The Sinking of the Lancastria (2 page)

‘I’ll pull you clear, matey, if you promise not to hold on to me,’ he called out.

‘I won’t touch you,’ Dunmall replied. ‘Just pull me clear.’

The man got on top of one end of the plank, and manoeuvred it fifty yards from the hull.

‘Are you all right, matey?’ he asked.

Dunmall thanked him. The man waved, and swam away.

A soldier without a life jacket approached an RAF man, who was wearing one, and said very politely: ‘Good afternoon. I propose to share your life jacket.’ The RAF man, Sergeant Macpherson, took it off, and they used it as a buoy, sculling with their spare arms to move away from the ship.

Some of those in the water went mad, ranting and raving. Others were silent in prayer. Many were choking on the 1400 tons of oil that poured out of the liner’s tanks.

‘My baby, look after my baby,’ a woman shouted.

‘It’s all right ma, we’ve got her,’ came a call, and men swam up holding the child above the water.

‘Baby, baby,’ the mother said repeatedly as she headed with her 2-year-old daughter for a raft.

One of the oldest soldiers on board, a 64-year-old Boer War veteran called Norman de Coudray Tronson, had helped to fire a Bren gun at the attacking planes; but then a wave washed him overboard, and he floated in the sea, looking back at the liner.

Captain Clement Stott had gone under the water after jumping from the ship, having carefully arranged his pince-nez in his breast pocket before launching himself into the air. As he came up, he felt a man hanging on to his feet. Stott realised he had to get rid of him, or they would both drown. So he kicked hard with his army boots, and struggled free.

A 44-year-old father of five from Wales who had brought his fifty men of the Pay Corps safely to St-Nazaire, Stott watched a naked man wearing a green and red identity disc round his neck dive through a porthole into the sea. At first, Stott could not spot anybody alive in the mass of wreckage and burned and blackened bodies, and already counted himself among the dead. But then he noticed a crowd of people, including some men from his unit, and raised his thumb in greeting. As he trod water, he saw they were all pitch black. ‘That’s a funny thing,’ he thought. ‘I didn’t see any Africans aboard.’ Then he became aware of the oil spread over the surface of the sea – his own face was also completely black.

Stott swam towards a raft crowded with men singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. But a voice shouted ‘Get off! Get away!’, and feet in grey army socks kicked him in the face – Stott, 5 feet 5 inches tall and of slight build, was glad that, unlike him, they had taken off their boots.

In places, the thick oil slick caught fire from the German strafing. When a blazing patch threatened a lifeboat, a sailor jumped over the side to try to put it out; as he hit the water, he cried out, and was seen no more.

William Knight, who had fought his way across France after Dunkirk, saw a man swimming past a flaming patch of oil towards the float on which he sat. Suddenly, the man’s hair caught fire. He began to scream. His head went under, and the oil closed over him.

Two soldiers shot one another to avoid drowning. A man was stuck in a porthole, the equipment he wore trapping him; somebody bashed him over the head with a piece of wood to save him from a lingering death as the side of the ship came down to the level of the sea. People who could swim or had life belts found themselves dragged down by those who could not or did not. A 13-year-old girl refugee dropped from the ship to the sea holding her father’s arm; on the way down, she lost her grip and fell alone – she never saw him again. A lifeboat full of people plunged vertically into the water after somebody mistakenly cut its rope. An officer from the liner tried to help a man by pulling him along by his hair: it took him some time to realise that all he had in his hand was a severed head.

Circling the stricken
Lancastria
in his Hurricane, which had been sent to help defend the evacuation fleet from German planes, Norman Hancock brought his fighter low over the ship, and threw his Mae West life jacket down from the cockpit. People below cheered. Then, his fuel running low, Hancock turned and headed back to the airfield at Nantes.

Sitting on a hatch cover, Donald Draycott, an RAF ground crewman from Derbyshire, was surprised at how calm he felt. A travelling salesman for a tobacco company before joining the air force, he had been one of the first to jump from the ship. As he looked back at the 16,000-ton liner with her grand sweeping decks, Draycott thought: ‘You’ll never see anything like this again.’ He watched people throwing life jackets
through portholes and diving after them, only to find that those already in the water had grabbed them. He heard ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ ‘as though it had been sung in an English pub’.

Twenty minutes after the German dive bomber had swooped out of the sky, the
Lancastria
’s upturned hull came level with the water. Men on the keel were still singing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Enemy fighters came in low, machine-gunning. Then the ship went under.

News of the disaster reached London as Winston Churchill was sitting in the Cabinet Office looking out at Whitehall bathed in early summer sunshine. He decided that there had been quite enough bad war news for a single day. France was suing for peace with Germany. Hitler and Mussolini were holding a triumphal meeting in Munich. Invasion forces were massing on the other side of the Channel; and the Luftwaffe was about to launch massive bombing raids on British cities. So the Prime Minister ordered that the sinking of the
Lancastria
was not to be reported in the media for the time being. In the rush of events, as he put it, he
forgot to lift the ban.
¹

Survivors returning to ports in southern England in the following days were told not to talk about their experience. In any case, many of them preferred to try to forget. Giving his recollections more than half a century later, one soldier who supported himself in the water by stretching his arms across corpses wearing life belts, said he had not spoken before to anybody about the disaster, not even to his wife or two sons, because ‘it is still a painful memory’.

The news was published in a newspaper in New York nearly six weeks later, with photographs taken by a sailor who had been on a destroyer in the rescue fleet. As a result, it surfaced
in the British press, but only for one day’s editions. After that, the tragedy vanished from public view, becoming a footnote to the history of the Second World War. There would be other, more glorious, events to savour – the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the invasion of Italy, D-Day and the final defeat of Hitler. Though associations of survivors fought to keep alive the memory of what had happened off the coast of France on 17 June 1940, the sinking of the
Lancastria
disappeared into national amnesia.

The torpedoing of the liner, the
Lusitania
, in the First World War is well known. The death toll was 1195. The sinking of the
Titanic
is even more familiar, with its 1522 fatalities. On the lowest count, the death toll when the
Lancastria
went down off St-Nazaire was well above that of those two other disasters combined.

In his war memoirs, Churchill put the loss
at ‘upwards of 3000 men’.
²
Crew members were recorded as saying that the number on board was more than 6000. Some estimates have put it considerably higher. Survivors numbered around 2500. So, at its lowest, the death toll appears to have been in excess of the number Churchill mentioned – at least 3500 or 4000.

The sinking of the
Lancastria
certainly brought the greatest loss of life in any single British maritime disaster. But those who died that June afternoon have been forgotten except by the survivors and families who gather once a year at a church in London to remember them, and to give thanks for their own survival. This book tells their story, and the story of how they found themselves on the
Lancastria
that summer day and how they fought for their lives in oily waters among thousands of dead and dying.

CHAPTER 1

Friday, 14 June 1940

IT WAS, THE CHIEF OFFICER
of the
Lancastria
decided, time to buy himself a good meal. Harry Grattidge and the rest of the crew had been at sea for much of the ten months since the outbreak of war with Germany. Gone were the days of cruising to the Norwegian fjords, the Mediterranean and the West Indies, of five-course dinners and of days filled with shore visits, bridge and whist drives, lotto parties, treasure hunts, concerts and, during a stopover in Cadiz, a cricket match at which gentlemen passengers beat the ladies by 107 runs to 85.

When war was declared in September 1939, the
Lancastria
had been on a cruise to the Bahamas. Her captain was told to head immediately for New York. When she sailed from Nassau, a crowd of local inhabitants turned out to see her off, but there was no cheering, and the ship left in the most profound silence Harry Grattidge had ever heard. ‘All of us sensed that it would never be the
same again,’ he recalled.
¹

In New York, the liner was fitted out as a troopship. Nonessential crew were disembarked, including the musicians who played beside the sprung dance floor and the gardeners who tended the plants in the verandah café and the potted trees on the promenade deck. The gleaming hull and superstructure in the black and white livery of the Cunard White Star Line was painted battleship grey. So was the single red funnel topped by a black band. The portholes were blacked out. A 4-inch gun was fitted as her sole armament. Then she sailed back to her home port of Liverpool without an escort.

In the following months, the
Lancastria
crisscrossed the Atlantic, ferrying men and supplies to and from Canada. In the late spring of 1940, she joined a convoy of twenty ships evacuating Allied troops from the ill-judged campaign to halt the Nazi advance in Norway. On the way back, the
Lancastria
was the target of an air attack, but the bombs fell wide. After disembarking the dirty, depressed troops in Scotland, it was time for another trip north, this time with men to garrison Iceland.

Returning from that voyage, the
Lancastria
called at Glasgow, where her captain asked for surplus oil in her tanks to be taken off, but there had not been time to do so before she sailed on to Liverpool. Knowing of the high losses of merchant shipping, including the Cunard liner, the
Carinthia
, which had been sunk by a German submarine the previous month, the crew were tense. They had spent months on repeated voyages without any proper defence against German planes and submarines. But now, there was the promise of a rest while their ship was reconditioned in her home port.

As soon as the
Lancastria
berthed in the Mersey, her captain, Rudolph Sharp, went ashore, crossing the broad river
to his home in Birkenhead. Harry Grattidge called the 330-strong crew together in the dining salon to tell them the ship was going in for a refit. The men from outside Liverpool would be paid off while the locals would be kept on the books.

The Chief Officer had been at sea for thirty-six years, having gone from school to become a cadet in the merchant marine, first on a four-masted cargo barque, and then on liners that took him to the Americas and the Mediterranean. In the First World War, he spent a year in the doomed campaign in the Dardanelles. Later, he would captain Cunard’s most famous liners, the
Queen Elizabeth
and the
Queen Mary
, mingling with celebrities and statesmen on cruises and transatlantic voyages.

The son of a brewer from the market town of Stafford, Grattidge was a companionable man who disliked having to apply the more rigorous aspects of the Cunard disciplinary code – on one occasion, he excused a male and a female crew member who had broken regulations by being in a cabin together. Having dispatched the crew and completed other formalities, the solidly built, full-faced Chief Officer flipped a coin to decide whether to eat at a steak house or the best hotel in town, the massive, white painted Adelphi, with its colonnaded upper storeys and huge, chandeliered lounge. The coin having told him to go for the second, he headed up Hanover Street from the docks to enjoy a leisurely lunch in the ornately decorated dining room.

After his meal, Grattidge strolled back towards the docks in the afternoon sunshine. To while away the evening, he could choose between two top-line variety shows – one starring the ‘wizard of the piano’, Charlie Kunz, at the Empire, the other with the comic singing sisters, Elsie and Doris Waters, at the
Shakespeare. Then he planned to take a three-week break in the Lake District to get over the pressure and danger of the previous months.

As Grattidge passed the office of the Cunard Line behind the Port of Liverpool building at Pier Head, the Cunard Maritime Superintendent, a small, lively Welshman, hurried up to him.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ he said. ‘Big trouble. Get down to the ship and recall everyone. You haven’t much time – you’re sailing at midnight.’