The Sinking of the Lancastria (22 page)

Sharp was pulled on board with some difficulty given his heavy frame and the slippery oil on his clothes. He was taken to the
Havelock
, and then transferred with hundreds of others to the damaged liner, the
Oronsay
, where the first bombing had stopped all the clocks at 1.15. As men crossed a plank between the destroyer and the passenger ship, the rolling sea made some tumble into the water.

Already on the
Oronsay
, Harry Grattidge gave Sharp a drink from a brandy flask he had in his pocket. Then the Chief Officer changed his water-sodden Cunard Line uniform with its gold braid for a corporal’s jacket which he put on over his woollen underwear. The liner’s main salon was turned into a sick bay: some of the men were, Grattidge recalled, ‘so burned you could hardly credit that a life survived beneath the
raw and weeping tissue’.
³

A French tug pulled alongside with 500 men, who crossed to the liner except for a Belgian who refused to board the British ship and was taken back to St-Nazaire. The men were given blankets which they wrapped round their bodies and heads. Coming to in the semi-darkness after passing out when he was pulled from the sea, Percy Braxton of the RAF thought he was surrounded by a crowd of hooded monks. Others put on torn-up sacks. Some of the injured had to be carried on to the deck, and lay there smoking cigarettes. For a few, it was their last smoke. When they died, they were sewn into hammocks and buried at sea.

A Salvation Army man and his wife, who had travelled from
Paris to St-Nazaire to join the evacuation with nothing more than the clothes they wore and a cache of francs, put up money to buy the survivors cigarettes and drinks; they explained to Grattidge that, though their organisation did not normally encourage use of stimulants, this was a special situation.

Going down to the sick bay cabin on the
Oronsay
, Grattidge saw a familiar figure, tending to survivors in his shirt sleeves: Lieutenant Colonel Earle, whom he had met on the liner,
Carpathia
, twenty-six years before.

When the Chief Officer hailed him, the other man raised his eyebrows and nodded. He might have been interrupted reading
The Times
in his club. Grattidge introduced himself, but Earle did not remember him. After the Chief Officer gave some more information about himself, the surgeon said: ‘Oh, really, glad you were picked up. A good show.’ Then he went back to his work. It was, Grattidge reflected in his memoirs, a marvel of British imperturbability – ‘while there were men like Lt-Col. Earle, I thought, there always indeed
would be an England.’
⁴

What he did not mention was that Earle was operating without anaesthetics.

Wing Commander Macfadyen and Captain Griggs also ended up on the
Oronsay
after being picked up by overloaded French rescue ships. Seeing men without life jackets arriving, the Captain insisted that they should go. ‘It wasn’t being heroic,’ he remembered. ‘I was too breathless to climb up a ship’s ladder just then.’

On board, Griggs reached into his jacket pocket and found a packet of twenty Players cigarettes still in its cellophane. The packet was, miraculously, nearly bone dry. He lit one himself and handed round the other nineteen.

The Captain was handed a shirt, shorts and gym shoes. He went in search of a bathroom. A steward offered him a hip bath full of hot fresh water which, unlike salt water, would remove the oil.

It was only then that the reaction to the event set in as Griggs suddenly realised how easily he could have been among the dead. ‘The thought had not struck me before,’ he recalled. ‘I had felt no fear on the ship or in the water, only anger.’

Sitting on the deck, he watched a naked man black with oil from head to foot dive off the side of the ship and swim out to bring survivors back. He saved five men before exhaustion stopped him. Later, Griggs made a point of finding out who he was and reporting his exploit to the War Office, which awarded him the Military Cross.

The Welsh accountant, Captain Clement Stott, saw a fishing boat close to him. His head felt ‘like a forty shilling pot’ as they said in his part of the country. But it was his last chance of surviving, and he got within reach of one of the tyres hanging from the side of the ship.

When he stretched out his arm to grab it, his hand slid off, and he swallowed a mouthful of oily water. Then, Stott recalled, ‘a line suddenly came whizzing through the air, my hand caught it; but again I had no grip. I was covered in oil to the last square inch and by now my strength was almost gone. I just floated, unable to move any of my limbs.’

The swell lifted him away from the boat. The dirty old car tyre on its side seemed a symbol of life. A man on board put his hands to his mouth, and shouted ‘
Courage mon vieux
!’

Stott thrust out his left arm. It hit something. He turned to see what it was. A dead body.

That seemed the end. For the only time in his life, he said to himself, ‘I’ve had it!’ Then, suddenly, he thought of his wife and children. ‘At that terrible moment,’ he recalled, ‘my mind was all at once filled with a life-like picture of them all. It gave me another ounce of strength and a new determination.

‘“I will not die.” The words formed in me. I had been a lucky and happy man in my home life, no family sorrow had ever got my dear wife or me down, and I damn well wanted to see them all again – this side of heaven! I would see them again!

‘I braced myself and gritted my teeth and made ready for my last attempt. Three seconds I’d give myself. I counted “One! Two!”’

A big swell flung him on to the fishing boat where he passed out as it took him to St-Nazaire. There, a medical orderly insisted on giving him a new officer’s jacket, covered with blood. Stott was moved to a troop ship, and provided with hot soapy water, but it would not wash off the oil. He was also handed a mug of cocoa which he could hardly keep down. Finally, he was given a big coat. He pictured himself at that moment – ‘A little, middle-aged man in pince-nez and an officer’s overcoat . . . which might have fitted Jack Dempsey.’

CHAPTER 9

St-Nazaire

AT 10 P.M., THE PORT COMMAND
in St-Nazaire got round to reporting the sinking of the
Lancastria
to French naval headquarters. Marked ‘Secret’, the message limited itself to noting: ‘British liner
Lancastria
carrying evacuated troops hit by German bomb and sank on the Grand Charpentier roads at 1516gmt.’ There was no further entry in French naval records.

The men who were not taken straight to one of the rescue ships in the estuary were landed on the quayside at St-Nazaire. It was night by now, and there were no lights because of intermittent German air raids.

The wharf was crowded with survivors. ‘Some was injured,’ the electrician, Frank Brogden, recalled. ‘Some was in a state of shock. Some was clothed. Some wasn’t clothed at all, all black from head to toe with oil fuel.’

Frenchwomen dug holes in bales of straw on the dockside, and helped men climb inside for shelter. An old lady put a white apron round one soldier, who had lost most of his clothes. A Red Cross unit tended to the wounded as best it could.

Two Royal Navy officers approached a group of men lying on the straw covered with blankets. They offered a choice – either to stay and be taken to hospital, risking capture by the Germans, or to board one of the freighters still in the harbour. Most chose to go, and spent the night on the ships, which were the targets of unsuccessful bombing, before heading for the open sea at dawn.

Fleets of ambulances drove those who could not leave, or did not want to do so, to the town’s convent hospital. Nursing nuns met them. The first job was to clean the oil from the soldiers’ bodies.

Sergeant Miller of the Buffs, who had passed out after being picked up by a fishing boat, came round when nuns threw buckets of hot water over him. As the nurses scrubbed Private Proctor of the RASC, he vomited up oil and was given an injection that made him sleep till the next morning.

Sergeant Youngs of the RASC was driven by ambulance to a ward that was spotlessly white except for black marks on the walls from the soldiers’ hands. He was put in a children’s area where a boy was coming round from an appendix operation. One of the staff removed his filthy clothes, and he was taken to a bathroom where he was ‘acutely aware’ that it was a nun who scrubbed his body. After which, a doctor gave him a sleeping injection.

In another religious hospital, there was little soap or hot water, and the nuns handed the men sheets with which to wipe themselves as clean as they could. Then they wrapped
them in blankets and took them to lie on palliasses between the beds, telling the men to be quiet so as not to disturb the patients. Local people brought clothes – Frank Brodgen was given a pair of velveteen trousers and a shirt; he looped strips of old carpet round his feet as slippers. The oil had not been scrubbed off, however. ‘What the patients thought in the morning when they woke up and saw a bunch of nigger minstrels between the beds!’ Brodgen wrote later.

In one large hall, men were given coffee or tea, laced with brandy, rum or whisky. There were twenty bathtubs of hot water, with two or three men using each.

‘It was a case of first one leg in the bath, then the other, then the arms and the head,’ Bill Slater, of the Pay Corps, recalled. ‘Then the back. Each man had to take turns in washing the back of the other. He cleaned mine and then I cleaned his. When there was more diesel oil in the bath than water, or when the water was too cold, two ladies took it away and came back with more.’

With much of the oil removed, the men dressed from a pile of old clothes. Slater picked up a vest, and a pair of trousers which had belonged to a man whose stomach was five inches bigger than his but whose legs were five inches shorter. He also got a blanket, but no shoes or socks. Then he and others who had been cleaned up were driven back to the dock in an ambulance. On the way, Slater was violently sick from the mixture of coffee, brandy, rum and diesel oil which he had swallowed. ‘I felt terrible, but it was all for the best,’ he added. ‘It helped to clear the stomach.’

When Denise Petit of the Banque de France arrived at her home that night, she saw a van stopping in the street outside.
Men got out. Were they really men, she wondered. They were filthy, naked and shivering. Some were wrapped in blankets. Having unloaded them, the van driver headed back for the docks.

There had been an ambulance post beside her house, but it had been moved, and there was nobody to look after the men. So Denise called her mother and neighbours and passers-by. They took the men inside their homes, washed them, and gave them clean clothes and hot alcohol. A British lieutenant called the roll.

Denise could see that the men were suffering all over their bodies, and in their eyes and noses where the oil had penetrated. They found it difficult to breathe, but none complained. As soon as they were ready, those who could went back to the docks to re-embark, having heard rumours that the Germans were already in Nantes. Denise and her mother nursed others through the night as German planes swirled overhead.

Joe Sweeney was brought ashore after being picked up by a lifeboat and put on a French trawler. He was naked, having taken off all his clothes to enable him to swim more easily.

Walking carefully because of his bare feet, he crossed the road at the docks and went into a bar filled with raucous soldiers. All he wanted was peace and quiet. Noticing a hatch door below the bar, he scrambled through it into a dark back room. The
patronne
strode in, not realising in the darkness that the French-speaking Sweeney was naked. He told her what had happened to him on the
Lancastria
.

‘Wait here,’ she shouted. A minute later, she returned with a half-full bottle of brandy, a packet of Gauloises and a box of
matches. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw he had no clothes on.

‘Go on! Get out! Now,’ she said, showing him through the back door, and then adding in a whisper, ‘
Bonne chance, gamin
.’

Thanking her, Sweeney went out into the night. He crossed the road to sit on the pavement, sipping the brandy. It made him feel warmer. Euphoria overcame him as he smoked one cigarette after another, and fantasised about escaping to Spain.

When a teenage girl walked by, Sweeney got up to greet her. She asked if he was hurt.

‘No, I’m all right; just frozen stiff,’ he replied. They sat down and she asked him about the
Lancastria
. Suddenly a flare lit up overhead and she saw that he was naked.

‘Good Lord! You’ve got no clothes on,’ she cried, jumping up.

Then she added, ‘
Pauvre homme
!’ and told him to wait.

A few minutes later, she returned with a pair of her brother’s riding breeches and a flannel shirt. The breeches were too small – Joe had to rip the seams to get them on. The shirt was too small, too, so he and the girl tore the neck and sleeves. She also produced a little bottle of cognac, more cigarettes and matches. They chatted some more. Then she left saying, ‘
Au revoir et bonne chance
.’