by John Nichol
Meanwhile, on the beach in Dunkirk itself, a morning mist was slowly clearing, to reveal a miracle. Corporal Montague and what was left of his field ambulance gazed out to sea. ‘We could see hundreds of small craft of every description moving in as close to the shore as possible. Many of our fellows were wading out to these cabin cruisers, motor barges and lifeboats, climbing on board and being ferried out to cross-Channel steamers, fishing vessels, river pleasure boats and yachts lying in deeper water.’ From one of those steamers, medical officer Malcolm Pleydell looked out at ‘black clusters of men swarming like a disturbed ants’ nest on the sands. We steered gingerly between the wrecks of ships, their masts leaning over at drunken angles, and could hear a grating noise as we grazed past them.’18 Small craft were zipping backwards and forwards ‘like water beetles’, he recalled, in this ‘macabre regatta’. But for all the size of this armada and the incredible courage of those at the wheels and tillers, it was clearly going to be a very slow process to get everyone away.
What dismayed the waiting and watching Montague was that, however many men braved the deep water and the waves to get from shore to ship, ‘the khaki multitude along the beach did not appear to diminish, and, if anything, seemed to swell by the hour.’ Men threw caution aside in their desperation to escape. Liverpoolborn Len Brown was a bugler in the 1st battalion of the South Lancashires and doubled up as a stretcher-bearer. But the prowess he drew on now was neither musical nor medical. What mattered was that he was a swimmer in the battalion water polo team. ‘I saw this ship anchored 600 yards out, and I said to my mate, “Shall we have a go?” We waited until the next air raid was finished, took off our clothes and went in.’ Sailors on the ship spotted their heads bobbing in the water, lowered a small boat and came for them. ‘They helped us in and gave me a cigarette, and a pair of brown overalls, because I had no clothes on.’19
By the time night came, Corporal Montague had not had his chance to get away and, with the many tens of thousands left on the beach, he drifted towards the Mole, where long queues were still forming. There was no respite from the bombardment. The Germans had taken Calais, and their heavy guns there had got the range of the Mole and its approaches. He realized with alarm that ‘the enemy is clearly closing in on us.’ But discipline was maintained. A brigadier in a red-banded, soft-peaked cap was calling out instructions, Montague recalled, ‘as coolly and calmly as if he was coaching a rowing eight at Henley’. The men formed themselves into groups of fifty and, on a command, raced through gaps in the shellfire across the beach and on to the Mole. ‘We were ordered not to stop once we had started. The group ahead of us slowed down, and a shell landed in the middle of them, leaving many dead, dying and wounded. We were directed past them and arrived safely on the Mole.’ Montague scrambled along a plank towards a waiting ship, a Dutch ferry. He looked down nervously at the black oily water some 30 feet below before the strong hands of two Royal Navy ratings seized him and hauled him on board. He was going home. Eight hours later, the ship pulled into Folkestone harbour ‘under a clear blue sky, without any gunfire’.
Many ships, crammed with evacuees, never got that far. The destroyer HMS Grenade was blown apart by a bomb while she was tied to the Dunkirk Mole. Nineteen-year-old sickbay attendant Bob Bloom was hit with such a blast and was in so much pain from burns that he wanted to die. ‘The skin was hanging from my hands as if I was trying to pull off gloves. My face was stinging, my lips were swelling and my nose had all but disappeared.’20 He jumped into the water, then climbed up on to the Mole and over to a paddle steamer berthed on the other side. But she too was hit, and he found himself back in the water. ‘By now my face was so swollen I could hardly see. But I was saved by two soldiers who were hanging on to what looked like a barn door with a ring fixed to it.’ They kicked with their legs, and he sat clinging to the ring until, hours later, they were picked up by a passing ship and taken to Ramsgate.
*
Back in France, tens of thousands were still waiting for their chance to escape. Many of them were medics, invariably among the last to leave any of the dwindling number of defensive positions around Dunkirk. In his aid post in a cellar in a village six miles from the sea, Richard Doll, with just one orderly and two stretcher-bearers to help, had a continuous stream of casualties, whom he was patching up and sending off in ambulances to the port. When he finally managed to poke his head out of the door, he saw that the battalion of Lancashire Loyals he had been retreating with had all disappeared, and the message left for him was that he should ‘do what I thought best’. All around him were burning ruins. He decided it was time to get out. The wounded who could still fire a rifle were armed and put in the back of a lorry. The others were crammed into his car. ‘Before starting, I gave all of them a last dose of morphine,’ he recalled.21
Headed by a stretcher-bearer (a conscientious objector – one of many who would not fight but who bravely went to war anyway to save lives) on a motorbike, the mini-convoy headed for Dunkirk. They came on the Loyals again, who were dug in along a canal bank. Doll sent off the lorry with the wounded towards the beaches –‘the last I saw of it’ – and set up a new aid post in a barn. The last bridge over the canal was about to be blown, but a deserter was lying drunk in the middle. Doll, ever the life-saver, ignored orders to leave him, revved up the engine of his car, accelerated on to the bridge, heaved the man into the back, turned and fled. Only afterwards did Doll grasp how reckless he had been and took a swig of tea and brandy to calm his nerves. Then he got back in his car and toured the area for genuine casualties. All the while, shells were bursting around him. He sent off more fully laden ambulances towards the beaches and was heartened when all the drivers dropped their loads and came straight back, though it would have been the easiest thing in the world for them to have taken the chance to flee. That night, the battalion was finally given permission to withdraw under cover of darkness. ‘I had one wounded man with me in my car, and I gave a lift to two others with blistered feet as we headed for the Mole, which was lit up in the distance by a pillar of fire.’
When they could go no further, they ditched the car and began to walk the last half-mile. ‘The Mole was full of French troops, who were moving slowly out along it into the dark, ignoring the shells falling all around. To us it seemed too dangerous even to try, and we found spades and dug a shallow shelter for ourselves among the foxholes and craters on the beach. But it was soon obvious that we could not just sit there. We must either push on along the Mole and get to a ship that way or else wander off and look for boats along the beach.’ There was a rumour that empty boats had been spotted a mile or two along the sands, and Doll decided to take a chance and head with his men in that direction. It could have been a wild goose chase, and a fatal one at that. In fact, he had made the right call. ‘We had walked for about ten minutes when we saw a dark mass ahead of us and found to our joy that some two hundred to three hundred British soldiers were standing in the water while out beyond them were a couple of rowing boats. We lined up to wait our turn and, as the boats returned to the shore, we waded out to them. The water came up to my chest before I was pulled over the gunwales and aboard.’ A motorboat tugged the now overflowing dinghy out to a waiting paddle steamer. Doll stood soaking wet and exhausted in a crowded gangway but did not mind the discomfort and the cold. ‘This was the boat that was going to take me back to England, and that was the only thing that mattered.’
The doctor’s work, though, was still not finished. There were a dozen stretcher-cases in the sick bay for him to treat. Doll was utterly done in, but he was revived with steaming cups of tea, Oxo and bread and butter and knuckled down to the task. ‘Some were so terribly wounded I didn’t know how they had got on board. One Coldstream Guard, a survivor from a platoon that had been hit by a shell on the beach, had six separate leg fractures, and he died before the boat got back. A sergeant from the Loyals looked unhurt, but when I cut away his shirt I saw that his right shoulder was almost blown away and the arm wa
s held on by a few pieces of muscle and skin. I splinted it by pinning pieces of bandage to the back of his coat, over his arm and on to his chest.’ Now Doll could sleep, and when he woke, the steamer was in Ramsgate harbour.
*
It was 2 June when Doll got back to England and, by then, close on 300,000 British and French troops had been brought back across the Channel. ‘Dynamo’, as the operation was called, was wound up two days later, having rescued eight times as many men as those masterminding it from underground headquarters inside the cliffs at Dover had ever thought possible. In France, 30,000 British soldiers were dead, never to return, or wounded, and a further 35,000 already in the bag as prisoners of war. But another 150,000 were still at liberty and, with the fall of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne, were heading westwards along the coast in the hope of finding a means of escape.
Among those still at liberty was Major Ralph Brooke, who had stayed at his post in the hospital at Rennes with one other doctor and a handful of orderlies while France was collapsing around them. The town, through which thousands of refugees were pouring as they headed towards the Atlantic ports, came under attack from the air. The hospital was hit and he was thrown down a flight of stairs and showered with broken glass. He vomited, sick with fear. ‘But then I began to pull myself together’ – which was just as well, because an ammunition train had exploded next to two troop trains in the railway station and hundreds of casualties were arriving. ‘We picked up the up-ended operating table, swept as much broken glass as we could from the floor and set to work.’ The window frames had all been blown out and there was a large gap in the wall through which, on this hot mid-June day, the sun streamed brightly. A second table was rigged up, two patients were anaesthetized at a time and Brooke moved between them as fast as he could.
‘There was no time for proper sterilization,’ he recorded in his diary, which was extraordinary for a doctor who had warned so stridently (and correctly) about the dangers of sepsis in army hospitals when he was first posted to France. The realities of war changed all that. ‘One just washed one’s hands and went from one table to the other, working with bare hands, lopping off limb after limb, tying arteries, sewing torn bowel. No sterile towels, only a macintosh sheet. Instruments flung into a boiler between cases sometimes, sometimes the bloody ones used from the previous case.’ He went on for hour after hour. ‘No stop. Limbs piled up in buckets and when the buckets were full the limbs were thrown into a corner.’ As soon as patients came off the table, they were loaded, some still under the anaesthetic, into ambulances waiting outside and driven away. He counted later that he had carried out forty-seven operations and removed fourteen legs and six arms.
‘Then word came through that the Hun was only two hours away and coming fast. We were ordered to leave at once and make for the coast.’ By then he had collected more than two hundred seriously wounded men, and the hastily assembled convoy joined the exodus of cars and carts crawling out of the wreckage of Rennes along streets strewn with bodies. Out in the country, they came under attack from the air. ‘I was riding in the first ambulance, there was a huge flash behind and I turned to see that the two behind me had been hit. We stopped and searched for injured, but all of them had been killed.’ Ten men had been blown to smithereens, with nothing left except pieces of mangled flesh and torn clothing. A large crater was now blocking the way of the rest of the convoy, and the ambulances had to detour through ploughed fields to get back on the road. ‘I can still hear the groans from the poor fellows as the ambulances lurched over the furrows. I gave morphia to as many of them as I could.’
In the early hours of the morning, they crept into St Nazaire. When they opened up the ambulances, Brooke found that six more patients had died. At the port, ships were casting off and about to sail, already full to the brim. There was no room. Brooke lined up his ambulances on the quayside and, as dawn broke and enemy bombers came swooping over the water, he felt utter despair. ‘All hope left us. So nearly away and yet so far.’ A British naval officer came to the rescue. He dashed up in a car and told Brooke that a Norwegian cargo boat carrying copper bars in the hold was leaving from another part of the harbour. ‘If we could get there, the captain would take us, but he would not wait.’ They raced over and were given fifteen minutes to load as many stretchers as they could. ‘A fearful struggle against time began. We worked like navvies carrying the stretchers up a single, steep gangway and stowing them on top of the copper.’ From somewhere, he found superhuman strength as he toiled away ‘as I had never done before in my life. I discovered I could lift a stretcher with a heavy man on it with ease, whereas in cold blood I could not have contemplated such a thing, let alone done it. The last man was being loaded as the ship moved away from the quayside. We had carried eighty-two stretcher-cases on board in fifteen minutes.’ How close a call it had been was apparent as the ship cleared the lock gates. ‘We could see the Boche tanks coming down the hill into the town. We were the last out. The ship following us was caught at the lock gates.’
*
The rescue of the BEF had concentrated on bringing home the able-bodied, who would form the nucleus of the army that, in time, would return to France and do to the Germans what they had done to the British Army. Out of necessity, many of the wounded had had to be left behind. But there were still many thousands of injured men22 who made it back home, thanks to the doctors, orderlies, ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers who had stayed resolutely by their side. It was now down to medical staff on the home front to take over from them. Each ship arriving in port with casualties was met by a naval medical officer and two sick-berth ratings, whose first job was often to release tourniquets that, in the panic and horror of the evacuation, had been left on too long. ‘We saw many cases of congestion of the limbs due to prolonged application of tourniquets,’ reported Surgeon Captain A. R. Fisher, the senior medical officer at Dover. One soldier he came across had had his wounded arm strapped tight for thirty-six hours, and the limb was completely dead. Fisher put the case for windlass-operated tourniquets –‘easy to apply, easy to release and easy to re-tighten, and can be controlled by the patient’23 – but it would be the next century before such devices were standard.
From the south-coast ports, the wounded were whisked by rail to hospitals around the country. Artist Keith Vaughan, a conscientious objector who volunteered for medical work, met one such train in Yorkshire. As he climbed on board with his stretcher, he was hit by the smell of wool, urine and sickly-sweet flesh. But the sight that greeted him was vindication of his deep loathing for warfare. Here were its unforgettable victims.
Three tiers of bunks lined the white walls, each with a face that stared out quietly and expressionless. Some turned to look at us, visitors out of the night, from another planet. Others were still locked in their prisons of pain, where we had no admittance. No one spoke. We held our stretchers up to the bunks and coaxed the men to brave the crossing on to the steel meshes. They dragged across those parts of their bodies they were able, the rest we carried for them, grotesque shapes of wool and splint and bandage, joined to them only by pain. In a bunk near the door a pale boy watched our approach with an open, curious gaze and turned his face away when he saw we were coming for him. A nurse whispered something in his ear and wiped his forehead with some wool. We asked him if he could ease himself across a bit. He tried and couldn’t. ‘It’s his leg, poor laddie,’ the nurse said, and gave him a quick little pat and a smile. We drew back the blankets and saw that his arms finished at the wrists in two logs of yellow-stained wool and bandage. His right leg was a shapeless ball of bandage supported on pillows. He worked himself across slowly on his elbows, lay back a moment with closed eyes and lips trembling in despair. Then, drawing together the last fibres of courage, he forced himself too quickly on to the stretcher so that the leg twisted in our arms. His face broke open with silent tears.24
Ann Reeves witnessed even greater agonies as a student nurse in a London hospital when some of the worst o
f the wounded arrived. She remembered a man whose face was shot away and having to feed him ‘through what was left of his mouth, either by a tube or a tea spoon, and somehow spare him the ignominy of dribbling. I had to remove long lengths of congealed ribbon gauze from huge cavities, before packing them with clean dressings soaked in Eusol [a solution of chlorinated lime and boric acid]. It was like bleach, and he just looked at me with large, hurt eyes. He was still a person, but shattered beyond recognition.’ Burns victims could be even more traumatic. ‘They made my flesh creep,’ she admitted. ‘Most of them had been covered in flaming oil and were indescribably, horrifically, burnt.’25
She recalled a Scots corporal named Jock who had been enveloped in thick burning oil when the rescue ship he was on was bombed. He was ‘a living torch’ as he jumped into the sea and was now ‘an unrecognizable bulk of burnt flesh’. She put his charred arms and legs into cellophane Bunyan bags filled with saline and treated the rest of his body with tannic acid. ‘He was never free from pain except when mercifully drugged with morphine.’ Like all burns cases, he needed urgent rehydration, but his lips and tongue were too corroded and swollen for him to drink. Doctors tried an intravenous infusion of saline, ‘but they could not find a vein in Jock’s charred body and so he died’. But a suffering world had a long, long way to go before, like Jock, it would be out of its misery. And, though it didn’t bear thinking about and didn’t seem possible, on the other side of the world, a whole new dimension in man’s inhumanity to man was soon to begin.