The Sinking of the Lancastria by Jonathan Fenby Page A

the
Maid of Kent
, keeled over, and set fire to a train drawn up alongside containing 580 wounded men. The planes came back, and began machine-gunning. ‘That’s when the real horror began,’ said an army major at the scene.
    After the raid, Tronson sent medical stores to the west, and then left at the head of a convoy of six cars at midnight. In the morning, he stopped in the town of Alençon, in southern Normandy, for breakfast and a haircut. There was no sign of the other five cars, but he did not wait. On the way west, he met up with a train carrying members of his staff from Dieppe. They headed for La Baule, with its luxury hotels behind the wide, three-mile-long beach converted into military hospitals to treat men brought in from across northern France. When the evacuation order was transmitted on 15 June dozen of military ambulances lined up outside to carry the wounded to St-Nazaire.
    Some of the retreating foreigners did not behave so well. One British soldier carried a valise crammed with leather shoe soles; another filled his map pocket with hundred franc notes he collected along the way. A sergeant carried two haversacks stuffed with clocks, watches and other souvenirs of France. A driver known as ‘Matey’, with a headquarters unit of the Royal Engineers, made off with an album of beautifully drawn and coloured pornographic illustrations he came across. After showing them round, he tucked them into his uniform jacket to take home. They would go down with him on the
Lancastria
.
    In Nantes, a newspaper reported an incident at a farmhouse in the region. Two foreign soldiers had asked the farmer’s wife for food, which she gave them. As they were eating, a delivery man arrived with a package. To pay him, the woman went to a cupboard to get money stored there. The next day, while she was out, the money was stolen, along with savings books kept in the cupboard. The report left no doubtthat it was the foreign soldiers who were responsible. Whether they were British was not specified.
    A handful of civilians were also trying to get out through St-Nazaire. Among them were members of the YMCA and the Church Army – a convoy carrying two of its sisters called Trott and Chamley was attacked five times by German planes.
    In La Baule, an Englishwoman from London, Mrs Jory, had stayed on with three of her children in their family villa on the calculation that London might be bombed and that a resort in western France would be safer. As she watched the army ambulances lining up outside the hotel-hospitals to take the wounded to be evacuated, she realised that it was time to go. She got a pass for the
Lancastria
, but did not manage to obtain one for her young sons and daughter. The family’s large Austin car did not have enough petrol to drive to St-Nazaire. So the family stayed in La Baule, and the children stood on the beach watching German planes flying in to bomb the ships in the bay – at the end of 1940, they were arrested by the Germans and the French police, and held in several camps before being freed in 1944.
    Most of the civilians who did get to St-Nazaire came from an aircraft factory operated by the Fairey Aviation Company near Charleroi in Belgium. The plant had been bombed at the start of the German offensive in May, and the firm decided to evacuate its management and their families to France. With them, they carried plans for aircraft construction that the British did not want to fall into enemy hands.
    Among those in the Fairey party were 13-year-old Emilie Legroux and her brother, Roger, eleven, three-year-oldClaudine Freeman and a baby, Jacqueline Tillyer, aged two. The women and children set off by car, the men by tram.
    They found a train that took them across the French border to Valenciennes where it was stopped by a heavy bombing raid – the men lay on top of the children to protect them. After the planes had gone, the children complained loudly about having been crushed. One of the mothers