June 17, 1940

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The HMT Lancastria was sunk on June 17, 1940, off the French port of St. Nazaire while taking part in Operation Ariel, the evacuation of British nationals and troops from France, two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation. After a short overhaul, she had left Liverpool on June 14 under Captain Rudolph Sharp and arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary on June 16. She anchored 11 miles south-west of St. Nazaire.

By the mid-afternoon of June 17, he had embarked an unknown number (4,000-9,000) of civilian refugees (including embassy staff and employees of Fairey Aviation of Belgium), line-of-communication troops (including Pioneer and Royal Army Service Corps soldiers) and Royal Air Force personnel. The ship's official capacity was 2,200 including the 375-man crew. Captain Sharp had been instructed by the Royal Navy to "load as many men as possible without regard to the limits set down under international law".

At 13:50, during an air-raid, the nearby Oronsay, a 20,000-ton Orient Liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer HMS Havelock advised her to do so; but, without a destroyer escort as defence against possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait.

A fresh air raid began before 16:00. Lancastria was bombed at 15:48 by Junkers Ju 88 aircraft from Kampfgeschwader 30. Three direct hits caused the ship to list first to starboard then to port, while a fourth bomb fell down the ship's smokestack, detonating inside the engine room and releasing more than 1,200 tons of crude oil into the Loire estuary. Fifteen minutes after being hit, Lancastria began to capsize and some of those who were still on board managed to scramble over the ship's railing to sit on the ship's underside. Lancastria sank within twenty minutes.

When German aircraft began strafing survivors in the water, the fuel oil which had leaked into the sea ignited, and was quickly transformed into a flaming inferno. Many drowned; others were choked by the oil, or were shot by strafing German aircraft.

Survivors were taken aboard other evacuation vessels, the trawler HMT Cambridgeshire rescuing 900. There were 2,477 survivors. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force; the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France. She sank around 5 nmi south of Chémoulin Point in the Charpentier roads, around 9 nmi from St. Nazaire.

The Lancastria Association names 1,738 people known to have been killed. In 2005, Fenby wrote that estimates of the death toll vary from fewer than 3,000 to 5,800 people although it is also estimated that as many as 6,500 people perished, the largest loss of life in British maritime history.