The Sinking of the Lancastria (12 page)

Not everything was destroyed at St-Etienne-de-Montluc as the motor transport detachment shuttled lorryloads of equipment to be taken off from St-Nazaire. A convoy that left at 6 a.m. contained transformers, hand tools and stores. The soldiers also wanted to move heavy equipment down the Loire to the sea, but the French refused to provide tugs to pull the barges.

After the second convoy left, they were told that no more
materiel could be taken – every available vehicle was needed to carry troops. As their unit’s report noted: ‘Men’s lives were considered
more valuable than stores.’
¹⁰
The crank cases and cylinder blocks of vehicles under repair were smashed. Axles were severed with oxyacetylene cutters. A hole was dug to house equipment which might be used again if they ever returned.

At 7 a.m., the whole unit was summoned to the parade ground. They were told that they would now stage a rapid move to the coast, taking one pack each with them. ‘All orders, or counter orders,’ the instructions added, ‘to be obeyed implicitly, no matter how trivial they might appear at the time’. Civilians must not be told where they were going. They were reminded of Dunkirk and how ‘the fighting spirit and the will to win through would probably save an apparently hopeless situation’.

Acid was poured over the Quarter Master’s stores. The ‘Shunting Engine’, a five-ton transportable crane, was destroyed. Everything except for buildings was either removed or made useless. At 10.02 a.m., the Motor Transport unit drove out in trucks. They had no food or water with them; some would not have anything to eat for forty-eight hours.

Another convoy of lorries found itself slowed down by a Frenchman driving a horse-drawn cart on which a canal barge was loaded. The British stopped him, threw the boat into a ditch and chased the horses into a field. When they got to the airfield outside St-Nazaire, they were told that everything they had brought must be dumped and set alight. The order from London was ‘save the men and destroy everything’.

The departure for St-Nazaire of the Royal Engineers unit
to which Neville Chesterton returned after hearing rumours of surrender at the cinema was delayed not once but twice.

First, it was the fault of his friend Derek, whom Chesterton described as habitually looking as if he had a hangover. When the men were told to fall in to march off, Derek was missing; he was found shaving, his pack slung on his back the wrong way up. He was ordered into line immediately, half his face still covered with lather. ‘If there are more soldiers like you,’ the red-faced sergeant major bellowed,’ God help us.’

Then the unit’s captain could not find his helmet. He refused to leave without it, so a search was mounted. The headgear was discovered, and the fifty-man unit finally left. After a while, it found three abandoned army lorries on the road. The unit’s motorcycle riders got into the driving seats, but, unfamiliar with the gears, they moved forward only slowly. The delays and the slow pace of the trucks may well have saved their lives.

In Nantes, the men left at the base ordnance depot, who had been packing stores to be moved to the coast, received fresh instructions – they were to get out and leave the supplies behind. ‘Everything was thrown open,’ 19-year-old Henry Harding from Wales recalled. ‘You could help yourself to whatever it was you wanted, so we took chocolate.’

Joe Sweeney, who had arranged for the reunion in the café at Nantes between his friend, Les, and Thérèse from Belgium, replaced the army gear in his kitbag and backpack with tins of Players No. 3 from the open NAAFI stores. Another group of men took boxes of Woodbine cigarettes and kidney-shaped tins of ham from an abandoned military store. An officer stuck a bottle of Johnny Walker and a bottle of Vichy water in
a pair of rubber boots strung round his neck on a piece of string.

When the French Cabinet met in Bordeaux on the evening of 16 June, Reynaud read the British document on Franco-British union twice. His optimism swiftly crumbled as he came under violent attack. Marshal Pétain called the idea ‘fusion with a corpse’. Others saw it as a British attempt to exercise dominion over France, or to grab the French Empire.

Pressure for peace had been raised by the neatly timed reading of a cable from the front announcing another defeat, and calling for an immediate decision on a truce. Tempers flared as the tough Interior Minister, Georges Mandel, called a leading pro-armistice minister a coward. But opposition to the union was such that no vote was taken on the proposal from London.

At 7.30 p.m., Reynaud called in General Spears and the ambassador, Ronald Campbell. The Premier appeared relieved. It was, Spears wrote, ‘as if, walking into a room to console a widower, one was confronted by a bridegroom’. After the British visitors left, Reynaud went to the drawing room to join the Comtesse de Portes, and read to her a telegram he was about to send to Roosevelt saying he was stepping down. At 8 p.m., he formally submitted his resignation to President Lebrun.

As they left the Premier’s office, Campbell and Spears found de Gaulle waiting between the dark columns of the entrance hall, his face pale. He said Weygand was going to have him arrested. He wanted to go to London.

After consulting Churchill, Spears arranged to fly the French general out aboard his plane the following morning.
De Gaulle then went to see Reynaud to say he was leaving for Britain. The Premier handed him 100,000 francs from secret government funds.

At the Bordeaux préfecture, the Interior Minister, Mandel, sat at a desk at the end of a long gallery lit by candles. Spears went to urge him to join de Gaulle on the flight to London the following day.

‘You fear for me because I am a Jew,’ Mandel replied. ‘Well, it is just because I am a Jew that I will not go tomorrow; it would look as though I was afraid, as if I was running away. Wednesday, perhaps.’

‘It may be too late,’ Spears argued.

‘I will not go tomorrow,’ the Frenchman insisted.

Just then, Mandel’s mistress popped her head round the door, and said their bags were packed. They were leaving Bordeaux, but not France.

‘
À bientôt, à très bientôt à Londres, j’espère
,’ – ‘See you soon, very soon, in London, I hope’ –
Spears said as he left.
¹¹

Unaware of what had happened in Bordeaux, Churchill ate dinner before being driven to Waterloo station to take the train to Southampton, where he would board a cruiser to meet Reynaud in Concarneau. As he prepared to leave Downing Street, a terse telegram arrived from the ambassador, Campbell: ‘Meeting cancelled, message follows.’

Unready to accept the news, Churchill still got into his car for the station. His wife went to see him off. At Waterloo, the Prime Minister boarded the train, and sat in his compartment while the locomotive got up steam. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s military aide, and the naval commander, Admiral Dudley Pound, urged him to give up the trip, but Churchill sat
where he was for half an hour, as if the sheer exercise of his will power could prevent the ally across the Channel from falling apart. Then reality took hold, and he returned to Downing Street where a further message from Campbell gave details of the crisis which had erupted in Bordeaux.

At 11.30 p.m., French radio announced that Philippe Pétain had been asked to form a new administration; the new Premier said he was making ‘the gift of myself to France to lessen her misfortune’. Weygand would take second rank in the government. Peace advocates got other senior posts.

At 1 a.m., the Foreign Minister, Paul Baudouin, told Campbell that France was going to ask Germany for its armistice terms. An hour later, Churchill telephoned Pétain. He warned the French leaders that giving up the fight would ‘scarify their names for a
thousand years of history’.
¹²
One senior British civil servant called the Prime Minister’s message ‘scorching’. Another described it as ‘the most violent conversation I ever heard Churchill conduct. He only spoke so roughly because he felt that anger might sway the old Marshal when nothing else would.’

But Pétain was past swaying. Campbell reported that he and Weygand were ‘living in another world, and imagined that they could sit round a green table discussing armistice terms in the old manner’. The Marshal’s grasp of affairs was tenuous. He fell asleep during meetings, and was said to enjoy ‘an hour of lucidity a day’. But there was one thing he firmly believed in – the need to end the war as soon as possible. A tongue lashing from London was not going to make any difference, even at 2 a.m. Though some army units would put up resistance, the Battle of France was over and the task of rescuing troops remaining across the Channel became even more urgent.

Between 16,000 and 17,000 troops were taken off from St-Nazaire by midnight on 16 June, most on the big British and Polish boats lying in Quiberon Bay. Among them were a handful of officers who had abandoned their men to get to the troopship, the
Georgic
. Though it was not known exactly how many men were still waiting to be embarked, and some had left directly from Nantes, the number was rising as more troops came into the town. The combined total of soldiers and airmen who passed through St-Nazaire was equal to its population of 47,000.

Still, the war diary of the British command in Nantes shows no great urgency
in the orders for evacuation.
¹³
Though the Luftwaffe was stepping up air raids on western France, German tanks and troops were some way up the Loire, moving towards Angers. Messages concerning the rescue ships envisaged a five-day operation. One problem was settled when it was decided to hand over 400 mules of the Indian Transport Company to the French, rather than trying to embark them for England.

The British forces in and around St-Nazaire were made up of a huge patchwork of units. There were men from the Royal Artillery, the Sherwood Foresters, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, the Buffs of the Royal East Kent Regiment, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Essex, East Surrey and Cheshire regiments. There were units of the Royal Engineers, the Royal Ordnance Corps, the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps and the Pay Corps, along with RAF ground crew and support forces, soldiers who had manned bases in Dieppe and Nantes, members of the Church Army, the Salvation Army and the YMCA. There were also the civilians from the Fairey aircraft factory in Belgium who had travelled up the west coast by train.

A report by the British garrison in the port recorded that, given prevailing conditions, the hours of waiting, the lack of food or water and the air-raid alarms, ‘the conduct of the
men was very satisfactory’.
¹⁴
But one officer noted that some of the troops took the law into their own hands, and some officers argued among themselves about whose units should go first.

The harbour was covered with a pall of smoke from the repeated bombing raids, one of which sank a French minesweeper. There was a lot of gunfire when the German planes attacked. Wing Commander Macfadyen watched ‘an amazing display of pyrotechnics’ as French troops fired at aircraft far out of range of their light guns. Spent bullets fell on the men on the docks – one hit the Wing Commander’s steel helmet.

On one side of the main embarkation quay, piles of army coats were stuck up on sticks to look like soldiers standing in a single file. The deception attracted some of the strafing aircraft, but the real troops still had to dodge the ricocheting bullets as they passed along the other side to reach the waiting tenders. When an NCO got a piece of shrapnel in his eye, his fellow soldiers bathed the wound and covered it with lint. One man decided to get out – when a call was made for a driver to take a lorry back to Nantes to collect troops there, he stepped forward, and probably saved his life.

At 10 p.m. on 16 June, the French admiral in charge of the port of St-Nazaire ordered the embarkation to be stopped for the night. He feared that lights would be used in the evacuation, and that this would allow the planes to see targets
more clearly – in fact, given the full moon and calm sea, no illumination would have been needed.

Some troops tried to sleep in the street or on the cobbles of the town’s main square. Others went to a cobblestoned jetty with a small lighthouse or wandered along the quay by the estuary looking out across the water to the flat coastline on the other side of the Loire. On the beach, a group of men found a cache of West Indian rum, and got drunk, waking late the next morning. A unit from the RAS Corps crawled into some empty barrels to sleep.

Men congregated in bars, singing and shouting as they drank. Officers organised meals of bully beef and biscuits. Strong tea was a constant source of comfort. One man got his comrades to smash up wooden boxes to light a fire, and brewed tea in old petrol cans – soon he had a long queue waiting for char.

Lying in a gutter, Sidney Dunmall of the Pay Corps, who had dived for cover twice when the German plane flew over his unit marching towards the coast, tried to sleep, using his respirator as a pillow. Getting hungry, he went to the sea wall to join some comrades who had two tins of bully beef. But somebody knocked them into the sea by mistake, so they had to make do with bread. After that, their sergeant major told them to get into slit trenches on the seafront because an air raid was coming. ‘All Hell broke loose as the ack ack battery behind us blazed away like mad,’ Dunmall recalled. When the planes left, he finally got to sleep.

The civilians from the Fairey aircraft works in Belgium, who had travelled down to Bordeaux and then up the west coast, arrived in St-Nazaire on 16 June. Roger Legroux, the
11-year-old son of a Fairey manager, saw the sea shore covered with troops and materiel. More vehicles and men were arriving. The planes went on bombing into the night as the Legroux family slept in a lorry; some of the other civilians passed the night in cars. The civilians discussed what to do next. Afraid of being sunk on the way across to Britain, some decided to return to Belgium. Roger’s father said that, having come so far, they should go on.

Leonard Forde, the radio operator from the Royal Corps of Signals who had driven his ‘gin palace’ wireless truck across France, abandoned it after arriving at St-Nazaire. He shot holes in the radio set, and ran down to the beach to join a crowd there. Ravenously hungry, he also longed for a smoke.