The Sinking of the Lancastria by Jonathan Fenby Page B

knocked their heads together, telling them, ‘We have enough wars as it is.’
    Another train got them to within twenty miles of Paris, but it stopped there, and the party spent the night in a field. In the morning, they boarded another train thinking it was for the French capital. Instead, it went south, and they ended up near Bordeaux, where they moved into an inn that offered baths as well as food.
    From there, they contacted the Fairey head office in Hayes, Middlesex, and were instructed to get to England. So they made their way up the west coast of France by rail to find a route to Britain.
    As the Fairey group was heading for Nantes and St-Nazaire, the Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30) unit of the Luftwaffe was settling into its new base outside Louvain, east of Brussels. It had been allocated an abandoned airfield that was little more than a harvested field from which to mount sorties against France.
    Kampfgeschwader 30 was an elite group, flying the new Junkers JU-88 bombers, with the unit’s symbol of a diving eagle emblazoned on their noses. The twin-engined planes were among the most destructive and frightening elements inthe Nazi attack, diving at almost 300 miles an hour to release their bombs as their siren hooters set up a banshee wail to frighten people below.
    No sooner had they arrived in Belgium than the Diving Eagles were sent to attack France. On the way, they landed to take on fuel at an abandoned RAF airfield outside Amiens where one of the Germans found a big box of English sweets left behind by the retreating airmen. From Amiens, the JU-88s flew west, diving through anti-aircraft fire to attack the port at Cherbourg from which British troops were being evacuated. One of the fliers, a newly married, former civilian test pilot called Peter Stahl, was struck by the desolation below him on the way. He noted the numbers of cows lying dead in the fields, and the crush of people on the roads.
    The Diving Eagles did not attack the refugees; that was a job for smaller aircraft. They were after larger prey, strategic bridges, communications points and ships – one of their main training exercises had been to swoop on an old battleship to gain experience of attacking big naval targets.
    At 9.30 in the evening of 15 June, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, told him the latest bad news from France as they went in to dinner at the Prime Minister’s official residence at Chequers in Buckinghamshire. Churchill became very depressed, so the meal began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The Prime Minister ate quickly and greedily, his face almost down in the plate. As well as Colville, his scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindeman, was present, eating a special vegetarian menu. The Prime Minister’s eldest daughter, Diana, and her husband, the politician, Duncan Sandys, completed the party.
    Champagne, brandy and cigars lightened Churchill’s mood, and the group became talkative, ‘even garrulous’,Colville recorded in his diary. 8
    ‘The war is bound to become a bloody one for us now,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘But our people will stand up to bombing.’ He was particularly concerned that, if France gave up, its fleet should not fall into German hands. ‘If they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but . . . if they surrender without consulting us, we shall never forgive,’ he declared. ‘We shall blacken their name for a thousand years.’
    Churchill and Sandys stepped into the garden, walking in the moonlight as they discussed the latest events. In the distance, sentries with fixed bayonets watched over them.
    Returning to the house, Churchill recited some poetry, and said he and Hitler had only one thing in common, their hatred of whistling. Then he began to murmur:
    Bang, Bang, Bang goes the farmer’s gun
,
    Run, rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run
.
    The American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, telephoned, and Colville heard Churchill speaking forcefully about how the United