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Not many people realise that after the evacuation of trooops from Dunkirk there were still some 150,000 British troops still in France.

It was considered that it might be possible to hold the Brittany peninsular. I was commissioned in the Spring of 1940 and sent on a liaison officers' course and from there was posted to 2 Corps headquarters under the command of Sir Alan Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke). He was given the task of organising the defence of Brittany. We crossed from Southampton toCherbourg on 11 June 1940 to be greeted by an air raid. The next day the headquarters was set up at Le Mans. Alanbrooke, realising it was not going to be possible to hold Brittany with the troops available, was, after a thirty-minute telephone conversation with Winston Churchill, able to convince the Prime Minister. Shortly afterwards, France ceased military action.

At St. Nazaire on the evening of 18 June another junior officer from the headquarters boarded what had been an Irish ferry. Earler a troopship had been hit and sunk by German bombers. The total on board was later reported to be 6,000 with 4,000 casualties. We had some of the survivors on our ship. They were in a pitiable condition. Our jouney back to Falmouth took three days. We saw one German aircraft but we had no problems.

Apart from the loss on the Lancastria some 150,000 British troops and 47,000 Allied trooops were brought back to England. The evacuation took place from Cherbourg in the north to St. Nazaire in the West. Considering the conditions prevailing this was no mean achievement. In spite of this it is reported in Arthur Bryant's 'Turn of the Tide' that when he returned to England he was asked why he had not brought back more vehicles and equipment.

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