Agus My father was part of a unit receiving and forwarding signals as those who were not evacuated at Dunkirk retreated, so he heard a lot of what was going on, but he did not say much about it. I only remember him saying that they left one end of Rennes as the Germans entered the other end, and when I went to France via Cherbourg he said that the last time he had seen Cherbourg was quite enough for him.
Since he died I have found out more about those few weeks. Many of his postcards and sketches are of Rennes. During the time he was there, three trains sitting together in the railway station (a busy junction) were attacked by enemy aircraft and destroyed. They were bound for the channel ports, and packed with refugees, nuns from a convent, patients from a hospital, families fleeing the invasion. The station was completely flattened, as were buildings around it. A British officer had pleaded with the station master to disperse the trains out into the countryside, but bureaucracy prevailed, and they were stuck there, sitting ducks.
While he was at Cherbourg, waiting to embark or to sail (on 18th June), he must have seen the column of smoke that rose from the Lancastria. sunk off St Nazaire on 17 June, causing the deaths of at least 4,000 people packed on board like sardines to be evacuated, more lives than the combined losses of the RMS Titanic and RMS Lusitania. It had also the highest death toll for UK forces in a single engagement in the whole of World War II. Over 1,400 tons of fuel oil leaked into the sea and went on fire.