Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Such was the chaos of the retreat towards Dunkirk that one column of ambulances, caught in a traffic jam, were told they would have to carry all their patients over a bridge in order that it could be destroyed to prevent the enemy’s advance. After the bearers had toiled through the night to get the wounded men safely over the river – resulting in the patients spending a night in the open – the news was given that the bridge was not to be blown. Similarly, Ginger Barnett’s unit had wasted hours trying to find a river crossing since so many bridges had been blown. As he later recalled: ‘It wasn’t organized chaos – it was just chaos.’

  One of the units caught up in the chaos was the 13th Casualty Clearing Station, as Graham King recalled:

  Our unit was unfortunate really. We were supposed to be moving up to the front. We were cut off by the sweeping movement of Rommel’s division. We had about 100 miles to move but we had no transport. We couldn’t move any of our equipment. We’d sent the more mobile stuff ahead. They were going to prepare the ground. We were supposed to bring the heavy stuff up afterwards, once they’d prepared the ground. But we were having to march up. On the way we met some French medics who were retreating. They told us the Germans were ahead. But our colonel said, ‘My orders are to go St Pol so we will make our way on.’

  Despite the colonel’s understandable desire to reach his destination, the odds were stacked against the 13th CCS. Splitting into three separate groups, each group tried to find a way through the Germans to reach the rest of the unit: ‘That’s when it all came unstuck. We’d been wandering around in the wilds trying to make our way through. We had very little food – just our iron rations. Loads of the blokes had eaten them before we even started, so they had nothing. The rest of us had to share our food with them. So that cut down how long we could survive. We were absolutely starving and getting weaker with it.’ On 23 May, now desperately hungry, King and his comrades decided to barter for food in a French village: ‘We got eggs and bread and milk. Whilst we were sat at the roadside eating and drinking a German patrol came up. We wondered if someone had gone and told the Germans. We weren’t a fighting unit so we couldn’t fight. They just rounded us up. I later discovered the ones who had gone ahead with the light section actually got away from Dunkirk. But when they got back the 13th CCS wasn’t reformed. I suppose they thought it was unlucky.’

  King and his fellow medics were refused permission to remain in France to fulfil the role they had trained for, and since they had no medical equipment, the Germans made no effort to treat them as protected personnel: ‘We were just treated as ordinary POWs. You couldn’t do anything about it, especially when there’s a man pointing a gun at you. When you’re captured no one says to you, “Well done, old boy. Sorry you’ve found yourself in such a mess. Would you like to sit down and have a cup of tea.” War’s not that simple.’

  King and his comrades began the long march into Germany:

  After much to-ing and fro-ing, we were herded into columns and were marched off . . . This was a calamity as we had been given no food and were forced to find sustenance from the fields we passed, if there was anything left. From the back of the column one could see a brown mass moving along to a distant green field. As the head reached there, it hesitated and then spread out over the green until it covered the field. This seething mass then began to retreat, leaving a field of dark earth as all the crops had been harvested. For those who were at the rear there was little chance of getting any kind of adequate foodstuff and they became weaker . . . One evening I bartered with two French Moroccan soldiers for a cigarette tin of stewed stinging nettles. We settled on two cigarettes and an English shilling. Very tasty were the nettles. Eventually, our captors got things organized and began to give us barley soup, which looked like bleached porridge and army bread covered in green mould – but eaten with relish.

  If getting used to the realities of captivity was tough for those captured on the battlefield, it was perhaps worse for those who had had no opportunity to create their own destiny. Those who were patients by the time they were captured were already helpless and could think of nothing but survival – any notion of evading the enemy was but a distant dream. However, among the patients there was one group with a particular sense of bewilderment. These were the men who had reached the supposed sanctuary of Dunkirk only to be taken prisoner in the hospitals that lined the evacuation beaches. For them it was a case of ‘so near, yet so far’. At the beginning of the evacuation the wounded had been given priority, being carried on to ships by stretcher-bearers. Later, even when evacuation became more difficult, both walking wounded and stretcher cases had been helped out on to the waiting ships. However, as the situation worsened, it became more difficult to get the wounded on board the boats. Quite simply, many were too sick to be moved.

  Others who found themselves left behind in Dunkirk hospitals were men who had safely reached the beaches only to be wounded while they awaited evacuation. Among them was Leslie Shorrock, who was wounded in the back when German artillery shells landed amid the sand dunes. His battledress tunic running with blood, Shorrock was helped by two soldiers who dressed his wounds, then two French sailors – wearing berets and striped jumpers – helped him to the nearby French sanatorium that was being used as a hospital. As he arrived at the red-brick building he noticed there were fully armed British soldiers in trenches around the building, as if expecting an imminent assault.

  What he found, he later described as ‘hell upon earth’.5 Inside, the entire floor was covered with the wounded, groaning in pain. To Shorrock the sound of their pain mingled in with the hellish cacophony of war – German planes screaming down from the skies, naval guns firing, shells and bombs exploding. Elderly nuns comforted the injured, doing what little they could to ensure the dying men were as comfortable as possible. As one worked she had tears streaming down her face. Elsewhere a priest in full robes administered the last rites to soldiers as they lay dying on stretchers.

  Having fallen asleep, Shorrock awoke to find himself being lifted on to the operating table of a makeshift theatre. Around him were French surgeons whose aprons were covered with blood. Shorrock was fortunate the doctors still had gas available to put him to sleep for the duration of the operation. When he came round he was confronted with the sight of a corporal he had met the previous day. Then the man had taken pity on him and they had shared a precious cup of tea. Now he was on a stretcher minus one arm.

  The wards were thick with the terrible stench of unwashed bodies, dried blood, open wounds and urine from men unable to reach the toilets. Although many among them were too badly wounded to care about their situation, others remained wholly aware that they were all but helpless. Out on the sand dunes they had been able to run and take cover from bombs and shells, but within the hospital they could do nothing to escape from the deadly rain of high-explosive that poured down upon Dunkirk. Leslie Shorrock realized their helplessness when two shells hit the neighbouring ward: ‘It was horrible, the glass in our ward shattered and the resultant pandemonium from the helpless wounded was unbearable. There was smoke, debris and screams coming from the ward that was hit.’6 As they lay there, the corporal beside Shorrock grabbed his hand and said, ‘This is it,’ then he hid his head under the pillow and said goodbye. When the doctors and nurses entered from the wrecked ward the horrified looks on their faces reflected the carnage they had witnessed.

  Two days after the bombing, Shorrock noticed that everything had fallen silent: ‘I looked out of the window on to the small pathway between the wards and saw, with very mixed feelings, a middle-aged German soldier slowly riding along on a bicycle. I knew what that meant . . . We knew that it was over, that we were now prisoners of war.’7 Shorrock was about to discover the reality of the Germans’ attitude towards wounded prisoners. Their captors entered the ward and observed the amputees and men too sick to be moved. Reaching the less badly wounded Shorrock, the German looked at him and shouted, ‘Raus!’ – telling him it was time to get up a
nd leave the hospital. But first he had to find some clothes to replace the hospital gown he was wearing. The only clothes available were French, consisting of boots, a pair of short trousers, striped socks, a striped seaman’s jersey and a tasselled cap. In this ludicrous apparel he began the journey into captivity.

  The most fortunate of the wounded prisoners were those who were already patients in, or taken to, established British military hospitals. In these they were treated by doctors who could speak their language and, more importantly, were prepared to listen to them and treat their wounds without exception. They also had their own ambulances, beds, orderlies and vital supplies of medicines. If they were to receive first-class treatment anywhere it would be in their own hospitals.

  In all these hospitals decisions had already been made to evacuate some of the medical staff while leaving others behind to look after those patients who could not be moved. In some cases there were simply not enough vehicles left to transport both patients and staff. The decision over which staff should stay and which should go was made in different ways. Sometimes volunteers were called for, alternatively the men drew straws or flipped coins. Often all married men were exempt from remaining behind.

  At 17th General Hospital in Camiers, where the British medics treated both military and civilian casualties, six officers and thirty other ranks were detailed to remain behind. Territorial Army medic Bill Simpson was one of those who volunteered to stay with the prisoners. One of his comrades, who had been detailed for evacuation, was left behind because he was so busy he missed the transport. When it came time for Simpson and one of his friends to make the choice over who should be left behind, the decision was surprisingly easy: ‘We just shrugged our shoulders and came to the conclusion that he would go and I would stay. It was one of those cases of heads you win, tails I lose.’8 Simpson and the remaining medics worked to remove the bodies of the dead from the hospital where they had been mixed up among the living. Their corpses were then buried in slit trenches in the gardens. As the medics moved among the dead they found few were properly laid out, instead they were simply lying rigid in the positions they had died in. Such was the foul aroma given off by the abandoned corpses that the wounded complained the drains must be blocked. Later the stench of gangrene grew so strong that Simpson remembered crossing the ward to avoid the smell.

  The wounded men added their own smells to those of the corpses. Compound fractures were treated with plaster of Paris casts, which soon drew suppurating flesh into the plaster, giving it a ‘high’ smell compared to that of overripe Camembert cheese. Yet it was a small price to pay for the chance to recover from wounds. Bill Simpson later wrote of this awful period:

  While all this was going on the surgeons were operating trying to deal with the more urgent cases first. The sum total of suffering in that main ward was simply unbelievable to someone like myself who was seeing it for the first time. I recall a badly wounded elderly woman, close to death, with a large notice pinned to her bedclothes, ‘Useless to operate’. A patient drew my attention to the man in the next bed to him who seemed to be in some sort of trouble. Just as I got to him, he coughed up something from the back of his throat and died. And so it went on.9

  In another tragic incident a distraught Belgian woman came into the hospital asking to see her dead child. The medics could not convince her not to go in to view the corpse. Once she had seen the child she was surprisingly able to compose herself and calm down. By night the medics listened to the voice of a sick Frenchman calling out ‘Vive la France.’ In response a British voice piped up, ‘Can’t someone kill that old bastard?’

  As the battle grew closer to the hospital so the tragic scenes continued. Some of the hospital’s own ambulances reappeared after coming under fire, bringing back the wounded they had earlier tried to remove. For Simpson it was a defining moment: ‘I always regard that day as the longest and certainly the worst I ever had to endure in the whole war . . . There was an overwhelming feeling of desolation . . . the BEF did not stand a chance against the German war machine . . . I realize that 22 May 1940 was the day I really grew up.’10 When the final moment came it was something of an anticlimax for the staff of the hospital. The first Germans who arrived told the staff they were surprised the hospital had not already been taken over. As a result they simply checked to make sure the German patients were receiving suitable care and then moved on, leaving just a guard at the door.

  With the Germans in control of the hospital, the first job for Bill Simpson was to make a list of all the patients. In the days that followed the situation began to change. Wounded prisoners started to arrive from across the region, including Leslie Shorrock, who arrived just in time to experience the declining rations that resulted from the Germans taking away the hospital’s entire food stores, leaving them with nothing but stale bread.

  The shortages of food may have been a problem for the wounded men and the hospital staff but it was nothing compared to the shortages of medical supplies. At one hospital there was no access to x-rays for an entire month. Elsewhere prisoners were treated in a hospital which was without any anaesthetic. Instead, in a throwback to the early days of the nineteenth century, the patients were made to drink cognac to dull their senses prior to operations. Even before the shortages the use of anaesthetics had been restricted to giving injections rather than the preferred use of gas. The dangers of an explosive, inflammable gas bottle in use so close to the battlefields could not be contemplated. This did not make the work of the anaesthetist any easier. If patients received too much they risked stopping breathing, with the tongue falling back to choke them. Too little anaesthetic and the patients, though unconscious, would not relax their muscles fully, making the surgeons’ work increasingly tricky.

  Furthermore, both doctors and nursing staff were forced to begin to use medicines with which they were less than familiar. Scrounging from the Germans, or using what could be found from the French or Belgians, they sometimes found themselves embarking on uncertain treatments. Every army seemed to have its own way of treating wounds and, as a result, its own medicines for the purpose. At one hospital, staff found themselves administering a purple antiseptic liquid to open wounds, similar to the Lysol they normally used, but they could not be certain. Elsewhere doctors used Rubiazal, a French version of the more familiar Prontosil, to prevent infection in wounds. One patient died because the doctors’ lack of knowledge about the drug resulted in them over-administering. They were also forced to improvise. Another treatment for open wounds was acriflavine tablets dissolved in water.

  One commodity that needed to be kept in constant supply was the blood needed for transfusions. The BEF had refrigerated stocks of whole blood and stocks of dried, powdered plasma. It had been believed the whole blood could only be stored for fourteen days until further research showed its life span was four weeks. As the shortages began to bite, some doctors continued to use stored blood that had been extracted up to seven weeks earlier. With these precious stocks dwindling, desperate measures were used, including the direct transfusion of blood from healthy men to patients. With no stocks of blood or plasma available, it was the only solution for the hard-pressed doctors. Using a Joubelert machine, the donors whose blood group matched those of the needy patient were joined to the recipient. The constant need for blood took its toll on the donors, in particular those whose blood type made them universal donors. It was not just the blood loss that affected the donors – in one hospital they were also given a bottle of champagne each as a reward for their efforts.

  Conditions within the hospitals led to tragic scenes in which wounded men drew their last breath in an unfamiliar, and sometimes hostile, environment. The plight of the dying, and the need to offer them some dignity in their final moments, made a lasting impression on all of those who witnessed the scenes. Sent to hospital for treatment to a wounded hand, Second-Lieutenant Peter Wagstaff later wrote of entering a ward to find a dying British soldier: ‘The poor devil was unconscious and there
was nothing I could do. I felt so utterly inadequate, so useless, but that I had to stay with him until the last. And when he had gone I remember trying to give him that semblance of repose by closing his eyelids; his left eye closed without any trouble but the right eye, in spite of all my gentle attempts, kept springing open. I could not even give him that simple service.’11

  As the 51st Highland Division withdrew to St-Valery-en-Caux, their casualties mounted. Two entire field ambulance teams were at work within the perimeter; 152 Field Ambulance had its dressing station within the town and 153 Field Ambulance collected wounded men in the nearby village of Blosseville. A local French doctor, Dr Aureille, treated some of them within his own home because of the lack of hospital beds. Hoping to find a place of safety for his wounded, one of the British doctors, Major E. Walker, made a reconnaissance of St Valery. To his dismay there was nowhere he could safely transfer them to – too much of the town was burning or unsafe. Unfortunately for Major Walker the wounded were already in ambulances, sitting out in the open, totally exposed to enemy fire. There was nowhere for them to go, they could neither move forward nor go back. Hopelessly exposed, they soon came under mortar fire that hit one ambulance, killing the men in the back. Even as the bearers tried to remove the wounded from the ambulances, the Germans continued to fire on them.