The Sinking of the Lancastria Read Online Free PDF Page A

of his most celebrated speeches that summer. ‘We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’ If the Nazis invaded Britain, he told colleagues, either they would be driven back, or he would be carried out dead from his office.
    At a meeting of the Defence Committee in London on 8 June, Churchill had concluded it ‘would be fatal to yield to the French demands andjeopardise our own safety’. 8 So it was not surprising that, when the French asked him at Briare what Britain would do if they capitulated and Germany focused its might across the Channel, the Prime Minister replied, in French, that he would drown as many of the invaders as possible and then ‘
frapper sur la tête
’ those who crawled ashore. After which the British and French delegations had a light dinner, and went to bed.
    The next morning, two French officers eating breakfast in the dining room of the château were taken aback when the big double doors opened. Standing there in a long flowing red silk kimono, his hair on end, was Churchill, asking about his morning bath.
    Washed and dressed, the Prime Minister resumed the conference. The news from the battlefront was even worse. Weygand reported that some French divisions had just three or four guns; four had none at all. With the Germans only thirty miles from Paris, Churchill suggested that the city might put up resistance in the same way as Madrid had during the Spanish Civil War. ‘To make Paris a city of ruins will not affect the issue,’ Pétain responded, and Weygand declared the capital an open and undefended city to avoid bombing.
    His doubts about France’s will to resist reinforced, Churchill decided to fly home. He and his party were using a small pink plane, known as the Flamingo. The escort of fighters which had accompanied it from Britain the previous day was out of fuel, and supplies had not arrived by the time the Prime Minister was ready to leave. So the Flamingo flew alone. As it crossed the Channel, the cloud around it cleared. Below Churchill’s plane, two Germanfighters were attacking a fishing boat. Their fliers did not look up and spot the unarmed aircraft.
    Reporting to the War Cabinet on his return, Churchill said the Germans ‘seemed to have over matched and outwitted’ the French whose army wasnow on its last line. 9 ‘Effective resistance by France as a great land power was coming to an end,’ the Secretary for War, Anthony Eden, who had been at Briare, added. At the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary: ‘French howling for assistance . . . but it’s so muchdown the drain.’ 10
    Still, for Churchill, everything possible had to be done to postpone the day when France capitulated, not only out of his genuine feeling for the nation across the narrow sea but also because the longer it took Germany to defeat its neighbour, the more time Britain would have to build up its forces against the coming storm. So, on 13 June, as the
Lancastria
was sailing home to Liverpool from its mission to Iceland, the Prime Minister flew back to the Loire Valley for another meeting with Paul Reynaud at the French government’s new headquarters.
    Arriving at the airfield of the city of Tours at lunchtime, the British found thatthere was no welcoming party. 11 Churchill’s pilot recalled that he ‘looked as though he was trying to chew a mouthful of nuts and bolts’. He approached a group of French airmen, and told them his name, adding that he was the Prime Minister of Britain. He would, he said, be grateful for
une voiture
. The airfield commander’s small Citroën was produced, and the five-man British party crammed itself inside, Churchill