Already the LANCASTRIA was listing heavily and beginning to settle slowly in the water. Even the most inexperienced aboard — and most of them knew nothing of the sea — knew that the LANCASTRIA had not long to live.
Hundreds were trapped below decks. In some cases watertight doors were shut fast or, like many other doors, immovably warped by the buckling effect of the explosion. Others were trapped just as effectively by the solid mass of men filling the gangways and ladders leading to the decks above — there was little hope indeed for the last men in the queues below decks. Some of these escaped through portholes, others through loading ports on the ship's side: Father Charles McMenemy, the former Roman Catholic chaplain in Wormwood Scrubs prison, led a group of such trapped men to a loading port some six feet above the water, gave his own life belt to a sergeant-major who couldn't swim, urged all the men into the sea and went himself last of all. No man ever better deserved to survive than Father McMenemy — and survive he did.
The Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young were among the lucky ones — those who reached the upper deck in safety. Broadbent and Young had to take their turn with the others, joining the solid queues of soldiers tramping slowly up the steel-ribbed companionway steps to the freedom of the upper decks and the illusory safety that lay beyond.
Mrs Tillyer had a far easier passage. No sooner had she emerged from the dining room with the lifejacketed baby Jacqueline in her arms than a score of voices took up the cry 'Make way for a baby!' And make way for the baby they did, every man pressing back against the side of the companionway to afford clear gangway, even though they knew the ship was sinking under their feet. This they did for every woman and child on the ship: it can never be computed how many men lost their lives because, in standing back to give way to others, they sacrificed those few seconds that made all the difference between living and dying.
The Tillyers, Broadbent and Young, reviewing these few ghastly hours, retain three outstanding memories in common, and that was the first of them — the utter calmness, the kindness, the selfless gallantry of the soldiers and crew. Confusion there was, and haste — these were inevitable: but of panic there was no trace.
But this impression, permanently engraved in the memory though it was, was a fleeting one only: there was no time for more. The air was filled with the staccato crash of AA weapons from every quarter of the roads, a bedlam of sound and smoke: Luftwaffe bombers still cruised overhead, some of them mercilessly raking the now sharply canting decks of the LANCASTRIA with machine-gun fire; the steel-tipped bullets swathing through the close-packed ranks of men queuing up for the lifeboats.
First into the lifeboats were the women and children. Clifford Tillyer saw his wife and Jacqueline aboard one of these boats just as it was about to be lowered. He himself then stepped back into the waiting crowd, only to find himself seized by soldiers from a tank regiment and bundled in beside his wife and child, 'Get in, mister,' they told him. 'You've got to look after your youngster.'
But the lifeboat was a refuge as temporary as it-was treacherous. Even as it started lowering towards the oil-slicked sea, it began to capsize. Neither of the Tillyers hesitated. Over the side they went and struck away from the sinking ship, Mr Tillyer holding Jacqueline's head above the oil as best he could.
For Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent there were no lifeboats. All those that could be lowered had already gone — and many of these had capsized.
For the first time in many weeks Sergeant Young forgot all about his bicycle. Lather still on his face from the unfinished shave, he made straight for the side and jumped into the water, into the confusion of wreckage and splintered wood and hundreds of men, many of them nonswimmers with neither life jacket nor anything to cling to, struggling in the water. Young knew what happened to people who stayed too close to sinking ships — and the LANCASTRIA was sinking foot by foot before his eyes. He struck out furiously to get well clear of the foundering liner, of the lethal suction that would be the death of anyone in the vicinity when she plummeted to the bottom of the Quiberon roads.
Corporal Broadbent was exactly as he had been when he had been preparing to take his bath — completely naked. (He was to remain thus for three long days.) Nothing, he says, ever worried him less than his unclothed state at that moment. With the deck sliding away beneath his feet he ceremoniously shook hands with his friend Sid Keenan — who had actually been in the bath when the LANCASTRIA was hit — and dived into the sea.
Then came the moment when the second main impression of the disaster was registered forever on the minds of the two soldiers and the Tillyers — and, indeed, of every one of the thousands who saw it. Its great propellers breaking free above the water, the LANCASTRIA slowly, inexorably, turned over, just before she sunk. Hundreds of soldiers, most of whom presumably were unable to swim, still clung ant-like to the great hull. There was no shouting, no screaming, no sign of fear at all. Instead, they were singing, and singing in perfect unison, 'Roll out the barrel' and 'There'll always be an England', and they were still singing when the waters closed over them. It is little wonder that many of the soldier survivors could never again bring themselves to sing 'Roll out the Barrel', the unofficial anthem of the army in the early years of the war.
Corporal Broadbent was one of the nearest to the ship when it went down. He himself has a personal memory, one which, he says, will always haunt him — the face at the porthole. As the LANCASTRIA tipped over, Broadbent could see a man trapped in a cabin desperately trying to smash in the thick toughened glass of the scuttle — trying and completely failing. For one brief moment Broadbent caught sight of the terror-stricken face, then the porthole slid beneath the oil-blackened surface of the sea.
And now came perhaps the worst experience of all — fire. Not fire aboard the LANCASTRIA — that would have been easy to escape — but fire on the surface of the sea, and for all too many there could be no escape from that. Nor was the fire any accident, but a piece of calculated and cold-blooded callousness for which there can be no forgiveness. In addition to machine-gunning and killing unknown numbers of people in the water — the twenty occupants of one raft, for instance, were completely wiped out by a sustained burst of machine-gun fire — the Luftwaffe pilots began to drop incendiary bombs on the oil-covered sea, and set it on fire.
Oil on fire is the most horrible, the cruellest death known to men. It is death by slow, agonizing torture, by drowning to escape that torture, by incineration of those parts of the body above water in a lung-gasping asphyxiation — for the flames feed on all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea, and a man suffocates in the superheated and lifeless air. But drowning is quiet and simple and almost without pain, and where no hope of escape is left, only a madman would stretch himself out on the shrieking rack of agony a moment longer than was necessary when the means of kindly deliverance lies so close to hand.
The official history of the war at sea professes itself unable to understand why so many people — 2,823 — lost their lives when the LANCASTRIA went down, even though the disaster happened in broad daylight in a road crowded with many ships, especially small, manoeuvrable ships which were quickly on the scene — the anti-submarine trawler CAMBRIDGESHIRE alone rescued almost a thousand survivors.
It is difficult to understand this puzzlement: it is remarkable indeed that so many people, about two and a half thousand, were in fact rescued. Most of the ships in the roads were too busy looking after themselves, fighting off the attacks by the German bombers, and those which did eventually steam to the oil-covered and wreckage-strewn scene of the sinking liner found comparatively few survivors there after the CAMBRIDGESHIRE had gone. Hundreds had died in the initial explosion, as many again were trapped and taken to the bottom locked inside the shattered hull of the LANCASTRIA. Hundreds more, still clinging to the hull, were drowned as the liner plunged to the bottom, and of those then in the water alongside, many were either killed by the flame-covered sea or had swam so far and so frantically in search of safety, that they had put themselves outside the radius of search of the immediate rescue operations.