The Sinking of the Lancastria (3 page)

Grattidge asked what the destination would be.

‘The mission is urgent but unspecified,’ was the only reply he got.

At that moment, the Chief Officer had a sense that something appalling was about to happen. Still, ‘there was nothing I could do but obey orders’.

Some of the crew were still on board, including the Chief Engineer. Grattidge told him to get up steam. He telephoned Captain Sharp, and had telegrams sent to crew members who had left. ‘You are urgently requested to return to ship immediately,’ the cable read. ‘Acknowledge. Master.’

Loudspeaker messages were broadcast at Liverpool railway stations telling those waiting for trains to go back to the ship. Others were contacted by telephone. All but three returned in time for the midnight departure. Among them was a Liverpool flyweight boxer, Joe Curran, who had joined the Merchant Navy. The youngest was a 14-year-old deck boy; the oldest a 74-year-old deck hand.

One of the
Lancastria
’s waiters was in a Liverpool pub with his mother and father when two plain-clothes detectives came in and asked if Joe O’Brien was there. After O’Brien identified himself, he was told to report back to the liner.
Walking down to the docks with his father, they met the ship’s chef, Joe Pearse. O’Brien’s father asked Pearse to look after his son. ‘I sure will,’ the chef replied.

A Canadian sailor, Michael Sheehan, was drinking at a pub in Canning Place in Liverpool when he heard that the
Lancastria
needed to gather together crewmen in a hurry. He headed for the docks, and signed on.

While the ship was in Glasgow, one of the liner’s stewards, Tom Manning, had written to his brother-in-law, John, in Liverpool saying that he had got a job for him on board. Accompanied by his wife, John went to the docks on the night of 14 June intending to board the
Lancastria
. By the time they got to the quay, the ship was moving out. The couple stood and watched until she was out of sight.

Thomas Frodsham, known as ‘Shorty’, had been told by the
Lancastria
’s doctor to take time off for medical treatment. But no sooner had he reached his home in Birkenhead than he was informed that the liner was sailing that night. He asked his wife to pack him a small suitcase, and set off on the ferry back across the Mersey with his daughter, Leonora. Taking his leave, he assured her that he would be on deck beside a lifeboat at the first sign of trouble. ‘Don’t worry, and take care of your mum,’ he told 18-year-old Leonora. Then she kissed him, and cried all the way home. They would never see one another again.

Built in Dalmuir in Scotland by the William Beardmore Company, the
Lancastria
made her maiden voyage for the Cunard Steamship Company to Canada in 1924. Originally called the
Tyrrhenia
, she was known to her sailors as the Soup Tureen. Her name was then altered to the less obscure
Lancastria
. Though it might be easier to pronounce, the change was not welcome to the crew given the maritime superstition that doing this boded eventual disaster. But the worst that had happened to her was running aground on a pier in Liverpool harbour during a gale in 1936.

With a single funnel and two masts, the
Lancastria
was 582.5 feet long and seventy feet wide. She had five decks, the top one forty-three feet above the water line – the bridge from which Captain Sharp and Chief Officer Grattidge ran the vessel was another fifteen feet up. Her single funnel left room for 3000 square feet of deck for sports, bathing and sun. Her oil-burning engines meant that the top decks were free from the dust or cinders encountered on coal-fired ships. Advertisements made much of the way that white clothes could be worn for games of quoits and egg-and spoon-races without their wearers having to worry about being smudged by coal specks in the air.

There were two open-air swimming pools and a library stocked with the latest books. Special ventilators drew air down into staterooms. Her gymnasium had exercise bicycles, electrically powered horse-riding machines set to trot, canter or gallop, and a similarly designed electric camel whose use was said to be good for the figure.

The sixteen-foot-high dining room was decorated in Italian Renaissance style with semicircular arches set on small columns, a central dome, projecting balconies with wrought-iron fronts, and a thick carpet in geometric pattern. The ivory-white walls were inlaid with grey panels; the curtains were blue and gold. The verandah café resembled a courtyard garden, with trellis work, plants and wicker armchairs. The main lounge in French Renaissance style had oak panelling, mouldings, a barrel-vaulted ceiling, and a specially designed
dance floor. The promenade deck was fitted with potted trees and wicker chairs. The smoking room was flanked with marble pillars, and lit by a chandelier.

The
Lancastria
was, one crewman recalled, a ‘very, very happy ship’. But, despite her impressive interior, she was, by the standards of the top Blue Riband luxury liners that crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s, a bit small and a bit old. So she came to be used for cruises from New York to the Bahamas and the West Indies aimed at young American company managers, secretaries giving themselves a treat and honeymooning couples.

Receiving the call from Grattidge, Captain Sharp headed back across the Mersey from Birkenhead. He had taken command of the
Lancastria
only three months earlier. A solemn-looking and somewhat stout man of 5 feet 11 inches, Rudolph Sharp came from a seafaring family: his grandfather and uncle had both served with the Cunard Line, and one of his sons was in the navy. Graduating into the merchant marine in Liverpool in 1908, he had worked his way up on famous liners, including the
Lusitania
, which he captained until shortly before she was torpedoed in the Atlantic in 1915. He then commanded two other big liners, the
Mauretania
and
Olympia
, served on a third, the
Franconia
, and was staff captain on the
Queen Mary
. A Commander of the British Empire and member of the Royal Navy Reserve, Sharp sometimes appeared weary. He looked older than his fifty-five years.

With her captain and nearly all the crew on board, the order was given to sail down the west coast and round Cornwall to Plymouth. Nobody had any idea of their eventual destination, or why they had been called back to service.
Normally, the
Lancastria
blew her siren as she left Liverpool, but on 14 June 1940, she left silently, her departure cloaked in darkness.

Five weeks had passed since Adolf Hitler ended eight months of phoney war on his Western Front by launching what he called ‘the most decisive battle for the future of the German nation’. Tanks, planes, artillery and infantry carved through the Netherlands and Belgium, outflanking the French by striking through the wooded hills of the Ardennes to avoid the supposedly impregnable fortifications of the Maginot Line. Sweeping north, the Wehrmacht drove back the British Expeditionary Force from its positions in Belgium and north-east France. Then, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Hitler had hesitated.

The commander at the front, General von Rundstedt, had recommended that the tank advance should be stopped so that the slower-moving infantry could catch up. His superiors, including the Commander-in-Chief, von Brauchitsch, told him to press on. But the Führer backed von Rundstedt. So the Panzers halted, and 330,000 British and Allied troops escaped from Dunkirk in what Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister in the middle of May, called ‘a miracle of deliverance’ and the
Daily Mirror
described in a headline as ‘Bloody Marvellous’. Later, Hitler would say that he had wanted to spare Britain and to show that he was ready to reach a peaceful settlement. In fact, he may have believed that intense bombing raids by the Luftwaffe would force Britain to surrender – and have relished a chance to show his mastery over the army high command.

Behind them, the troops rescued in the armada of small
boats from Dunkirk left a country in collapse. The roads of France were clogged with refugees, moving through the summer heat in any form of transport available or, failing that, on foot. Millions fled the German advance. A Luftwaffe airman flying overhead described the scene below as ‘desolate and dreadful’. The French pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, compared it to a great anthill kicked over by a boot.

Refugees from the Low Countries poured into Paris by train, bewildered
and seeking shelter in France.
²
At the Gare d’Austerlitz in the capital, 20,000 people were waiting for trains heading south at any one time. The crowd at the Gare Montparnasse, which served Brittany, stretched for a kilometre. The population of Lille, in the path of the German advance, dropped from 200,000 to 20,000. In the cathedral city of Chartres, only 800 of the 23,000 inhabitants stayed. In the eastern city of Troyes, thirty people remained.

Cars and lorries abandoned when they ran out of fuel stood on the roadside beside dead horses. Dive-bombing by Stuka planes added to the panic. So did rumours of fifth columnists, and of German paratroopers landing behind the lines disguised as nuns. The Interior Ministry questioned 62,000 suspected enemy agents, but detained only 500. In the northern town of Abbeville, twenty-two foreigners were shot out of hand.

With police joining the fleeing throng, law and order broke down. In one town in the Loiret department south of Paris, a local official reported that refugees were ‘killing the chickens, the rabbits, the cattle [and] carrying off drinks and goods and bedclothes’. Families became separated on the road. Farmers demanded payment for water from their wells. ‘Poor devils,’ a British general wrote. ‘It was a horrible sight.’

Blame for the collapse of France was laid on politicians, Communists, Jews and Freemasons as a proud nation sought reasons for its implosion, and the military leaders tried to explain away their inability to cope with the mechanised and aerial warfare pioneered by Germany. Military failure fostered an already latent sense of inferiority among the French in the face of resurgent Germany. Politicians were regarded with cynicism or contempt, and defeatism spread.

After Dunkirk, a new candidate joined the scapegoats. Britain, which had sent some half-a-million men to the continent following the declaration of war in September 1939, came to be depicted as an untrustworthy ally which had got France into the war and was now abandoning her at the crucial moment. A senior official remarked that, with the evacuation, Britain had already donned mourning clothes for France. Fearing the effect on morale, the high command asked Churchill not to say how many men had been taken off the beaches at Dunkirk – the Prime Minister declined to comply.

Though 100,000 of their soldiers had been among those evacuated, the French could only see the withdrawal as fresh proof of the validity of their description of Britain as a perfidious nation. The Permanent Under Secretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, noted that, if Britain did send men and planes back across the Channel, it would not ‘prevent
the French reviling us’.
³
The American journalist Clare Booth recorded growing hatred of the French for the English. The pro-appeasement French minister Paul Baudouin noted bitterly that Britain had saved 80 per cent of its men while France
lost half of its troops.
⁴

For the British, having got so many men home safely was a triumph in defeat despite the loss of 68,000 troops killed
or captured in Belgium and France. For the French, it was made all the worse by the ringing declarations from Britain’s Prime Minister that his nation would go on fighting whatever happened across the Channel; at one point, the French embassy in London made it known that it did not regard this as ‘exactly encouraging’ for its country’s own efforts.

The Germans did all they could to sow discord among their opponents. Leaflets dropped by their planes and broadcasts by Nazi radio stations in French made much of the phrase ‘
filer à l’anglaise
’ (to take French leave). Britain, it was said, would fight to the last Frenchman.

In London, the British Cabinet did not speak openly of a French defeat. Instead, ministers referred only to ‘a certain eventuality’ which, they feared, could lead to Britain being attacked from two directions – across the Channel from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and over the North Sea from Norway. Reports from the war front made British generals increasingly pessimistic about their ally, and increasingly unwilling to send reinforcements back to France. In his diary, Alexander Cadogan reflected a widespread view when he wrote that, rather than dispatching help, ‘I’d really rather cut loose and concentrate on
defence of these islands.’
⁵

Churchill, who was also Minister of Defence, was torn between two conflicting objectives. He wanted to keep France fighting, but he knew the need to conserve men and supplies – and, above all, planes – to defend Britain if the battle across the Channel was lost. The way France was crumbling could only arouse his worst fears. On 10 June, he set out for the airport to fly to Paris for a meeting with the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud. But he was told that the government had left the French capital, fearing it was
about to fall to the Germans. ‘What the Hell?’ the Prime Minister said, and changed his plan to head for the Loire Valley where Reynaud and his ministers had set up temporary quarters.

On arrival at an airfield outside Orléans, Churchill walked around leaning on a stick; according to one observer, he was beaming as if this was the only place he wanted to be. However, his military liaison officer, General Edward Spears, noted that the French colonel who drove them from the airfield ‘might have been welcoming poor relations to a funeral reception’. At the red brick Château du Muguet at Briare, east of Orléans, where the talks took place, the French sat with set white faces along one side of the conference table, their eyes cast down. ‘They looked for all the world like prisoners hauled up from some deep dungeon to hear an
inevitable verdict,’ wrote Spears.
⁶