The Sinking of the Lancastria (6 page)

Having got to temporary safety, they peeled off from the convoy and went west, their lorry still carrying its load of explosives. Bypassing Abbeville where the battle was raging, they got over the River Somme. Then they headed cross-country to Normandy, using small country roads to avoid the Germans. On one occasion, their progress blocked by the destruction of a bridge, they cut down trees to enable them to get across a small river. Along the way, they met soldiers from the 51st Highland Division en route for St-Valéry, but decided to go off on their own rather than heading there.

French and Belgian stragglers joined the party to swell it to about thirty. One day, coming round a corner, they saw tanks, and German troops grouped round the armoured vehicles. Getting as close as they could, they threw hand grenades and fired their guns at the enemy. One man clambered up on a tank, and dropped a grenade inside. Then William Knight and his comrades retreated with three Germans prisoners, whom they handed over to a group of French soldiers having lunch in a field on a table set with a cloth.

Moving further west, Knight’s unit ran into more German armoured vehicles and motor cyclists with machine guns who took them captive. They were ordered to sit on the side of the
narrow road while the armoured cars drove off, leaving two motorcyclists to watch the prisoners.

Knight shouted out insults about Germans in English to test whether the guards spoke his language. There was no response, so he told the others that he was going to jump a guard, and that they should deal with the second man. Taking out his cigarette case, he tried to lure the first guard close to him by offering him a cigarette; but the German did not smoke. Then Knight indicated that he wanted to defecate. The guard signalled his agreement. Going to a bush, Knight started to undo his trousers. The guard came across to watch him. Knight leaped at the man, and got his arm round his throat. The rest of the unit jumped on the other guard, battering him to death.

As Knight put his weight on top of the first man’s gun, the German drew a trench knife from his boot. The blade went through the Englishman’s hand, and into his chin. Fighting for his life, Knight found the guard’s jugular, and pressed it till he passed out.

The party got into its truck, drove to the main road and turned left towards Rouen. His companions wrapped field dressings round Knight’s bleeding wounds. On the way, the truck sped past advancing Germans, and got across a bridge over the Seine to join British troops south of the river.

Not wanting to be caught there, they headed off again, aiming for the ancient town of Beauvais. Hearing that the Germans had taken it, they went south towards Compiègne. However, that, too, was about to fall, so they drove to the walled city of Senlis where they handed some of their explosives to the French army to help blow up a house that would impede the defenders’ field of fire. In return, they were given a lot of nasty wine.

They debated trying to get to Switzerland, but decided to drive the fifty miles to Paris, instead. On 11 June, on the way to the capital, Knight passed his thirtieth birthday. That night, they were put up in a farmhouse where they enjoyed a bath and a good hot dinner. Two days later, they got to the suburbs of Paris – just as the Germans were entering the city from the other side. So they decided to go west, reaching Le Mans on 14 June, and staying the night at a big British army dump that had been set up on the motor race track, the first part of their escape from Dunkirk completed.

For some British units, the retreat was eased with the local wines or stronger alcohol. Military canteens and NAAFI stores had been left open, and men were taking what they could find. The driver of one air force lorry got so drunk that he could not stand up even after his head was held under a cold water tap. More soberly, others crammed sweets and cigarettes from Salvation Army shops into their kitbags. A Royal Engineers unit found a radio in one abandoned store, and got its first news of Dunkirk by listening to Churchill’s speech announcing that the BEF had been successfully evacuated from France.

Outside Orléans, Sergeant Macpherson, who would share his life jacket with a man who could not swim as they escaped from the sinking
Lancastria
, was posted to an RAF base on a tributary to the River Loire at the village of Olivet. He and his colleagues regularly crossed the Loiret in a dinghy to what he recalled as ‘a road house with a funny English name’ to eat and drink white wine. Returning one night, Macpherson took up the stance of a Viking figurehead at the front of the little boat, brandishing two litre wine bottles; when his companions rocked the dinghy, he fell into the water.

As the Germans advanced towards Orléans, most of the RAF men headed west. Left behind to burn the unit’s papers, Macpherson crossed the Loiret for the last time on his own in the dinghy to eat two pâté de foie gras sandwiches at the roadhouse, washed down by white wine. He finished off with liqueurs, each glass costing him the equivalent of three pence.

While eating his sandwiches, he got into conversation with an American woman who had worked in a British servicemen’s club in Paris. She told him how bad the military situation was. Leaving her, Macpherson rowed back across the river to burn more documents. Then he borrowed a bicycle to go to a nearby village to collect food and drink. The road was crowded with refugees; at one point, a car knocked him off his bicycle.

Macpherson drank more wine in the village, and then rode back to join the remaining members of his unit whom he found at the base eating enormous doorstep sandwiches of corned beef, and sharing huge mugs of strong, scalding tea. Feeling rather ill, he got into the back of a big French army lorry where he found a large armchair, in which he sat down to rest.

Further west, life was uneventful for British troops stationed in and around Nantes, a major port sitting astride the wide River Loire, forty miles from the sea with elegant avenues and squares of eighteenth-century houses built on the proceeds of the slave trade. Jack Ratcliffe, of the Royal Ordnance Corps, who worked as a clerk in a warehouse, recalled that the daily routine consisted of ‘drill, breakfast, drill, parade to depot, lunch, parade back, until 5.30 p.m., march back for mug of tea, bread and cheese, fill in sandbags to defend the city, working until dark’. On Sunday, they went to the Protestant church. Generally, they were ‘having fun, all men together’.

Major Fred Hahn passed his time watching tennis at the city’s university stadium. A First World War veteran from Cheadle in Lancashire and commander of a divisional ordnance workshop, Hahn made contact with the local fraternity of Masons, and joined them in a group photograph, the Mayor sitting in the middle of the front row.

Though the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, had warned that the British camps in Nantes would be bombed, there was no sign of the enemy. French newspapers and the radio reproduced optimistic military communiqués or simply told readers, ‘
Rien à signaler
’ – ‘Nothing to report.’ Everybody believed that the great Maginot defensive line along the traditional German invasion route would hold the enemy back with its huge concrete emplacements, heavy guns and underground railways. In Nantes, the British met at their club as usual, and life was calm.

Then the refugees started to arrive on trains and down the roads along the Loire. The first, from Belgium, were no particular cause for concern – everybody knew fighting was going on there. But, before long, people began to come from northern France, and, one resident recalled, ‘horror of horrors from Paris’. Fifth columnists stirred up anxiety, and German planes flew over the city.

Donald Draycott, the RAF ground crewman from Derbyshire who was to be surprised at how calm he felt as he watched people jumping off the sinking
Lancastria
, sensed some hostility from the local people when he visited the main theatre in Nantes. Also, ‘when a bus came along and the bus was pretty well full, they’d push you out of the queue and get on themselves,’ he recalled. But then, he reflected: ‘I think it’s part of the French characteristics, they did it to others as well.’

Horace Lumsden, who had left school at fifteen-and-a-half to join the Ordnance Corps as a bugler and clerk, had been in Nantes since the first BEF base was established in the city in 1939. He had celebrated his twenty-third birthday there at the beginning of June. He found the French very friendly, particularly the wife of the owner of the Café des Jardinières, but he noted some friction, too. In part, this was because the British troops were better paid than their French counterparts, and so had more money to spend.

There was also rivalry over female company. Many local men had gone to the front, leaving their wives alone. Some foreign soldiers had affairs with Frenchwomen – one resulted in the birth of a son months after the British had left. French families sometimes objected to these liaisons on behalf of the absent husbands or boyfriends. One of Horace Lumsden’s fellow soldiers was at a young woman’s house when a relative came round with friends. She was married, and her husband was away with his unit. The Frenchman beat the British trooper so badly that his face was reduced to a mass of pulp.

Nantes and St-Nazaire had been used to bring supplies and vehicles into France since the outbreak of war, and the British set up a network of support and repair bases in the area. In the Gâvre Forest, they laid down a roadway of stones and concrete foundations for hangars and for two block houses. By a dirt track in another forest, a unit from the Royal Engineers went to work to build a railway line. Next to their headquarters was a small farmhouse. The farmer’s wife cooked the soldiers eggs and chips. Her 13-year-old son, Laurent Couedel, whom the troops called Laurie, watched
the men at work, striking up a friendship as he chatted in French they could not understand.

One base was in St-Etienne de Montluc, a large village with a small château and an imposing white calvary beside the railway line to St-Nazaire and the Atlantic coast. The men of the Number One Heavy Repair Shop of the Royal Army Service Corps repaired damaged vehicles brought in by rail, and serviced vehicles from Britain, in workshops set up in the pigsties of an abandoned farm.

The 400 men were a cheerful group, taking as their emblem Happy from the Seven Dwarfs, whom they depicted carrying a spanner and a brace inside a circle inscribed with the motto ‘Whistle While You Work’. They drank and ate fish and chips in the Lion d’Or café opposite the large stone church. A touring concert party entertained them for a time. French women cooked their rations into tasty meals in local homes. At Christmas, they marched through the streets, and attended a midnight mass that seemed to go on for ever – afterwards, there was an early breakfast in the village. The soldiers spoke no French when they arrived, but learned a few words including ‘Voulez-vous promener avec moi?’ to say to the local girls.

The barn where the repair men slept with a view of the sky through holes was baptised ‘Holden’s Hotel’, apparently after one of their number – a sign with the name was put up outside the door. To wash off the grease and dirt after the day’s work, they heated water in a big pot on a stove – but it did not go far. Their latrines were in the field alongside. In the lavatory one day, one of the mechanics, Stan Flowers, found a copy of the
Faversham News
, from his home town in Kent. He made inquiries, and discovered that there was another Faversham man in the unit, called Walter James
Smith, whose mother ran a hairdresser’s in the main street of the town. They met up, and became fast friends.

A communal mess hall was set up for all the troops posted to St-Etienne. Outside was a sty for a pig which the local people had given to the British troops. Each morning, the soldiers fed it porridge after calling out ‘Morning, Pig.’ One day, the pig looked grumpy.

‘What’s wrong, Pig?’ one man called out.

‘Not enough sugar in the porridge,’ another replied.

Despite their tranquil lives, some of the men grew concerned at the way the war was going. Alec Cuthbert, the carpenter from Lincolnshire who heard about the German advance on the BBC, could not understand why they were not being evacuated. There was no way the unit could resist the Panzers if they reached St-Etienne. But, instead of being moved, they were called out on parade each morning as though everything was normal.

The Pay Corps private Sidney Dunmall, who would be pulled free from the suction of the sinking
Lancastria
on a plank, was posted to the small town of Pornichet on the coast just west of St-Nazaire. He had read about Dunkirk in the
Continental Daily Mail
, and had been to the cinema to see a Deanna Durbin film,
Three Smart Girls
. He and his friends ate in a forces canteen run by a local woman in a château at the end of a long drive. They found the eggs and chips served there very nice. One day, the woman shrieked: ‘Paris has fallen. Paris has fallen. What are we going to do? All is lost.’

Dunmall and his friends went to the counter to console her. They said they had heard that a large contingent of
Canadians was arriving at Cherbourg. ‘Don’t worry,’ they told her. ‘It’s not the end.’ What they did not know was that the Canadians had been turned round and sent back to Britain in the face of the German advance.

As the men walked up the drive after finishing their meal, their duty sergeant rode in on his bicycle, shouting: ‘ Where the Hell have you been? Get back to your billets immediately. There’s a flap on.’

They hurried to their billets in the Hôtel des Étrangers, but no orders were awaiting them, so they went to bed – Dunmall shared a four-poster with four or five other men. During the night, an air-raid warning sounded. They got up and their sergeant major commanded them to go out into the road without stopping to get dressed. So they formed up in the drizzling rain, some in their pyjamas. The sergeant major marched them a couple of hundred yards to slit trenches half full of water. Sheltering there, they heard a throbbing noise overhead, followed by a tremendous explosion. When everything was quiet, they went back to bed. In the morning, they saw a big crater in the beach.