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"Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Copyright 2006 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
August 23, 2006
'They've forgotten about us for the past 65 years' In 1940, Britain's worst maritime disaster occurred when the Clyde-built Lancastria was sunk by German bombers.
JIM GILCHRIST
Pictures: Fiona Wilson/PA
CHARLES Napier was one of the lucky ones. He was on the top deck of the Lancastria , behind a ventilating shaft, when the bombs struck on that grim afternoon of 17 June 1940, five miles off the French coast at St Nazaire. "I looked out and saw a huge lump of something flying through the air," the 88-year-old recalls from his home in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire. "I thought they'd hit the plane, because it was up in the air, but it was part of the deck."
At that point the young Royal Engineer was hit in the head by debris, and his memory of subsequent events is sketchy. In between spells of unconsciousness, he remembers looking down and watching as crowded lifeboats capsized in the oily water, some of them taken down as the massive bulk of the Clyde-built, former Cunard liner rolled over. He remembers a crazily tilting deck and a sailor who told him to get into a lifeboat and then lowered it from the davits; he has a fleeting memory of helping other men out of the water.
Eventually he found himself on board a French trawler, from which he was transferred to the destroyer HMS Havelock and taken to Plymouth. He lived to fight again, returning to France the day after D-day and working on the revolutionary Pluto Project to pump fuel under the English Channel for the Allied invasion force. Some 4,000 others were not so lucky. The sinking of the Lancastria by German bombers as it evacuated thousands of the British Expeditionary Force rearguard from France, a few days after Dunkirk, saw more people killed than in the wrecks of the Titanic and the Lusitania put together. Yet there are those who feel it has been all but airbrushed from official British wartime history, and last weekend a petition was launched, calling for the government to finally give official recognition to the site of Britain's worst maritime disaster.
The liner Lancastria was launched from William Beardmore's Dalmuir yard at Clydebank in 1922, and was originally named the Tyrrhenia - a name changed to Lancastria just two years later as American passengers had difficulty pronouncing the original name and this was seen as inauspicious enough to justify changing it, an act usually regarded by seamen as bad luck. And bad luck caught up with the vessel when, not long returned from evacuating troops from Norway and on the point of going into dry dock in Liverpool, it was suddenly ordered to sail for Plymouth, and then to France, crossing the Channel with another former Cunarder, the Franconia.
After the Franconia was crippled by enemy bombing, the Lancastria proceeded towards St Nazaire, where Napier, who was in 663 Artisan Works Company of the Royal Engineers, and thousands of other British servicemen (largely support and logistical units of the BEF, as well as RAF personnel), had passed a hellish night on the quayside, being bombed by the Luftwaffe. "Not a good night to be there," Napier recalls, laconically. The German army was only 25 miles away and closing in fast.
IN THE EARLY hours of Monday 17 June, despite warnings from a French pilot boat crewman that they risked becoming a sitting target, the Lancastria dropped anchor a few miles off the coast. By eight in the morning the first boats, crammed with weary troops, were making their way out from St Nazaire to the big vessel. The Lancastria had lifeboats and lifebelts for some 2,200 people and could take as many as 3,000. However, its captain, Rudolph Sharp, was reportedly instructed to take as many men as he possibly could, "without regard to the limits of international law" - a crucial element when considering the subsequent appalling losses.
The vessel had taken on board an estimated 6,000 men (some claim 9,000, although the precise number and death toll cannot be confirmed) when, around 1pm, German Junkers 88s appeared, first bombing and damaging the nearby troopship Oronsay. At 3:48pm, the bombers turned their attention to the packed Lancastria, with three bombs hitting the liner. It has often been said that one bomb went down its funnel, but statements from surviving crew suggest that was not the case.
The ship was mortally stricken, however, and started to roll heavily to port as oil from its fuel tanks poured into the water around it.
She capsized and went down within 20 minutes, leaving thousands cramming into the lifeboats or struggling in the oil-slicked sea; hundreds were sucked underwater as the huge vessel sank. Witnesses have described men clinging to the hull, defiantly singing Roll Out the Barrel and There'll Always be an England, and how the German aircraft returned to strafe those in the water.
Vessels ranging from Royal Navy warships to small French fishing boats picked up the oil-drenched survivors. Records give 2,477 men as rescued, but the still-uncertain death toll constituted the worst single loss of life for British forces during the Second World War. Winston Churchill, fearing that this would further damage British morale following the capitulation of France, immediately suppressed the news, declaring: "The newspapers have got quite enough disasters for today at least."
THE SCALE OF the disaster was revealed in the New York Times the following month, but the official report remains sealed under the Official Secrets Act - possibly, it has been argued, because if it could be confirmed that the Ministry of Defence did indeed instruct Captain Sharp to ignore load restrictions and carry as many people as possible, there would be grounds for compensation claims from relatives. Churchill later claimed in his memoirs he simply forgot to rescind the ban.
But Britain's greatest maritime disaster has never been properly recognised by the government, argues Mark Hirst, chairman of the Lancastria Association of Scotland, which launched its petition last weekend calling for official recognition of the wreck as a maritime war grave through the Protection of Military Remains Act (PMRA). In June, the French government established a 200-metre exclusion zone around the wreck, which lies some five miles off St Nazaire in about 20 metres of water.
The petition, sent out initially to the Association's members (a copy is available on its website, www.lancastria.org.uk) calls on the British government "to use the powers it has to legally and finally declare Lancastria an official maritime war grave", says Hirst, whose grandfather, Walter, a fellow Royal Engineer with Napier, also survived the sinking.
"The only formal recognition most relatives of victims had was a telegram notifying them that their brother, son, husband or father had been lost in action aboard Lancastria, and for many that news did not come until years later," Hirst continues. "Our association is committed to campaigning for the formal legal recognition that these men deserve and which they should have been granted automatically, decades ago."
Hirst is a parliamentary researcher for Christine Grahame, the SNP MSP, but stresses that the Association's campaign is cross-party and says that the Scottish Executive has been "pretty supportive" of an associated campaign to erect a permanent memorial to the victims of the Lancastria sinking at Dalmuir in Clydebank, where she was built.
He has accompanied survivors to St Nazaire, where there is a seafront memorial to the disaster. "The French government had a full military band there, and a French naval vessel present, a guard of honour and local dignitaries. But there was no-one from the British side, even though the Association had written to the Ministry of Defence. The feeling of the survivors was: 'Well, they've forgotten about us for the past 65 years, so no change there.' There was a kind of seething anger."
His grandfather, Walter Hirst, from Dundee, boarded the Lancastria with Charles Napier, who gave him a life jacket. Both men survived, although they never met again. "He talked about it rarely," says Hirst of his grandfather, who died in 1997. "But one thing that struck me, not only from speaking to my grandfather but from speaking to other survivors, was that the sinking changed their lives very profoundly. It was hushed up for reasons of national morale, and that was understandable at the time, but there's certainly a need to redress that [now]."
The Association estimates that more than 4,000 men were lost: not only servicemen, but some Belgian refugees, including women and children. Many bodies were washed ashore during subsequent weeks, he adds.
"There are approximately 12 cemeteries around the St Nazaire area holding graves of Lancastria victims. I would estimate that there are somewhere in the region of 800-900 graves on land and the other 3,000 or so are still down with the wreck."
THE FRENCH EXCLUSION zone - established in June, following negotiations between Britain and France after the Association had lobbied MPs, MSP and MEPs - means that divers or vessels disturbing the sunken vessel can be prosecuted, says Hirst, "although because of the situation of the wreck, it's difficult to police. Nonetheless, we're still pushing for formal recognition by the British government under the Protection of Military Remains Act."
It has been suggested that PMRA can't be applied in French waters, but Hirst denies this is the case, pointing to the PMRA designation granted in May to the wrecks of British warships sunk off Denmark during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. He also cites an MOD e-mail, to which he gained access under the Freedom of Information Act, which suggests that a vessel sunk in French waters could be designated under PMRA, although it wouldn't necessarily make the site a protected area and could be difficult to enforce.
The first Scottish memorial service for Lancastria was held in June in St George's Church West, in Edinburgh, where Christine Grahame gave the eulogy.
Among the survivors attending was Charles Napier, who had boarded the ill-fated ship 46 years before. His battalion alone lost 93 men, he recalls. "We were told not to speak about it at the time, and we didn't."
He may describe 17 June 1940 as "a day we all try to forget", but he also believes that, for the wider world, what happened to the Lancastria and its passengers should never be forgotten.
---- INDEX REFERENCES ----
NEWS SUBJECT: (Government (1GO80))
INDUSTRY: (Resorts (1RE44))
REGION: (New Zealand (1NE69); United Kingdom (1UN38); Scandinavia (1SC27); Australasia (1AU56); Scotland (1SC90); Northern Europe (1NO01); Europe (1EU83); Oceania (1OC40); Denmark (1DE14); England (1EN10); France (1FR23); Western Europe (1WE41); Mediterranean (1ME20))
Language: EN
OTHER INDEXING: (ALLIED; BEF; BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE; CHRISTINE GRAHAME; CUNARD; CUNARDER; FRANCONIA; GERMAN JUNKERS; LANCASTRIA; LANCASTRIA ASSOCIATION OF SCOTLAND; LUSITANIA; MINISTRY OF DEFENCE; MOD; PMRA; RAF; ROYAL NAVY; SCALE; SNP; TITANIC) (CHARLES Napier; Churchill; Dunkirk; Eventually; Hirst; Mark Hirst; Napier; Nonetheless; Pictures; Pluto Project; Rudolph Sharp; Sharp; Walter; Walter Hirst; William Beardmore; Winston Churchill)
EDITION: 1
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