The Sinking of the Lancastria (9 page)

Captain Griggs of the Royal Engineers, who would swim through dead fish in his full uniform and tin helmet, found a blue Vauxhall saloon car in a ditch and recruited a French driver to take him along the Normandy coast from his base at Le Tréport to Dieppe. Then he went south-west, enjoying a good lunch, stopping at bistros along the way to sample their wares, and spending the night at a ‘very pleasant Pension’.

Heading the same way, Sergeant Macpherson of the RAF, dozed in the armchair in the back of the lorry that had
brought him from Olivet. After Nantes, he and his companions drove on for forty miles to a base outside St-Nazaire. There, a squadron leader ordered all the available food – corned beef, potatoes, cheese and baked beans – to be put into a massive pot, covered with water and condiments, stirred and boiled furiously for an hour. ‘Curiously,’ Macpherson recalled, ‘it was not such a bad mess, and everybody had some.’

Some of those seeking a way out of France made their own way to the evacuation ports, or found themselves unexpectedly exposed to the enemy. A British teacher, Grace Classey, who had been on the staff of a school in France for five years, hitched rides through Brittany to join a ship taking soldiers home.

Margaret Ellis, an army nurse stationed at Offranville, near Dieppe, was woken early one morning by her matron and told to get dressed and to leave immediately, without stopping to pack. Ellis grabbed a few essentials, including a quarter-pound packet of tea. Rather than going to Dieppe, which was under heavy bombing, she and her colleagues headed south-west, without food and sleeping in barns and haystacks. When they arrived in Le Mans, British officers offered them dinner at their hotel, and gave up their rooms though there were not enough beds – Ellis slept on the floor. The town was bombed during the night. The next day, they boarded a train for the coast. There, they found a rescue ship and set off on an eighteen-hour voyage across the Channel, using water heated in the engine-room boiler to make themselves tea.

A group of Canadian soldiers was taken by train from the
coast down to Tours, unaware that the Germans were encircling the city on the Loire. When they arrived, a British officer told them of the military situation. The Canadians tried to get the engine driver to take them back to the coast. He refused to budge. So four of them worked out how the locomotive was operated, and set off for the north, the others poking their rifles through the open windows. They made it to the Channel, and found places on a boat.

One of the more extraordinary individual escapes was made by a trio of soldiers headed by a corporal called Patrick Hanley, from Deal in Kent. At the beginning of June, their unit had been posted to block a road to the coast. They suddenly found themselves faced with a German armoured convoy that stretched back for ten miles. When the order ‘Every man for himself’ was given, Hanley hid in a wood for the night with two privates. In the morning, they were discovered by the Germans, and locked in a church. After eight days there, Hanley told the others that he had had enough, and would ‘clout’ the guard when he came round in the evening. He duly did this; so the three of them escaped, hiding in another wood for four days with no nourishment except for milk they took from a cow. Then they sheltered in a barn where a farmer found them, and gave them food.

Setting out again, the trio met a group of Belgian refugees who handed them civilian clothes. Stealing bicycles, they headed for the coast, but were stopped by German troops, and taken to the commander. Hanley said they were Belgian, though he had no papers. The German officer, who did not speak French, believed him. So they got away again, reaching the Channel coast. There, they pretended to be beachcombers, rolling up their trousers and walking about
with seaweed draped over their shoulders while they decided what to do next.

Two girls they ran into told them of a rowing boat abandoned in a garage by a doctor who had joined the refugee exodus. The boat was white, which the soldiers thought too conspicuous. So they got hold of some black paint, and used it to darken the craft. The girls gave them food to take with them, as well as a Union Jack and corks with which to plug holes from machine-gunning if they were strafed. Rowing through the night, they became extremely seasick, but got home in the end.

In Nantes, Major Fred Hahn, the First World War veteran from Lancashire who had passed his time watching tennis and meeting local Masons, was put in charge of ensuring food supplies for the British troops camped on the racecourse, where French recruits practised driving two-men Hotchkiss tanks.

It was a tough assignment because rations were nonexistent. Bread was scarce. What provisions Hahn could find were old and mouldy. Stores had been abandoned and, in some cases, looted. The Major was more in his element when he and a few others were given the job of salvaging equipment, including secret radar parts, after the main body of troops moved off to St-Nazaire. Guards with Bren guns were posted round the workshop as Hahn went to work dismantling equipment and loading it on to lorries.

Another transport detachment posted behind a network of trenches outside Nantes had got an idea of the way things were going when its women ATS staff had been taken back to Britain on 12 June. In their absence, the men found
office work extremely difficult. As a defence against the Germans, they stretched steel wire at a 45 degree angle across nearby roads: they reckoned it could pitch a light tank into the ditch. They also formed a ‘flying column’ of a truck mounted with a Bren gun and two lorries carrying twenty men each to deal with any German parachutists who might drop on them.

At 1 p.m. on 15 June, the men were called to the parade ground to be told they would be leaving. They began to pack up their machine tools and stores, and to dismantle big pieces of equipment. French civilians working at the base were sent to remote parts of the facility so that they should not see what was going on. At 6 p.m., the first convoy left for St-Nazaire with lathes and drilling machines.

Lieutenant Colonel Norman de Coudray Tronson, the 64-year-old Boer War veteran who would fire a Bren gun at the attacking planes from the deck of the
Lancastria
, reached the end of his exodus across France in La Baule. He had fought in India and South Africa as well as in the First World War when he was gassed and wounded. He had been sent to Dieppe to supervise hospital facilities and a medical depot. The Norman port became the target of heavy raids by German aircraft whose crews took no notice of the big red crosses painted on the roofs of medical centres. The house where Tronson was staying was hit three times, destroying most of his possessions. Two British hospital ships were bombed. One, the
Maid of Kent
, keeled over, and set fire to a train drawn up alongside containing 580 wounded men. The planes came back, and began machine-gunning. ‘That’s when the real horror began,’ said an army major at the scene.

After the raid, Tronson sent medical stores to the west, and then left at the head of a convoy of six cars at midnight. In the morning, he stopped in the town of Alençon, in southern Normandy, for breakfast and a haircut. There was no sign of the other five cars, but he did not wait. On the way west, he met up with a train carrying members of his staff from Dieppe. They headed for La Baule, with its luxury hotels behind the wide, three-mile-long beach converted into military hospitals to treat men brought in from across northern France. When the evacuation order was transmitted on 15 June dozen of military ambulances lined up outside to carry the wounded to St-Nazaire.

Some of the retreating foreigners did not behave so well. One British soldier carried a valise crammed with leather shoe soles; another filled his map pocket with hundred franc notes he collected along the way. A sergeant carried two haversacks stuffed with clocks, watches and other souvenirs of France. A driver known as ‘Matey’, with a headquarters unit of the Royal Engineers, made off with an album of beautifully drawn and coloured pornographic illustrations he came across. After showing them round, he tucked them into his uniform jacket to take home. They would go down with him on the
Lancastria
.

In Nantes, a newspaper reported an incident at a farmhouse in the region. Two foreign soldiers had asked the farmer’s wife for food, which she gave them. As they were eating, a delivery man arrived with a package. To pay him, the woman went to a cupboard to get money stored there. The next day, while she was out, the money was stolen, along with savings books kept in the cupboard. The report left no doubt
that it was the foreign soldiers who were responsible. Whether they were British was not specified.

A handful of civilians were also trying to get out through St-Nazaire. Among them were members of the YMCA and the Church Army – a convoy carrying two of its sisters called Trott and Chamley was attacked five times by German planes.

In La Baule, an Englishwoman from London, Mrs Jory, had stayed on with three of her children in their family villa on the calculation that London might be bombed and that a resort in western France would be safer. As she watched the army ambulances lining up outside the hotel-hospitals to take the wounded to be evacuated, she realised that it was time to go. She got a pass for the
Lancastria
, but did not manage to obtain one for her young sons and daughter. The family’s large Austin car did not have enough petrol to drive to St-Nazaire. So the family stayed in La Baule, and the children stood on the beach watching German planes flying in to bomb the ships in the bay – at the end of 1940, they were arrested by the Germans and the French police, and held in several camps before being freed in 1944.

Most of the civilians who did get to St-Nazaire came from an aircraft factory operated by the Fairey Aviation Company near Charleroi in Belgium. The plant had been bombed at the start of the German offensive in May, and the firm decided to evacuate its management and their families to France. With them, they carried plans for aircraft construction that the British did not want to fall into enemy hands.

Among those in the Fairey party were 13-year-old Emilie Legroux and her brother, Roger, eleven, three-year-old
Claudine Freeman and a baby, Jacqueline Tillyer, aged two. The women and children set off by car, the men by tram.

They found a train that took them across the French border to Valenciennes where it was stopped by a heavy bombing raid – the men lay on top of the children to protect them. After the planes had gone, the children complained loudly about having been crushed. One of the mothers knocked their heads together, telling them, ‘We have enough wars as it is.’

Another train got them to within twenty miles of Paris, but it stopped there, and the party spent the night in a field. In the morning, they boarded another train thinking it was for the French capital. Instead, it went south, and they ended up near Bordeaux, where they moved into an inn that offered baths as well as food.

From there, they contacted the Fairey head office in Hayes, Middlesex, and were instructed to get to England. So they made their way up the west coast of France by rail to find a route to Britain.

As the Fairey group was heading for Nantes and St-Nazaire, the Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30) unit of the Luftwaffe was settling into its new base outside Louvain, east of Brussels. It had been allocated an abandoned airfield that was little more than a harvested field from which to mount sorties against France.

Kampfgeschwader 30 was an elite group, flying the new Junkers JU-88 bombers, with the unit’s symbol of a diving eagle emblazoned on their noses. The twin-engined planes were among the most destructive and frightening elements in
the Nazi attack, diving at almost 300 miles an hour to release their bombs as their siren hooters set up a banshee wail to frighten people below.

No sooner had they arrived in Belgium than the Diving Eagles were sent to attack France. On the way, they landed to take on fuel at an abandoned RAF airfield outside Amiens where one of the Germans found a big box of English sweets left behind by the retreating airmen. From Amiens, the JU-88s flew west, diving through anti-aircraft fire to attack the port at Cherbourg from which British troops were being evacuated. One of the fliers, a newly married, former civilian test pilot called Peter Stahl, was struck by the desolation below him on the way. He noted the numbers of cows lying dead in the fields, and the crush of people on the roads.

The Diving Eagles did not attack the refugees; that was a job for smaller aircraft. They were after larger prey, strategic bridges, communications points and ships – one of their main training exercises had been to swoop on an old battleship to gain experience of attacking big naval targets.

At 9.30 in the evening of 15 June, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, told him the latest bad news from France as they went in to dinner at the Prime Minister’s official residence at Chequers in Buckinghamshire. Churchill became very depressed, so the meal began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The Prime Minister ate quickly and greedily, his face almost down in the plate. As well as Colville, his scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindeman, was present, eating a special vegetarian menu. The Prime Minister’s eldest daughter, Diana, and her husband, the politician, Duncan Sandys, completed the party.

Champagne, brandy and cigars lightened Churchill’s mood, and the group became talkative, ‘even garrulous’,
Colville recorded in his diary.
⁸

‘The war is bound to become a bloody one for us now,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘But our people will stand up to bombing.’ He was particularly concerned that, if France gave up, its fleet should not fall into German hands. ‘If they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but . . . if they surrender without consulting us, we shall never forgive,’ he declared. ‘We shall blacken their name for a thousand years.’

Churchill and Sandys stepped into the garden, walking in the moonlight as they discussed the latest events. In the distance, sentries with fixed bayonets watched over them.

Returning to the house, Churchill recited some poetry, and said he and Hitler had only one thing in common, their hatred of whistling. Then he began to murmur: