The sinking of the Lancastria

On the afternoon of 17 June 1940 German bombers attacked the ships lying in the roads off Saint-Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire. Hit by several bombs, the British liner Lancastria, onto which troops evacuated from France in Operation Aerial had been loaded since the morning, capsized and sank in about twenty minutes. No one knows how many people were on board. Some 2,500 were rescued, while according to various estimates between 3,000 and more than 5,000 people died – soldiers, airmen and civilians, among them women and children. It was the worst disaster in the history of British shipping: by commonly accepted estimates, more people died than on the Titanic and the Lusitania combined. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, forbade publication of the news, and the British public learned of it only five weeks later.

How many victims?

It is often said that 5,000–7,000 people died. Such figures do appear in the literature, but they are the upper limit of the estimates. An exact toll cannot be established, because in the rush no one counted the people coming aboard. The ship’s master, Captain Rudolph Sharp, estimated the number embarked at about 5,500; one of the officers responsible for loading spoke of more than 7,200; and figures ranging from 4,000 to 9,000 appear in the literature. 2,477 people were rescued. The historian Jonathan Fenby, author of the most comprehensive book on the disaster, wrote that estimates of the dead range from just under 4,000 to 6,500. Other authors give about 3,000, and it is generally accepted that at least 3,500 people died. Far fewer victims have been identified by name: the association that commemorates the disaster knows the names of some 1,700 of the dead. Yet even the lowest estimates make Lancastria the ship on which more people died than on any other in the entire history of British shipping.

The ship

Lancastria was launched in 1920 at the Beardmore yard at Dalmuir on the Clyde as Tyrrhenia, for the Anchor Line, part of the Cunard group. She was of 16,243 GRT and almost 176 metres long. In 1924 she was renamed, reputedly because passengers could not pronounce her old name. She sailed between Liverpool and New York, and in the 1930s as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and the waters of northern Europe. After the outbreak of war she was requisitioned as a troopship: she was painted grey, her portholes were blacked out and a gun was mounted on her stern. As a troopship she could carry about 2,200 people, including her crew. In the spring of 1940 she carried troops during the Norwegian campaign, and Captain Sharp brought more than 2,600 soldiers back from Norway in her.

In mid-June Lancastria was at Liverpool, where she was due to undergo a refit, and some of her crew had gone on leave. Urgently called back to sea, she put in at Plymouth on 15 June and was ordered to France. On the evening of 16 June she reached the mouth of the Loire, and at 4 a.m. on 17 June she dropped anchor in the Charpentiers roads, a few nautical miles from Saint-Nazaire, together with several dozen other ships. The port, accessible only by a narrow tidal channel, could not take large vessels.

Embarkation

In those days British rear-echelon troops who had remained in France after Dunkirk were converging on Saint-Nazaire and Nantes: engineers, men of the Pioneer Corps and the supply services, mechanics and RAF ground crew from the airfield at Nantes. In the morning naval officers came aboard Lancastria and asked the master how many men he could take. Sharp replied that “if necessary” he could take 3,000. He was told to take as many as he could, regardless of the limits laid down by international law. All day destroyers, tugs, fishing boats and barges ferried soldiers from the shore to the ships in the roads, each trip taking several hours. Men were crammed in everywhere – in the holds, in the passageways and on the decks. Civilians also came aboard: staff of the British Embassy and personnel of the Belgian Fairey aircraft works, which had been evacuated to France, together with their families.

At noon that day the new head of the French government, Marshal Philippe Pétain, appointed the previous evening, announced on the radio that “the fighting must stop”. The British in the ports were now in no doubt that the evacuation was a race against time. From the morning German aircraft had been appearing over the mouth of the Loire. Cover was provided by Hurricanes of three RAF squadrons, but they had to patrol a stretch of coast several dozen kilometres long and could not be everywhere. At 1.50 p.m. a bomb hit the bridge of the liner Oronsay, lying nearby. The commander of the destroyer HMS Havelock advised Sharp to sail at once. The captain, however, fearing U-boats, did not want to sail without an escort and waited until he could leave together with Oronsay.

Twenty minutes

At around 3.50 p.m. another wave of bombers came over. According to most studies, they were Junkers Ju 88s of the bomber wing Kampfgeschwader 30. The Hurricanes were then at the far end of their patrol line. Three, perhaps four bombs hit Lancastria. According to many survivors one went down the funnel; according to the account of an officer from the engine room, they hit holds full of men; and the last exploded right alongside, rupturing the fuel tanks. The ship listed to starboard. From the bridge men were shouted at to move to the port side. The hull righted itself for a moment, then rolled over onto its port side and never came up again.

There were sixteen lifeboats and about 2,500 lifejackets. Some of the boats were destroyed by the bombs, others could not be lowered at such an angle of heel, and several capsized as they were launched. Many soldiers who jumped from the high deck in their lifejackets were killed by the impact with the water or the hull. The men shut in the holds had no chance. Those who clambered onto the exposed bottom of the capsizing ship, according to many accounts, sang “Roll Out the Barrel” and “There’ll Always Be an England” until the hull disappeared beneath the water. Lancastria sank at about 4.10 p.m., roughly twenty minutes after the first hit.

The water in the mouth of the Loire was covered with a thick layer of oil from the ruptured tanks. Men choked on it and drowned from exhaustion. Many soldiers could not swim. Survivors recounted that German aircraft machine-gunned the men in the water and dropped flares onto the oil slicks to set them alight. Some historians accept these accounts; others point out that they are hard to verify today.

Rescue

The survivors were picked up by every vessel in the vicinity: the destroyers HMS Highlander and HMS Havelock, merchant ships, tugs, fishing boats and small French craft from Saint-Nazaire and the surrounding villages. The largest number, some 900 people, were rescued by the armed trawler HMT Cambridgeshire, whose crew, themselves under fire from the air, turned back again and again in their boat for exhausted men. The survivors, often wounded, burned and covered in oil, were transferred to other transports, which sailed for England that same evening or the following day. The evacuation from Saint-Nazaire continued despite the disaster and ended on 18 June.

For weeks afterwards the sea washed bodies up on the shores of Brittany and the Vendée. The French buried them in the cemeteries of coastal towns, among them Pornic, and the fishermen of the islands of Ré and Oléron laid to rest in their own cemeteries the bodies they had recovered from the sea. For years many families knew only that their loved ones had died in France in June 1940.

The ban on publication

News of the disaster reached Churchill at Downing Street in the afternoon. In the second volume of his war memoirs he wrote that he forbade its publication, saying that “the newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least”. That same day France asked for an armistice. The ban was passed to the press through the so-called D-Notice system, the guidance by which the authorities indicated to editors which subjects were covered by military secrecy. Churchill claimed that he had intended to release the news a few days later, but that events “crowded upon us so black and so quickly” that he forgot to lift the ban.

The sinking was reported on the evening of 17 June by the German English-language radio programme Germany Calling, presented by William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”, but no one in Britain believed his broadcasts. Survivors told of the tragedy in their home towns, and a few local newspapers printed their accounts. The national press stayed silent. On 25 July the New York Times published the news, and on 26 July, more than five weeks after the disaster, it was carried by The Scotsman and the Daily Herald. On 4 August the Sunday Express printed a photograph of the capsized hull with men on its side, taken from the deck of Highlander, under the headline: “The last moments of the greatest sea tragedy of all time”.

Significance

The sinking of Lancastria brought a tragic end to a campaign in which the British had lost all their army’s equipment and their only ally on the Continent. By some estimates, roughly a third of all the British soldiers killed in France in 1940 died aboard her. The disaster did not halt the evacuation: for the following week warships and merchant ships went on taking British, Polish and Czechoslovak troops off from the ports of western France, until the armistice came into force on 25 June. In the summer, during the Battle of Britain and the wait for invasion, few people remembered Lancastria. In collective memory she was overshadowed by the “miracle of Dunkirk”.

For decades the memory of the disaster was kept alive mainly by the survivors and the victims’ families. Captain Sharp survived, and two years later was killed as master of another Cunard liner, the Laconia, sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of West Africa on 12 September 1942. In 1988 a memorial was unveiled at Saint-Nazaire to the more than 4,000 victims and to the local people who rescued the survivors. The wreck lies in French territorial waters, and at the request of the British government the French authorities gave it protection as a war grave in 2006. The victims’ families long demanded the release of all the documents and an official commemoration. In 2008, with the official backing of the Scottish Government, a commemorative medal began to be presented to survivors and the relatives of victims, and on the 75th anniversary, 17 June 2015, the disaster was remembered in the House of Commons, with an acknowledgement that it had been kept secret during the war.