Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Every man who left the Mont des Cats that morning shared certain experiences. There were soldiers of all regiments and all nationalities mixed up in the retreat. By day they walked with their heads turned skywards in a desperate search for enemy aircraft. By night they walked in the eerie light of German flares, fired to illuminate the retreating troops. Scenes of chaos and confusion seemed to symbolize the entire retreat – corpses, burning vehicles, abandoned equipment, men who remained resolute and men who had abandoned hope. Everywhere they looked they saw ruined churches, their steeples destroyed to prevent their use as observation posts. All among them felt the quickening of the heart and dryness of throat provoked by fear. And all knew they would be lucky to survive.

  Each soldier who made the march towards the coast had his own memories, sights he would carry like snapshots through his life. There were plenty of surreal scenes. Small trucks hung from the branches of trees, where they had been blasted. There was the vision of a drunken British soldier riding around on a carthorse, laughing as he waved his hat at the men he passed. Elsewhere troops watched as a traumatized horse swam up and down a canal, unable to escape the water, until it was put out of its misery by a soldier appalled by its plight. In the chaos one infantry officer found himself hitching a lift on an artillery gun tractor. He soon found the driver had little idea of his destination and appeared to be going around in circles.

  Bill Holmes and his mates shared all these horrors as they marched silently past a column of burning trucks. The convoy had been bombed just minutes before, but no one had come to its assistance. As the marching soldiers turned to look, they could see the charred figure of a driver within each truck. Their desperate situation was reinforced as Holmes turned back to watch sappers blowing up a canal bridge they had just crossed. Now he was certain – they must surely be the last of the rearguard to reach Dunkirk.

  In those final days thousands of men like Sid Seal and Bill Holmes finally reached the dubious safety of the Dunkirk perimeter. Once there, whether they slipped safely across the Channel in the reassuring hands of the Royal Navy, were mown down on the beaches by marauding German warplanes, were wounded or left behind to be taken prisoner – it was all a lottery.

  As the men of the rearguard arrived in Dunkirk they entered a surreal world. Burnt-out trucks littered the verges on the outskirts. The entire town was surrounded by the wreckage of vehicles. It seemed bizarre to the arriving soldiers that drivers, who had so lovingly tended these vehicles, should now be destroying them. Soldiers stood in front of trucks smashing windscreens with rifle-butts, as others removed vital engine parts and threw them into ditches and canals. Lorries stood with their bonnets open, tangled wires, holed sumps spilling oil on to the road. Everywhere were cars with smashed windscreens and slashed tyres. Motorcycles, their petrol tanks cracked open by axe blows, lay in heaps alongside twisted bicycles. The ground was littered with the remains of smashed car batteries, abandoned on the roadsides along with the sledgehammers that had destroyed them. One soldier saw an officer seated upon a packing crate. The forlorn man was holding his head in his hands, unable to watch the destruction. The soldier realized it was his own brigade commander. Utterly dejected, the brigadier could not watch as his driver battered his staff car with a pick-axe. Vehicles were not the only victims of this destruction. Like hideous metal trees, the ruptured barrels of wrecked artillery pieces pointed skywards, as if taunting the natural world with man’s ability to wreak havoc.

  Once within the town the soldiers were faced with mounting horrors. Dunkirk assaulted their senses. Burning buildings lined the roadsides and a dark pall of smoke and dust hung over the entire town, while at night a deep red glow filled the skies. The crackle of flames, the crash of collapsing buildings and the vicious pinging of exploding ammunition joined the hideous drone of aircraft and the shrieking of incoming shells to lay siege to their ears. The radiant heat seared the skin of the men walking these streets. They could smell nothing but the heavy smoke. Indeed, the retreating soldiers could taste the very air around them as they advanced through a rain of burning embers towards the port and its waiting ships. By contrast, burst water mains sent water pouring into the streets. It mattered little that the water mains had been shattered; there was no one left to put out the fires.

  In scenes that had become chillingly familiar throughout the retreat, the corpses of men and animals lay unattended where they had fallen. No one troubled to cover the dead or record their names. The swollen forms of the horses that had pulled French gun carriages into Dunkirk lay beside the wreckage of their weapons. Taking no notice of the stench of death, the soldiers marched onwards, stepping over the corpses. As he looked around, in streets lit only by the fires, with tangled trolley wires above his head and twisted corpses beneath his feet, Bill Holmes couldn’t help but compare the scene to Old Testament tales of the wrath of God. It seemed that Dunkirk must be facing the vengeful wrath of its maker.

  Yet this was a human tragedy, not divine intervention. This was the work of the Luftwaffe and the German gunners. On every corner, in every street, the evidence of their ferocious assault could be found. The rubble of fallen buildings filled the streets. Glass crunched under every footfall of the weary soldiers and clouds of hot dust were kicked up from beneath their boots. Amid scenes worthy of Armageddon, drunken soldiers roamed the streets, their boots crushing the shop contents strewn across the cobblestones. Leaderless and uncertain of what they should do, drunken looters raided shops, carrying away radios, clothing, food and drink. In the chaos, small groups of men sat around eating whatever they could find – one group, who had not eaten for days, gorged themselves on a combination of bananas and tinned beetroot.

  In the last days before the fall of Dunkirk, anarchy reigned. Officers took little notice of drunks or looters. When terrified soldiers refused to leave their basement shelters and make their way to the port, officers simply ignored them. Instead they devoted their energies to those men who wanted to be saved.

  Territorial anti-aircraft gunner and former City of London office worker Leslie Shorrock was one of the thousands whose fate was determined on the beaches. Since having been given the order to destroy his vehicle and head to the coast, he had trudged across ploughed fields, clambered through hedgerows, stumbled in and out of ditches and crossed canals on makeshift wooden bridges. All the time he had walked in virtual silence, hardly passing a word with the men around him. It was as if each of them had been consumed by his own personal drama.

  Upon arriving at the coast, Shorrock saw thousands of soldiers filling the beaches that spread eastwards towards the flames of Dunkirk. He later wrote of the scene:

  A vast queue of men, three or four abreast, stretched from the top of the beach down to the sea, a distance of hundreds of yards. It was a very warm sunny day, with a clear blue sky, the sea appeared very calm and immediately in front of me, approximately one quarter of a mile from the beach, a large ship was slowly sinking bow first … As I stepped on to the beach at the top I saw immediately in front of me, lying on his back in the sand, a dead British soldier, partly covered with a gas cape and on top of his chest his army pay book, with his name written thus, Driver Barraud RASC.14

  In the hours that followed he watched as officers were forced to draw their weapons to control crowds of soldiers all intent on rushing to gain a place on the departing boats. The scenes of chaos and desperation convinced him there was little future in the operation. Subsequently he fell asleep and lost contact with his mates. What followed would influence the course of the next five years of his life.

  Fate had also brought Noel Matthews to the evacuation beaches. Unlike the other wounded who had been left to face the shelling of the monastery at the Mont des Cats, his ambulance had taken him the thirty miles towards safety. Still shaken by his experiences on the battlefield, Matthews trudged over the dunes, little knowing what to expect: ‘I got there late afternoon to be greeted by the sight of hundreds of chaps shooting at aeroplanes in the
sky. I was with these two chaps and we moved along towards an empty ambulance. We kipped down there for the night. Next day I went around the back of the sanatorium and asked a French soldier for food. We hadn’t eaten for three days. He filled my mess tin with wine and gave me bread.’ With De Panne under fire, Matthews walked towards Dunkirk: ‘After a day of waiting a bloke came along yelling out for any blokes from the Queen’s Regiment, because the colonel was collecting men. There were about twenty of us there. He gathered us together and said, “Wait here while I get us a boat.” That was the last we saw of him. So we just dispersed.’

  He waited another day on the beaches, uncertain whether he would ever get away. At times it hardly seemed worthwhile attempting to find a boat: ‘You saw these chaps standing all day waist deep in the water, waiting for boats. Plus the German planes were trying to knock the boats out. So all the time you were on land you were safer. I decided I wasn’t going to swim out into the sea unless I saw the Jerries coming over the dunes.’ Eventually, after hanging around the beaches, Matthews made his way to the quay and took a running jump on to a ship. His fears about aerial attack were justified when the ship was dive bombed three times on the passage to Dover.

  Also experiencing the hell of Dunkirk and the beaches was Bill Holmes. While some among his comrades had arrived in Dunkirk within a day or so of leaving the Mont des Cats, Holmes and his pals had been wandering through fields and lanes for three or four days, surviving on eating raw vegetables they dug from the fields. When they finally arrived within the Dunkirk perimeter they had little idea of what might happen next. Such was the ferocity of the German assault that it seemed there could be little hope of survival: ‘It was so fierce you didn’t know what was going on – there seemed to be a constant drone of aircraft above us. One of the saddest things was seeing the blokes who got on boats and then the boats got bombed. It was mass murder. It made me feel lucky. At Dunkirk there was nothing else but bodies.’

  While Bill Holmes took four days to reach the fiery wasteland of Dunkirk, not all his comrades were so unfortunate. Despite his wounded face, Sid Seal reached the coast just one day after leaving the Mont des Cats. As luck would have it he arrived in the Belgian seaside town of De Panne. At the far eastern end of the evacuation beaches, the scenes in De Panne were not like those in Dunkirk. For a start there were fewer soldiers awaiting evacuation and, more importantly, there were fewer German planes overhead:

  It was the 30th of May when we got there and we could already see Dunkirk in flames. We could see crowds of troops at Bray Dunes, there was plenty of panic there, thousands of men were on the beach. But where we were wasn’t so busy. We were just fortunate. On the night of the 31st we found a rowing boat. It had probably come off one of the ships that had been bombed. The Germans were shelling and bombing De Panne, so it was get into the boat or stay in the town and get blown to pieces. So seven or eight of us – just one of them was a chap from my battalion – got in and rowed out into the Channel, just hoping we were going in the right direction. Fortunately we were. A fishing boat picked us up and took us back to Ramsgate.

  In contrast to the situation at De Panne, the apocalyptic scenes in Dunkirk left Bill Holmes utterly despondent. There were still vast crowds of soldiers desperate to be rescued. Some were still fully armed and equipped, others had nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. There were wounded men everywhere, all hoping they might be able to get on board a ship to safety. Terrified horses seemed to be running everywhere, through the town and across the sand dunes. He even watched as half-buried corpses of soldiers were dragged from their sandy resting places by starving dogs. Waiting on the beach, it seemed there was nowhere to go. As the evacuation drew to a close there were fewer and fewer boats arriving on the French coast to evacuate the troops. Those men waiting on the dunes no longer found lines of men snaking out into the water. There was no longer a constant ferry service of small boats running in to the beaches. For the stragglers who had fought the rearguard battles, allowing their comrades to make their way to safety, escape to England was a lottery.

  Sid Seal was fortunate to make good his escape:

  Oh God, it was amazing to see those white cliffs. What a relief! We were going home. I slept on a hatch and when we reached Ramsgate they woke me up. I was stuck to the tar on the hatch! So I had blood all down my front and tar all over my back. I must have looked a picture. Some kind lady came up to me and threw an army blanket over my shoulders. I still had my haversack and rifle and as soon as we got off the boat they took them off us. Then we got on a train and they gave us a cup of tea – it was better than champagne. It was a great feeling of relief. It was a defeat, but we didn’t think about it. We were just glad to be home.

  On the train journey northwards, he passed through his home village, but missed it since he was in a deep sleep. However, he was one of the lucky ones. As the train moved through Sussex it passed the homes of many soldiers who would not see England for many years.

  Bill Holmes was one of those to whom fate was unkind. He had arrived in Dunkirk too late to join the queues of men who were safely transported home. Instead he joined the forlorn crowds of men for whom the story of Dunkirk was far different from the one celebrated in newspapers around the world. This was not a victory but a terrible defeat that condemned them to five years of captivity.

  When the end came it was a shock, but Holmes and his comrades no longer had the energy or the will to resist the enemy:

  I hadn’t dreamt I’d ever be taken prisoner. I thought I might be killed, but never once did I think I’d be a POW. Then before we knew what was happening, several of these German motorcycle combinations arrived. They fired tracer bullets at us, so we had no choice. You either gave up or died. I never thought I’d ever be a prisoner. I thought I might be killed. But one thing was I thought if I’m going to die I’d like to die at home. I didn’t mind being shot but I didn’t want to die out there. I was a long way from home.

  For Holmes, and the others who were rounded up that morning, the story of Dunkirk had come to an end. Their story had not ended in salvation but in fear, chaos and confusion. The conclusion did not come in the safe hands of the Royal Navy, but standing on the beach at Dunkirk staring down the barrel of a machine-gun. Now was not the time to pray for escape. All that mattered was survival. For Holmes one thing was certain. General Alexander’s fabled tour of the beaches, standing on the deck of a launch, calling out for the stragglers to come forward, was not his experience of that day: ‘I never heard any calls for that final evacuation.’ Put quite simply, Bill Holmes and the men around him had ‘missed the boat’. For those abandoned on the beaches of Dunkirk it was a phrase that would for ever have a new and poignant meaning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Round Up

  Tommy, for you the war is over, but your troubles have just begun.

  German soldier to Private John Lawrence,

  France, May 19401

  It is impossible for any non-POW to understand what the effect of capture is. There is fear, being unarmed, surrounded by armed, vicious, filthy-looking men . . . Exhaustion, physical and neural, hunger after several days without food, thirst, and no hope of going home soon, perhaps never, caused severe mental depression.

  Corporal Graham King, Royal Army Medical Corps

  The frantic actions of those final days seemed long past as the exhausted remnants of the BEF faced up to the reality of their situation. The desperate efforts to snatch hundreds of thousands of men to safety were over. The Royal Navy was no longer the dominant power on the beaches of northern France. Instead, they had been withdrawn across the Channel to prepare for what surely would be the next step in this already vicious war – the invasion of Great Britain.

  Men like Bill Holmes, who had watched and waited for boats that never came, had been sacrificed for the greater good. Quite simply, the Royal Navy needed its vessels to protect Britain’s shores and shipping routes. The fate of those who had arrived too late to e
scape and were still stranded in France was nothing compared to the fate of the entire nation. Now, as the men who waited for boats that never came discovered, the beaches of France belonged to the Germans: ‘Everybody was trying to get away but it was impossible. I was lucky, I was unwounded, but there were men there with broken legs and all kinds of wounds. I was frightened because I thought we were going to die. I expected to be lined up against a wall and shot. Most of us thought the same. We knew the Germans didn’t care about what they were doing. It played hell with your nerves.’ Tired, dirty and weak, Bill Holmes was too exhausted to fully comprehend what was happening. Like so many around him all he could think about were sleep and food. Once the German motorcyclists had come into view every emotion was submerged beneath one basic instinct, as he remembered: ‘I just hoped to survive.’

  As the troops remaining in Dunkirk were rounded up by machine-gun-wielding German soldiers, they were sharing the same emotional turmoil thousands of soldiers throughout Belgium and France had already experienced. The dreadful realization that they were now prisoners was not confined to those unfortunates who had ‘missed the boats’. It was shared by thousands of soldiers of the BEF. Men of every rank and every background went ‘into the bag’. In the weeks ahead even a major-general joined the ranks of men destined to spend five long years in captivity. At the other end of the scale, there were also raw recruits, like the former merchant seaman who had been in the army just twenty-four hours. He had signed on in England and been sent immediately to France, still without a uniform. He arrived in France and was taken prisoner before he could reach his regiment.