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IT WAS their deadliest hour. As German planes strafed from the summer sky, thousands of British troops struggled for survival in the oily waters of a wide bay off the coast of France.
Behind them, hundreds of soldiers stood on the upturned hull of a stately liner, the Lancastria, singing There'll Always Be An England as she sank ever deeper into the water.
Inside the ship lay the corpses of hundreds more who had died instantly when a Junkers dive-bomber dropped four bombs into her. Those who had managed to jump into the sea scrambled to hold on to anything that would float. Oil from the liner's tanks gushed out, choking them and coating their bodies.
Flaming oil, set on fire by the German machine-gunning, engulfed some of those in the water.
Chief Officer Harry Grattidge reached out to save a man from drowning by pulling him up by his hair - only to find he was grasping a severed head.
"If there's a Hell, this is it, " thought a 19-year-old Welsh trooper, Harry Harding.
Men formed circles to support one another.
Some kicked away those trying to scramble on to their rafts but, for the most part, everybody helped everybody else. By nightfall, more than 3,500 soldiers and airmen had died in Britain's deadliest naval disaster. The toll was higher than the sinkings of the Titanic and Lusitania put together.
When the news of the sinking of the Lancastria on June 17, 1940 was brought to him as he sat in the garden of Downing Street, Winston Churchill instantly decided to ban publication of the story.
The press and the BBC complied. The ban broke briefly when the story appeared in New York six weeks later. Then it disappeared once more.
Until the publication of a book this week, the sinking of the Lancastria has remained a great untold story of the Second World War.
The tragedy came two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation as France was about to surrender to Hitler. The War Cabinet had been told all the British Expeditionary Force had been taken off at Dunkirk. In fact 150,000 men were left behind.
There were three fighting divisions but most were support troops - engineers, RAF ground crews, transport and admin staff and wireless operators.
At first, Churchill wanted to organise them to resist the German onslaught carving through northern France. But the fighting divisions were overwhelmed, and let down by the French. General Alan Brooke, a Dunkirk veteran who had been sent back across the Channel, persuaded the Prime Minister that the men must be brought home.
Most were taken off successfully from Channel ports but more than 30,000 were still languishing in the far west, round the city of Nantes and the shipbuilding port of Saint Nazaire.
The Lancastria was the largest of more than 30 vessels dispatched to mount a desperate rescue mission.
The Cunard liner had been commandeered as a troopship on the outbreak of war. Though painted battleship grey, with her portholes blacked out, she was not fitted with guns so was defenceless against attack. She retained features from her time as a grand transatlantic liner. Her high dining salon was in Italian renaissance style. In the gymnasium was a mechanical camel.
The Lancastria had ferried troops on the ill-fated British expedition to Norway in the spring and was due to re-fit in her home port of Liverpool. But she was ordered to sail south to join the flotilla heading for France.
As she arrived in the estuary of the River Loire off Saint Nazaire, German planes were attacking the town.
Because the bay was shallow, the 16,000-ton ship had to anchor six miles out. Tenders ferried men to her.
Everyone wanted to get on the big ship.
As one man put it, she looked "as solid as the Strand Palace Hotel".
SOON the cabins were full to bursting. Men sat on the deck wherever they could find a place. Eight hundred RAF men were sent down to the holds. The soldiers and airmen had been on the move for days - in some cases weeks. They were tired, dirty and hungry. Some slept, others shaved and bathed. They tucked in to breakfasts of porridge, bacon and eggs, and sausages and mash.
Later, there was lunch with stewed beef, crab salad, cod, cold meats and rice pudding, followed by liqueurs.
Those who could not find a place in the dining salon crowded into the bar or queued to buy bottles of beer.
The ship had become seriously overcrowded so Chief Officer Grattidge ordered an end to the embarkation.
Nobody knew how many were aboard.
Stewards were overhead saying they stopped counting at 6,000. Others thought there might have been 8,000.
Grattidge and the Lancastria's captain, Rudolph Sharp, discussed whether to leave. Worried about submarines, Sharp wanted a destroyer escort. The Royal Navy commander on the spot said this could not be provided. He told Sharp to sail but Sharp decided to wait.
Shortly before 4pm, a German Junkers diving out of the sun dropped its bomb load towards the Lancastria.
They missed. Men on the deck jeered at the climbing aircraft.
Minutes later another JU-88 from the Diving Eagles squadron appeared. All four of its bombs hit the Lancastria - three boring down into the holds to explode among the men sheltering there. Fires broke out. Smoke filled passageways. Scalding steam gushed from burst pipes. The staircase up from the dining room collapsed under the weight of those trying to escape.
UP ON deck, soldiers were killed by flying debris. Some set up their Bren guns to fire at the German planes. British fighters appeared. One German plane was brought down.
As the Lancastria began to turn over, Grattidge gave the order to abandon ship. Lifeboats turned turtle when inexperienced troops tried to lower them.
There were 1,000 cork lifejackets on board, but the men had not been told how to use them. So many broke their necks as they jumped into the water, their bodies continuing downwards while the cork stayed on the surface.
Some soldiers squeezed through portholes. Others threw down deck chairs, wooden crates, packs - anything that would float and could be clung to, then leapt into a sea full of desperate men. Many could not swim.
One of the few civilians on board, a young mother, held up her two-year-old daughter calling out: "Baby here! Baby here!" One or two men went mad, others cried out for divine help. As one survivor recalled: "There were no atheists within my hearing." Two friends from Faversham, Stan Flowers and Wally Smith, climbed to the highest point in the ship, took off their boots and slid down ropes to the sea, chafing their hands. In the water they held on to deckchairs, surrounded by huge jellyfish. The tide pushed them apart. Stan got home, while Wally's body was washed up down the coast.
On the bridge, Sharp turned to his second-in-command and said: "It's time, Harry." Putting on a lifejacket, the Captain abandoned ship.
Grattidge, a strong swimmer, waited until water lapped at his feet - then he walked out into the sea in his Cunard uniform and a tin helmet.
On the upturned hull, an officer stood smoking a cigarette. Others clung to the huge propeller which had come up out of the water. Waves washed some into the sea, including the oldest soldier on board, a 64-year-old Boer War veteran, Norman de Coudray Tronson.
From the hull came the sound of Roll Out The Barrel. Then a fine Welsh tenor voice led the singing into a hymn. The Lancastria went to her final resting place, 12 fathoms down, 20 minutes after she had been hit, .
Other British ships in the evacuation flotilla hurried to rescue men from the water. So did French fishing boats. One old man and his grandson circled in a rowing boat, pulling out survivors.
Many of those plucked from the water had stripped off their clothes to make swimming easier. Most were covered with oil, some had swallowed so much that they could hardly breathe.
Huddling on the decks of rescue vessels, gulping down mugs of tea, they wrapped themselves in blankets and newspapers, or took sailors' jerseys.
Below decks on one ship, an army surgeon operated - without anaesthetic.
Other survivors were landed in Saint Nazaire to await re-embarkation. The badly injured were taken to hospitals, where they were embarrassed to be bathed by nuns to remove the oil.
By the morning of June 18, nearly all had left France - among them General Alan Brooke, who sat on the deck of a destroyer eating a sardine sandwich as he headed home.
In Plymouth, in line with Churchill's ban, the 2,500 survivors were told not to talk about the events. The disaster was to be hushed up. Back in France, local inhabitants began to notice bodies washing ashore. Fishermen found corpses in their nets. Still, the secret remained intact - until the end of July when photographs taken by a sailor on one of the rescue ships appeared in the New York Sun.
British newspapers ran the story under banner headlines, but then dropped it. They - and Churchill - had other concerns. Dunkirk had been celebrated as a glorious retreat.
Nobody wanted to read about the destruction of a defenceless ship with the loss of thousands of lives. Hitler was poised across the Channel. The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
When they got to their homes, some survivors were greeted as ghosts. Their parents had received telegrams saying they had been lost in action. Within a few weeks, most were back on duty. Rudolph Sharp perished off Africa when the ship he commanded was torpedoed. Harry Grattidge went on to captain both the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.
Sixty-five years on, the Lancastria lies undisturbed on the bottom of the Loire estuary. The French authorities have declared her a protected maritime monument. The tides in the bay make diving too dangerous.
Still, the survivors do not forget.
Each year they gather at St Katharine Cree Church in the City of London to commemorate the disaster. There is a moving service, during which the Lancastria Association standard is lowered in honour of the dead. Over tea and cakes afterwards, survivors recall that June day.
Next month, they will go to Saint Nazaire on a pilgrimage to lay a wreath over the wreck, and remember as the story of Britain's most deadly naval disaster is finally told.
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