Estimates on the number of victims range from 2500 to 6000. The most common figure quoted is 4000, twice the number lost on Titanic and the Lusitania combined. The exact death toll will never be known. It has been established however that the loss of Lancastria is the worst disaster in British maritime history and the worst single loss of life for British forces in the whole of World War 2.
Lancastria was built on the Clyde in 1922 and was an elegant (and for her time) state-of-the-art cruise ship.
Originally named Tyrrhenia she was renamed Lancastria in 1924 as American passengers had difficulty pronouncing her maiden name. Seamen felt this was a bad omen, given the maritime superstition that it was bad luck to change the name of a ship.
Her main cruise route before the war were transatlantic sailings, the occasional Mediterranean trip and tours of the Baltic, which included sailings to Leith, Edinburgh. In March 1940 she was requisitioned as a troopship, painted battleship grey and one of her first operations was to deploy British troops to Norway.
In early June she was sent back to Norway as the Germans overran the country. After disembarking the British troops in Orkney and Greenock she was sent to Liverpool, her home port, to get a well needed overhaul, however within a few hours her crew were recalled and the ship sailed for St. Nazaire to help in the evacuation of the remaining 150,000 British troops still left in France. Popular history implies that the British Expeditionary Force were all evacuated through Dunkirk, but hundreds of thousands of men and their equipment were still in France a full 2 weeks after the Germans over ran the country and the last small boat had left the beach at Dunkirk.
The Lancastria anchored approximately 6 miles from the French coastal town of St. Nazaire, in the Loire Estuary at approximately 6.00am on Monday 17th June 1940.
Soon after to Royal Naval officers boarded and gave the following order to Captain Sharp: “You are to load as many men as possible without regard to the limits set down under international law”. That was to prove a fatal order for the thousands who subsequently boarded Lancastria.
The units included a large contingent of RAF ground crew, many from the Bouguenais airport at Nantes but were generally support troops made up of Royal Engineers and Army support and logistical corps. There were smaller detachments of troops from frontline infantry units like the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Fife and Forth Yeomanry and Kings Own Scottish Borders. An unknown number of Belgian and French Refugees were also aboard.
At 3:48pm the Lancastria was attacked by German Junkers 88 bombers which specialised in anti-shipping operations. 3 bombs directly hit the liner, and many witnesses claim one went down the funnel although it has since been established from statements from crewmen in the engine room immediately below the funnel that this was not the case.
Lancastria sank in approximately 20 minutes. Witnesses recall men clinging to the turning hull began to sing which the German bombers continued the attack by strafing men in the water and on the slowly upturning vessel.
2477 men were recorded as being rescued.
Several witnesses who spoke with the Chief Purser claim there were 9000 embarked when Lancastria was attacked.
On learning of the disaster late on the 17th of June Winston Churchill banned all news coverage of it for fear it would damage public morale further, following the capitulation of France which also occurred that day. Churchill later claimed he simply forgot to lift the ban. An American newspaper was the first to publish details of the loss of Lancastria late in July 1940.
