Thomas Dennis Voce

Lost aboard HMT Lancastria.

Lancastria, captained by Rudolph Sharp, was towards the port of St. Nazaire, where many troops were waiting to be lifted, on the way, an air raid damaged the HMT Franconia which returned to England for repairs, leaving Lancastria to continue alone. She arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary late on 16 June. Because the port has to be accessed along a tidal channel, Lancastria anchored in the Charpentier Roads, some 5 miles south-west of St. Nazaire, at 04:00 on 17 June, along with some thirty other merchant vessels of all sizes. At 13:50, during an air-raid, the nearby Oronsay, a 20,000-ton Orient Liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer HMS Havelock advised her to do so; but, without a destroyer escort as defence against possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait for Oronsay before leaving. A fresh air raid began at 15:50 by Junkers Ju 88 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 30.

Lancastria was hit by three or possibly four bombs. A number of survivors reported that one
bomb had gone down the ship's single funnel which is most likely, given the speed with which the ship sank - about 15-20 minutes. The testimony of an engineering officer, Frank Brogden, who was in the engine room at the time, contradicts this. Brogden's account states that one bomb landed close to the funnel and entered No. 4 hold. Two other bombs landed in No. 2 and No. 3 holds while a fourth landed close to the port side of the ship, rupturing the fuel oil tanks. As the ship began to list to starboard, orders were given for the men on deck to move to the port side in an effort to counteract it, but this caused a list to port which could not be corrected. The ship was equipped with sixteen lifeboats and 2,500 life jackets; but many of the boats could not be launched because they had been damaged in the bombing or because of the angle of the hull. The first boat away was filled with women and children but it capsized on landing in the water and a second had to be lowered for them. A third boat had its bottom staved-in by landing too fast. A large number of men who jumped over the side were killed by hitting the side of the hull or had their necks broken by their life jackets on impact with the water. As Lancastria began to capsize, some of those who were still on board managed to scramble onto the ship's underside and were heard to be singing 'Roll Out the Barrel' and 'There'll Always Be an England', though this is strongly denied by some survivors. The ship sank at 16:12, within twenty minutes of being hit, which gave little time for other vessels to respond. Many of those in the water drowned because there were insufficient life jackets, or died from hypothermia, or were choked by fuel oil. The German aircraft began strafing survivors in the water and dropped flares into the floating oil.

Survivors were taken aboard other British and US evacuation vessels, the trawler HMT Cambridgeshire rescuing 900. Capt WG Euston recommended several of his crew for awards, including Stanley Kingett for "making repeated journeys in a lifeboat to pick up exhausted men from the water while under machine-gun fire from enemy planes", and William Perrin for "keeping up continuous machine-gun fire in an attempt to prevent enemy planes machine-gunning men in the water." There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France. The Lancastria Association names 1,738 people known to have been killed. Estimates of the death toll vary from fewer than 3,000 to 5,800 people although it is also estimated that as many as 6,500 people could have perished, the largest loss of life in British maritime history.