The Sinking of the Lancastria by Jonathan Fenby

hid in a wood for the night with two privates. In the morning, they were discovered by the Germans, and locked in a church. After eight days there, Hanley told the others that he had had enough, and would ‘clout’ the guard when he came round in the evening. He duly did this; so the three of them escaped, hiding in another wood for four days with no nourishment except for milk they took from a cow. Then they sheltered in a barn where a farmer found them, and gave them food.
    Setting out again, the trio met a group of Belgian refugees who handed them civilian clothes. Stealing bicycles, they headed for the coast, but were stopped by German troops, and taken to the commander. Hanley said they were Belgian, though he had no papers. The German officer, who did not speak French, believed him. So they got away again, reaching the Channel coast. There, they pretended to be beachcombers, rolling up their trousers and walking aboutwith seaweed draped over their shoulders while they decided what to do next.
    Two girls they ran into told them of a rowing boat abandoned in a garage by a doctor who had joined the refugee exodus. The boat was white, which the soldiers thought too conspicuous. So they got hold of some black paint, and used it to darken the craft. The girls gave them food to take with them, as well as a Union Jack and corks with which to plug holes from machine-gunning if they were strafed. Rowing through the night, they became extremely seasick, but got home in the end.
    In Nantes, Major Fred Hahn, the First World War veteran from Lancashire who had passed his time watching tennis and meeting local Masons, was put in charge of ensuring food supplies for the British troops camped on the racecourse, where French recruits practised driving two-men Hotchkiss tanks.
    It was a tough assignment because rations were nonexistent. Bread was scarce. What provisions Hahn could find were old and mouldy. Stores had been abandoned and, in some cases, looted. The Major was more in his element when he and a few others were given the job of salvaging equipment, including secret radar parts, after the main body of troops moved off to St-Nazaire. Guards with Bren guns were posted round the workshop as Hahn went to work dismantling equipment and loading it on to lorries.
    Another transport detachment posted behind a network of trenches outside Nantes had got an idea of the way things were going when its women ATS staff had been taken back to Britain on 12 June. In their absence, the men foundoffice work extremely difficult. As a defence against the Germans, they stretched steel wire at a 45 degree angle across nearby roads: they reckoned it could pitch a light tank into the ditch. They also formed a ‘flying column’ of a truck mounted with a Bren gun and two lorries carrying twenty men each to deal with any German parachutists who might drop on them.
    At 1 p.m. on 15 June, the men were called to the parade ground to be told they would be leaving. They began to pack up their machine tools and stores, and to dismantle big pieces of equipment. French civilians working at the base were sent to remote parts of the facility so that they should not see what was going on. At 6 p.m., the first convoy left for St-Nazaire with lathes and drilling machines.
    Lieutenant Colonel Norman de Coudray Tronson, the 64-year-old Boer War veteran who would fire a Bren gun at the attacking planes from the deck of the
Lancastria
, reached the end of his exodus across France in La Baule. He had fought in India and South Africa as well as in the First World War when he was gassed and wounded. He had been sent to Dieppe to supervise hospital facilities and a medical depot. The Norman port became the target of heavy raids by German aircraft whose crews took no notice of the big red crosses painted on the roofs of medical centres. The house where Tronson was staying was hit three times, destroying most of his possessions. Two British hospital ships were bombed. One,