The Sinking of the Lancastria (25 page)

The ship, the
Punjabi
, was among six destroyers and seven transport ships sent to rescue the Poles, who were reported to number 8000. In fact, there were only 2000 and the size of the fleet was a considerable waste of resources: once again, the British commanders were operating on the basis of faulty intelligence.

Catching up with the destroyer, Youngs and his companions hailed her. The tall, bearded captain came in close to the shore, and asked them who they were.

They shouted that they were survivors of the
Lancastria
.

‘How do I know that,’ the captain asked

‘You don’t’, they replied. ‘You will either have to take a chance or leave us to the Jerries.’

A small boat was sent to fetch the soldiers. Brought to the captain’s cabin to be questioned, they showed their British army papers. When they asked why he had decided to take them on, the captain said no German could have assumed Youngs’ cockney accent.

CHAPTER 11

Home

THE FIRST RESCUE SHIPS
entered Plymouth Sound and other harbours in south-west England on the afternoon of 18 June. Survivors remembered how beautiful the weather was, and their relief at reaching dry land. But some were struck by the apparent indifference of their compatriots to the threat of invasion. Gazing at the shore while his ship came in along the coast, Sergeant Harry Pettit was shocked to see the number of holidaymakers on the beaches. My God, he thought, they just do not know what is in store.

A Royal Marine band in full dress uniform played popular tunes to welcome the rescue boats. People sang along. The cheering was so loud that one officer remarked: ‘You’d think we were winning this war, instead of losing it.’

On the
John Holt
, which had spent twenty-three hours on the
voyage home, the captain took off his clothes for the first time in five days. Two weeks later, the boat set off without an escort to West Africa carrying 1090 French troops.

As the
Havelock
reached the Devonport naval base, Harry Pack of the RASC had a last look round to see if any of his friends were on board. He spotted Julie Delfosse, the Belgian woman he had swum with for four hours. After being picked up and put aboard a French trawler, she had found the son from whom she had been separated by the bombing of the
Lancastria
.

She told Pack she had been searching for him. ‘She recognised me by my eyes,’ he remembered. ‘She wanted to thank me.’

With Church Army sisters acting as interpreters, Julie asked him for his home address. Harry was reluctant to give it, but she insisted, so he did. Then she went ashore to be reunited with her husband, and spend the rest of the war with him in Lancashire.

From the dockside, people threw packets of biscuits, tins of corned beef and tins of milk to the men on the ships. A flying tin of bully beef cut open the head of one soldier.

As the men came ashore, they were met by young women holding out trays of cigarettes. The Salvation Army and Church Army and Women’s Voluntary Service distributed tea, sandwiches, fish and chips and postcards for men to write home that they were safe. The streets up from the docks were crowded with people, who emptied their pockets and handed over money, cigarettes and tobacco.

Some men arranged for telegrams to be dispatched to their homes saying they were still alive. In several cases, their parents had received messages from the authorities that their sons were missing in France, and were thought to have died. A chaplain sent a telegram to the parents of the
Lancastria
electrician, Frank Brogden, reporting that he had survived – they had previously been told he was thought to have been killed. When Joe Sweeney got home and rang the bell, his father turned pale as he opened the door: he and his wife had received a telegram from the War Office saying their son was missing in action and presumed dead.

The evacuated troops in best condition from the final episode of the evacuation of Operation Aerial went ashore first. Those from the
Lancastria
were kept till last; nobody wanted too many people to know what had happened.

Going down the gangplank, one man lost his balance after treading on the trailing edge of the blanket wrapped round a soldier in front of him. Two nurses grabbed him, and tried to lead him to a First World War ambulance with canvas sides. The more he resisted, the more convinced they were that he was suffering from shock. Eventually, he got away from them, and joined his comrades heading for a barracks building nearby.

On the quay, evacuees from the
Havelock
lined up to give three cheers for the destroyer’s crew. The sailors cheered back. ‘It was a moving moment,’ Harry Pack recalled. ‘Then we marched off – barefoot and filthy.’

Helpers lit cigarettes for men who were shaking so violently that they could not do so themselves. The badly wounded were carried into a fleet of ambulances, and given morphine.

While the wounded were treated in hospital, others were taken to naval barracks where they bathed and shaved. After that, they tucked into a huge meal of fish and chips washed down with mugs of tea. Some were directed to a school for deaf and dumb children. Members of the
Lancastria
’s crew went to the Seamen’s Mission. The wireless truck driver, Leonard Forde, who had rowed out to a rescue ship, was billeted in a girls’ school whose pupils had been hurriedly evacuated to make room for them. The men were amused to see a notice above an electric bell push reading: ‘IF IN NEED OF A MISTRESS RING THIS BELL’!

Many survivors were bizarrely dressed in what clothes they had been able to get on the rescue ships. Some had only newspapers wrapped round them. Harry Pettit wore underpants and half a blanket. George Thomson, a 36-year-old NCO, walked ashore with two other survivors: none of them had any clothes. A woman relief worker asked if they would like a cup of tea. ‘I’d rather have a pair of trousers,’ Thomson replied. He was given a pair of sailor’s bell bottoms, a Wasps rugby vest and a squadron leader’s jacket.

As Joe Sweeney walked down the gangway, a big cheer went up and everybody started laughing. He looked round to see what was so funny, and then realised that it was the sight of him in the too-small clothes he had been given by the girl in the street in St-Nazaire and had ripped apart to accommodate his body. At the marine barracks, he was handed boots a size too small for him – they were the biggest available. It was seven months before he got a pair that fitted him, and he suffered in-growing toenails as a result.

Sergeant Major Picken was still in the pyjama bottoms and butcher’s apron he had taken from a cupboard on a French trawler. He recorded being ‘smuggled in’ to Plymouth among
columns of ‘well uniformed chaps’. ‘From our red, weathered faces, many people thought we were Gurkhas!’ he added.

As Fred Coe shuffled along the street covered in a blanket, an ‘extremely attractive’ young woman approached him and led him to her home. There she gave him an Ever Ready single-blade safety razor, soap and a toothbrush while her mother provided soup and her father handed over clothes, including trousers that were six inches too short.

Captain Griggs went to a telephone box to call his family, who had not heard from him for more than a month. He told them that he was ‘sound in wind and limb’. Then he used money in the wallet he had kept on him to buy new clothes.

After he had been issued with clothing, the one thing Bill Slater of the Pay Corps wanted was a beer. He had no British money, but he got ten francs from a friend, ordered a pint and handed over the French note. By the time the till was rung, he had drunk half the glass – and then he got tuppence change.

Sidney Dunmall paused at the quayside to fill up one of the letter cards to be sent to their families being handed out by the Salvation Army. ‘I am well, am back in the UK,’ he wrote. Then he got into a coach and was driven to a barracks where he and his colleagues feasted on roast beef and rice pudding before being taken on to Crown Hill Fort above Plymouth for a good night’s sleep.

Jim Skeels had been given a smart uniform with gold braid by a marine gunner on the trip back from St-Nazaire. As the soldier walked down the gangplank at Plymouth, with his new uniform partly unbuttoned, two burly marines took him by the arms, lifted him off the ground and hustled him into a naval lock-up. An officer told him he had contravened
regulations – ‘A marine, even if he is dying, must have all buttons fastened.’ Skeels got a message to his commanding major in the army who came and had him released, giving the marine officer a flea in his ear.

Denis Maloney, the sailor from the
Highlander
who had led the rescue of forty people in a lifeboat, also had trouble after landing. Initially, he and two mates were ignored when they arrived at Devonport, stinking and filthy with oil. They went to a barracks parade ground covered with people lying wherever they could. There, Maloney and his companions were each given an advance of five shillings against their pay.

Maloney went to a pub and drank a few pints of beer. When he came out into the street, he had gone only a hundred yards when he ran into a naval police patrol, who asked him where his gas mask was. They frogmarched him back to the barracks, and kept him under detention for the night. He expected to be court-martialled for leaving his ship without orders. Instead, the officers lined up to shake his hand. Later, however, an officer wrote on his papers, ‘this man needs supervision’.

When the convoy that included the
City of Mobile
arrived in Plymouth, the men on board, who had been without food or water since leaving France, pushed aside the guards on a tender that came alongside with supplies. They grabbed the bread and ham, and set the water pump operating. Fred Hahn described them as ‘thirst mad animals’. He, himself, went on to Southampton where he called his wife,
Betty, from a telephone box.
¹

‘Hallo, Fred,’ she said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t drown. Have a lovely trip?’

‘Lovely,’ he replied. ‘Sea as smooth as a mill pond and fine sunny weather. How’s the kids?’

Another man on the
City of Mobile
, who had been irritatingly jittery on the voyage about submarines and mines, had a less welcoming reception when he telephoned home. According to Hahn, his father told him, ‘you white-livered bastard. I hope I never see you again’, and rang off.

A young woman, Muriel Hooper, of King Street in Plymouth, stood in the street with her autograph book, asking survivors to sign it.

‘There will always be an England,’ wrote one man from the RASC.

‘Up and at ’em,’ added another.

A sapper wished Miss Hooper, ‘Good luck and all best wishes.’

Another man chose to draw a map of Holland.

Six decades later, Miss Hooper’s autograph book lies among
Lancastria
memorabilia at the RAF station at Digby in Lincolnshire, home of the 73rd squadron which lost so many men on the liner.

When the Duggan family arrived in Plymouth from Brest on a cross-Channel steamer escorted by a minesweeper, they were held up for John’s Bedlington terrier to be put into quarantine. That settled, Eddie Duggan went to try to get hotel rooms, but was turned away because he did not have enough English money. He rejoined the other civilians who had come over on the steamer, and they pooled their cash. Duggan took it to a big hotel where they got rooms at last.

Thirteen-year-old Emilie Legroux, who had been taken from a raft on to a rescue ship, was looked after in Plymouth by an Englishwoman from the Fairey Aviation branch there. Her mother and 11-year-old brother were housed in a refugee centre. Before long, Madame Legroux found her daughter, and the three of them tucked up in bed at a Salvation Army hostel. Later, they went to London and visited Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus before settling in Hayes, Middlesex.

Isobella Macclaine Bowden, from Padstow in Cornwall, was working with the Red Cross in Plymouth when the survivors were brought ashore. She collected the letters they had written to say they were safe, and took them to the main post office which stayed open past midnight to handle the traffic. She also got home telephone numbers from some of those who had escaped the disaster, and placed calls during the night.

‘I can’t tell you who I am or where I am,’ she said. ‘But I have spoken to your husband (or boyfriend, father, brother). He’s in England safe and sound and will be contacting you.’

In some cases, there was a silence at the other end of the line, and then a scream loud enough to wake the whole household, and a cry of ‘He’s home; he’s safe.’ Others just whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you.’

Men who were taken to leave Plymouth by train were not told where they were heading; only the engine drivers knew that.

A detachment at the foot of the slope leading to the station looked so exhausted that it seemed they would not be able to
stagger up with their rifles. A very young-looking lieutenant called them to attention, and gave the order to march. To cheers from onlookers, the men moved up the slope as though they were at their depots.

On the platform, a young soldier raced forward and grabbed a young woman from the Red Cross who was collecting letters from those boarding the train. He whooped with joy as he took her by the waist, swung her round and kissed her to a roar of laughter from the other soldiers. Then he politely apologised. He explained that, while leaving France, he had told himself that, if he got back to England, he would kiss the first pretty girl he saw.