The journey had taken a long, miserable month, but they had arrived at last: and as Clifford Tillyer, with his wife Vera and two-year-old baby daughter Jacqueline gazed out across the St Nazaire roads, crowded with Allied shipping which ranged from tiny minesweepers to great ocean-going liners all waiting to embark them and take them home to England, he felt that it had all been a hundred times worth while. The suffering, the fear, the privations of hunger and long sleepless nights all lay safely behind: before lay hope and freedom and home.
So, too, felt tens of thousands of others. No civilian refugees these others, but the last regiments of the British Expeditionary Force to France. Most of the BEF had already been evacuated from the continent. The miracle of Dunkirk was a fortnight old, and almost a third of a million men from these beaches were now safely home in England. Cherbourg, St Malo and Brest had been completely evacuated — a fantastic achievement in which 85,000 men had been snatched from the closing pincers of the Panzer divisions without the loss of a single ship or man. And now these men waiting along the banks of the Loire were almost the last to go. Men like Corporal John Broadbent, who had spent almost six weeks driving his OC from Rheims to the evacuation port and whose picture, published in the newspapers of the world, was soon to be known to countless millions: or like Sergeant George Young of the RASC, leaning against the brand new French bicycle which he had trundled half way across France, whose subsequent adventures in the next three days belonged to the realms of the wildest fiction.
But for Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent, the past, as it was for the Tillyers, was forgotten. The excitement of the immediate present, the promise that their turn would soon come for one of the dozens of tiny trawlers and minesweepers that were ferrying both soldiers and civilians out to the big ships lying offshore-these were all that mattered. Already they had been told the name of — and could clearly see — the ship that was to take them home: the LANCASTRIA. Even at the distance of three or four miles she looked gigantic, massive and solid and secure: once aboard that ship, they told themselves, all their troubles would be over.
The LANCASTRIA, a 16,243 ton Cunard White Star liner, swung gently from her two bow anchors in the Quiberon roads as the scores of small craft fussed busily around her during all that long morning and early afternoon of 17 June, 1940. Steadily the complement of soldiers and civilian refugees aboard her mounted — one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then four. And still the ferryboats came, the numbers mounted, the decks rang constantly to the disciplined tramp of hundreds of marching feet going to their allotted positions in the ship.
Captain R Sharp, watching the scene from the bridge of the LANCASTRIA, was desperately anxious for the loading to be finished and the LANCASTRIA to be gone. With both anchors down, neither the room nor the ability to manoeuvre the great passenger liner, surrounded by small boats and with the number of refugee troops and civilians aboard steadily mounting with the passing of every minute, he realized all too clearly the hopelessness of offering any organized resistance to aerial or submarine attack.
Submarines, perhaps, were not greatly to be feared — a flotilla of destroyers prowled the estuary unceasingly. But an air attack was another thing: only the previous day the FRANCONIA had been attacked and hit, an adumbration, Captain Sharp feared, of worse things still to come. And now again the Luftwaffe's heavy bombers were beginning to launch scattered attacks against the passenger ships in the roads.
But however acute Captain Sharp's apprehensions, however sharp his anxiety for what might befall his ship, he could never have guessed, never have suspected that the name LANCASTRIA, then known only to a comparative few, would within a few short days become the worldwide symbol of the greatest maritime disaster in British history, a tragedy worse even than that of the TITANIC, the LUSITANIA or the ATHENIA.
Half past three in the afternoon. Air-raid sirens were sounding, anti-aircraft guns were beginning to open up against the heavy bombers of the Luftwaffe circling lazily above the Quiberon roads, as the last refugees were just embarking on the LANCASTRIA — a total complement, now, of almost 6,000 men, women and children.
Among the six thousand were the Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young.
Mrs Tillyer had already bathed, dried and dressed young Jacqueline and now, with her husband and daughter, had gone down to the dining saloon for a meal. What Mrs Tillyer remembers most clearly about that moment was the order and courtesy she found on every hand: the smooth, calm efficiency of the white-jacketed stewards who moved about their duties as if quite oblivious of the gunfire and sirens above: the smiling painstaking care of the sailor who adjusted the tapes of Jacqueline's lifebelt, so that it would no longer slip over the slender shoulders.
Sergeant Young had come aboard almost at the same time as the Tillyers, still lugging his new French bicycle. Ex-Sergeant Young, now living in Wickersley Road, London, admits, in a masterly understatement, that the crew of the overcrowded liner did not take too kindly to the bicycle, but he ignored their curses, hauled it aboard, parked it in what he judged to be a relatively safe position, then went below for a shave, only seconds after he had seen the nearby liner ORANSAY struck on the bridge by a bomb. Bombs were disquieting enough, Mr Young says: but the need for a shave was imperative.
There were no half-measures like shaves, for Corporal John Broadbent. Ex-Corporal Broadbent, now a London taxi-driver living in Newport Street, confesses that he was feeling slightly apprehensive just at that moment, not because of the falling bombs or the fact that he was completely undressed and about to step into a bath, but because the door of the bathroom bore the legend 'Officers Only'.
Just after three-thirty, the LANCASTRIA was hit by three aerial torpedoes. One struck for'ard and another aft, but it was the third that caused most of the damage and was responsible for much of the subsequent appalling loss of life.
This aerial torpedo, by one chance in a hundred thousand, plummeted straight down the LANCASTRIAN's single funnel and exploded with curiously little sound but devastating power in the confined spaces of the boiler room and adjacent underwater compartments, many of them immovably packed with troops for whom there had been no room on the upper deck.
The boiler room was destroyed. Fuel tanks and lines were ruptured and thousands of gallons of oil immediately filmed out over the adjacent waters until the sea round the LANCASTRIA was covered in a thick carpet of oil. But, far more terrible was the fate of the men in the underwater compartments: close on five hundred of them, mostly RAF personnel, were blown out through the great jagged hole blasted through the thin, unarmoured sides of the great liner: many were already dead, killed by the concussive impact of the exploding warhead, by great sheets of steel plate wrenched from the sundered bulkheads, by the flying shrapnel that ricocheted blindly, lethally, around the confined spaces in which these men had been standing: many of those who were flung alive into the water survived only to die in choking, coughing agony in the thick oil pumping out from the ruptured tanks and lines immediately behind them.