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ON A calm, glassy sea under a cloudless sky, the survivors of the sinking of the Lancastria, Britain's biggest maritime disaster, gathered yesterday to mourn the comrades who went down with the ship 60 years ago to the day.
They sailed out again into the Atlantic to the spot six miles off the French port of St Nazaire where the 17,000-ton liner lies on the seabed, her masts just eight metres below the surface.
Leading the mourners was Canadian Michael Sheehan, 83, from Ontario, who was the helmsman of the Lancastria on that fateful day. Yesterday he cast the first wreath of poppies on the water as his fellow survivors gazed into the depths - remembering and reliving as a piper played a lament and a soldier recited the sailor's prayer which begins: "There are no roses on a sailor's grave, Nor wreaths upon the storm tossed waves."
Twenty-four of the 100 or so remaining known survivors returned to Brittany last week for the anniversary of the tragedy in which some 5,000 British servicemen were lost. The exact number who perished remains unknown as a precise count was never taken of those on board.
The Cunard liner which had been converted into a troop ship was lying at anchor off St Nazaire in Brittany, taking on soldiers and airmen from all over France, two weeks after the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force had been saved in the heroic evacuation from Dunkirk.
But it was spotted by the Luftwaffe, and between 3.30pm and 3.50pm, the Lancastria was hit by three German bombs and sank in 20 minutes - with hundres of men clinging to the hull singing Roll out the Barrel and There'll Always Be An England as it slipped beneath the waves. Those who leapt into the water were strafed by German planes which dropped incendiary bombs to set light to the 1,700 tons of fuel which spilled out from the liner, coating the sea and everyone in it with thick, black oil. French fishermen who put to sea in dozens of boats to help in the rescue gave warm red wine to the survivors to make them vomit and thus bring up the oil they had swallowed.
Winston Churchill, who had been Prime Minister for only a few weeks ordered that the tragedy should be kept secret, fearing that news of such huge losses would be bad for morale coming so soon after Dunkirk. The result was that to this day the fate of the Lancastria is little known and unrecognised. Neither decorations nor campaign medals were ever issued and those who survived were ordered not to talk about their ordeal.
The Lancastria lies in only 26 metres of water and for several years the ship's hull remained visible beneath the waves. But the shifting seabed eventually sucked her deeper and now only a buoy marks the spot where she sank. It is now a designated war grave.
Survivors from as far away as Australia, Zimbabwe and Canada gathered last week for a week-long pilgrimage to Brittany - visiting each of the 15 cemeteries where 427 known Lancastria victims were buried by the French after their bodies were washed up on the shores of small fishing villages for months after the tragedy.
With the survivors were relatives of the dead, many of them visiting the graves of their loved ones for the first time. Before they sailed out to the spot where the liner sank they laid wreaths on the dockside in St Nazaire where a stone memorial faces directly out to sea to the spot where the Lancastria went down.
The youngest survivor to make the pilgrimage is Jacqueline Tanner, nee Tillyer, who was two years old when she boarded the Lancastria with her parents. Her family had lived in Belgium for 10 years but after the Belgians surrendered to the Nazis in the spring of 1940, the Tillyers trecked across France for six weeks to reach the evacuation ships on the Atlantic coast. Her father kept Jacqueline alive by gripping her clothes in his teeth as he swam.
"I still have the sailor's sweater they wrapped me in when we were rescued and my mother's watch which stopped at five past four, the time we entered the water," said Mrs Tanner, 62, who lives in Malvern, Worcestershire.<
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