thecaptain51
master brummie
I live in Italy now and thought I had covered most subjects about WW2, I was in for a shock.
I was attending a class to improve my Italian(trying to talk in italian with out my Brummie accent!), in the class was an English woman, she was about my age, her name is Ann Sweeney. She has an accent that I could kill for (Private school) . We got talking and after numerous conversations, she told me her father had died last year and that he had lived in Canada, I then asked her" How old was he? She told me. I asked "did he serve in WW2" and she said "Yes".
One day, after one of the lessons we went for a coffee and she began to tell me about The Lancastria and what happened to her father while he was on board, I was flabbergasted as the story was unrolled to me. The Lancastria came under attack from The Luftwaffe as she was about to leave for England, it was packed to the rafters with soldiers, Royal Airforce personnel and refugees, a Stuka dive bomber got in close to her and bombed the ship. Absolute pandemonium broke out as the ship began to list, the German planes then began machine gunning anybody who was in the water. The French locals came out in their boats to rescue as many people as they could also supported by the boats already in the harbour.
Churchill did not want the British people to be aware of what had happened to The Lancastria, censorship at its worst. It was The Americans who let the world know what had happened. It was a bigger tragedy than The Titanic, the full numbers of dead will never be known, but approximately 4,000+ lost their lives that day. The bodies of dead British soldiers/airmen were being washed up on the beaches for months afterwards.
Did anybody on this site, have any family on The Lancastria and would like to tell their own personel story about this event.
This site below is Joe Sweeneys story about what happened
https://www.lancastria.org.uk/joe-sweeney/
The picture of R.M.S. Lancastria and survivors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDOE0zpAxXA
The story of what happened
https://www.squidoo.com/lancastria
The captain
I was attending a class to improve my Italian(trying to talk in italian with out my Brummie accent!), in the class was an English woman, she was about my age, her name is Ann Sweeney. She has an accent that I could kill for (Private school) . We got talking and after numerous conversations, she told me her father had died last year and that he had lived in Canada, I then asked her" How old was he? She told me. I asked "did he serve in WW2" and she said "Yes".
One day, after one of the lessons we went for a coffee and she began to tell me about The Lancastria and what happened to her father while he was on board, I was flabbergasted as the story was unrolled to me. The Lancastria came under attack from The Luftwaffe as she was about to leave for England, it was packed to the rafters with soldiers, Royal Airforce personnel and refugees, a Stuka dive bomber got in close to her and bombed the ship. Absolute pandemonium broke out as the ship began to list, the German planes then began machine gunning anybody who was in the water. The French locals came out in their boats to rescue as many people as they could also supported by the boats already in the harbour.
Churchill did not want the British people to be aware of what had happened to The Lancastria, censorship at its worst. It was The Americans who let the world know what had happened. It was a bigger tragedy than The Titanic, the full numbers of dead will never be known, but approximately 4,000+ lost their lives that day. The bodies of dead British soldiers/airmen were being washed up on the beaches for months afterwards.
Did anybody on this site, have any family on The Lancastria and would like to tell their own personel story about this event.
This site below is Joe Sweeneys story about what happened
https://www.lancastria.org.uk/joe-sweeney/
The picture of R.M.S. Lancastria and survivors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDOE0zpAxXA
The story of what happened
https://www.squidoo.com/lancastria
The captain
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