The Sinking of the Lancastria (8 page)

So the call went out for ships to join in the final rescue mission from France, and the
Lancastria
set out on her fateful voyage.

CHAPTER 2

Saturday, 15 June 1940

THE BRITISH GARRISON
command in St-Nazaire had been told that, if an evacuation was decided, it would receive one of two signals. PIP would mean it should arrange to leave France in twenty-four hours. PIP PIP would mean that it had forty-eight hours. At ten in the morning on 15 June, it picked up the single PIP signal. In his camp, the wireless operator, Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones, noted in his diary: ‘June 15. Two letters from my darling. Evacuating, stand
by for moving off.’
¹

As the
Lancastria
had sailed through the night to Plymouth, her crew saw other boats following the same course. They could sense that they were part of a big operation from the lights of the ships heading down the west coast or coming out of the Bristol Channel. Following Churchill’s telephone conversation with Alan Brooke, vessels were
already sailing across the Channel to pick up men from Cherbourg in Normandy, and in Brittany from St Malo and from Brest at the tip of the peninsula.

Few naval craft were to be seen. Nearly all the vessels were merchant ships. Some had once carried fruit from Africa; others had been passenger boats. It hardly looked a fleet constituted to go into battle, particularly not a battle that was being so decisively lost. The crew of one destroyer had been told that the operation was merely ‘to embark surplus base personnel’.

While the
Lancastria
waited in Plymouth for sailing orders, naval officials came aboard to inspect the accommodation that would be available for troops being evacuated from France. Chief Officer Harry Grattidge looked up the ridge of the Hoe above the harbour, where Francis Drake had played his famous game of bowls as the Spanish Armada approached. Girls in summer dresses were idling in the summer sun. To Grattidge,
they seemed ‘almost unreasonably beautiful’.
²

Across the Channel, advocates of an armistice were increasing the pressure on Premier Paul Reynaud by the hour. Hope of American intervention had been dashed by a message from Roosevelt who expressed moral support, but, because of anti-war sentiment at home, asked that his message should not be made public. In a follow-up message to Churchill, the President made plain that there was no question of being able to commit his country to military involvement, even if he had wished to do so. That was a matter for Congress, and Congress, clearly, would agree to no such thing.

The figurehead of France’s peace party, Marshal Pétain, threatened to quit the government unless an armistice was sought. At one point the ancient, white-haired soldier drafted a letter of resignation in protest at the delay in opening negotiations with the Germans. Reynaud changed his mind constantly, badgered by his mistress to end the war: in search of a little rest, he took the line of least resistance with her, telling a friend: ‘You don’t know what a man who has been hard at work all day will put up with to make sure of an
evening’s peace.’
³

After the French Cabinet approved a motion to explore German terms for an armistice, the Premier sent the leading military advocate of resistance, Charles de Gaulle, to London in a final bid to try to get Churchill to provide assistance. Before leaving Bordeaux, the 49-year-old general had dinner at the Hôtel Splendide. Pétain was sitting at the next table. At the end of his meal, de Gaulle went over to shake the Marshal’s hands. Neither said anything. It was the last time they met.

Since no plane was available, de Gaulle set out to drive with an aide through the night up the west coast to Brittany where he would take a ship for England. On the way, he called in to see his dying mother, and his wife and two daughters. Reaching Brest, he boarded one of the last naval boats to leave the harbour, the destroyer,
Milan
. Arriving on British soil, he took the train to London where he lodged at the Hyde Park Hotel beside the French embassy.

Far from being ready to send in the men and planes France wanted, the British were concentrating on getting as many as possible back across the Channel. Having won his
argument with Churchill, Alan Brooke was intent on saving the maximum number. He had no interest in fighting the enemy or staying in France while guns and supplies were loaded on evacuation ships. The political difficulty, he recorded in his diary, was ‘to extract the existing forces without giving the impression that we were abandoning our ally in
its hour of need.’
⁴
Still, his own movements left no doubt about his intentions as he shifted his headquarters each day from Le Mans to Vitré and then to Redon, north of St-Nazaire.

After the losses at Dunkirk, and given its other obligations, the Royal Navy could not spare enough ships to set up a proper convoy system, so the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, Admiral James, decided to run continuous flotillas across the Channel with available warships acting as a screen and providing escorts.

Patriotic feeling was running high, and fishermen all along the south-west coast volunteered to help. There were offers of boats from Brixham, Dartmouth, Exmouth, Falmouth, Fowey, Teignmouth and Torquay. A trawler company in Torbay, which had sent ships to Dunkirk, said it wanted to join in again. ‘They arrived faster than we could deal with
them,’ a naval report recorded.
⁵
‘Improvisation was the order of the day.’ By 15 June, a fleet had been assembled of 50 merchant vessels, 23 destroyers and 20 armed trawlers.

Known as Operation Aerial, the evacuations from the major ports of Normandy and Brittany were strikingly successful. The official British naval history reports that 186,700 British, French and Polish
soldiers and airmen were rescued.
⁶
Some boarded French boats. In one case, men from the Royal Engineers had to brandish a pistol to get the
captain to take them; there was so little space on board that they had to abandon their kitbags and their last sight of France was of people on the quayside grabbing the contents.

There was no recorded loss of life in these evacuations from the main ports, and no major damage to vessels. The haste meant, however, that valuable arms and equipment which could have been taken off were left behind. For all the speed of their advance, the Germans were not as close to the north-western coast as the British command believed because of faulty intelligence and the general air of panic gripping France.

Some of the soldiers who had embarked from southern England the previous day never landed in France – their ships were told to return home. The Canadians, who had advanced to Laval in the Mayenne department, were instructed to turn round and head for St-Malo when they were some twenty miles from the German vanguard – their total losses were six men who went missing somewhere in their journey through France. A Canadian colonel commented acidly that the British command appeared to be in ‘abject fear’ of being overtaken by the Germans. The withdrawal was, he added, ‘conducted as a rout’. The official naval historian, Captain Roskill, noted in his account of the war at sea that ‘
the end was premature’.
⁷
Still, it saved well over 100,000 men for the defence of Britain against the expected German invasion, and for later service in Europe and the Middle East.

French newspapers were still printing official communiqués reporting that the defenders were inflicting heavy casualties on the Wehrmacht in the east, but nobody believed them any more. German planes dominated the skies and Panzer units forged at will across the country. Though there were
instances of resistance – at Tours, 300 North African troops held up the Germans for three days in a battle that set the city on fire – the Maginot Line had been pierced and the enemy took the highly symbolic First World War strong point of Verdun. Rather than flying into battle, French planes were being towed on long trailers to the south-west. The ‘certain eventuality’ envisaged after Dunkirk was fast becoming reality.

In the early stages of Operation Aerial, 84,700 men were taken off by evacuation ships from Brest, Cherbourg and St-Malo. Another 21,300 were rescued from smaller ports. That left almost 50,000 men in the far west of France round Nantes and St-Nazaire at the mouth of the River Loire. Meeting an hour after receiving the PIP signal, the officers of the St-Nazaire garrison drew up plans to ship them to safety on the evacuation flotilla that would be making its way round the Brittany peninsula from southern England.

A captain from the garrison went into the town to make arrangements to withdraw the remains of 80 million francs the British had deposited at the Banque de France office to cover their expenditure. A young woman member of the bank staff called Denise Petit remembered him as having been ‘so refined, delicate, thoroughbred’.

‘What will happen to us, Captain, with the Germans?’ she asked.

‘Don’t despair,’ he replied. ‘We will be back. Sometimes England loses the first round, sometimes even the second one, but never the third one.’

He gave Denise a small photograph with his signature. Two
days later, the Captain boarded the
Lancastria
, and was believed to have been among those who died.

Troops from inland began to get to St-Nazaire on 15 June. Denise Petit watched them ‘arriving from all sides, abandoning their supplies and equipment’. Most were directed to a half-finished airfield outside the town. Many more were still on their way across western France under the summer sun.

As they abandoned their bases, the British broke up and burned equipment, vehicles and stores to prevent them falling into German hands. Some fitted themselves with new boots from abandoned army stores for the trek to the sea. They slept in fields or village squares. One artillery unit, which had come all the way from Champagne, was woken during the night by a town crier announcing that Paris was surrounded: the soldiers got to their feet and hurried on. Another unit passed a travelling circus, led by six elephants ridden by mahouts. Heading west by train, Sherwood Foresters found the track cut by bombs. They repaired the line and, when the driver refused to go on, persuaded him to change his mind by sticking a pistol in his ribs. Moving more slowly on foot from Rouen, other Foresters stopped from time to time to play housey-housey with their remaining francs.

‘Cobber’ Kain’s unit, the 73rd squadron of the RAF, was among those moving west. Instead of joining the retreat, wireless operator Vic Flowers, who had been in the crowd that watched the ace plunge to his death, volunteered to go to a base from which planes were still due to fly against the Germans. An officer ordered him to take the place of a
wounded air gunner on a Fairey Battle bomber waiting to take off. Flowers said he had never been up in an aircraft and had no idea how to fire a machine gun. The officer insisted that he get in, but Flowers managed to disappear from the scene though, as he later recalled, ‘the penalties for failing to comply with an order on the field of battle were very severe’.

He got a ride on a lorry to another airfield where he was put to work unloading hundreds of four-gallon tins of high octane fuel from a wagon which caught fire as the last few cans were being taken off. On 15 June, Flowers and other men from ground crews were told to board available trucks, and make for Nantes. On the way, they passed airfields with rows of burned out Battle and Blenheim bombers. Arriving at Le Mans, they were taken aback to see NAAFI stores deserted; everyone was helping themselves to cigarettes and tobacco from wooden crates that had been broken open. Five hundred motorcycles had been stored at the British camp on the city’s racetrack, and RAF ground crews were riding them round for fun.

Edwin Quittenton of the Royal Engineers had a particularly erratic journey across France. Originally, he and a colleague had been ordered to drive a five-ton lorry from Abbeville to Reims in Champagne, 130 miles to the east. Their mission was to bring back stores and provisions from an abandoned depot. On the way they passed through deserted towns bereft of any sign of life – not even a cat or dog.

At the depot, they spent two hours loading the lorry with tinned food, cases of cigarettes and whisky and wines. They ate, smoked and drank, and then decided it was time to head back to Abbeville.

Suddenly they heard the sound of bullets. Looking out of
the driver’s cab, they saw German planes diving on the depot. ‘Blimey, Jerry’s here,’ they shouted at one another.

Speeding off, they took corners on two wheels, and did not stop until they reached a British army barricade thirty miles down the road. The sides and the back of the lorry were riddled by bullets. All the bottles of whisky had been hit. The tins of fruit were holed, and the juice inside had run out. Only the cigarettes had escaped damage.

Getting back to Abbeville, Quittenton endured a big bombing raid before driving across Normandy to Rouen to join a group of Royal Engineers that had been told to impede the German advance and destroy supplies and oil tanks. But the enemy advance was too strong, and he followed a crazy pattern across northern France, dodging back to Le Havre, and then driving 300 miles to Nantes before doubling back with his comrades to try to find an evacuation ship at Cherbourg. No luck there, so they went down to Granville at the bottom of the Cotentin peninsula. No luck there, either, so they drove across to Rennes. A brief stay there as German planes staged bombing raids. Then back to Nantes where Quittenton became the driver for a commanding officer he described as ‘a thorough gentleman’.