224923 S/Sgt. Harold Richard "Harry" Humphrey British Army Royal Army Ordnance Corps from:Haywards Heath Extract from a letter dated 1st August 1940 that my late Father sent to his civilian employer, Caffyns Ltd. Haywards Heath, Sussex, following his evacuation from Nantes, via St Nazaire:
"We went back to the harbour next morning and after hanging around for what seemed an eternity and having to dive for cover every few minutes, when Jerry broke through our cordon of fighter planes and attacked us with machine guns (it was rather amazing really, but I don't think anyone was hit, although several received slight cuts from flying glass and debris,including myself)...we were then taken off by a destroyer.
We had to back out of the harbour and had hardly got clear when there was a dickens of a commotion and we found we had run foul of a buoy anchor cable which had obligingly wrapped itself round our propeller and, of course, put the boat out of action. After a few minutes a French tug came along and took us in tow, but soon gave up that idea and we transferred on to the tug and left the destroyer to look after itself. It was while we were doing this that the Lancastria was sunk! I didn't realise at once what had happened as I was on the opposite side of the boat, and as bombs were dropping fairly consistently one bang more or less didn't make much difference. The Lancastria was about half a mile away but the Skipper had spotted it and as soon as we were all on board we made for it as fast as possible. The crew did their utmost in picking up as many as possible while we concentrated on keeping Jerry off with rifles and a Lewis gun we had managed to salve. But the Germans seemed to derive fiendish delight in harassing the poor devils in the water and kept diving and machine gunning them the whole time.
The Lancastria very quickly went under, in about twenty three minutes as near as I could judge, it was a wonder it stayed up as long as that though, for the bombs appeared to have fallen right down the forward hatch and had blown a large section of the side out."
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