The Sinking of the Lancastria (17 page)

Returning from his abandoned trip to collect chocolate from the Purser’s office, Sidney Dunmall was blinded by a tremendous flash in front of him as he reached the top deck. Smoke billowed up. His hair and one arm were singed.

Looking round, he saw that the deck rail had gone, and the mast was broken. A man with a shattered arm cried out for help. Dunmall slithered down a rope to the sea. Round him were older soldiers from the Pioneer Corps hanging on to ropes and screaming, ‘Save Me, Save Me, I can’t swim.’ Nor could Dunmall.

Men on the top deck were throwing planks as big as railway sleepers over the side to support those in the water. Sidney grabbed one, digging his nails into the wood. He hung on for grim death, until the man with a life belt pulled him clear of the sinking ship.

Harry Pettit of the RASC, who had worked on RAF airfields in eastern France before being evacuated across the country, shook hands with a friend called Charlie, and said: ‘This is it; here we go.’ Together, they dropped into the sea.

Sinking below the water, 24-year-old Harry felt as if his lungs were going to burst. The compression made him fear he was about to explode. The pressure on his ears was intense. A hundred things from the past flitted through his mind in a few seconds that seemed like hours. He conjured up a clear, calm picture of his home and his widowed mother, and wished that death by drowning did not take so long. Then his fall through the water was halted when he hit a sandbank, and shot up to the surface like a cork, gasping and choking on the oil he had swallowed.

Coming out the dive after dropping their bombs, the JU-88s jolted, and the gravitational force pinned the crew tightly back into their seats as they pressed their heads against the back rest to avoid them being thrown forwards on to their chests. For a few seconds, they lost consciousness while the planes shot upwards.

With the French fighter still on his tail, Peter Stahl did not look down to see where his bombs had fallen. He put his aircraft into a steep downward banking movement. The Morane followed, but was not catching up. Stahl executed a series of twists, and flew steeply upwards to gain space. The French pilot was still there behind him, steadying his course to fire. Stahl went into another bank. The two planes dodged across the sky, and then, suddenly, the fighter turned away and headed back for the estuary. Stahl set the Junkers on a homeward course.

‘The encounter had been rather hairy to say the least,’
he wrote in his diary.
¹
But the KG30 planes got back to their base in Belgium without any losses, though one was hit more than seventy times and had to make a belly landing. Stahl noted that the unit had scored ‘a number of good hits’, even if the crews did not know exactly what their bombs had blasted.

Whether the ‘fat freighter’ Stahl mentioned as his target was, in fact, the
Lancastria
or whether he was aiming at another vessel cannot now be established. No boat among the evacuation fleet that was bombed appears to have corresponded exactly to that two-word description. Stahl was certainly among the pilots who swooped on ships in the estuary since his diary records that he did not fly in over the St-Nazaire harbour. Diving in so fast, he might well have taken the liner for a large freighter. But, if so, it will never be
known if his Junker was the plane that made the first, unsuccessful dive on the liner or the second, which hit the
Lancastria
.

‘God, look at those flames,’ Captain Sharp said to Harry Grattidge as they stared from the bridge. Oil from the fuel tank had caught fire, sending up clouds of inky smoke. The deck was covered with blood and splintered woodwork. A screaming man, his face and hands scalded by steam, ran across in front of them and leaped into the sea.

Standing by the deck rail, Percy Braxton of the RAF heard a voice saying, ‘There he is!’ Two men were pointing over the starboard bow. For a moment, Braxton thought one of the German planes had gone into the sea. Looking over the side, he saw ‘a large pit of red swirling water and a human head going round and round’. It was a man who had been blown through a hole in the liner’s side.

On the top deck, crew members were pushing through hundreds of soldiers to try to lower the lifeboats. Some men had already climbed into one boat, and sat there as if expecting it to lower itself automatically to the sea. Soon, the craft was so crowded that there was only room to stand.

The chaplain, who had counselled calm in the lounge, took charge of the men round him on the deck. He told them to remove their boots, puttees and heavy clothing, and then to go over the side. Some leaped into the air; others slid down the side of the liner as it came up out of the water. The chaplain waited till they had all gone, then tried to follow. But the angle of the deck had become so acute that he could not make his way to the rail. He called to the last man on the rail
to stick out his leg, grasped it and pulled himself up and over, sliding down into the sea.

Richard Newlove of the RASC was shaking hands with two friends before jumping into the sea when he heard a detonation behind him, and felt something rubbing against his back. He turned, and saw the body of a young officer who had just shot himself. A second young officer bent down, picked up the revolver and killed himself, too.

An elderly sailor and an RAF man lashed a rope on to a stanchion near the stern, and threw one end over the side. ‘Down you go and when you reach the bottom put your feet to the side of the ship and give a good kick outwards,’ they told the men around them. Percy Braxton nodded at the old man to go ahead of him, but he replied, ‘No, ye go laddie.’ So Braxton took off his boots, threw his tin helmet on the deck and climbed down the rope. He watched the propellers rising in the sky above him, kicked off the side of the ship and fell into the water.

Stan Flowers and his fellow townsman from Faversham, Wally Smith, from the transport unit at St-Etienne-de-Montluc, had been in a hold when the bombs exploded. Aged twenty and twenty-one respectively, they managed to get up to the deck though the rail of the stairway they used collapsed under them. At first, there was panic. Then they calmed down as they found themselves on the high part of the ship, with a long drop down to the sea. They removed their boots, putting them down neatly one beside the other. Shaking hands, they grabbed ropes hanging over the side. As they slid down, the chaffing badly burned their hands.

Both went under the surface, but they came up together and swam more vigorously than they ever had in their lives to get away from the sinking liner. Finding two floating deck
chairs, they draped themselves over them. There were massive jellyfish in the water round them. From time to time, they shouted abuse up at the German planes. But the movement of the water separated the two men, and they were too tired to be able to make the effort to keep together. They never saw one another again.

When soldiers came to the bridge, Captain Sharp tried to reassure them, but he knew that there were only 2000 life belts on board for three times that many men. Signallers called into the intercom to tell the dozen men in the engine room to evacuate. Despite the shock of the bombing, the electrician, Frank Brodgen, who was on duty there, recalled that they took their time to leave, getting their things together and checking that everybody was present before they went up through the hatch, urging soldiers they saw to follow them.

Grattidge and Sharp looked at one another, saying nothing. The Chief Officer felt as if he was at a deathbed. But he had to take action. Picking up a megaphone, he called out: ‘Clear away the boats now. Your attention, please . . . clear away the boats.’

When the liner listed to starboard, Grattidge shouted through the megaphone for men on the deck to go over to the port side to try to balance her. As he issued his order, he saw the ship’s Second Officer standing in front of him with a sheaf of papers in one hand while he tugged up his trousers with the other – he had been dressing when the bombs landed. Despite the death and chaos all around, Grattidge could not stop himself laughing.

The Chief Officer’s instruction had a temporary effect in
righting the ship. But then she listed too far to port, her deck dropping towards the water, her stern rising in the air. At the very back of the liner, Captain Field sat ‘perched like a bird’ watching the crowd below him struggling to release the ropes holding the lifeboats. Sailors were throwing everything that floated over the side for those already in the water, but the tide carried most of it away.

Field saw ‘bodies and oil, bodies some with their life jackets on.’ Good swimmers forged through the water, one still wearing his helmet. Closer at hand, ‘decks were packed with soldiers laden with rifles and equipment, just waiting for a miracle to happen’. A man dived from the deck clad only in his underpants.

‘Off with your boots, and over the side!’ Harry Grattidge called. Men sat down on the listing deck to do so; some stripped completely to make swimming easier. Thomas Hutchison, a 19-year-old soldier from the Number One Heavy Repair Shop, started to comply with the Chief Officer’s order, but he could not undo the laces on one boot. So he jumped into the water still wearing it. He lay on his back in the sea as German planes came in to strafe. Deciding that, if he was going to be killed, he was not going to watch it happen, he rolled on to his side. The bullets missed him by inches.

A Welsh soldier, Peter Lawrence, who had been burned on his face and arms, took a life jacket from a corpse and jumped when the deck was six feet from the surface of the sea. ‘Goodbye,’ a friend called out. ‘See you later, best of luck.’ Lawrence turned on to his back, and flapped his arms to get himself moving away from the liner.

More German planes swept in to drop flares and to strafe the ship, their bullets crackling like hail. Captain Field decided
it was time to leave his vantage point at the end of the stern where he risked being sucked down with the ship. Before making the seventy-foot drop into the sea, he took all his money out of the pocket of his trousers and lodged it behind a hatch cover. It was, he later reflected, ‘a sign of how we go a bit mad under the strain’.

From the cliffs overlooking the estuary, the air force wireless operator, Vic Flowers, and the other two RAF men, who had got back across the gangway of the tender in the harbour, saw German aircraft skimming over their heads. Then they heard explosions on the sea below. Smoke soon obscured their view of the sinking of the ship they had refused to board. Flowers was later told that thirty-seven of his ground crew group died on the
Lancastria
.

On the ship, survival could be a matter of chance or of where you were – those on the top deck had the best chance. Those down below who were fortunate enough to be near portholes or hold doors scrambled through them – one sergeant pushed a little brown dog out in front of him.

Having a life jacket could be a double-edged privilege. Men jumping into the water wearing one were strangled or had their necks broken by the stiff cork collars. The place you chose to sit could make the difference between life and death. As the bombs hit, the Sherwood Forester, G. Skelton, was turning to talk to his friend, Joe Saxton, for whom he was looking after the picture of his girlfriend. Joe simply wasn’t there any more: he had been blown away by the blast. Skelton was only wounded in the right shoulder.

Just before the attack, a sergeant major from the RASC had returned to the stateroom where he was billeted and told his colleagues of the excellent ‘posh feed’ lunch he had just enjoyed in the dining room. The others hurried off to eat. It was the last he saw of them.

Another RASC soldier was sent by his cabin mates to fetch beer. While he was waiting in line to be served, the first bombs fell outside the ship. Water and fish flowed in through the open porthole. Still, the soldier went ahead and bought three bottles of Bass, returning to his cabin. The beer drunk, he went out on to the deck to put the bottles in a refuse bin. He was not harmed when the bombs exploded in the lower part of the ship.

Down below, one man walked on a carpet of the dead in the passages as he sought an escape route. Reaching the top of the ship, he linked up with another soldier, and they slid together down the almost vertical deck, stood on the rail and walked off into the water. They never saw one another again.

In the lounge, the weight of men struggling to get up from the lower decks broke the rail of the main stairway, sending dozens falling down on those below. Then the whole stairway collapsed, cutting off escape.

Sid Keenan and his friend, John Broadbent, who had gone into a bathroom marked ‘Officers Only’, were shaving and washing when the alarm sounded for the second attack. They heard a terrible crash, and everything seemed to shudder. ‘I bet nobody ever left a bath quicker than I,’ Broadbent recalled. ‘When Sid and I got back on deck, it was a case of every man for himself.’

Major Scott-Bowden was resting in his cabin when the
bombs hit. He picked up his rubber boots containing the bottles of whisky and mineral water and linked by a piece of string. He hung them round his neck, and went on to the deck in his bare feet. As the ship tilted, he grabbed the handle of a door which opened – on the other side, he saw iron staircases coming up from the engine room full of climbing men. He took the bottles from his boots, put them down and pulled on the boots before jumping into the sea.

Norman Driver was in a toilet. Burning timber fell on him. His pal, Cal Beal from Sheffield, shouted from an adjoining lavatory, ‘I’ve been hit. There’s blood on my leg.’ In fact, he had not been injured, but had pulled up his trousers so fast in the shock of the explosions that he had wet them and, in the panic of the moment, had taken the stain for blood. Opening the toilet door, Driver looked at the spot where another of his group, Londoner George Watling, had been having a wash and shave. There was a hole in the floor. Watling was not seen again.

With Beal holding on to him, Driver made his way up a gangway to a loading bay running the full width of the ship. Men and their kit were sliding down the sharply tilting deck. Seeing light from the doors above, Norman and Cal scrambled out on to the deck. Beal put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it – and then they both jumped into the sea. As they went under the water, they lost contact with one another. When he came up, Cal tried to puff at his sodden cigarette. Norman hit his head on a life raft as he surfaced, but managed to swim to a lifeboat and was pulled on board.