The Sinking of the Lancastria (4 page)

They had every reason for pessimism. German tanks, spearheaded by General Erwin Rommel’s fast-moving Panzers, were smashing their way forward. A third of France’s 105 divisions had been lost. French generals had no idea how to wage the modern form of warfare now confronting them. They had been expecting a conflict in which their army would fight from static positions; instead they were dealing with a mobile, elusive enemy who was not tracked by their faulty intelligence. When the French evolved new battle plans to contain the foe, they found that German tanks had already gone beyond the lines they drew. The bombing and strafing attacks of Stuka planes added a new dimension to the campaign, particularly since much of the French air force had been destroyed on the ground. In despair, some generals broke down in tears while others stared at their maps as if totally lost.

Facing Churchill and his party at Briare sat the French
Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, whose taunt skin and precise features gave him the look of an Oriental mandarin. Weygand had been called back from Syria to take the post three weeks earlier as the German advance made a mockery of the defensive plans of his predecessor, General Maurice Gamelin. The 73-year-old Weygand knew he had inherited a desperate situation. France had reached ‘the last quarter of an hour,’ he declared in an order of the day after assuming command.

The front, he told the British, was in a state of dislocation. He did not have a single battalion left in reserve. Exhausted men were deserting in droves. ‘I am helpless,’ Weygand told Churchill. As he listened, Spears found that his mouth had grown so dry
that he could not swallow.
⁷

Sitting hunched over at the conference table, twisting his ring, Churchill said all he could offer France was a Canadian division with seventy-two guns, which would be followed by another division ten days later. If France could hold out until the following spring, twenty to twenty-five divisions could be dispatched. Such a long timescale took no account of the situation on the battlefield, as everybody present knew all too well.

France’s newly-appointed Deputy Defence Minister, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, who had led a tank unit in an unavailing attempt to stop the northern German advance at a battle round Abbeville, chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette from another and preaching resistance. But a much more weighty voice chipped in on the other side. Looking extremely pale and staring down at his hands spread on the table, France’s Deputy Prime Minister, Philippe Pétain, was ready to admit defeat. The 84-year-old hero of the First World War Battle of Verdun, which had cost 700,000
casualties, said France was being smashed to pieces, and Britain had no chance of halting Germany if the French army failed to do so.

Weygand, a short-tempered man who grew impatient at any sign of opposition, returned to the charge. Dunkirk had deepened his distrust of the British who, he noted, could not resist ‘the appeal of the ports’. ‘Apart from his distinguished qualities,’ he remarked on one occasion, ‘the Englishman is motivated by an almost instinctive selfishness.’ Yet Britain could redeem itself by sending all its fighter planes to France immediately. ‘Now is the decisive moment,’ he added.

‘No,’ Churchill replied after a pause. The decisive moment would come when Hitler hurled the Luftwaffe against Britain. ‘If we can keep command of the air over our own island – that is all I ask – we will win it all back for you,’ he added.

However great his sympathy for France and his desire to buttress his ally’s morale, the vital consideration for the British Prime Minister was to retain the ability to keep fighting whatever the outcome across the Channel. In his first telephone conversation with Reynaud after taking office, Churchill had assured him that, whatever the French did, the British would continue to fight to the last. ‘We shall go on to the end,’ he declared in one of his most celebrated speeches that summer. ‘We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’ If the Nazis invaded Britain, he told colleagues, either they would be driven back, or he would be carried out dead from his office.

At a meeting of the Defence Committee in London on 8 June, Churchill had concluded it ‘would be fatal to yield to the French demands and
jeopardise our own safety’.
⁸
So it was not surprising that, when the French asked him at Briare what Britain would do if they capitulated and Germany focused its might across the Channel, the Prime Minister replied, in French, that he would drown as many of the invaders as possible and then ‘
frapper sur la tête
’ those who crawled ashore. After which the British and French delegations had a light dinner, and went to bed.

The next morning, two French officers eating breakfast in the dining room of the château were taken aback when the big double doors opened. Standing there in a long flowing red silk kimono, his hair on end, was Churchill, asking about his morning bath.

Washed and dressed, the Prime Minister resumed the conference. The news from the battlefront was even worse. Weygand reported that some French divisions had just three or four guns; four had none at all. With the Germans only thirty miles from Paris, Churchill suggested that the city might put up resistance in the same way as Madrid had during the Spanish Civil War. ‘To make Paris a city of ruins will not affect the issue,’ Pétain responded, and Weygand declared the capital an open and undefended city to avoid bombing.

His doubts about France’s will to resist reinforced, Churchill decided to fly home. He and his party were using a small pink plane, known as the Flamingo. The escort of fighters which had accompanied it from Britain the previous day was out of fuel, and supplies had not arrived by the time the Prime Minister was ready to leave. So the Flamingo flew alone. As it crossed the Channel, the cloud around it cleared. Below Churchill’s plane, two German
fighters were attacking a fishing boat. Their fliers did not look up and spot the unarmed aircraft.

Reporting to the War Cabinet on his return, Churchill said the Germans ‘seemed to have over matched and outwitted’ the French whose army was
now on its last line.
⁹
‘Effective resistance by France as a great land power was coming to an end,’ the Secretary for War, Anthony Eden, who had been at Briare, added. At the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary: ‘French howling for assistance . . . but it’s so much
down the drain.’
¹⁰

Still, for Churchill, everything possible had to be done to postpone the day when France capitulated, not only out of his genuine feeling for the nation across the narrow sea but also because the longer it took Germany to defeat its neighbour, the more time Britain would have to build up its forces against the coming storm. So, on 13 June, as the
Lancastria
was sailing home to Liverpool from its mission to Iceland, the Prime Minister flew back to the Loire Valley for another meeting with Paul Reynaud at the French government’s new headquarters.

Arriving at the airfield of the city of Tours at lunchtime, the British found that
there was no welcoming party.
¹¹
Churchill’s pilot recalled that he ‘looked as though he was trying to chew a mouthful of nuts and bolts’. He approached a group of French airmen, and told them his name, adding that he was the Prime Minister of Britain. He would, he said, be grateful for
une voiture
. The airfield commander’s small Citroën was produced, and the five-man British party crammed itself inside, Churchill complaining that he had had no lunch and was very hungry. On the way into the city, they passed crowds of refugees before reaching the préfecture where they found the tough-minded Interior Minister, Georges Mandel, talking on two telephones at once
as he tried to rally local officials to resist. Nobody knew where Reynaud was.

A French officer helped the British party to find a restaurant where they took a private room and ate cold chicken and cheese, washed down by the local Vouvray white wine. Eventually, Reynaud was found, and the meeting began in the préfecture. The diminutive 62-year-old Premier, his hair in a neat centre parting, showed his strain and exhaustion. The defeatists in the French government and high command were pressing him remorselessly to sue for peace, abetted by his domineering, pro-German mistress. The Premier’s eyes twitched, and his face jumped with a tic, as he asked Churchill to release France from its undertaking not to make a separate peace with Berlin.

The British leader replied that he must discuss this with his colleagues alone. So they went out into the ill-kept rectangular garden of the préfecture, edging round puddles under rain-sodden trees, the surroundings matching their spirits. Returning to the meeting room, Churchill said that, though he understood the difficulties the French faced, he could not agree to the request. On leaving, Churchill saw Charles de Gaulle standing at the doorway, ‘solid and expressionless’. ‘
L’homme du destin
,’ the Prime Minister said in a low voice as he passed. The future head of the Free French remained impassive – if only because he had probably not heard the words.

That evening, the French Cabinet gathered in a château being used as the official residence of the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, an infirm 69-year-old who always hoped for the best – another politician said he ‘cried whenever a cloud covered the sun’. He had every reason for tears now.

A fierce argument erupted between the Interior Minister, Mandel, and the Commander-in-Chief, Weygand, who flounced out. The pro-peace party made much of a linguistic misunderstanding arising from a remark by Churchill in French during the talks in Tours. When Reynaud had asked the Prime Minister what his attitude would be if France surrendered, Churchill had replied ‘
Je comprends
’, intending to mean that he understood his ally’s difficulties. But his words contained a dangerous ambiguity since they could be taken as indicating acquiescence. So they were promptly spun by proponents of ending the fighting as evidence that Britain agreed with the proposal to seek an armistice.

Later that night, General Spears saw Reynaud looking ‘ghastly, with a completely unnatural expression, still and white’. His mistress stalked the corridors of the château where they were staying, throwing open doors to track down her man and press him to agree to yield to Hitler.

On 14 June, before leaving the Loire Valley for the greater security of Bordeaux, the French Premier sought help from across the Atlantic by sending a message to Franklin Roosevelt telling him that, unless he gave a firm undertaking that the United States would enter the war in the very near future, ‘the destiny of the world will change’. But the President was running for re-election, and American public opinion was set against involvement in a European war – in one speech in the autumn, Roosevelt assured voters that ‘your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war’. It would be another eighteen months before Washington entered the conflict, and then only after being attacked at Pearl Harbor.

On the afternoon of 14 June, as the
Lancastria
’s crew was being summoned back to duty, the Germans entered Paris. The writer, André Maurois, said France had become a body
without a head. Only 800,000 people remained in the city, a quarter of its peacetime population. The occupation troops behaved well, paying for food and offering their seats to old ladies on the Métro. But, with the soldiers came the first Gestapo agents, and Hitler made his aims quite clear: a new phase of the war was starting – ‘the pursuit and final destruction of the enemy’. Unknown to the invaders, and unrecognised by their own government across the Channel, 150,000 of those enemy troops were lying in the path of the advancing Wehrmacht.

On 3 June, at the end of the exodus from Dunkirk, Churchill had told the War Cabinet that the troops of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium ‘had now been withdrawn to this country practically intact, except for their losses
through casualties in combat’.
¹²
The following day, a report to the War Cabinet said it was ‘possible that a certain number of men might be trying to make their way back independently in a south-westerly direction’. The First Sea Lord chipped in to say that the navy was keeping a watch for individual British soldiers who might reach the French coast.

A confidential annexe to the Cabinet minutes did note that the Secretary of State for War was anxious to withdraw remaining divisions south of the Somme which had been out of the main line of the German advance. But, as far as everybody in Britain was concerned, the BEF had come home on the armada of small ships. That impression remains in place six decades later – one recent history of the fall of France written by an eminent British historian records that ‘after Dunkirk, there was hardly any further British army
presence on the Continent’ except for a Highland division which was still in France
after retreating from the Saarland.
¹³

Churchill’s government had every reason to encourage the belief that Dunkirk had drawn a line under the disastrous opening of the war. With France about to be defeated, the evacuation marked the end of the beginning, a manifestation of unquenchable spirit by a nation standing united against the technological prowess of the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.

The reality was very different. The British troops who ‘might’ be trying to get away from the Germans were far from being the scattered individuals suggested by the War Cabinet reports.

In all, 150,000 British troops were left across the Channel – almost half as many as had been taken off from Dunkirk. There were also 85,000 Poles fighting on French soil.

Some of the British soldiers still in France had failed to get to Dunkirk, or had not been told of the evacuation; some had been cut off from the Channel by the German push northwards from the Ardennes. But most had not been near the battles of May and early June. Many were support troops, in what were known as Lines of Communication units, engineers, repair men, transport and communications staff, wireless operators, RAF ground crews, NAAFI store minders, cooks, bakers, pay clerks and guards for arms and supply depots.