The Sinking of the Lancastria (27 page)

In the six weeks of fighting since 10 May, France had lost 90,000 dead, with another 200,000 wounded and as many as 2 million taken prisoner. A postscript to the Battle of France came when Britain’s fear that the French fleet might eventually fall into Nazi hands led to a Royal Navy attack on ships at the Algerian port of Oran that destroyed two battleships and killed 1299 French sailors. German losses in the western offensive were put at 27,000 dead and 110,000 wounded. Casualties for the BEF were reported as 68,111 killed, wounded or missing.

By any estimate, the second evacuation of British troops from France in the early summer of 1940 was an enormous success. In the eight days after Alan Brooke landed at Cherbourg, 144,171 British soldiers and RAF personnel were taken off, plus 24,352 Poles, 18,246 French, 4,938 Czechs and 168 Belgians – making a total of 191,875, 57,175 of them from Nantes and St-Nazaire. Apart from the
Lancastria
, only two ships of any size were lost – the
Teresias
, sunk off St-Nazaire with no loss of life, and a troop carrier bombed during the movement of troops from Le Havre to Cherbourg. Fears of German submarines attacking the rescue ships proved unfounded. Though great quantities of equipment were left behind, some through the needless haste of the evacuation, 2292 vehicles, 1800 tons of stores and 310 guns were shipped back to Britain.

As the official historian of the war at sea, Captain Roskill, has remarked, in some ways it was ‘an even more convincing demonstration of the effectiveness of sea power’ than Dunkirk. But in a brilliant exercise in spin, which gave national morale an important boost, Churchill elevated the earlier evacuation to the status of a triumph in defeat. So it was best not to speak of those who had been left behind, and of what happened to the former Cunard liner in the bay off St-Nazaire. What is surprising is how this neglect persisted down the decades, cloaking Britain’s worst maritime disaster in ignorance to this day.

CHAPTER 12

The Bodies

THE 15-YEAR-OLD FRENCH BOY
was tending a potato patch on the sea marsh by the Bay of Noirmoutiers below St-Nazaire, at the end of June, when he saw the first bodies washing up on the beach. The tide on the bay goes out a long way, more than a mile. He and the other villagers of Les Moutiers-en-Retz had heard the explosions and bombing from up the coast in the middle of the month, but there had been no mention of the disaster at the time in the main regional newspaper. Later, another local newspaper,
Le Courrier de Pain-Boeuf
, had reported that a ship had been sunk, but gave no idea of how many lives had been lost.

In three weeks in late June and the first half of July, 128 bodies came ashore at Les Moutiers: one day, the tide brought in sixteen corpses. They were loaded on to carts drawn by oxen, and laid on straw in a mass grave at the top of the wide beach – the path there is still known as Chemin du
Lancastria
.

The Germans stripped the corpses of their papers and anything of value, and then called in Frenchmen to take them away for burial. In some places, a few locals went out to try to steal from the dead before the Germans reached them – the occupiers warned that anybody caught doing this would be deported.

The bodies on the wide beaches carried with them a collection of everyday objects: wristwatches, scissors, mirrors, rings, combs, pipes and tobacco pouches, whistles, cigarette cases, pencils, pens, penknives, bandages and purses. One man had put his false teeth in a pocket. There was the paraphernalia of military life – army paybooks, maps and identity discs – along with Bibles, rosaries and letters. The body of a 40-year-old soldier, which washed up on a jetty dressed in a cotton khaki shirt and blue trousers, had seventy francs in a pocket. Three men were identified from their driving licences, another by his cheque book from
Barclays in Edgware Road, London.
¹

A 22-year-old had been carrying a letter written from the East Cliff Hotel in Cliftonville and a card inscribed ‘Café Beth Marden, restaurant Citron House’, plus two 100 franc notes. Another body had a letter on it from John Jaborn, 2, Clifton Street, Birmingham 18, and two ten shilling notes. There were cards from boarding houses, from a journalist on the
West London Observer
, and from a man in a town in the Loir et Cher department. On another corpse, a piece of paper was found with the address of Mlle Nadine Gossard, at an impasse in Abbeville. One man carried a medallion inscribed with the name of Lily and a cross of Lorraine.

On a fishing boat out at sea from the small port of Pornic, 18-year-old Claude Gourio noticed bloated bodies in the nets. There were a dozen in all. Gourio and the other fishermen
on his boat put ropes round them to pull them back to their harbour. Some of the corpses were so decomposed that the arms
came off on the way.
²

In the following days, Gourio and the other fishermen came across big patches of oil in the sea, and found bodies floating in the middle of them. They brought the corpses back to land, and laid them out on the slipway in front of Pornic’s casino before burying them. Five other bodies landed on the rocks along the coast outside the port. In mid-July, the local paper reported that hundreds of people strolling on the quayside watched a ‘poor, blown-up body which, driven by strong westerly winds, was coming into the port on the galloping waves’. At the end of the jetty, a boat went to pull it to the shore where it was hoisted into the van of a local carpenter and driven away. A procession was held after evensong one Sunday evening in mid-July to bury the dead.

As summer drew on, more corpses were washed up all round the south of the bay, and down to the Île de Noirmoutier. Others were carried north to La Baule and surrounding ports. Swimming in the estuary, a French teenager felt his hand hit something. He turned to look. It was an arm floating in the sea. He carried it back to the shore, and put it on a rock.

Some bodies were swept out into the sea. A fisherman from the island of Yeu, where Marshal Pétain would be held after the war, found sixteen corpses tangled in his nets six months after the disaster – he took their identity discs and the papers in their wallets, kept them and handed them to a British naval ship that called in after the Liberation of France.

The tides swept other corpses and debris from the liner further down the west coast. A Frenchman found two wooden
plates on the beach at Soulac-sur-Mer in the Médoc, 170 miles to the south. He could make out the lettering, in black paint, of the
Lancastria
on them. Since they would be considered as enemy materiel, he hid them in his attic until the end of the war when he sent them to England. Many years later, local fishermen still reported finding human bones in their nets, and presumed they came from the wreck in the estuary of the Loire.

The remains of Stan Flowers’ friend from Faversham, Wally Smith, were washed nearly 100 miles south before coming ashore in salt marshes near the village of Triaize. The people who found the corpse buried it in secret, not telling the Mayor, who was a pro-Vichy collaborationist. After the war, Wally Smith was given a proper burial, but the locals did not know who he was. It was only in 1998 that the body was identified after the villagers heard a passing tourist speaking English in a restaurant, and took him to see their ‘English body’ in an unmarked grave. Wally was identified from the dog tags still on the body, and a commemoration was held the following year, attended by Stan Flowers and other survivors from the
Lancastria
.

The register of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records 1816 of those who died on the
Lancastria
. More than four hundred bodies lie in cemeteries in western France. The largest is looked after by the Commission on a hill in Pornic, where the 266 graves include men from the Royal Engineers, Pioneer Corps, Royal Armoured Corps, Royal Artillery, Royal Army Service Corps, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Ordnance Corps, Cheshire regiment, Royal Hussars as well as the navy and air force, and a 60-year-old steward from the
Lancastria
.

The village cemetery in Les Moutiers has a special wall
dedicated to forty-six men interred there, from the Royal Engineers, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Royal Army Service Corps, the Buffs and Sherwood Foresters. Forty-three of the dead from the
Lancastria
are buried at the cemetery on a hill behind La Baule, among them a 19-year-old from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a 50-year-old from the Pioneer Corps, and men from the RAF, the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Artillery and the Sherwood Foresters.

These bodies were reburied after the war. How they were treated at the time depended on the attitude of the German commanders in the occupied villages, and on the political sympathies of local mayors. Some refused to allow burial in cemeteries, so the corpses were put in trenches dug at the top of the beaches. At Clion-sur-Mer, on the other hand, the Mayor had trees cut down to make coffins.

In the coastal village of La Bernerie, 120 bodies were taken in coffins on carts from the sea front to the stone and concrete church, accompanied by a German guard of honour and a detachment of soldiers carrying a wreath. A crowd of local people and officials gathered, and absolution was sung while the bells tolled. The coffins were then lowered into a trench grave. A triple gun salute was fired. The senior German officer present said the soldiers who had just been buried ‘fought for their country with the same courage as we did for ours and our Führer’.

CHAPTER 13

Aftermath

TWO DAYS AFTER THE DISASTER
in St-Nazaire, a correspondent of
The Times
on the south-west coast of England wrote an account of what had happened, reporting that there had been about 5000 people on board the
Lancastria
– and that around half of them had been saved. The story told of a major who had ‘a miraculous escape’ when a bomb dropped through his cabin, of a lieutenant who had been standing on deck within a few feet of the first bomb but got out unscathed, and of civilians who swam to safety. Because of Churchill’s imposition of censorship, the story was not printed.

Telegrams from the military authorities to the families of those who had been on board the liner said simply that the men were missing in action, without giving any details of where they had been lost. So their relatives thought they had died in the Battle of France: Wally Smith’s parents were told he had perished at Dunkirk.

Finally, the news of the disaster appeared, not in Britain but across the Atlantic after the New York
Sun
got hold of the photographs taken by Frank Clements on the
Highlander
, and broke the story on 25 July. British correspondents promptly picked up the news, and cabled it to London where
The Times
ran a story quoting the New York paper. On 26 July the Ministry of Information announced the loss of the liner, and the press and the BBC finally reported what had happened at St-Nazaire more than five weeks earlier.

‘Troopship lost – Bombed in BEF evacuation – Heavy casualties,’ read the headline above the story by the aeronautical correspondent of
The Times
, which put casualties at about 2500 – one of the dead, it said, was a padre of an RAF squadron who had refused to leave St-Nazaire on a earlier boat because he did not want to abandon
a crate full of Bibles.
¹
The dispatch from the local reporter which had been held since 19 June was printed below.

The
Daily Mirror
splashed with the story and a photograph of the liner going down. It put the death toll at 2823. The
Daily Telegraph
estimated the number on board at 5350, of whom nearly 2500 were known to have been saved. ‘It is thought that others may have made their way ashore and fallen into enemy hands,’ the paper added.

The
Illustrated London News
ran a picture spread at the beginning of August headlined: ‘When a Troopship founders: The ordeal of “
Lancastria
” survivors’. The magazine,
War Illustrated
, followed with a feature showing photographs Clements had taken of bedraggled survivors crowding on to the
Highlander
. The headline read: ‘Men of the “
Lancastria
” Gritted Their Teeth and Smiled at Death’.