The Sinking of the Lancastria (5 page)

They were often poorly armed, and had received little or no combat training. The British high command showed scant interest in them – they were referred to as ‘the Grocers’.

Many had been stationed in areas which had not been attacked, or had moved away from the main line of the enemy advance. One unit of the Royal East Kent Regiment spent a
month being shuttled round France by rail in cattle trucks without seeing any fighting – its men were led to understand that a second British Expeditionary Force was on its way and that they would join it. The senior officers of one RAF unit, whose airfield was guarded by French soldiers armed with rifles dating from the war of 1870 against Germany, drove about in a Bentley, at one point saving the life of the gunner from a downed German plane whom French peasants had wanted to kill with their farm implements.

Three divisions saw action at the collapsing front. One of them, the 51st Highland Division made an excellent impression on the British commander, General Henry Karslake. But he was shocked by others he came across. ‘Their behaviour
was terrible!’ he noted.
¹⁴
‘From all sides I heard that this was typical of the New Army Discipline, as a result of the Democratising of the Army.’ General Karslake also came to the conclusion that the men were being given excessive quantities of rations.

After withdrawing from their original position in the Saar, the Highlanders had been isolated from the rest of the BEF by the German drive for the coast. They were dog tired, and their numbers were depleted by battle casualties. The commander, General Victor Fortune, called the front he was meant to hold south of the Channel coast ‘ridiculous’. His ‘dead beat’ men, he noted in a letter, had not had a proper night’
s rest for six weeks.
¹⁵
The remnants of one battalion had sheltered under hedges from an air attack for ten minutes – as the bombs fell, the commanding officer and half his men fell asleep.

‘I feel it is time we explained to the [French] Commander-in-Chief and Army Commander that there is a limit to gambling with troops on a wide frontage,’ Fortune added in
a report. ‘Also please some air [support]! . . . Forgive me for being vindictive but I do not want to see 51st destroyed and useless for the future which it will be at the present rate. I am quite willing to ask them for a good deal, but I think they have been asked for too much.’ Weygand took to
calling the Highlanders’ commander ‘Misfortune’.
¹⁶

The division was ordered to head for the Channel coast to be evacuated. Its original destination was Le Havre, but this was switched to the small Norman port of St-Valéry-en-Caux. A fleet of rescue ships set out to pick it up. Most of the boats lacked wireless communications and, when fog covered the sea, they were cut off from one another. Forty thousand French troops on the flank surrendered, and Rommel’s Panzers occupied St-Valéry before the Highlanders could embark, shutting them into an isolated pocket. A few British troops escaped by running for six miles under machine-gun and mortar fire until they reached the port of Veules-les-Roses where ships were waiting. In all, this evacuation fleet took off 2137 British and 1184 French troops. But General Fortune was forced to surrender, and was photographed looking disconsolate on the quayside with a smiling Rommel beside him. Eight thousand British soldiers were taken prisoner. Churchill called it a ‘brutal disaster’. Half a century later, a granite monument was erected on the towering white cliffs overlooking the pebble beach from which the Scottish division had not escaped, with the inscription ‘In proud and grateful memory of the 51st (Highland) Division who gave their lives during the war 1939–45’. Down below, one of the main streets in St-Valéry is named
l’Avenue de la 51ème
.

An ill-equipped scratch force known as the Beauman Division, from the name of its commander, was put together
from various British units to help defend the Norman capital of Rouen on the River Seine. Thinly stretched over a fifty-mile front, it was told to destroy bridges, and lay anti-tank mines. A sergeant with the division noted in his diary that, as they moved to the front, they passed a stream of French refugees who put their thumbs up, ‘even the kids’. In villages, girls blew them kisses. But they were soon swept back by the Panzer advance – in all, the division had just twenty anti-tank guns.

Further forward, the 1st Armoured Division, which had been sent to France in the spring, had never had time to organise itself properly. One brigade only got its equipment a day or two before crossing the Channel. Bicycles for messengers were still in their wrappings. None of the men had been trained to
fire an anti-tank gun.
¹⁷

The divisional commander, Roger Evans, decided to make a stand on the railway east of Rouen. Weygand told him that the struggle for the city would be decisive. Since the French could not produce any more troops for their Tenth Army in the sector, the outcome would depend on the 1st Armoured, he added.

Evans pointed out the extreme weakness of his force which faced far heavier and more numerous German tanks. Weygand replied that, if the British could not stop the enemy with its armoured vehicles, they ‘must stop him with bare hands and bite him like a dog’.

As the Tenth Army disintegrated, Evans prepared to retreat across the Seine. He watched French soldiers pouring to the rear, and looked in vain for any spirit of resistance. ‘No defences were prepared,’ a British report read. ‘No wire or anti-tank mines were sited and no trenches were dug. Nor was there apparently any offensive spirit among commanders or
troops . . . it is not too much to say that an atmosphere of inevitable defeat was growing.’

In adversity, relations between senior officers in the Allied armies grew frayed. A French general accused Beauman of cowardice, and dismissed his soldiers as ‘a thoroughly undisciplined rabble’. Another said Victor Fortune was guilty of treachery, and should be court-martialled. Karslake concluded that this was part of ‘a definite policy instigated by General Weygand’, presumably to find a scapegoat for the reverses suffered by his own forces.

In a bid to raise French morale, a Canadian division left Britain to cross the Channel. Landing at Brest, it moved through the Breton capital of Rennes and headed for the city of Laval on the line of the German advance. But, at the same time, Operation Cycle was launched to move more than 12,000 troops by sea from the big port of Le Havre in Normandy to the greater safety of Cherbourg on the peninsula sticking out into the Channel. Sixty-seven merchant ships and 140 small craft were drafted in for the task. The nature and pace of the German campaign made military planning difficult, and Churchill said the British forces should no longer accept orders from the French ‘who had let us down badly’. But, while the front-line soldiers were either evacuated or captured, more than 100,000 of their comrades were still forgotten in France.

Some of them followed the progress of the war by listening to the radio or picking up copies of the
Continental Daily Mail
they found in shops in towns near their bases before the occupation of Paris. Alec Cuthbert, a carpenter from Holbeach in Lincolnshire serving with a vehicle repair unit
outside Nantes, heard of the German advance on the BBC, but still ‘hadn’t a clue about what was going on’.

Many remained in the dark about the progress of the fighting or depended on the rumour mill. Some had not even heard about the evacuation from Dunkirk. ‘My time in France was nothing but retreat, anxiety, lack of knowledge of what was going on, communications were almost non-existent, fighter control as such had vanished,’ an RAF fighter pilot recalled.

Writing in a black-covered copy of the
Stockfeeder’s Diary
, wireless operator Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones noted:

Neville Chesterton, a 19-year-old former railway clerk from Wednesbury in Staffordshire, who found France very flat and uninteresting, sensed that nobody knew where his fifty-strong Royal Engineers unit was going or what it was meant to be doing. As the men headed westwards towards the Atlantic coast, they heard rumours that the fighting was going badly, though the word ‘Dunkirk’ was not mentioned. Eventually
they reached a camp thirty miles from the port of St-Nazaire where they practised rifle shooting and undertook guard duties. German planes flew very high overhead from time to time, but they saw no RAF aircraft. ‘This is a most peculiar war,’ Lance Corporal Chesterton thought, ‘nothing seems to be happening.’

On the other side of the country, a few RAF units were still operating in eastern France, and men gathered at one airfield to see off the New Zealander ace, ‘Cobber’ Kain, a glamorous figure who had chalked up seventeen ‘kills’ of enemy planes and was engaged to a well-known actress. He was heading back to England for leave. Before departing, he gave a flying display in his Hurricane. As he made a low roll, the tip of one wing hit the ground, the plane crashed and Kain was killed – not having heard the news, men on the hull of the
Lancastria
would call desperately for him to fly in to shoot down the German planes strafing them.

Some of those fleeing the enemy were caught in streams of refugees that were attacked by German dive bombers, their sirens sending out terrifying banshee screams as they swooped. A British dispatch rider found himself in a traffic jam at a village crossroads when the planes attacked. Swept from his motorcycle by the impact of the explosions, he landed beside a boy of about five whose legs had been blown off and who had been blinded in one eye. Taking the child in his arms, the soldier could see that he was dying in terrible pain; so he drew his revolver and shot him – the memory drove him mad.

Many of the British troops moving from the east of France to greater safety in the west were in organised convoys of vehicles, or were put on trains. But some went freelance. A sergeant from an RAOC Light Aid Detachment stole a bicycle
and rode across France from Lille; on the way, he saw a group of men from the Pioneer Corps attacking German tanks with their picks and shovels.

At the wheel of his wireless truck, 21-year-old Leonard Forde became separated from his convoy as it headed out of eastern France. Strafing attacks forced him to jump repeatedly from the cab on his lorry, known in service slang as a ‘gin palace’. With his crew, he took to small roads to escape enemy attention. Life became a game of hide-and-seek. Reaching Le Mans, he began to operate the truck’s wireless monitoring gear. As his radio chattered away in high speed Morse code, he noticed that the strong signals all had German call signs. It was time to move further west.

Wilfred Oldham’s Royal Signals unit had been sent to the Champagne town of Bouzy-sur-Marne to work with RAF detachments posted to eastern France before the German advance. He and his colleagues were housed in the premises of the Moët et Chandon wine firm: Wilf’s office was above the grape presses. Across the road was the headquarters of another great champagne house, Veuve Clicquot. The British bought champagne for nine pence a bottle.

At the end of May, the unit was ordered to withdraw. Under the command of an Australian major, the men took a dozen new American-made lorries from an abandoned air force base, filling the tanks with petrol and arming themselves with a dozen Lewis guns. Having no idea of where to head, they wandered round northern France. On the way, they ran into some French troops who told them about Dunkirk. After reaching Le Mans, their commander suggested driving to St-Nazaire. Their improvised journey to the west was typical of
the independent British units seeking a way out of France, ultimately taking them to the last escape hatch left.

William Philip Knight, who would be so frightened by the sight of a man disappearing in flames below the oily sea off St-Nazaire, was a sergeant in a General Construction Company of the Royal Engineers and an explosives expert. At the Dunkirk evacuation, his six-man group was detailed to patrol the perimeter of a British position in a lorry loaded with explosives to use against the advancing enemy. On 1 June, they staged an ambush for German tanks and motorcyclists. But their rifles were no match for the tanks, and they were forced to retreat, abandoning their lorry when it broke down.

Missing the evacuation from the beaches, they found themselves in a village which came under German attack. The six men dived into a cellar of a demolished house. They discussed whether to surrender, but decided to stay where they were. Early the next morning, Knight climbed the stairs from the cellar to see what was happening outside. The sky was black with planes dropping bombs. Looking down to the harbour, he saw clouds of dust and smoke, flying bricks and debris. For the first time in his life, he felt afraid, realising that only an Act of God would save them.

Just then, Knight heard a scurry of feet. Two civilians covered in muck and dust practically fell on him at the top of the stairs. The three of them went down into the cellar. Then one of the Frenchmen, who spoke quite good English, guided them to safety through back lanes and small holdings; at one point, they crossed a canal by climbing over trucks which had been tipped into the water.

The next morning, the men got back to their lorry which they repaired. They drove off towards the inland town of Hesdin, turning off the road in the evening, intending to
spend the night hidden in a wood. At that moment, they heard the noise of engines coming down the road – a procession of captured French and British trucks driven by Germans.

Counting on being taken for part of the convoy to get through the lines, the British joined up as the last vehicle. They drove for about forty miles without lights, and passed the enemy sentry posts. Nobody challenged them – the darkness hid their uniforms.