The Sinking of the Lancastria (21 page)

A Belgian woman, Julie Delfosse, was helped by Harry Pack, the soldier who had given up trying to get some beer when he had seen the crowd at the bar. Julie and Harry spent four hours together in the water before being picked up by a rowing boat – he was taken to a destroyer, while she was put on a French trawler where she was reunited with her son from whom she had been separated when the
Lancastria
went down.

Edwin Quittenton of the Royal Engineers managed to reach the side of the trawler as its gunner fired back at German plane attacks. He scrambled aboard, and threw ropes over the side to others. All around him on the ship, he recalled, were ‘mutilated bodies, men badly burned, and
amongst us, one woman and child. Out on the sea were hundreds of bodies, many past recognition, shot to pieces, machine-gunned or blown to pieces. At last came the order from the French captain that he could not take on any more men.’

A lifeboat filled with people came alongside the destroyer, the
Highlander
, among them an RAF man who had kept his shirt, collar and tie but nothing else. A sailor cut off his shirt with a jackknife, rubbed him down with cotton waste and gave him a duffel coat. Seeing the naked men covered with black oil, somebody on the destroyer began to sing Negro spirituals. At that, one of the officers recalled, ‘we all felt better’.

One of the
Highlander
’s crew, Denis Maloney, looked over the side and saw the empty lifeboat bobbing up and down on the water. He jumped down into it, shouting ‘Come on!’ Two other young sailors followed. They took the oars while Maloney held the tiller, which he found very heavy.

The boat reached a group of men in the water. One of those pulled on board the lifeboat was the Bren gunner, Fred Coe, who was given a towel to cover himself for modesty’s sake. The survivors helped to rescue others. Soon, forty men were in the lifeboat. Five died there, all covered in oil. Their bodies were put back in the sea to make room for others.

Looking back, Maloney saw the
Highlander
sailing away, loaded to the gunwales with men. Round his lifeboat were screaming men and floating bodies while German planes swooped down, machine-gunning those in the water.

‘War is war but that was murder,’ Maloney said sixty years on. ‘We were left stranded – on the
Highlander
they must have thought that they’d got hundreds on board and had lost three, so it was better to be off. We were all weak and it was
getting dark.’ Then a French motor-boat came by and threw a line to tow them to shore.

Maloney stayed in the boat until the rest had disembarked. One man was still on board – dead. Maloney walked over to the body, and took some letters from the pocket so that he could inform the family.

Clinging to the oar that had saved his life, Sergeant Major Picken made his way to a trawler. A rope was thrown down. He lost his grip, and went under. Still holding on to the oar, he rose to the surface and was hauled on board, unconscious. Coming to, he found himself in a small, dark cabin with other men. They broke open a cupboard which turned out to contain clothes. Picken donned a pair of pyjama trousers and a huge butcher’s apron.

The man who had seen a message from God in the sky was picked up by a small boat soon afterwards, and put on HMS
Cambridgeshire
, which took on 800 men. German aircraft swooped on the vessel. A Lewis gun on board jammed, reducing her defensive capability. But the captain watched the planes, and twisted the wheel to avoid their bombs, which slid into the sea beside her, sending up plumes of water that soaked the men crowded on her decks.

Later, the captain put forward three of his men for gallantry awards. Ordinary Seaman Arthur Drage, he wrote, had saved some fifty men from drowning by taking charge of a lifeboat from the
Lancastria
. Coxswain Stanley Kingett had made ‘repeated journeys in ship’s boat to rescue exhausted men from water while under machine-gun fire from enemy planes’. Able Seaman William Reeves Perrin had kept up ‘continuous machine-gun fire, in an attempt to prevent
enemy planes machine-gunning men in water. Probably brought down one plane, but
this cannot be confirmed.’
¹

Sidney Dunmall, whose premonition had sent him up from the queue for chocolate bars at the Purser’s office as the bombs were about to fall, survived by moving from a plank to an inflated rubber raft. The six men on it weighed it down almost to the level of the sea, but they improvised paddles out of pieces of boxwood and reached the
Cambridgeshire
. Dunmall was too weak to climb the scaling net on the side of the ship, so the others grabbed hold of him and pulled him up on to the deck where he lay by a drum filled with depth charges. After a time, he went down to the boiler room and sat in front of the open furnaces to dry off and get warm. A naked man asked if he could spare any clothes. Dunmall handed over his shirt.

On the
Highlander
, half a dozen men who had been taken for dead when they were pulled from the water were brought round by artificial respiration. After three hours in the sea, the Tillyers and their daughter, Jacqueline, were brought on board. The destroyer’s steward, ‘Ding Dong’ Bell from Dover, took the 2-year-old girl to the captain’s cabin to revive her by dipping her into alternate basins of hot and cold water. Then he rubbed the oil off her body, clothed her in a naval sweater, washed her hair, arranged it with the captain’s brush and comb, and carried her up to the deck wrapped in a blanket. After that he sold a bottle of whisky to one of the survivors who gave some to a naked man who came into the wardroom, and who turned out to be a lieutenant colonel.

Several rescue boats tried to pick up a Geordie who was so covered with oil that it was impossible to catch hold of him. Eventually, a sailor snared him with a boathook that cut
through his underpants into the flesh below. Before leaving Newcastle, he had gone shopping with his wife for a pair of pants. One pair in the shop cost half-a-crown, another only 1s. 11½d. He had bought the cheaper ones: now he wished he had taken the more expensive pair, reckoning that they would have been stronger. But he was saved, at the cost of a big gash in his buttocks.

At the front of a small boat lowered by the destroyer, the
Havelock
, stood a giant sailor, completely naked. He scooped men out of the sea, slung them over his shoulder and took them to the back of the craft. The other sailor steering the boat called the huge man ‘Pricky’, and one of those he saved said he appeared to be ‘very aptly named’.

The
Cymbula
took on a stream of survivors from smaller boats, including one soldier clutching a small dog which the ship’s mainly Chinese crew held on to and called ‘Fifi’. The Second Radio Officer, Richard Wilkins, handed a Penguin book of English poetry to one soldier, and a vest to another who was naked. Wilkins tried to give artificial respiration to a soldier who had swallowed a lot of water and oil by pressing down on his back with both hands, but had to stop because the man was in such pain.

Percy Fairfax of the RASC floated for four hours on an inflated cushion with a rope trailing from a raft looped round his shoulder. Then he saw a rowing boat coming towards him. Two French sailors on board were using the oars to move kitbags floating on the sea. The men on the raft cried for help. But the Frenchmen were scavengers, and pushed away those in the water.

A strong swimmer grabbed Fairfax’s shoulder, breaking the
loop of rope. Percy gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow, and, resting on his cushion, managed to reach the raft. When he tried to climb on board, it threatened to sink with his weight. Two men threw him off. He made another attempt. The men held his head under the water for a time. Then one grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to grasp a ring. Fairfax asked the man for his name. ‘There are no heroes or names on this raft,’ he replied. ‘We are all pals, so stick together and all keep quiet.’

A steamer passed by, and those on the raft called for help. But it did not stop, though its wash turned them round and carried them into clean water. Finally, a French ship stopped to pick them up.

For the first time, Fairfax let go of his cushion to grasp a rope thrown down to him. But his hands were so coated with oil that it slipped through his fingers like an eel. He went under. Rising to the surface again, he grasped another rope, which he put round his waist. The knot slipped, and he went down again.

Rising to the surface, Fairfax tried to grab the plaited rope on the side of the French boat. He could not get a grip. Down came another rope. Exhausted and knowing he could not last much longer, Percy took it in his hands, arms and teeth, wrapped it round his body and twice round his right arm, binding the end with his left hand. That was enough to get him hoisted up to the deck, where he passed out.

Coming round, he found he was lying with his head in the lap of a woman rescuer. He got up and walked to the covered-in part of the deck where men sat silently, drenched in oil. After a while, he asked an officer for the time. It was nine at night – five hours after the
Lancastria
had gone down.

The woman in whose lap Percy Fairfax had come round was Joan Rodes, the Englishwoman whose French husband was away at the front and who had organised hospital services in La Baule. She had been offered a place on an evacuation ship, but she decided to stay in France.

Though she was heavily pregnant, Rodes joined a friend of hers, Michel Luciani, to sail into the bay of St-Nazaire in his fishing smack, dodging mines dropped by German planes. Helped by a prominent local businessman, Pierre Huni, and a Briton living in the area, Henry Boyd, they ferried nineteen badly injured men back to La Baule, where food and drink were laid on. In the Hermitage, the luxury hotel that had been turned into a hospital, Joan prepared beds for the wounded. But they were so badly hurt that it was decided to take them by road to St Joseph’s hospital in St-Nazaire for treatment.

Huni and Rodes set off again with Luciani in his boat, the
Saint Michel
, to undertake more rescue work. It was a nightmare journey. On the way, they were strafed. Joan Rodes flung herself on the deck, her face white from the pain of her pregnancy. Among survivors of the
Lancastria
, she became known as ‘the Angel of St-Nazaire’.

Huni, a French delegate to the International Red Cross, used his limousine to ferry survivors who had come ashore. He tried to set up a final evacuation for some of the remaining British troops on a French boat, but the captain refused to take them – anyway the ship was waterlogged.

Getting back to La Baule, Joan Rodes helped to arrange for the burial of bodies from the
Lancastria
washed up on the wide beach of the resort. A local woman donated a field for the purpose. Broken wine bottles were put at the head of the graves with the men’s identity tags and other
personal belongings under the glass. Later the owner of the field put up white crosses, and cultivated flowers round the graves.

In the following days, a French general and a British destroyer captain both advised Rodes to leave France. Again, she decided to stay to do what she could to help British soldiers to escape. When a party of German officers turned up to take over her hospital, she put up a sign reading ‘Contagious’, telling them she was treating patients suffering from typhus. After the Germans left hurriedly, Rodes recruited a young priest and nuns to remove valuable X-ray equipment to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

Led by a young officer with a monocle, the Germans came back to have the hospital disinfected. As this was being done, Rodes saw the officer mistreating an elderly woman, and upbraided him.

‘You should lower your eyes, and hang your head in shame,’ he shouted, ‘for you
forget you were beaten.’
²

‘Beaten! I am not beaten! I am British!’ Rodes replied, walking off to the dispensary.

The officer followed her. She told him that her husband was at the front, and that her father-in-law was a general who had lost one eye and one arm in battle.

‘You are not afraid?’ the German asked.

‘That is not a word in my vocabulary,’ she responded.

‘Oh well, the war will soon be ended, and it’s only a matter of time before we invade and conquer England.’

‘Not on your life,’ Rodes said. ‘No German will ever set foot on English soil unless as a prisoner.’

The officer said he saluted her as one soldier to another.

A few days later, Rodes had a miscarriage. She remained in bed for two years suffering from fever and thrombosis and was
then a semi-invalid. Still, she operated a secret radio for the Resistance, and hid British servicemen in the cellars of her family-in-law’s house until they could find an escape route out of France.

Pierre Huni became a member of the Resistance: in December 1941, he was questioned by the Gestapo who raided the YMCA in Paris while he was visiting it. He was released after two-and-a-half hours. The captain of the fishing smack, Michel Luciani, went on to sabotage German patrol boats on the western coast of France. Their British partner, Henry Boyd, was arrested and died while interned at the American hospital in Paris.

A 15-year-old French boy, Gaston Noblanc, watched as the German planes swooped on the estuary and the port. He had got to know the British troops while working as a newspaper delivery boy, taking copies of the
Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
to camps round St-Nazaire. Now, he joined a relative on a tug that went out to try to save men from the sea, lowering a small boat to pull them from the water. ‘It was Hell,’ he recalled, ‘abominable, the height of horror.’

Like Rodes and Huni, Gaston Noblanc joined the Resistance. He used his newspaper delivery round to gather information on German military installations, passing it to London through an underground network run by the Mayor of La Baule. He spotted U-boats using the pens at St-Nazaire and informed the British through a clandestine radio. Captured by the Gestapo, he was tortured, and badly burned.

Captain Sharp was floating, exhausted, in the sea when the
Lancastria
’s surgeon, Dr Shaw, spotted him and went to help; they were rescued after four hours in the water. Two men from their ship on a rescue boat saw them. ‘Holy smoke,’ one called to the other, ‘there’s the Captain.’