lifeboats to be swung out in case they were needed. The crew was divided into two watches with orders to stand by the boats.

Down in a hold, Tom Beattie of the RAF had been playing cards and drinking. Suddenly, he started to vomit. So he climbed up on deck to get some air. A warrant officer collared him, and told him to stay there to act as a runner.

Returning with his family to their cabin after lunch, the Fairey manager, Legroux, suggested to his wife and children that they should put on their life belts. Doing so, they sat on their bunks waiting for the liner to move off.

In another cabin, Sisters Trott and Chamley of the Church Army, who had travelled to St-Nazaire in a military convoy which was attacked by German planes, were looking through a
porthole when they saw a black cloud in the sky, moving very fast. It was a German plane homing in on the
Lancastria
.

Arriving in London at the end of their journey from Bordeaux, General Spears installed Charles de Gaulle in a small flat in Curzon Place in Mayfair, and then took him to lunch at the RAC Club in Pall Mall. In the early afternoon, they drove to Downing Street where Churchill was sitting in the sun in the garden of Number Ten.

De Gaulle was not Churchill’s first choice to head the resistance to the Germans and the Pétain regime. A British mission had gone to Bordeaux to try to get Paul Reynaud or the former Interior Minister, Georges Mandel, to come to London to lead a government in exile. Mandel chose to sail to North Africa with other politicians who wanted to continue the fight from French possessions there – on arrival, he was arrested and held in German concentration camps until 1944 when he was handed over to the collaborationist militia in France and shot. Reynaud chose to stay in France. The following week, he was driving in the south of the country with his mistress when their car ran off the road. A suitcase in the back shot forward, hitting the Comtesse de Portes on the neck and killing her instantly. The former Premier was taken unconscious to hospital. When he recovered, he was arrested, sentenced to life imprisonment, and held prisoner in Germany throughout the war.