Dan Snow's History Hit - The Sinking of the Lancastria

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

On June 17, 1940, the British ocean liner, RMS Lancastria, was sunk during Operation Aerial.RMS Lancastria had sailed to the French port of St. Nazaire to aid in the evacuation of British and French soldiers, civil servants and British civilians after the fall of Dunkirk. The ship was loaded well in excess of its capacity— the consequences of which were felt when a German fighter plane flew overhead and catastrophically attacked the Lancastria.Janet Dempsey is a former maritime record specialist who worked at The National Archives for fifteen years. Janet joins Dan to discuss why the Lancastria was requisitioned as a troopship, the horrific sinking and loss of life, and how the subsequent media blackout at the time has informed ​​this largely forgotten chapter in British history.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. Today we're talking about the greatest maritime disaster in British history.

It was a colossal tragedy, a catastrophe. It's one that's hardly talked about or remembered today. On June the 17th, 1940, the gigantic British ocean liner, the Lancastria, was sunk by German Luftwaffe aircraft. It's now thought that more than 4,000 people died during the sinking, probably around three times as many that died on the Titanic. But it was hushed up at the time, and it's an inconvenient story in a summer that's supposed to have a strong narrative, from Dunkirk at the beginning of June

to the successes of the Battle of Britain in July, August and September. But it's an event that we really need to remember. We've got Janet Dempsey on the podcast today. She's a former maritime record specialist. She worked at the National Archives for 15 years. She has gone through accounts of that day from French civilians who witnessed it to people that survived the catastrophic bombing and sinking on board the ship. The Lancastria was in Saint-Nazaire, you almost call it southwest France. Following Dunkirk, there was still plenty of British allied civilians and service personnel stuck in France, escaping from the German advance. There were other evacuations, as you'll hear, in ports in northern France.

But by the middle of June, the pocket of territory the Germans didn't control was shrinking rapidly. And Saint-Nazaire, right over the West France on the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Loire River, had become one of the few places where people could try and escape to in the hope of being rescued by British ships. An astonishing number of people,

vastly more people than she was designed to carry, crowded aboard Lancastria with horrific results. After you've listened to this podcast, if you want to go and subscribe to History at TV, we talk a lot about Dunkirk and the summer of 1940, both in London and in the skies above Britain. If you wish to go and watch those documentaries, we have tons of documentaries, history documentaries over at History Hit TV. We've also got all the episodes of the podcast without the ads.

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Enjoy. Janet, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Hi, Dan. You're very welcome. Nice to be here. This is one of the great maritime catastrophes of British and world history. And yet we don't give it any thought compared to, for example, the Titanic a generation earlier. Why is that? I think with the Titanic, there's a glamour around the Titanic that there certainly isn't around the Lancastria. The Lancastria was a victim really of the date that this catastrophe happened.

Obviously, with the fall of France and the denotice and things that we go into a bit later, I think really a place in history is a consequence of the date that this happened. I guess there were so many tragedies compounding and landing on top of each other one after the other at this point of British history that it's been unremembered. Talk to me about the Lancastria itself. What was its job? She was launched in 1922 and she was launched as the Tyrenia. She changed her name because passengers and crew couldn't actually pronounce the way the Tyrenia was spelled. And the crew actually nicknamed her the Soup Tyreen. So it was actually deemed better to call her something more pronounceable.

But she actually celebrates a big anniversary this week because her maiden voyage was actually on the 19th of June 1922 so she would have been 100 years old this week. She didn't quite make it to that age but what she was built on the Clyde like all the great ships. She was indeed. A job what a transatlantic liner? She was a transatlantic liner She ran scheduled routes between Liverpool and New York, but she was also a cruise ship. She was used to cruise around the east coast of America, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. She was built for a crew of 300 and 2,200 passengers, which is quite significant actually in the unfolding events. She can take a lot of passengers. Was it a luxury? Was it a high-end vessel? It was. When she was originally fitted, she was first, second and third class. In the 1930s,

she underwent a refit, which meant she only took first and second class passengers. So yeah, she was quite high-end. She only took first and second class passengers. So, yeah, she was quite high end. What happened in September 1939 to ships like Lancastria? Basically, they were put under admiralty orders, which just meant they were requisitioned for military service. September 1939, Lancastria was actually in the Bahamas on a cruise when she was called to New York for a refit.

All her luxury innards, if you like, were taken away, all the silver and the china and the linens. She was painted battleship grey. All her windows were blacked out and she was fitted with guns. Did she carry troops to the Expeditionary Force in Europe or was she used all over the North Atlantic? No, originally she was requisitioned to carry troops to Norway and Iceland. She was one of 20 troop ships that actually was involved in the Norway operations. But just weeks after taking troops to Norway,

the same troop ships were involved in Operation Alphabet, which was evacuating the same troops from Narvik in Norway. And the problem with these ships is they are not designed, I mean, it's difficult for any ship if they get hit by a bomb or struck by a torpedo, but these civilian peacetime vessels, they're not designed to withstand that kind of damage, are they? No, no, not at all. That's why a lot of these ships actually had military escorts,

but they weren't actually designed. You know, if you're talking about something with large ornamental staircases down the middle of the ship, that's not going to withstand the same sort of battering as a battleship. Which were incredibly sort of battering as a battleship. Which were incredibly sort of compartmentalised, little warrens of doors that can shut out water and that kind of stuff, try and give it a bit of time after catastrophic damage. So let's get to the Dunkirk evacuation. We'll know about the little ships. This is a very, very big ship. What did the very,

very big ships do to help withdraw the defeated British and French troops from the continent? Well, this was a bit of an oversight by the Admiralty. A lot of the French ports like Dunkirk are very, very shallow. So when they send the big ships in to evacuate troops, the ships can't actually get anywhere near to the shore. And this is where the little ships come in. They're basically used as tenders to get to the beaches, get the troops, and then take them out to the big ships. Unfortunately, with Dunkirk, a lot of the troops that were evacuated from Dunkirk weren't actually brought home.

They were taken to Le Havre and Cherbourg. So the evacuation of Dunkirk, Op Dynamo, wasn't the big evacuation home that a lot of people tend to think it was. Churchill wanted a second BEF setting up further west. So a lot of these troops were taken further west. Unfortunately, the troops that were at Le Havre, the advance of the German army was so fast and so ferocious that a lot of the troops at Le Havre. There was some 11,000 British troops and some 26,000 Allied troops evacuated from Le Havre. Unfortunately, that still meant there were over 150,000 troops still in France. So they were all advised to head west for any open port they could make their way to. And between the 15th and the 25th of June, we saw Operation Aerial kick in. Unfortunately, with Dunkirk and Le Havre, they were single ports.

So the RAF, the Royal Navy and these ships that had been taken up from trade were all concentrated in one area. Unfortunately, with Operation Aerial, you had ports all the way from Cherbourg all the way down to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, deep in the Basque country so you had hundreds of miles of these ports being used to evacuate tens and tens of thousands of British troops, sailors, civilians, anybody who felt they were trapped in this German onslaught. We've forgotten about these post Dunkirk evacuations haven't we, the people just being told head west and a bit south and find some coast and the Navy will come pick you up. So tell me about the scene in Saint-Nazaire, which is down in the Bay of Biscay, so below Normandy and Brittany, much further from the UK. Tell me about the evacuation that takes place there.

Well, originally, Lancastria and Franconia were sent from Plymouth to Brest to actually evacuate troops from Brest. But by the time they got there on the 16th of June, Brest had already fallen. So the decision was taken to send them even further south to Saint-Nazaire. Unfortunately, the scene at Saint-Nazaire was chaos. just to give you an idea of how chaotic it was people were making their way to San Nazaire because soldiers and sailors and airmen were actually buying mid-shelter maps from local shops to find out where the ports were on that Bay of Biscay and obviously San Nazaire comes up in big letters so they were making their way to St Nazaire in their tens of thousands and all the war diaries for that period just show a scene of

absolute chaos you have a lot of support units veterinary service logistics logistics units, which are not like a regiment, like the regiments you had at Dunkirk, where you have a proper solid order, you have somebody in charge, you have somebody who's given the orders. In a lot of these cases, you've got groups of people who are corporals, privates, there's no officers around. There's nobody taking names. There's nobody making lists. There's nobody giving orders. So it's a scene of utter chaos. And there are British civilians, people who live in Paris, members of the embassy, weren't there? Also heading pell-mell down there as well. Yeah, there were also a lot of Belgians who'd walked all the way across from Belgium

Yeah, there were also a lot of Belgians who'd walked all the way across from Belgium to Saint-Nazaire, including a group of Belgian children who found themselves aboard the Lancastria. Tell me about the Lancastria arriving. What date did it arrive and was there just people thronging the quayside? Was it immediately clear that they'd have to start loading tons of people on board yeah she arrived at um four o'clock in the morning on the 17th but she wasn't actually allowed to start loading until six o'clock in the morning because the french harbour master didn't want any lights used in the evacuation bear in mind san jose again is quite a port, so she's anchored five miles off. So we've got these small boats, these tenders, bringing people over and over and over.

She started loading at six in the morning. By noon, you had two stewards, Welch and Beattie, literally counting people on with these little hand counters and by lunchtime there were already over 5,000 people on board a ship designed to take 2,200. Stuart Beatty was actually called away to start serving drinks in his lounge which had been turned into a sergeant and warrant officer's mess so So he actually stopped counting at lunchtime and bear in mind that there were people coming over to that ship all the way up to a few minutes before she was bombed. So after the count stopped you still had three and a half hours of people coming on board that ship. So in my estimation, from documents I've looked at, I reckon by quarter to four in the afternoon,

she probably had about six and a half thousand people on board. The master of the ship and the first officer described scenes of the holes being absolutely full, stairways being full, every available space literally had people crammed into it. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the Lancastria, more coming up. Castria, more coming up.

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Wednesday and Sunday. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. What happened at Corsica 4 on the 17th? A Ju 88 flew directly over and dropped four bombs on the Lancaster. One hit the funnel. It didn't go down the funnel as some people believe, but it fell very, very close to. And the other three went through hatches two, three and four. In number two hold there were 800 RAF personnel who took a direct

hit but in number three hold was 500 tons of surplus oil that was supposed to have been taken off Lancaster when she was at Liverpool before she was given orders to sail for Brest. And, of course, what happened was the bomb blew holes in both sides of the ship. So this oil basically formed a huge oil slick, which was to have dire consequences for those trying to get away from the ship. And so was she moored up at the time? Was she alongside? Yes, she was moored up. She was moored up along with another ship called the Oransey,

who was also there to evacuate. The Oransey took one hit but wasn't badly damaged and the Oransey actually took a lot of the survivors from the Lancastia and managed to get them home but the scene at the Lancastia when she was bombed because the bombs blew holes in both sides of the ship she listed very badly and literally went under in less than 25 minutes. You would have had a lot of people dying in the ship as soon as those bombs hit, as I say, the 800 RAF personnel who were in number two hold would have been killed immediately. There were also people who talk about, as the ship is listing, getting trapped behind wreckage, getting trapped underneath wreckage.

So they would never have been able to get off the ship at all. The people who did get off the ship found themselves trying to swim through a huge oil slick. Now the Ju-88 was still actually flying over a machine gun in the water, machine gunning the people in the water. So you would have had casualties there. But the machine gun fire was also setting fire to the oil slake. So you can imagine the smell of oil trying to swim through this. You've got fires, you've got smoke, you've got people in small boats trying to pick survivors out of the water,

you had soldiers who were basically stripping off their uniform because their oil-soaked uniform were pulling them down, you had a situation where you had the very old-fashioned style of cork life jackets, so you had people trying to jump off a listed ship in cork life jackets who, when they hit the water, had their neck broken for their efforts. So you had a lot of casualties there. It was as chaotic as the situation that was going on in France at the same time. She sank in something like 20 minutes. One of the other ships, the master timed it at about 24 minutes, which is very fast.

If you've got 6,500 people trying to get off a ship, 24 minutes is no time at all. And do you think around 4,000 people were killed? Yes. I believe there were around 6,500 people. We know 2,500 people survived. So the basic maths would say around 4,000 people died on that ship. What was the response? Did the British government admit that this had happened?

No. The first thing the British government did was to slap a denotice on the news story. A denotice basically bans it from being reported for a period of time. But the denotice on the Lancastru was never lifted. Now Churchill said much, much later that with the fall of France happening the same day and with hell breaking out across Europe it was literally a case that the government forgot to lift the D notice but the thing is the story broke in the American press six weeks later and it was widely reported in the British press the following day and for a few days after that. But I think the Lancaster, the story of the Lancaster, she's the victim of the dates, really, because everybody was more worried about the fall of France, what was going to happen to Britain. And don't forget, on the 18th of June, Churchill did his finest hour speech.

You know, Hitler will never land on these shores while we've got a navy and all the rest of it. The last thing Churchill wanted was the British people thinking that the navy and our shipping was vulnerable to this sort of catastrophe. So I think it was probably a case of they wanted the news story suppressed for a while, but I don't think the intention was to keep it buried forever. I find it a mind-blowing story. It's a greater loss of life, the Titanic and Lusitania combined. It's the greatest maritime disaster in British history. But it just feels like it doesn't fit in the narrative, does it?

Because you have people want to talk about Dunkirk. That's the kind of snatching some kind of victory from the jaws defeat. Then we're into Churchill's finest hour and then the Battle of Britain. And to go, oh, by the way, there was also the worst maritime disaster in British history, kind of inconveniently at that period. It doesn't work for the way we remember it or for people trying to tell the story of inconveniently at that period. It doesn't work for the way we remember it or for people trying to tell the story in spinners at the time. History is written by the victors. If there's an inconvenient truth in there, then why tell it?

What I find really quite sad is that medals for the people on the Lancastria were only actually issued in 2008 and by the Scottish government and then they were only claimable if you like until 2015 by which time survivors of that disaster have passed away. Families may never have been told the story. We read many, many accounts of people who were so traumatised by what happened on the Lancastria, they never ever spoke about it to families. They were encouraged not to talk about it, I suppose, when they came back. Did those survivors, on the whole, were they able to find alternative transport home or were there further catastrophes and pitfalls?

I don't know any of the survivors who didn't make it home. A lot of survivors were taken back to the Bay of Biscay, back to Saint-Nazaire, back to the places where the fishermen who had come out to help with the rescue took them into France. And this was a further complication about the numbers who died and who'd survived, because people held on to the belief that they'd been taken back to France and taken prisoner of war. So you've got this further complication. Is he a prisoner of war? Was he lost? As I say, the whole thing was just chaotic. was he lost? As I say, the whole thing was just chaotic. However, in 1940, the War Office opened a branch of its casualty office to start actually looking into who was on that ship, who died, who survived. And for some 12 years, they sent letters out to people, correspondence with people they knew who were on the ship. Did you see such and such? Did they survive? Were they taken prisoner

of war? Did they die? I've read a lot of these files. That's where I'm coming from with some of my figures. But even after all the work that they put in, it was still impossible to determine exactly who was on board. Such a remarkable story that reminds us of the chaos that was going on in France after Dunkirk. Dunkirk was not an end to that story. Janet, thank you very much indeed for coming on and talking about it. A couple of local observations. A local called Michel Rouget wrote that the bodies did not reach the shore immediately after the ship sank, but in July the bodies came ashore in large numbers. and at the Pont de Bec there were others. At Saint-Marguerite, all along the coast, there were corpses that were given back by the sea.

At each tide, there were corpses being washed up on the beach. However, later in the summer, Charles Merlet writes, We were walking along the coast on the 2nd of December and that's when we noticed there were bones, more and more bones, and lots of military clothing. And in these clothes that had really deteriorated and were damaged, we collected the wallets of these poor men who drowned to identify them. But there were so many bones, we never collected them. It was just not possible. To me, that is the absolute perfect illustration. To me, that is the absolute perfect illustration.

Janet, it certainly is. Thank you very much for coming on and reminding us all of this terrible chapter in our history. You're very welcome, Dan. Thank you. I think we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at

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don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.