The Sinking of the Lancastria (29 page)

Stan Flowers tells how the wallet he lost when he shed his trousers in the sea was found and returned to him in 1950; it must have been washed ashore quickly because he could still read the concert party programme tucked inside.

Alec Cuthbert, his eyes twinkling, recalls how he floated in the water for three hours with a man he did not know hanging on to his life jacket. Fred Coe says he did not dwell on the disaster after getting back to England because ‘life goes on’.

Coincidences bring survivors together. Two met in the
gentlemen’s toilet of the Savoy Hotel while attending a marriage there. When Harry Pettit opened his garden for charity, a visitor recognised a photograph of the
Havelock
in his bungalow – he turned out to be the man who, as a 19-year-old, had fished Harry from the water on to a rescue raft.

Returning from a trip to Australia by sea, Morris Lashbrook fell into conversation with a woman who was coming to Europe. She said one object of her trip was to visit St-Nazaire. Her husband had been among the RAF men who had died on 17 June. She asked Morris if he knew about the disaster. He told her the story of what had happened; she was very grateful as all she knew was from an Air Ministry telegram telling her that her husband was missing.

The
Lancastria
Association has 300 members, most of them relatives of those who were on board on 17 June 1940, and wish to honour their memory – or celebrate their survival. Established in 1980, it is the second such organisation, succeeding one set up after the war. Around 100 survivors are thought to be alive, some in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and North America. On Remembrance Sunday, a group of a dozen men from the Association joins the march past the Cenotaph. Regional get-togethers are held. An annual service is also organised at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, where a plot is dedicated to the liner and its dead.

Survivors visit the graves of those who died on the liner. In 1990, Harry Pettit walked through the cemetery at La Baule and saw a stone with no name but S147653 engraved on it. He recognised it as the service number of a friend with whom he had jumped from the
Lancastria
fifty years earlier.

Former sapper Norman Driver went back to the forest where he and his Royal Engineers unit had been building a railway line when they were told to head off for St-Nazaire. The dirt track they had used had been tarred, and new bungalows had been built. He asked about the farmer’s son who had sat and watched the soldiers at work – Norman had always regretted having been marched off from the forest without having had time to say goodbye to the boy.

A house was pointed out to him. When a man opened the door, Driver said, ‘Monsieur Couedel?’ The man replied ‘Oui.’ Driver told him who he was. In English, the Frenchman replied: ‘You dead! You dead!’

Driver explained how he had survived the sinking of the
Lancastria
. When he left, Laurent Couedel presented him with two bottles of wine and a chisel he had found from the Royal Engineers workshop.

In 2005, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, Christine Grahame, took up the cause of gaining proper recognition for what happened on 17 June 1940, lodging a motion urging the government to recognise the sacrifice of the victims and survivors. But there was little reaction from Westminster. Why the loss of the liner remains so little known is a mystery: it is as if some jinx hangs over the memory of the ship which changed its name. In the summer of 1940, the silence had said much about the national mood. After Dunkirk, the battle for Britain was looming, with a German invasion force poised across the Channel. The country sensed the need to keep morale high in the face of the all-conquering enemy who encapsulated evil. Nobody wanted to hear of a disaster in which thousands of defenceless people died, or to be told that
Dunkirk had not drawn the final line under the retreat from France. There was no desire to be told that 150,000 men had been left behind, most of them not dashing fighters of the kind who would fly in the Battle of Britain but the support troops who keep an army going – repair workers, carpenters, communications staff, ground crews, bakers and cooks and NAAFI store men.

Unlike Dunkirk, which was converted in the British imagination from a desperate retreat into a monument to the national spirit, the afternoon of 17 June in St-Nazaire could not be turned from defeat into a semblance of victory. Lying helpless in the estuary as the Luftwaffe swooped, the liner could all too easily have become a symbol for the island that was about to be pummelled from the air. For all their valour and defiance, the men singing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ had been powerless to ward off disaster. Their country was set on avoiding such an outcome.

The fate of those who died on the
Lancastria
or in the oily sea, and of those who survived, was a human story, not a military one – and many of those who got away preferred to move on to other things as soon as they could. They did not dwell on what had happened, but joined their units to continue the war against Hitler. As Fred Coe said, ‘Life goes on.’

Still, at the lowest estimate, 2500 people died that day. An Admiralty report said 2823 had been lost, and Churchill wrote of a toll of ‘upwards of 3,000 men’. Both figures may well be underestimates given that several reports set the number on board at more than 6000, and those saved were put at 2500. If that sounds high, another liner took 6000 off from Brest during the Operation Aerial evacuation, and some survivors from the
Lancastria
have talked of as many as 8000–9000 having been on board.

Whatever the estimate, the loss of the liner was the worst maritime disaster to a single ship in British history, even if it was relegated to a footnote in the impending battle for national survival. The size of the death toll was all the more shocking because it could so easily have been much lower, or perhaps avoided altogether.

The
Lancastria
was the only big ship hit in the second evacuation from France. If embarkation had stopped when 5,000 had come aboard, the dead would have been significantly fewer. One or two thousand soldiers and RAF men might have been taken to another of the rescue ships in the estuary. If those caught in the holds had not been sent below for safety, their chances of escape would have been much greater. The amount of oil in the tanks increased the choking slick that spread out from the dying ship. The failure to tell men how to enter the water if they were wearing a life jacket resulted in many broken necks. Had Captain Sharp followed the instructions from the naval commander, the liner would have been at sea when the Junkers swooped. He was worried about submarines, but none of the ships returning to England from St-Nazaire was attacked by a U-boat.

That collection of ‘ifs’ may make the tragedy an example of how an accumulation of factors can come together to cause a disaster. Still the heroism and fortitude shown by those who found themselves in the water as the liner went down reflects the spirit of 1940. Some gave in to despair, yet the overriding image is one of men, and the few women who were on board, refusing to succumb. If evocations of stiff upper lips have become unfashionable, this was what was in evidence that June day, from the men standing on the hull singing patriotic songs to the people refusing to abandon hope in the
oil-slicked sea. With breathtaking suddenness, four bombs had turned pleasure at having reached such a fine, solid ship into the worst experience of their lives. Whether helping one another in the sea or singing on the sinking hull, they reacted in a way hard to imagine today.

If only for that, the plaque by the seafront in St-Nazaire proclaims: ‘We have not forgotten.’

NOTES

Prologue

1
.  Churchill,
The Second World War
, Vol. 2, p. 194

2
.  Ibid., p. 194

Chapter 1: Friday, 14 June 1940

1
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 150

2
.  Horne,
To Lose a Battle
, pp. 519–23

3
.  Cadogan,
Diaries
, 2 June 1940

4
.  Booth,
European Spring
, p. 293

5
.  Cadogan,
Diaries
, 2 June 1940

6
.  Spears,
Assignment to Catastrophe
, pp. 138–59

7
.  For account of Briare see Spears, pp. 138–59; Jenkins,
Churchill
, pp. 613–616; Reynaud,
In the Thick of the Fight
, pp. 483–9

8
.  Defence Committee, London, 8 June 1940: Jenkins, p. 611; Spears, p. 149

9
.  Churchill, p. 162

10
.  Cadogan,
Diaries
, 2 June 1940

11
.  For account of Tours, see Spears, pp. 198–220; Cadogan,
Diaries
, 13 June 1940; Jenkins, pp. 617–18; Churchill, pp. 157–67

12
.  CAB 65/7

13
.  Jackson,
The Fall of France
, p. 97

14
.  Karslake,
1940, The Last Act
, pp. 262–3. Karslake’s report on pp. 253–3 summarises his view of the debacle and French policy towards British forces.

15
.  Karslake, Appendix A, lists units

16
.  Ibid., pp. 179–82; PREM3/188/5 at Public Records Office, Kew (PRO)

17
.  Ibid., pp. 156 et seq; PREM3/188/5 p. 80 at PRO

18
.  Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones’ diary, 9–14 June 1940

19
.  War Office (WO) 167/117 at PRO

20
.  Brooke,
War Diaries
, p. 74

21
.  Ibid., p. 80

22
.  Ibid., p. 81–82

Chapter 2: Saturday, 15 June 1940

1
.  Llewelyn-Jones’ diary, 15 June 1940

2
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 152

3
.  Spears provides an acid, and probably accurate, portrait of her.

4
.  Brooke,
War Diaries
, pp. 83–6

5
.  Naval report, ADM 199/371 at PRO

6
.  Roskill,
War at Sea
, p. 239

7
.  Ibid., p. 236

8
.  Colville,
The Fringes of Power
, p. 158

Chapter 3: Sunday, 16 June 1940

1
.  Colville,
The Fringes of Power
, p. 158

2
.  Ibid., p. 159–60

3
.  Ibid., p. 159–61; Horne,
To Lose a Battle
, p. 659

4
.  
Courrier de St-Nazaire et de la Région
, 6–13 July 1940

5
.  Denise Petit’s diary, p. 12

6
.  Stahl,
The Diving Eagle
, p. 53

7
.  
The Times
, 18 June 1940

8
.  Spears,
Assignment to Catastrophe
, p. 293

9
.  Ibid.

10
.  WO 167/918 at PRO

11
.  Spears, pp. 316–17

12
.  Colville, pp. 163–5

13
.  WO 167/117 at PRO

14
.  Ibid.

15
.  Ibid.

Chapter 4: Monday, 17 June 1940

1
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, pp. 152–3

2.  Denise Petit’s diary

3
.  WO 167/1155 at PRO

4
.  Brooke,
War Diaries
, p. 86

Chapter 5:The Bombing

1
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 107

2
.  Ibid., p. 155

3
.  Barry Stevens’ diary

4
.  Churchill speech, Hansard, Vol. 362, columns 51–61

5
.  Stahl,
The Diving Eagle
, p. 40.

6
.  Grattidge, pp. 153–4

Chapter 6: The Sinking

1
.  Stahl,
The Diving Eagle
, pp. 54–5

2
.  WO 167/1155 at PRO

3
.  Stahl, p. 55

Chapter 7:The Sea

1
.  Captain Sharp’s report, ADM 199/2133 at PRO

Chapter 8:The Rescue

1
.  ADM 1/12264 at PRO

2
.  Bond,
Lancastria
, pp. 223–6

3
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 159

4
.  Ibid.

Chapter 9: St-Nazaire

1
.  Fred Hahn’s papers, Imperial War Museum

2
.  Ibid.

Chapter 10:The Way Back

1
.  Admin 199/76, WH 7063 case at PRO

2
.  Brooke,
War Diaries
, p. 86

3
.  Ibid., 87–8

4
.  ‘Life and Times of Captain Barry Kenyon Stevens’ by Admiral Guy F. Liardet, February 1996, private paper in author’s possession.

5
.  Fred Hahn’s papers, Imperial War Museum

6
.  Churchill,
The Second World War
, Vol. 2, p. 172

7
.  Ibid., pp. 198–9

Chapter 11: Home

1
.  Fred Hahn’s papers, Imperial War Museum

2
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 160

3
.  Brooke,
War Diaries
, p. 88

4
.  Bryant,
The Turn of the Tide
, pp. 180–6 on Brooke’s return.

5
.  Grattidge, p. 161

6
.  Cadogan,
Diaries
, 17 June 1940

7.  Roskill,
The Navy at War
, p. 81

Chapter 12:The Bodies

1
.  This and next paragraph, WO 32/18802 at PRO

2
.  Gurio, interview with author

Chapter 13: Aftermath

1
.  
The Times
, 26 July 1940

2
.  Admin 199/76 WH case 7063 at PRO

3
.  WO 32/18802 at PRO

4
.  CAB 100 at PRO

5
.  Grattidge,
Captain of the Queens
, p. 161

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Accounts by survivors of their time in France, of the sinking of the
Lancastria
and of their subsequent journey back to Britain, have been taken from interviews by the author, oral history tapes at the Imperial War Museum and, above all, from two collections of narratives:
The Loss of the Lancastria
, compiled by John L. West and published by Millgate Publishing; and
HMS Lancastria: Narratives
, compiled and published by the Lancastria Survivors Association. Official War diaries and War Office documents are from the Public Records Office at Kew, the Imperial War Museum, and RAF records of 73rd Squadron at RAF Digby, Lincolnshire. The diary of Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones and the typescript of Fred Hahn’s account are at the Imperial War Museum. Captain Sharp’s reprort is at the PRO – ADM 199/2133. The Hirst family website at
http:­//­groups­.­msn.­com/­HirstFamilyWebsite/­homepage2.­msnw
has a wealth of detail about the liner and the disaster. The eventual publication of news of the sinking is taken from newspapers of
26 July 1940, at the Newspaper Library, Colindale. The evidence from Barry Stevens comes from his unpublished diary in the possession of the author. French naval documents mentioned in the text are from the naval archives at Vincennes. Local French documents, including Denise Petit’s account and contemporary newspapers, are in the departmental archives in Nantes and the Eco-musée in St-Nazaire. Memoirs, diaries and other works used as sources are as follows: