The Sinking of the Lancastria (24 page)

Also heading towards Brest, the Duggan family and the other two carloads of British civilians from Nantes had found a fan belt and repaired their broken-down vehicle. Reaching the coast, the convoy was stopped by French troops at a bridge, which they were planning to blow up. The soldiers were clearly very jittery, and it took some discussion before one shouted ‘
Allez vite
!’ and waved them across. The bridge was never destroyed.

Eddie Duggan drove to the docks in Brest and negotiated with the crew of an evacuation ship to be allowed on board.
In all, thirty civilians were waiting to be taken off – Madame de Gaulle is thought to have been among them. Eventually, they were given permission, and went up the gangplank, young John Duggan cradling his Bedlington terrier in his arms.

As they climbed on to the ship, two big dogs started fighting on the deck. A sailor shouted that no dogs would be allowed on board. Eddie Duggan grabbed the terrier from John’s arms, ran down the gangplank and handed it to a sentry. ‘Find a home for it, or shoot it,’ he called.

His son was devastated. He could hear the dog barking for him. Sitting on a bunk of the family’s cabin, he began to sob. Then the door opened. An RAF sergeant came in, and unbuttoned his uniform jacket. Inside was the terrier – the sergeant had jumped down from the ship on to the quayside, taken the dog, stuffed it inside his jacket and come back on board with it.

The captain of the
Highlander
took a loudhailer and announced to the survivors on the deck: ‘We’ve got no radio, no food, no escort, and we are listing ten degrees to port. Where are we going?’

‘Back to Blighty!’ came the reply.

On the destroyer, the
Havelock
, the dead were laid out in lifeboats in piles like stacks of corn. One man was found to be still alive. At 10.30 at night, the captain said he was ready to move off, and that the corpses would be left in the sea. A volley was to be fired in their honour, but then it was realised that this might set off panic among survivors still in
a state of shock. So the dead were buried at sea with no last salute.

Moving more slowly than usual because of her fouled propeller, the
Havelock
was heavily overcrowded as she headed for home. In the night, she suffered engine failure. During the repairs, heavy gear was dropped, making a loud noise that the edgy passengers took for a torpedo bursting.

Among those on board was a civilian passenger from the
Lancastria
called Green, who had been picked up with his young daughter by a French tug and transferred to the warship. An officer on the destroyer refused to believe that Claudine was Green’s daughter because she was speaking French.

‘You take the child and see what her reactions are,’ Green said.

The naval officer took hold of the girl who immediately started to scream and held out her arms to Green crying, ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy.’

Papers drawn up fifty-six years later for the obituary of the
Havelock
’s captain, Barry Stevens, who had transferred to the
Highlander
after his own ship’s propeller accident, contain an intriguing reference to the destroyer having carried ‘a large quantity of French government gold’ for which he was decorated by the French. But this appears to be a confusion with an earlier episode in which Stevens’ vessel had taken on
bullion from a French ship.
⁴

In all, 23,000 men left St-Nazaire in the night of 17–18 June. The biggest ship in the flotilla steaming back to England was the damaged liner, the
Oronsay
, with thousands on board, some of whom had swarmed up nets hung over the side. The direct hit on the
Oronsay
’s bridge by a German bomb at lunchtime had destroyed the chart, steering and wireless rooms, as well as breaking her captain’s leg. Holed, she was taking in water which was being extracted by the auxiliary pumps.

The captain had been told he could land the men back in St-Nazaire, but he chose to head for home, leaving at dusk. A young officer addressed the men on the deck, warning them that England was hundreds of miles away, that there was no escort, a 10-degree list to port, no food and no bridge.

Using the auxiliary steering gear, the captain sailed by a pocket compass, the sextant and a sketch map of France. Since the bomb had destroyed the wireless, a call was put out for somebody who knew semaphore to act as a signaller when she came towards the coast of England, where she picked up an escort of the heavy cruiser HMS
Shropshire
and a Sunderland flying boat. A soldier volunteered, but admitted that his skill was only of Boy Scout standard. He was stood down when an army signaller was found. As she pulled in to Plymouth, the
Oronsay
was listing so acutely that she could not berth, and the men had to be ferried ashore on small boats.

One of the smaller boats in the flotilla heading towards England was the pleasure yacht formerly owned by the Wills tobacco company, which had become HMS
Oracle
. She sailed without a pilot, her crew throwing down a plumb line to chart a course. At one point, they picked up a submarine sounding, and dropped depth charges, but they got back to Plymouth without any trouble. Among those on board was a small group of soldiers and the
Lancastria
electrician, Frank Brogden,
along with the crew from another ship, the
Teresias
, who had rowed to safety after their vessel was sunk by bombing as she entered the estuary the previous day.

Major Fred Hahn and Colonel Suggate were late leavers after their final drive to and from Nantes. When they got to the quay they found it still packed with long lines of men. Though he considered them ‘fine chaps’, Hahn described
them as ‘untrained and undisciplined’.
⁵
Equipment had been dumped helter-skelter. When a flight of four German planes passed low overhead, the men watched them apathetically, making no attempt to get under cover. Instead of diving and spraying the soldiers with machine-gun fire, the aircraft flew on their way.

Hahn and Colonel Suggate were taken out to the 10,000-ton freighter, the
City of Mobile
, which was full of men. The eighteen cabin berths were reserved for nurses; armed guards were posted at the doors to make sure they were not molested. There was no food. There should have been half a pint of water per person, but soldiers had run off all the drinking water so there was none. The dining salon was crammed: some slept on the tables, some on ladders, their limbs wrapped round the rungs. Hahn noticed that some of the men pilfered the belongings of others.

The
City of Mobile
joined a convoy of six vessels, including a tramp steamer that had been torpedoed in the bow and had what Hahn called ‘a hole a double decker bus could have driven through’. Passage out of the estuary was delayed because the Germans had dropped parachute mines. After a Sunderland flying boat detonated them, the convoy sailed in the clear dawn sunshine at six knots – the best the holed tramp steamer could manage.

The ships kept a quarter of a mile apart from one another while a destroyer, HMS
Drake
, circled on submarine watch. They wended their way through minefields, guided by French pilots. There were alarms about U-boats, but only one appeared, and it was chased off by a depth charge.

At 11 a.m. on 18 June, a final flotilla of a dozen ships put to sea. The last to leave was a cargo vessel, the
Harpathian
. St-Nazaire was declared an open town to avoid fighting.

When news of the
Lancastria
disaster was brought to Churchill in the Cabinet Office, he immediately decided to suppress reports of what he called a ‘frightful incident’. In his memoirs, he explained the decision as follows: ‘I forbade its publication, saying, “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least.” I had intended to release the news a few days later, but events crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban, and it was some years before the knowledge of
this horror became public.’
⁶

On the other side of the war, William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, announced the sinking of the
Lancastria
in his broadcast that night. But the Nazi turncoat carried little credibility though, for once, he was telling the truth.

The news for Britain was, indeed, grim during those days in the middle of June. Italy’s entry into the war on Germany’s side raised a new threat in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Meeting Mussolini in Munich, Hitler talked of the impending invasion of Britain, though he was also reported to have told the Duce that he thought the British Empire represented ‘an important factor in world equilibrium’. But, while he might harbour doubts about launching an offensive across the Channel and prefer to trust in the destructive power
of the Luftwaffe, the Führer clearly envisaged reducing Britain to a subservient role while he ruled over a Nazi Fortress Europe.

The German advance in France remained remorseless. The Pétain government was pressing for an armistice, and nineteen National Assembly deputies who sailed to North Africa to continue the fight from there were promptly arrested. De Gaulle’s historic broadcast from London declaring that France had lost a battle not the war made little impression across the Channel.

‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over,’ Churchill told the Commons on the afternoon of 18 June.

One of his prime concerns was to prevent France’s fleet falling into German hands. It had been a theme the Prime Minister had repeated to the French during the previous
week, and, despite seeking an armistice, the new government seemed to be of the same opinion.

The country’s most modern warship, a still uncompleted battle cruiser called the
Jean Bart
, was in the construction yard at St-Nazaire. The French admiralty ordered her to sail for Morocco to keep out of German hands. The
Jean Bart
’s heavy guns had not yet been fitted, and her only defence was twelve machine guns, so she had to slip away before the Germans used their full aerial power against her. For their part, the British warned her commander, Captain Ronarc’h, that, if there was a risk of his ship falling into enemy hands, the Royal Navy and the RAF would attack her.

Crossing the course of the evacuation fleet, a destroyer, HMS
Vanquisher
, sailed to St-Nazaire with a vice admiral aboard to make sure that the French cruiser either left or was destroyed. An order was also sent from London to the
Highlander
to leave the convoy heading for home and to ensure the destruction of the
Jean Bart
if it did not put to sea. It was far from clear how this was to be achieved since it would have meant passing through two sets of lock gates or taking depth charges by hand along the quays. But dock workers and the crew of the
Jean Bart
got the ship out, and the men on the
Highlander
were greatly relieved when they received a second message saying the cruiser was making her way from port.

Not that her escape was a simple matter. When tugboats pulled the
Jean Bart
from the dock, the current floated her on to a sandbank. German planes launched bombing runs, hitting the deck. But the tugs pulled her free, and she made it to the open sea where she took fuel from a French tanker and steamed to North Africa.

St-Nazaire’s pain was not over. On 19 June, German planes launched a major air raid on the town’s centre, killing many people and destroying buildings along the main streets. Some locals blamed it on a group of Polish soldiers camped on a marsh outside St-Nazaire awaiting evacuation to England, who were said to have fired at a reconnaissance plane. Denise Petit of the Banque de France believed it was more of a reprisal for the way the British troops had escaped. Her own house was badly hit – not a single pane of glass was left in the windows, the balconies were torn off and the doors stood ajar. She and her mother left the town. Looters pillaged their home until a neighbour barricaded the entrance.

Some British soldiers were still in the town’s hospitals, as the Wehrmacht soon discovered. An officer and two men marched in to the convent where George Youngs and ten other soldiers lay on mattresses on the floor. The officer told the British they were prisoners and must not try to escape. ‘As long as you make no attempt to escape you will be cared for,’ he promised. ‘If you try to get away, you realise we can shoot you.’

The men were moved to a military hospital, Youngs clad in an outsized sports jacket and baggy trousers donated by a French civilian. At the new hospital, a nurse told them of a French coal ship that was trying to leave for England. There were no Germans around, and five of the British went to the quay.

Despite the intercession of locals urging him to take the soldiers on board, the captain of the collier refused to do so. People on the dock called him ‘Pig, Boche, Traitor’, but he insisted he would not sail with any foreign soldiers on board.
Anyway, he was heading for Algeria, not Britain. So the five returned to the hospital, where an English-speaking priest visited them with books and got Youngs a pair of spectacles to replace those he had lost when the
Lancastria
went down.

Some days later, through the big window of their ward, looking out at the sea, the wounded men saw a British destroyer passing by. Helped by the nurses, they got into a Red Cross ambulance standing outside the hospital and drove off in the direction the destroyer had taken. Fortunately for them, the Germans had not moved down that stretch of coast.