The Sinking of the Lancastria (26 page)

There was a pleasant surprise at the station for Morris Lashbrook. Standing there when his unit assembled was his friend, ‘Chippy’ Moore, from whom he had been separated after they jumped together from the
Lancastria
.

In the evening, a dance was held with ladies from the WRAF; but most of the men just wanted to sleep, usually on the floor of military establishments in the town. Later, they remembered how wonderful it was to lie on a mattress with clean white sheets.

Others spent the night in pubs. In one, some of the
Highlander
’s crew met soldiers they had brought home, and they all made a night of it, singing and celebrating as they drank.

More decorously, in his new clothes, Captain Griggs had dinner at the house of the chief of the naval barracks where he stayed the night.

Barry Stevens, who had transferred from the
Havelock
to the
Highlander
, went to give a report to the commander in Devonport. Before he could do so, he passed out on the spot. Waking the next morning in a bed at Admiralty House, he
was told by the commander that he obviously needed leave – he was given forty-eight hours.

In the main hospital, a young man lay in bed looking intently around him, but saying nothing. When the nurse, Isobella Macclaine Bowden, came round to collect outgoing mail from the patients and to wish them good night, the man in the next bed explained that his neighbour was Greek and spoke no English. The nurse clasped her hands and put them under her cheeks, closed her eyes and said, ‘Sleep well.’ When she opened her eyes, she saw the young man sitting up in bed, holding up one hand and pointing one finger. ‘One sleep, no good,’ he said. Then ‘two sleep, ah’ and he threw his arms round himself in a warm embrace.

Walking round a shed on the dockside, Harry Grattidge bumped into the Chief Engineer from the
Lancastria
, whom he had believed dead on the ship. Grattidge was still in the corporal’s jacket and woollen underwear he had been given on the rescue ship. The engineer was clad only in an old patrol jacket. The two men pumped hands and, the Chief Officer recorded, ‘grinned at one another like
fools unable to speak’.
²

On his return, Alan Brooke recorded that he ‘thanked God for again allowing us to come home. I also thanked God that the expedition which I had hated from
the start was over.’
³

From the day he had arrived in France, he had seen that the battle on the continent had been lost, and that what mattered was to get as many men back to Britain as possible. Now what his biographer would describe as his ‘vision . . . of a beaten France and of only Britain
resurgent’ had become reality.
⁴

Brooke went to naval headquarters at Admiralty House in Plymouth, had tea, a bath and dinner – and took the midnight train to London, which was late arriving. At the War Office, he was questioned about why more equipment had not been brought back. His superiors seemed to have forgotten the order to save men and abandon or destroy material. Then Brooke went to his home in Hampshire to rest; six days later, he met Churchill for the first time over lunch and was appointed commander of the home front in preparation for the expected invasion from across the Channel – later, he would become Chief of the Imperial General Staff and chief military organiser of the British war effort.

The survivors who followed Brooke on the trains heading north from the coast during the following days were seen off at the station in Plymouth by women welfare volunteers handing out bags of soap, razor blades, sweets, cigarettes and matches. One group of survivors reciprocated with a singing concert including what were described as ‘some rather rude songs’. As their train pulled out, they looked at the holiday crowds sunbathing on Dawlish beach, and contrasted what they saw with what they had been through.

When RAF Warrant Officer W. Horne got to London, the strange assortment of clothes he had been given on landing drew stares from other travellers on the Underground. Harry Grattidge set off for the capital by train in a second-hand suit with tuppence in his pocket. The Chief Officer’s hair was still matted with oil, and the smell of fuel was on his breath. So strong was the odour that the other passengers in his compartment made for the refreshment car. At one point on
the journey, an elderly man, who looked as though he was returning from holiday on the coast, beckoned him into the corridor, and said he could see he was in trouble. He offered Grattidge a pound to tide him over. The seaman said he did not need help; he was being met in London. The old man kept a close watch on him when they arrived to check the truth of his story.

Getting to Waterloo station, Sergeant Major Picken and some comrades were taken for escaped German prisoners, and detained in a waiting room. They were moved to Kensington Barracks, and held until the Sergeant Major, who had served there before, was recognised and allowed to telephone his wife, who had not heard from him for six weeks.

Taking a few days’ leave in civilian clothes, Joe Sweeney found himself being shouted at by a woman who asked if he did not know there was a war on, and said he should be in the forces.

A Sherwood Forester who had donned an air force uniform while escaping from France was hauled in by military police, who asked him to which branch of the RAF he belonged. He said he was in the army. The police interrogated him as to why he was wearing an RAF uniform: in the end, he convinced them, and was released.

William Knight, who had driven across France in his lorry loaded with explosives, got back to Liverpool on a troopship after being picked up by a French fishing boat. When he was debriefed, he found that nobody wanted to know about the
Lancastria
, or to believe what he said. One of those who questioned him said he was suffering from a hallucination, and should be sent to an asylum.

Survivors were told that the sinking of the liner must be kept secret. It would be a breach of King’s Regulations to say
anything about what had happened at St-Nazaire. If the locals in Plymouth invited them to their homes, they were instructed by officers to refuse. In Liverpool, as the truth of what he was saying became evident, William Knight was told to keep quiet under the Official Secrets Act and to sign an undertaking not to mention what had taken place, particularly not to the press.

Reaching home in Faversham, Stan Flowers went to see the boss of a machinery works where he had been an apprentice before being called up. He told the older man that he had been in St-Nazaire, and had had a bit of trouble on a ship called the
Lancastria
. His ex-employer recalled that he had been on a cruise on her before the war.

Most of the survivors did not seem to have any desire to talk about the disaster, and wanted to put it behind them. Several who contributed recollections to the
Lancastria
Association more than half a century later had not previously talked about it, even to their wives and children. The soldiers and airmen were soon back in service, in Britain, Egypt and the Sudan or the Far East, and they did their best to push the tragedy to the back of their minds as they got on with the job of fighting the war. However, the experience would never dissolve. Later on, an airman who had been on the
Lancastria
jumped at a recruit who was singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ in a forces canteen and shouted at him to stop; then he apologised, saying, ‘Sorry, chum. But we’ve got memories.’

Survivors were informed that they could ask to be reimbursed for personal losses of possessions, but then found their claims refused. The only thing for which payment was made was a Bible – whose value was put at twenty-five shillings. ‘We resubmitted our claims, all claiming loss of Bible,’ one
man recalled. ‘We must have been a religious squad.’ Captain Griggs put in for the total loss of all his kit, but some months later a suitcase was delivered to his home, having been picked up by the navy.

When Joe Sweeney and other survivors from his unit got back to their base in Nottinghamshire and went on parade, a brigadier stopped in front of them, and ordered that they should be put on a charge for having lost their rifles. Sweeney remonstrated, but the officer insisted. Fortunately, the brigadier left the base soon afterwards, and the matter was shelved. Another survivor was told off for the ‘very serious offence indeed’ of having lost his army identity disc.

Fred Hahn had a long slow train journey through blackouts to his regimental headquarters in Leicester, where he stayed in the Grand Hotel before being given forty-eight hours’ leave. He headed for home at Cheadle Hulme, outside Manchester.

On the Saturday night, six days after the evacuation from St-Nazaire had started, he and his wife went to a dance at the Cricket and Tennis Club. As they arrived, the band was playing the Blue Danube waltz. A friend motioned to the musicians to stop playing while he greeted the survivor from France. As the music resumed, the Hahns began to waltz.

Back in France, 4000 troops were still left in St-Nazaire. Some were men saved from the
Lancastria
who had not been able to board the last rescue ships. Some got off on later rescue ships. Some were taken prisoner.

Others escaped, one group thanks to a 67-year-old retired
school teacher called Marie Rolland, who lived with her sister in the small town of Guémené-Penfao, north of Nantes. She formed one of the first Resistance networks, taking the codename of Annick. Her unit contacted survivors from the
Lancastria
still round St-Nazaire, and arranged for forty-seven of them to get back to England. Despite her age, she kept up an active career in the Resistance until the Gestapo identified her and put a price on her head, forcing her to go into hiding until 1944, when she was made a Companion of the Liberation, and decorated by Charles de Gaulle in person.

The loss of the
Lancastria
was felt particularly keenly in her home port; a quarter of the 330 crew had been lost. When the first survivors reached Liverpool by train, they found the station platform lined with women carrying photographs of their husbands, sons or boyfriends, asking if anybody had seen them. The wife of one sailor waited at Lime Street station for her husband, who she had been told had survived the disaster. He passed close to her as he left the train, but was so black with oil that she did not recognise him at first.

Captain Sharp and Chief Officer Grattidge met for lunch in a Liverpool pub to start work on a report on the disaster
.

The Captain was puzzled as to why such a big ship with her bulkhead doors closed had sunk so quickly.

‘My conclusion,’ he wrote, ‘is that each of the bombs which struck the ship passed through the upper deck and hatches, bursting in the ship and blowing holes in her sides. Then, apparently, a further bomb exploded in the water close to the side, just abaft the bridge, which probably added to the damage.’

The weather at the time, he added, ‘was light NW wind, slight sea and swell, cloudy with bright periods’. The report, marked confidential, put the death toll at between 3000 and 4000, including seventy of the 330 crew.

As they lunched, Sharp told Grattidge that the two Belgian children with their dogs had not been picked up. The Chief Officer already knew that. In his memoirs, he recalled taking some comfort from the fact that their dogs had been with them to the end. ‘I was still weak and light-headed with oil-poisoning,’ he added. ‘It seemed to me the best thing that had
come out of it.’
⁵

What he did not add was that, if he had not let the boy’s look lead him to bend the regulations for the sake of humanity, the two children would not have boarded the liner, and could well have found a safe passage out of France on another boat.

Checking on survivors from his unit when they landed at Falmouth, the pince-nez-wearing accountant, Captain Clement Stott, was pleased to note that, apart from the two corporals and one sergeant who had died in the bombing, all his men had returned safely.

Then he headed home to Wales, wearing the ill-fitting uniform he had been supplied with along the way.

At the station, his wife put her arms around him, tears running down her cheeks.

‘You know, Clem,’ she said after a time, ‘that battledress doesn’t fit.’

His eyes wet, Stott replied: ‘I know.’

‘And you need a haircut,’ his wife added.

So, on the way home, they stopped at the barber.

‘Bit greasy your hair, Sir, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ the Captain responded. ‘I’ve been in the water.’

Four days after the
Lancastria
went down, armistice talks between Germany and France opened in the Wagons Lits railway compartment where the surrender document had been signed at the end of the First World War. Hitler had ordered it to be pulled from a nearby museum to the place in the forest of Compiègne where the earlier capitulation had been formalised. The Führer, who had made a whirlwind tour of Paris beforehand, was present for the start of the negotiations. A monument commemorating the 1918 event was demolished after he had read its denunciation of the ‘criminal pride of the German Empire’ with a look said to combine hate, scorn, revenge and triumph.

A telephone line was opened to Bordeaux so that the government could follow the proceedings. On 22 June, the French agreed to the German conditions, and the country was divided between an occupied zone in the north and an unoccupied zone south of the Loire under the Pétain administration, which established itself in the spa town of Vichy. Churchill expressed ‘grief and amazement’ at the news. In London, Charles de Gaulle set up the Council of Liberation and the French National Committee declaring that, ‘the war is not lost; the country is not dead; hope is not extinct;
Vive la France
!’ But, for most of the French, it was time to stop fighting and for the refugees to go home – as the saying had it, in the summer of 1940, there were 40 million Pétainists.

The end of the debacle across the Channel had left the British, in the words of Churchill’s military aide, ‘Pug’ Ismay,
‘relieved, nay, exhilarated. Henceforth everything would be simpler; we were masters of our own fate.’ The Prime Minister’s private secretary, John Colville, found a line in Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
: ‘Tis better using France than trusting France.’ At the Foreign Office, the senior civil servant, Sir Alexander Cadogan, confided to his diary: ‘It will almost be a relief when we are left alone to fight the Devil,
and win or die.’
⁶