The Sinking of the Lancastria (16 page)

So the tall, gawky general, who was described by one senior British civil servant as having ‘a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’, was the best candidate available, already displaying supreme self-confidence in his mission. Churchill
greeted him in the Downing Street garden with a warm and friendly smile.

There was no concealing the gravity of the news, as Churchill acknowledged in a message to the British nation on 17 June. The defeat of the French army had turned into a rout. Officers abandoned their men, who headed home. In places, drunken troops commandeered any vehicles they could find, including ambulances. In Bordeaux, collaborationist politicians plotted in smart restaurants as they prepared to work with the Germans.

But, the Prime Minister insisted, what had happened in France made no difference to Britain’s faith and purpose. ‘We shall defend our island and, with the British Empire around us,’ he declared, ‘we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of men. We are sure that in the end
all will be well.’
⁴

The JU-88 was the pride of the Luftwaffe, having only come into service in 1939. It had angled wings and a complicated hydraulic system. Able to dive at 425 miles an hour, it could carry 6600 lbs of bombs, and was armed with four cannons as well as twin machine guns. The fully glazed nose provided the pilot with 180 degree vision. A Plexiglas panel below his seat improved the view as he swooped on the target. The plane was renowned for its steadiness as it dived – and the release of the bombs was accompanied by a howl from a hooter attached to the altimeter.

The crews chosen to man the JU-88s were an elite group. Peter Stahl, the former test pilot who had been among the first to fly them, was ‘as proud as anything’ to have been picked for the job. The four-man team consisted of a pilot,
bomb aimer/navigator, wireless operator and gunner. The pilot could operate all commands from his seat, and fly single-handedly if necessary. With all the controls around him, Stahl felt like an organ player. The plane, he wrote in his diary, was ‘almost like a temperamental star or diva: the JU-88 seems to know that it is beautiful and
interesting, and behaves accordingly’.
⁵

Approaching the west coast of France in the afternoon of 17 June, the pilots of the Junkers set the propeller blades at the best pitch, switched on the auxiliary fuel pumps, shut the radiator flaps, adjusted the altimeter, and fixed the contacts for the moment when they would pull out of their dive at an altitude of 2500 feet. The radio operators clicked the electric power to set the bomb fuses, and readied the automatic release gear. The crews checked their harness belts. The pilots rotated the trimming wheel to the diving marks, and activated the reflector sight to regulate the brightness of the aiming circle.

Below him, Stahl saw a large fleet of ships of all sizes in the wide estuary of the Loire. Furious anti-aircraft fire came up from the ground as he lay back from the main pack of Junkers to prepare his final approach. French single-engined Morane fighters flew in to attack them – a plane from another German squadron was hit, going down with its port engine on fire. A British Hurricane fighter piloted by 20-year-old Norman Hancock, who would later become a wing commander, followed one JU-88 for a long way, firing at it but not scoring a hit.

The dive-bombing technique which Stahl and the others had learned in training had been refined in the reality of war. The pilot throttled back the engine until it was almost idling; then he pulled the levers to activate the hydraulic dive brakes,
at the same time setting the adjustable tailplane to such an acute angle that the plane dipped its nose with a jerk. The next moment, the JU-88 would shoot down towards the targets which grew larger in the sights as the pilot corrected the diving angle, looking upwards while he did so because that was now where the horizon was.

As Stahl prepared to dive, a Morane appeared 500 yards away. The German tipped the nose of his plane, and increased his speed. The French fighter followed. Dropping towards the ships strung out below him, Stahl decided to complete his bombing mission despite the enemy plane on his tail.

When the attack on the
Oronsay
ended, Captain Sharp and Chief Officer Grattidge had gone down to their cabins. It was 3.40 p.m. Grattidge had had no leave since the start of the war, and just wanted to get some rest. But he could not nod off. He felt a sense of impending disaster, got off his bunk and looked at his watch – it showed 3.44. A minute later, the siren on the ship sounded.

Grattidge stood in his cabin listening to the ‘longest and most fearful silence’ he had ever heard. Then, there was the noise of the bomb coming so fast that it ripped at his eardrums – a ‘chilling banshee scream . . .
howling from the sky’.
⁶

The attack missed. Men packed tightly on the deck jeered as the explosions sent up huge columns of water, but caused no damage to the liner. Sidney Dunmall and his colleagues from the Pay Corps laughed their heads off. ‘They couldn’t hit us
if they tried,’ they called out. They were, he recalled, ‘sublimely confident, couldn’t care less, just happy to be going home’.

Then Dunmall heard that bars of chocolate were being distributed from the Purser’s office, so he went down below to join a long queue waiting for the hand-outs. As he moved towards the front of the line outside the Purser’s office, he had a premonition. Get out, get out, it told him. Though there were only two men still in front of him, he hurried up the stairs of the companionway.

In the dining room, a gunner from the City of London Regiment was sitting at a table talking to comrades when he heard the whistle of a falling bomb followed by a thud. They looked at one another, not knowing what to do. ‘It’s all right, that one went over the side,’ a crew member shouted. The soldiers breathed a sigh of relief, and tried to make conversation. On the upper deck, an army officer brandished his pistol at men sitting there to make them go down below for safety’s sake in case there was another attack.

Hearing the siren, Rudolph Sharp hurried to the bridge, where Grattidge joined him. At the end of the stern, Captain Field of the Army Medical Corps, who had been lying on the deck using his life jacket as a pillow while he read a book, felt sick with dread as he watched the German bomber climbing back up into the sky. Other Luftwaffe planes were arriving, flying in from the north-east. Field could sense how vulnerable the
Lancastria
was, with its lack of serious gun power.

Down in the sixteen-foot-high, Italianate dining room, with its arches, columns and ivory walls, Clement Stott, the Welshman who wore a pince-nez, felt no fear. The steward had just served his table with a selection of liqueurs to round
off lunch when there was a tremendous crash. The steward went outside, and returned to assure everybody that the
Lancastria
had not been hit. Finishing his drink, the Welsh accountant went to his cabin, lay on his bunk and, comfortably full of food and drink, immediately fell asleep.

With the French Morane fighter still on his tail, Peter Stahl raised his speed as he prepared to dive, his sights set on what he described as ‘a fat freighter’. Like the other JU-88s swooping on the evacuation fleet, he had the sun behind him to blind the gunners below. Homing in on the target, he pulled up the plane’s nose a bit. A blast from the hooter connected to the altimeter signalled that he was at the correct height. With a light push on a red button on the control column, he released the bombs.

Six planes were diving on the estuary. Men on the ship’s top deck ducked as they swooped so low that they could see the faces of the pilots.

Nineteen-year-old Henry Harding had gone down to the canteen to get a bottle of beer, but found it too hot in the queue. So he climbed to the top deck, and stretched out, resting his head on the life jacket he had been given when coming on board. Looking up, he saw two rotating propellers and bombs dropping.

There was a chatter of guns, and somebody shouted hopefully, ‘Got the bastard.’ But, this time, the
Lancastria
was hit by four high explosive bombs.

They landed with an impact which Captain Field described as being ‘like someone bursting a child’s tin kettle
drum with a hammer’. Three blew up in the holds, instantly killing many of those who had been sent below decks for safety’s sake, including the 800 RAF men crowded in one space. The fourth bomb either fell down the funnel or landed right beside it – Sharp thought that it was the first, but others who were in the engine room at the time said this could not have been the case or they would not have survived.

Bodies flew high in the air. Fires flared fore and aft, sending up an enormous cloud of black smoke. The air reeked of cordite. The starboard half of the liner’s signal yard was destroyed, and the rigging hung slack.

Scalding steam belched from burst pipes, sometimes on to men packed so tightly in passages that they could not move. Water poured in through holes that the explosions had punched in the hull. Ropes were thrown down into flooded holds, but there were too few for the hundreds trapped below.

In the ship’s hospital, a blast killed all twelve people in a bay. One of the bombs hit a bulkhead and ripped open an oil tank, unleashing 1400 tons of fuel. Big splinters of wood from the walls and floors impaled people standing nearby. A padre was trapped when a bomb sliced through the roof and side wall of his cabin: the damage jammed the door so tightly that nobody could get in to save him.

In the ornate dining room, Fernande Tips saw ‘a sort of shadow’ as the bombs fell. Then a mass of splinters flew through the air. Something hit her hard in one eye, and there was a tremendous bang. Crockery crashed from the tables. Chairs slid crazily across the floor through the smoke and fumes. In the bar, a Major had just poured whiskies and sodas for himself and his commanding officer when the explosion sent the glasses flying from their hands.

Seeing the bombs dropping from the Junkers, Henry
Harding quickly plotted their course, and realised that the ship would be hit. Burying his head in his life jacket, he heard everything go suddenly quiet – then there was pandemonium.

As Harding jumped up, a steward in the Cunard livery came up to him.

‘It’s all right son,’ he said. ‘this is a good ship, it isn’t going to sink.’

‘You may think it isn’t going to sink,’ Harding replied. ‘I have my own ideas and I’m going to get off.’ He pulled on his life jacket, and jumped into the sea. His watch stopped at 4.10 p.m.

CHAPTER 6

The Sinking

WITHIN TWO MINUTES
of being bombed, the
Lancastria
was listing heavily. Ships around her fired their guns, but, though one Stuka trailed smoke, most of the shells burst too low.

Edwin Quittenton of the Royal Engineers, who had been sent to a hold deep in the ship, had snatched some sleep, and had then set out to climb to the top deck with a friend to take the air. On the way, they had passed hundreds of sleeping soldiers.

In the crush by the bar, Quittenton had looked round for his friend and had just located him when there was a crash. His friend disappeared. The boat listed. The lights went out. Edwin felt a hot draught, and something hit him on the head. ‘It was hell let loose,’ he recalled, ‘a raging furnace.’ The fumes made him feel sick as he groped about in the dark, stumbling over bodies. Moans and shouts came from all round him. ‘This is my lot,’ he mumbled to himself, and then, ‘No, dammit, there must be a way out!’

In the French Renaissance-style main lounge, with its oak panels and barrel-vaulted ceiling, a seething mass of men fought to escape up the staircase. Some smashed the leaded windows to make their way on to the deck. An army chaplain standing by the staircase called out: ‘Go steady there. There is plenty of time.’

Outside the lounge, a First World War veteran, who had served in the Battle of Passchendaele, stood to attention. When a fellow soldier asked if he would join him in trying to get to a lifeboat, the sergeant replied that he was waiting for the order to abandon ship.

A crew member was helped along a corridor, his face a mass of blood. He made no sound, calmed by shock. A sergeant, described by his captain as ‘exceedingly stout’, was trapped in his cabin, unable to push his way through the jammed, half-open door or to squeeze through the porthole. Seeing men panicking, a major in the Royal Engineers called out to them to remember that they were British.

On the top deck, an army sergeant from the Fire Service shouted: ‘Come on lads; roll out the fire hoses.’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Donald Draycott told him.

William Henry Tilley, a Canadian soldier from Winnipeg, flung himself face down on the deck when the bombs exploded. Seconds later, he felt hot water thrown up from inside the ship on the back of his battledress.

Standing up, he saw the gaping hole in the upper deck, and tried to go below to help. But his path was blocked by injured men lying on the companionway. People were running round with blood streaming from their heads, some
bleeding so profusely that they could not see where they were going.