Summer 1940, a dark time for Britain and France.

German forces have swept through the French eastern border.

The line of concrete defenses and fortifications known as the Majino line that had cost 3 billion Franks.

Nearly4 billion US dollars had been passed neatly to the north by German panzer divisions that raced across the countryside.

The main German thrust was through Sedon, then San Quentin, and up north of Amian, aiming for the coast.

From the east came a secondary attack that bisected Belgium and plunged into Ostend and Liil to the north.

It was an encirclement like the jaws of a steel trap swung shut on the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force who’d rushed to defend France back in late 1939 and had sat idle for months waiting for the Germans to do something.

In May, the invasion had come.

Everybody expected it, but few anticipated its fury.

Advanced German aircraft knocked the impotent all French bombers out of the sky.

Junker’s Stooka dive bombers worked closely with ground forces to pound pockets of resistance into surrender or oblivion with devastating accuracy and unrelenting savagess.

The panzas had been held up by heavily armored French tanks in some places, but they swept in to back up the grenaders.

By months end, the British force had its back to the English Channel in a few small pockets in the north like Calala, La Havra, and most famously of all, Dunkirk.

Then the Germans paused inexplicably.

Weeks of relentless advance had taken their toll and it presented the British with a brief window of opportunity.

While French troops bravely held the line and fought back against the Germans, British forces began an oceangoing retreat.

It was called the miracle at Dunkirk when a fleet of ships, many of them civilian, came over from England and fished men by their tens of thousands from the ocean as they awaited rescue on the beaches.

Some 338,000 were successfully evacuated in Operation Dynamo.

It hadn’t been easygoing.

Assault from the sky was punishing.

The Stooka dive bombers did their work while Dorners and Jonas hammered big ships at Mooring awaiting their turn.

It was a close-run thing, but by early June, it was all over.

And the Germans at last stepped foot on the beach at Dunkirk to be greeted by mile after mile of abandoned guns, trucks, cars, and bodies.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

While the bulk of the British forces were mighty glad to be going back home to Blighty, some 140,000 more were still stuck in France, staring down the barrel of a massive German advance.

German troops had taken the north of the country.

Now they just needed to mop up and swing west to take the rest.

Enter Operation Aerial, a desperate attempt to try to evacuate all those left behind before it was too late.

In the west at San Nazair and Na, tens of thousands of British, French, Polish, and Czech troops and civilian refugees began to gather, awaiting the coming evacuation.

The Royal Navy needed to draw on some serious capacity to rescue them.

At Dunkirk, the little ships had arrived, fishing boats and cutters by their hundreds.

But this would not be a simple cross channel dash.

The western coast of France is pounded by the wild bay of Bisque, where big waves are channeled in from the Atlantic into a kind of goldfish bowl that can see swells stand up on end and make big ships rock and sway in submission.

The job called for passenger ships, big ones, and the Admiral Ty would have to make do with what they had to hand.

White Stars Georgic was called up as well as Canadian Pacific’s handsome Duchess of York, the Polish refugee ships Btorii and Soies, and finally Cunard’s Franconia and Lancastria.

Lancastria was a gorgeous liner originally built for the anchor line after a near sister ship Cameroonia.

Handsomely proportioned, the two featured long prominards with a commanding bridge island, single doineering red funnel, and a striking cruiser stern that marked them apart from their older fleet mates that still used the kind of old-fashioned clipper sterns that had been used on ships since the last century.

They weren’t particularly big, only about 16,000 gross registered tons and 580 ft or so long.

Nor were they overly glamorous.

Rather, they were the kind of workhorse ocean liners that companies relied on in the wake of the First World War to build back their lost fleets and earn some steady, reliable income without spending a fortune on construction for something bigger.

But they were very comfortable, featuring verander cafes clad with palms, sumptuous main lounges, and whitewall dining saloons with tall columns.

Lancastria was originally given the rather unfortunate name Terrinia, which nobody quite knew how to pronounce correctly.

myself included, and it was placed on the Glasgow, Quebec run before shifting over to the busier and more lucrative Liverpool, New York route.

In the mid20s and into the 30s, her comfortable interiors made her an ideal candidate for cruising in the offseasons, and she spent happy days gliding around the Mediterranean, out to the Bahamas, and even Norway in the fjords, often charted by the legendary travel agent and cruise pioneer Frank C.

Clark of New York.

bands belted out hot dance tunes on deck, and when the temperatures soared, a temporary pool was rigged between the prominard walkway above so that more daring passengers could use it as a diving board.

By 1939, Lancastria had seen such success at cruising that she had been modified specifically for purpose with a new cinema, a cocktail bar, a brewery, [music] miniature golf courses, shops, tennis courts, and more.

From the outside, the most obvious change was her paint job.

She was given an all-white scheme that looked smart and marked her out as a ship designed for fun.

These were happy days for Lancastria and her fleet mates, but they weren’t fated to last.

As if to preface the horror that was to come to the world in 1939, Frank Clark died in February, age 76.

The outbreak of war had seen ships like Lancastria recalled suddenly immediately to do their part.

She had actually been on a cruise in the Bahamas when she was ordered to make steam for New York and hurried conversion.

The ship that had just weeks prior been carrying happy passengers in sun lounges off Nassau emerged a very different beast.

Her finery removed, stripped or covered, her port holes and windows blacked out, a small gun poking out over her deck, and a thick coat of drab battleship gray dowsed over all of it.

The importance of the work and the danger faced by ships like Lancastria was shockingly demonstrated on September 3rd when the Athenia of similar size and layout to the Cunada was sunk without warning on the very eve of the British declaration of war by a Yubot which had mistaken her for a warship or a merchant cruiser.

It killed 117 civilian passengers and crew who’ boarded it at Glasgow in peace time.

Among the dead was a 10-year-old Canadian girl.

The international public was outraged and British ships were being hunted.

So it was in June 1940 that when the British needed to rescue those panicked refugees in France, they called up Lancastria.

Normally rated to carry around 1,700 passengers and crew, the ship would need to take on many, many more than that to play her part in the evacuation of Sanair.

Ports in France began to be drained of Allied troops.

Sherborg by June 18 saw upwards of 30,000 rescued.

San Malo too that saw 20,000 taken off.

Breast was a huge success too with little to no German attacks.

The evacuation saw somewhere around 32,000 rescued.

Operation aerial had been a roaring success so far.

Then came San Nazair.

On June 16th, Franconia and Lancastria lumbered into Quibberon Bay off the port.

Lauron and St.

in Nazair would probably prove to be the most challenging of the evacuations.

San Nazair sits at the mouth of the Lir River where it drains into the bay.

Scholes and rocks dot the coast.

It wouldn’t be an easy job.

Lancastria and Franconia would need to sit at anchor in the bay, totally at the mercy of the Luvafa and any patrolling yubot.

They would simply have to await their turn to go in and pick up their load of troops.

It was a job that had to be done.

Captain Rudolph Sharp, 54, watched the coasts with his binoculars.

Pillars of smoke rose up in the distance as port facilities and useful infrastructure in town was burned and taken apart.

Late on the 16th, Lancastria steamed slowly into position at the Sharpontier roads about 5 mi or 8 km from San Nazair in the Eststerie.

The situation on land was dire.

France would soon be surrendering and it had become a race against time to extricate everybody left behind.

At Sandair, the roads became choked with troops and civilian refugees.

During the night, recalled an RAF wing commander.

We were treated to an amazing display of pyrochnics caused by the discharge of every possible French light firearm at enemy aircraft, which must have been quite three times out of range.

The danger to personnel in the docks was much greater owing to the laws of gravity, and I personally received a portion of the French defenses on my steel helmet.

Embarcation finally began at 6:00 a.

m.

on the 17th of June.

Apparently, it could have started earlier during the night, ensuring the operation could be largely completed under the safe cover of darkness, but for the French harbor master, who forbade the use of any lights at nighttime.

Regardless, a trail of small boats ran back and forth between land and the big gray hulk of Lancastria as she rode at anchor, a 16,000 gross registered ton sitting duck.

She wasn’t alone, though.

Nearby lay the gorgeous Orient liner Aronz bobbing gently at anchor as well as she waited for her compliment of refugees.

As they stepped aboard Lancastria, officers were led down to their cabins while the other ranks were filed into vast dormitories that had been made from the thirdass bases and the holds.

The scene aboard was surreal.

Cabin stewards began to take officers lunch orders.

The cocktail bar began serving out drinks to troops.

The mood was jovial and for good reason.

These men had just escaped the jaws of Hitler’s war machine.

Now they were heading home on a vessel many of the enlisted men could never dreamt of affording a trip on in peace time.

As morning turned to afternoon and more boats fed yet more troops out, Lancastria began to sag lower into the water as a peaceime compliment more than doubled.

A steward tasked with counting those that came aboard was ordered away for something.

Nobody knew how many troops were coming onto the ship, but it was absolutely packed from the suits and the cabins down to the thirdass birds and the voluminous holds.

The Germans seemed less keen on letting the British operation go by unimpeded this time.

Occasional strafing runs had startled the men in the little boats, but nobody was hit.

Then came a more serious raid.

Just before 2 p.

m.

, some bombers roared overhead and sent a bomb straight into the Aron’s bridge.

The mood changed completely.

Nearly 2 hours later, Lancastria was full to bursting.

And then, suddenly, an alarm began to blare throughout the ship.

It was another air raid.

Five bombers, Junka’s 88s, came in low.

Flack burst into life, but the ships were pathetically protected from these fastmoving aircraft.

The planes were being flown by experienced pilots from the second grouper of Kashwara or bomber squadron 30 freshly back from the Norway campaign.

There below them was a big fat target, a passenger liner perfectly stationary.

The length and the width of the ship which had once provided passengers with plenty of comfortable space for lounging in the Baham sun now instead provided Kfkash 30’s bombarders with a perfectly wide spot to plunge a group of 250 kg bombs.

They came in fast and dropped their payload.

Some missed and threw up big columns of spray that rained down on the decks, but others hit.

A bomb smashed through near the base of the ship’s funnel.

Captain Sharp saw it from just feet away.

It punched through the deck and exploded somewhere below with a dull thud that made his ship quiver.

Then came another straight through a cargo hatch.

Then two more.

They could not have been aimed more perfectly.

They struck the ship exactly where they could do the most damage.

And instead of exploding harmlessly on deck, they crunched their way down through plating and hatch covers to detonate deep within the ship’s boughels.

The men down there in the holds, packed in like sardines, stood no chance.

Those not vaporized by the blasts were met by a sudden inrush of water as the ship’s sides blew out and the Lir came in, waited down with their webbing and equipment, jammed in for the short journey home, there was no getting out.

Lancastria wallowed in the water.

Most alarmingly of all, a black cloud began to surround her.

Her oil tanks had blasted out, too, and thick fuel oil began to coat the water’s surface.

The ship had plenty of lifeboats, but she took on a sudden list that made it difficult to get them away.

That and many had been smashed to pieces by the blasts.

Lancastria began to roll to starboard.

Captain Sharp and his officers ordered everyone on deck to rush over to port, but this created an irreversible list to that side instead.

Water came in quickly, seething white with fury as it dragged the big old ship down.

One boat was launched with a few women and children, but it turned over in the water as it landed and threw them all out.

Men rained down the steel sides of the ship, desperate to get away, only to break their limbs or their necks in their haste.

Lancastria went quickly.

With a roar, she rolled onto her side and then disappeared below in sheets of spray.

Left behind on the surface was a terrified group of living mixed in with the dead.

Encumbered by heavy gear and slowed by the thick fuel oil that clung to them and stung their eyes.

From above came chattering like the sound of a stenographer and a typewriter, the circling bombers were machine gunning the water.

After about 2 hours, recalled one steward, I began to feel that I would pass out, and I pinched and banged myself to bring myself out of it.

I was surrounded by men in similar condition.

And even when our own aircraft flew over and dropped rafts for us, we were too weak to struggle to them.

I was by now also full of fuel oil, continuously sick, and deadly cold.

Two soldiers near me were clinging together, and when I saw a boat approaching, I shouted the news to them.

And I was eventually dragged into the boat.

But the two soldiers were by then dead.

The survivors were scattered by the tides and hidden by the oil slick.

So it took hours and hours to find them and pluck them out of the sludge.

Worst of all, the oil had ignited either from German gunfire or flares igniting on contact with the ocean.

They made a thick cloud of black acid smoke that hid yet more of the survivors from view.

Many didn’t make it.

Captain Sharp survived.

For his part, he spent somewhere around 4 hours treading water.

Many succumbed to the cold and the exhaustion.

When the destroyer HMS Havlock was able to take people on board, many of them simply passed away from the strain.

Lancastria had gone in just 20 minutes.

Thousands were dead.

July 1940, a month since the Lancastri is sinking, France was by now an occupied country.

The swastika flew over the Eiffel Tower.

At San Nazair and the West Coast came a grim reminder of the tragedy that had happened the month prior.

Corpses began to come ashore.

The bay had kept them out to sea for weeks, but then midsummer they finally came in.

Two or three with each tide.

“We were walking along the coast on December 2nd,” said one resident.

“That’s when we noticed that there were bones.

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 had drowned to identify them.

And then the many bones, we never collected them.

It was not possible.

There were too many.

all over.

The evacuation of San Aair was hard fought, but it was worth it.

Nearly 58,000 men were taken off there, but an untold number had died with Lancastria.

The numbers were stunning, but nobody knew exactly how many had been lost.

They’d simply lost count of how many men had gone aboard the ship.

It can’t have been fewer than 3,500 killed.

Estimates range up to as many as 6,500 people or more.

The worst single loss of life in a British ship sinking.

and one of the worst maritime disasters in history.

Lancastria was just one in a series of horrible disasters that summer in 1940.

France fell so quickly that the British expeditionary force lost some 66,000 men.

But for the incredible bravery of the boats and ships that went to rescue the rest, many, many more would have been left behind.

Lancastria’s sinking accounted for about a third of all the men killed in France that summer.

It was a horrible shock, but it was censored quickly by Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself.

He recognized the scale of the tragedy that had occurred, and the British public, staring down the German army and air force now waiting just on the other side of the channel, needed a victory.

The miracle at Dunkirk was spun not as a hasty, disorganized flight, but as a demonstration of British resolve.

That became the focus of the story.

Operation Dynamo.

Operation Ariel was largely consigned to the history books.

Lancastria’s sinking was buried and the families of the men who’d been killed were told simply that their lads had been lost somewhere in France.

To this day, only about 1,800 men are known or confirmed to have died on Lancastria.

Many, many hundreds more are still down there in the steel holds of the ship that had sunk so quickly.

Today, Lancastri is protected by the French as a grave as it sits so close to their shoreline.

In 2005, at a cemetery at Pinese near San Nazair, where many of the bodies had washed up, a massive bronze bell was found with a note.

The author said he had pulled it up from a shipwreck some 30 years earlier, and wanted to give it back.

Etched on the front of the bell was the name Terrinia, Lancastria’s original name.

Still coated in thick marine encrustation, the bell now rests at St.

Katherine Cree Church in London.

A tragic reminder of those dark early days of the war, the thousands of lives lost in the attack, and the ship itself, one of hundreds that wouldn’t survive the war.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s your friend Mike Brady from Oceaner Designs.

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