The Sinking of the Lancastria (7 page)

Trainloads of wounded British soldiers had begun to arrive in the area, awaiting evacuation. In the smart resort of La Baule, up the coast, the top hotel, the half-timbered Hermitage, was converted into a hospital. The owner of the local casino, M. André, provided another building where medical services were organised by Joan Rodes, a 23-year-old Englishwoman from Portsmouth married to a French army officer who was away at the front. Rodes knew La Baule well from holidays spent with her family-in-law at their villa there. Initially, she and her three staff cared for French refugees, but, before long, hundreds of wounded British were in the town.

In the shipbuilding port of St-Nazaire, the British set up a regional garrison command in a villa in the tree-lined Rue Marcel Sembat. Headed by Colonel V. T. R. Ford, DSO, it had twelve staff, including a lieutenant colonel, six majors, and three captains. There was also an army chaplain. Its area of responsibility ran along the Atlantic coast from the fishing port of Pornic to the south, through St-Nazaire to La Baule, and then up the River Vilaine to the town of La Roche-Bernard.

On 4 June, the garrison’s diary recorded rumours that St-Nazaire
was about to be bombed.
¹⁹
But no planes appeared.

On 5 June, the British officers turned their attention to finding a camp site for a corps of Indian Mules consisting of 300 men and 400 animals, which had been left behind in France. A French naval captain paid an official call to discuss defensive measures. Two platoons of British troops were posted to the airfield in case the enemy tried a parachute landing there. Fourteen light-machine-gun posts were placed on the docks. A second Church of England chaplain, the Reverend Holt, arrived.

On 6 June, a hospital ship, the
Dorsetshire
, took on a thousand wounded men, and sailed off in the evening.

For 7 and 8 June, as the
Lancastria
was returning from Norway and the French government was burning its papers before leaving Paris, the garrison diary recorded simply: ‘Nothing of note.’ The following day, three hospital trains arrived at La Baule. Most of the wounded were from the battle at Abbeville.

On 10 June, as Italy entered the war, Colonel Ford, the garrison commander, called on the Mayor of St-Nazaire to discuss defensive measures. During the next two days, as Churchill met the French in Briare, the Colonel inspected a
submarine depot and the defences of the ancient town of Redon. At 10 p.m. on 12 June, a German plane dropped a single bomb near the St-Nazaire marshalling yard, damaging the track and several wagons. One, containing oil, caught fire. There were no casualties.

On 13 June, once again, there was ‘Nothing of note.’

The next day, everything suddenly changed. Officers were called to a conference to consider the ‘possibility’ of an evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force. In Nantes, Major Fred Hahn reckoned that ‘the balloon is about to go up’ but, ‘as a responsible officer’, he made no entry to this effect in his diary. Up the River Loire in Olivet, Sergeant Macpherson was sitting in the armchair in the back of the lorry as his unit drove away through the night from its base, five hours before the Germans entered Orléans.

Further north, Joe Sweeney’s regiment had been ordered to leave the base it had occupied outside Le Havre for the past four-and-a-half months. Sweeney, a 21-year-old, fair-haired Scot who had worked at the City Treasurer’s office in Newcastle-upon-Tyne before being called up, drove a Humber Snipe staff car in a convoy of vehicles carrying supplies to safety. He crossed the Seine on a ferry, heading west. In the evening, a car carrying the unit’s colonel passed him. Sweeney spoke fluent French, and the officer told him to go to a nearby farm to ask the farmer’s wife to make a meal. The two men and the colonel’s driver enjoyed an excellent dinner, well washed down with wine. In return, Sweeney presented the farmer’s wife with a dozen tins of bully beef and tinned beans from his supplies.

In a move typical of the dislocation of the time, the convoy was suddenly told to turn round and go east back to the Seine: it took twenty-four hours to get formed up to take the new course. Sweeney used the delay to hitch a lift in a French van to the town of Evreux, where he had another good meal, and visited the main church to say a prayer. The first car to stop for him on the way back was that of his colonel, who had also gone into town for a meal. The two men sat on the back seat of the car, the young man feeling ‘like a lord’ as he chatted with his commanding officer.

The next morning, after sleeping in or under the vehicles, everybody had breakfast of bacon and eggs, served in billycans. By 8 a.m., they were driving east. Along the way, they passed a French military airfield which was being bombed by German Stukas. They dived into ditches and watched five French fighters take off, only to be shot down before reaching cruising altitude.

When the Stukas had gone, the British drove back to the Seine where they camped by a promontory overlooking Rouen. During the night, Sweeney counted forty-one German planes flying through ground fire to bomb bridges. The group spent five days by the river, collecting equipment from an abandoned British army depot which had been left in such a rush that there were unfinished meals in the mess tent. The equipment was put on a train, but was destroyed by a Luftwaffe raid.

An hour before midnight on 10 June, Sweeney and his comrades heard that the Germans had crossed the Seine, and were approaching their base. They boarded trains to go west again, stopping at Le Mans to pick up coal. There, Sweeney filled water bottles for himself and the five other men in his
compartment from the big pipes used for the locomotive. The water was muddy and dirty, so he put in purification tablets, adding fruit salts to take away the nasty taste.

After a slow journey interrupted by frequent stops, the men eventually arrived in Nantes where they were taken to a big mess hall for a meal, the officers and chaplain sitting at the top table. As everybody stood for grace, the fruit salts went to work, and Sweeney dashed to the lavatory.

His unit was billeted in a camp on a football field in the city. There were no inspections or work to do. So the men passed the time as best they could. Visiting a museum, Sweeney spotted a German First World War helmet, and asked whether he could have it. The curator said yes, and the young man carried it off as a war trophy.

As the days passed, Sweeney got into the habit of going to the railway station buffet for morning coffee, and to watch the arrival of refugees. One day, five trains rolled in one after another. Among the passengers pouring on to the platform, Sweeney noticed a woman he had met in Le Havre.

She was Thérèse van Looche, the daughter of Belgians who had moved to France during the First World War. She had been in the typing pool at the harbour station in Le Havre, where she had become friendly with a British soldier called Les Stevenson, whom Sweeney knew. Les’ job was to write out vouchers and take them to be typed up. As their friendship blossomed, he began to take all his vouchers to Thérèse.

Sweeney went out to meet her, and she asked: ‘
Mais où est Les
?’ Sweeney led her to the main door of the station, and pointed out the Café de la Gare across the road. If she was waiting inside at 5 p.m. that afternoon, Les would arrive, he assured her.

Heading back to the British base, Sweeney went looking for his friend, telling everyone he met from his unit that, if they saw him, they should tell him to be at the café at 5 p.m. Getting the word, Les turned up at the appointed hour. Joe and five others were waiting outside.

Sweeney opened the door, saying to his friend: ‘
Après vous
!’

‘Oh no Joe!’ Les replied. ‘After you!’

The half-dozen soldiers pushed Les inside. Then they closed the door, and went off to another café.

General Alan Brooke was less than pleased when he was sent back to France in the middle of June. The 57-year-old soldier, who would go on to become Britain’s Chief of Staff, had helped to command the evacuation from Dunkirk, sleeping for thirty-six hours after he reached his home in Hampshire. Then he was called to the War Office to be told he was going across the Channel to organise British troops left there to resist the German advance.

Brooke, who had been brought up in south-west France by his mother who preferred that country to Britain, recorded that this was one of his blackest moments. ‘I knew only too well the state of affairs that would prevail in France from now onwards,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I had seen my hopes in the French Army gradually shattered . . . I had witnessed the realisation of my worst fears concerning its fighting value and morale and now I had no false conceptions as to what its destiny must inevitably be. To be sent back again into that cauldron with a new force to participate in the final stages of French disintegration was
indeed a dark prospect.’
²⁰

He asked the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John
Dill, if he could refit two of the divisions which had come back from Dunkirk and take them with him to provide experienced troops. There was no time, he was told. When the Secretary for War, Anthony Eden, enquired if he was satisfied with what was being done, Brooke replied that his mission had no military value, could not accomplish anything, and had every probability of turning into a disaster.

Leaving Southampton at night on 12 June, Brooke sailed to Cherbourg on a dirty Dutch steamer – there was no food on board, but Brooke’s wife had made him sandwiches. In a further sign of the dislocation and the bad state of Allied relations, the French harbour authorities would not let him disembark for several hours. When he did get ashore in heavy rain, it was in the middle of an air raid. To make things worse, the local British command had not been told that the General was coming. It was, Brooke noted, ‘a
very unpleasant return trip’.
²¹

At 8 a.m. the next day, he set off on a six-hour drive to British headquarters at Le Mans, his journey much slowed down by refugees on the road. On arrival, Brooke took over command of all British troops in France, telling his predecessor, Henry Karslake, to fly home immediately. Then he continued his journey south to meet the French Commander-in-Chief in the government’s temporary resting place at Tours.

Maxime Weygand was away for the day, and, when they met the following morning, he said the French were no longer capable of organised fighting. Resources were exhausted. Many formations worn out. Organised defence had come to an end. The commander, who had injured his neck in a car crash, looked very wizened, Brooke noted.

After his confession of the plight of the armies he commanded, Weygand brought up a plan that seemed to point to an unsuspected spirit of resistance. The British and French governments had, he said, decided to defend the peninsula of Brittany with a new, 100-mile front line.

Brooke did not think much of this. Holding the front would require at least fifteen divisions which were simply not available. The Germans dominated the air. In ten days of fighting in France, seventy-five RAF planes had been shot down or destroyed on the ground and another 120 were unserviceable or lacked fuel to fly; in all, the British had lost a quarter of their fighter strength while German planes wreaked havoc with their dive-bombing raids.

Nor, it turned out, did Weygand or his deputy, General Georges, approve of the Brittany idea, though it was said to have caught the fancy of the Deputy Defence Minister, de Gaulle. The French Commander-in-Chief called the notion ‘romantic’, and said it had been dreamed up by politicians without military advice. But he insisted that they had to follow instructions, and that the British must join in.

Returning to his headquarters on the afternoon of 14 June, Brooke rang the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London to ask about the Brittany scheme. Dill knew nothing about it, but undertook to ask Churchill.

The unreality in the air was extraordinary. Though Churchill had made his priorities quite plain in the meetings at Briare and Tours, the government in London sent a message to France promising the ‘utmost aid in her power’. British newspapers reported enthusiastically about reinforcements being sent across the Channel. They were, said
The Times
, ‘well equipped and with high hearts’. Most
were Canadians who wore carnations as they embarked in a skirl of bagpipes – the newspaper’s reporter noted that one carried a mandolin and another a tin of fruit salad.

After a couple of days in France, Brooke’s initial reservations about organising a new BEF to resist the Germans had multiplied. He told Dill that, given the ‘general state of disintegration which was setting in to the French Army’, all further movement of troops and materiel to France should stop, and arrangements should
be started for wholesale evacuation.
²²

An hour later, Dill telephoned back to say that Churchill knew nothing of the Brittany plan – it had been mentioned at his meetings with Reynaud and de Gaulle had expressed interest, but nothing had been agreed. Still, the Prime Minister was anxious that everything should be done to ensure good relations with the French government, which had retreated further south to Bordeaux. Driven by a mixture of pride and realpolitik, Churchill did not want it to appear that Britain was deserting its ally.

Brooke had lost all patience with any such niceties. He had made up his mind that the only thing to do was to save as many troops as possible. Dill said that Churchill did not wish him to do that.

‘What the hell does he want?’ Brooke responded.

‘He wants to speak to you,’ Dill said.

The Prime Minister came on the line. He and Brooke spoke for half-an-hour, the General on the verge of losing his temper.

Churchill stressed how important it was to make the French feel they were getting British support.

Brooke replied that it was ‘impossible to make a corpse feel’. The French Army, he added, was dead to all intents and
purposes. The main priority should be to get as many men back to Britain as possible.

‘All right, I agree with you,’ Churchill said at last.