Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Another group of 1,000 prisoners that travelled by river spent forty-eight hours in a coal barge travelling between Lokeren and Emmerich. Once again the British were sent in the company of French colonial troops. United Nations war crimes reports later stated that the racial mixing of the British troops with the French Africans was a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. Jim Pearce was one of the prisoners who travelled on a barge that had already been used for transporting men into Germany: ‘It was shocking. The French Moroccans had been on it before us, they’d been to the toilet everywhere. It was filthy. It was awful. Then we got the fleas and lice.’ Gordon Barber, his spirits lifted slightly by the help received from local civilians, found the next stage of the journey returned him once more to a state of extreme discomfort: ‘They loaded us into the hold of this barge. That wasn’t a pretty sight ’cause most of us got diarrhoea.’

  Jim Charters recalled the toilet facilities being no more than a pole on the edge of the barge: ‘By this time some of us were so weak that several of the men fell off the pole into the canal and had to be fished out.’ As the boats sailed past watching civilians, they had to drop their trousers, hold on the edge of the boat and do their best to hang on as they emptied their bowels. Cyril Holness remembered his journey from the Netherlands on an old coal barge: ‘This was when I started to feel really lousy. They degraded us. You just hung over the side of the barge, whilst people were walking past on the towpath. It was disgusting. We were all in a right state. That was my worst time.’

  Fred Gilbert, still nursing the wounds that were wrapped in increasingly filthy bandages, remembered the cramped conditions:

  They’d certainly forgotten how many people were supposed to go on a barge! There was room for everybody on the barge. A few people even found room to sit down – they were lucky. If you got space to lay down you were extremely lucky. I had my two feet of space and squatted there. You couldn’t leave that space because someone would take it. Then you’d be stuck standing up. After a while I ambled about a bit and went down below decks. Two lads – silly things – got up from under a ladder. So I got their space and sat in that. They came back and saw me sitting there. They said a few things – I expect they wanted it back. But I wasn’t moving. So I stayed and slept there.

  Although the exhaustion of the march had been relieved by the chance to sit down and rest, the question of food was still foremost in the thoughts of the prisoners. Dick Taylor and his mate Stuart Brown realized it was vital to keep their strength up at all costs: ‘We were down below. It was horrible – pretty rough. But you put up with it and make the best of things. We got an issue of raw potatoes and some of the lads started to peel theirs. I said to Stuart “Let’s collect all the peelings” because I knew that later on we’d get nothing. So as they threw them away we got them and kept them. It was astute because it meant we still had something to eat. It makes the difference between keeping on or going under.’ Fortunate enough to be travelling on the upper decks, Fred Coster was able to make contact with the crew of his boat: ‘We were lucky to be on a ferry. The captain was Dutch. I had an army watch with a luminous face. I heard he was flogging food so I went up to him and said, “What will you give me for this watch?” He said one loaf of bread. I said, “What about two?” He agreed so I said, “What about three?” But he wouldn’t budge. So I got these two loaves and took them downstairs and shared them with my two mates. That was our first food for ages.’

  As the barges and ferries made their way through the waterways of Belgium and Germany, the prisoners celebrated these issues of food, however meagre. Dry bread was better than no bread – scraps were better than nothing – and just to be able to sit down as they ate, rather than devour raw root vegetables as they walked, was blissful. Fred Gilbert remembered the two ‘meals’ he enjoyed on the Rhine trip: ‘We got bread with cheese and even butter. They were tiny pieces, but because we’d had nothing the day before, that was a jolly good meal! The second day we got the bread and butter, but no cheese. That was the daily ration. But it was food – hooray!’

  As they travelled by boat many of the desperate prisoners began to notice some new companions had joined them. At first they scratched at their filthy bodies and thought it was just a reaction to being so pitifully filthy. Then they started to notice movement in each other’s hair. They had lice. This was a new experience; some had known head lice as schoolchildren but it was nothing compared to the invasion of lice that arrived as prisoners of war. Leslie Shorrock, taken prisoner in a hospital beside the Dunkirk beaches, wrote of the lice: ‘We were now in the grip of a savage tormenter, for we were all thoroughly lousy. Lice live and breed on the body, biting and drawing blood, invading every part, especially those covered in hair. We constantly scratched and scratched, but these lice concealed themselves in seams of uniforms . . . it would take us almost a year to fully rid ourselves of these vermin.’7

  For some, the arrival at their first proper stop in Germany was marked by an ominous greeting – the town’s air-raid sirens were wailing, and they watched as RAF planes flew overhead and the local population scattered. It served as a warning that as prisoners within Germany they would have to contend both with the violence of their guards and the attentions of the Allied air forces. In time it would become a terrifying combination.

  Disembarking from the barges into Germany, many of the veterans of St Valery faced the same treatment that their comrades had faced in Trier. Some recalled how groups of Hitler Youth arrived to goad and beat them. Arriving in Dortmund, where they were sent to a sports stadium, one group recalled the ‘devilish torture’8 by guards who seemed to enjoy every chance to humiliate them. Leslie Shorrock wrote of his first experience of being greeted by German civilians: ‘As we approached a village the inhabitants were all lined up ready to receive us, nearly all old men, young and old women and detestable children. As we passed this unhappy crowd they hissed and spat upon us, tried to kick us, unrestrained in their affectionate welcome by the sadistic guards.’9 As Bill Holmes later admitted, he simply resigned himself to being abused and spat at by civilians. Others were less accepting of their fate. Ronald Holme, of the East Surrey Regiment, recalled the abuse heaped on him by Brownshirts when he disembarked from the barge in Wesel: ‘As our morale got lower our hate for the Germans became more intense.’10 This was a common experience. Jim Charters, who received the same treatment when his barge reached Germany, wrote: ‘I would like to have been there in 1944 when the Yankees arrived. I’d like to know if they were trying to kick them!’

  One of the groups disembarked from the barges at Emmerich found themselves spat at, washed down with buckets of water thrown by locals, and immediately sent on a sixty-mile (100-kilometre) march to Dortmund. The prisoners could hear church bells ringing in the distance and realized it must be Sunday morning. As they marched Tommy Arnott had a stroke of fortune:

  As our straggly line of POWs hiked on, we came to a field in which an elderly German lady stood, holding a basket of rye bread. She must have been terrified at the sight of this horrible lot approaching, so she fled as fast as she could, dropping the bread. Now, hunger is a terrible thing. It becomes the survival of the fittest and you do things you never imagined you would. We were starving – there was a basket of bread – so Ned and I ran over and grabbed a loaf. Other POWs were starving as well and they weren’t going to stand by and watch us eat it. I was knocked down in the rush and had my loaf grabbed out of my hand. By now the German guards were getting worried and fired over our heads to bring us back into line.11

  At the sports stadium in Dortmund the prisoners discovered there were groups of wounded British officers who had been transported from France without ever having received treatment. Some were allowed inside the stadium while others remained in a field surrounded by barbed wire. The misery of the scene was enhanced by the piles of steel helmets that had been left on the ground outside the fence. French, Belgian and British helmets had been abandoned there since the guards had decree
d they were no longer to be worn by the prisoners. As the already dejected prisoners watched, a guard marched around the fence, casually sticking his bayonet into helmet after helmet, piercing them with a deliberate action as if to underline the magnitude of the German victory. Then he reached one particular British helmet. At the first thrust his blade simply slid off the helmet. He tried again and again, until with one almighty thrust steel met steel and his bayonet snapped in two. A great cheer came up from the watching crowds. It was as if this simple act had helped instil some small glimmer of hope for their future.

  Following their arrival in the Third Reich, no one bothered to tell the prisoners where they were. All they could do was try to decipher the names they saw on signposts. And nobody told them where they were going.

  The final stages of the prisoners’ journeys were by rail, crammed again into cattle trucks, usually with the stencilled words ‘40 men – 8 horses’ on the sides. In place of windows there was a slit running around the top of the wagon that allowed a little daylight to creep in and some air to circulate. Graham King later made light of what was a quite awful experience: ‘No horses were travelling on that occasion, so we travelled eighty to a truck.’ As many would later recount, in modern Europe there would be angry blockades and boisterous protests if sheep were to be transported in such cramped conditions.

  As the first men entered the wagons they had little idea of what lay ahead. Many had already travelled by rail, although on those occasions the army had been careful about how many men were allowed in each truck. Furthermore they had often travelled with the doors open, allowing air to enter as they moved through the French countryside. This was different. When Bob Davies described the experience as ‘pretty grim’ he was downplaying the reality of what he and his comrades endured. The Germans made no attempt to count how many were going into each wagon. Men who had slumped down on to the floor found themselves trampled on as the space got increasingly crowded and the doors were slammed shut and bolts drawn across to trap them inside. Eric Reeves recalled the experience: ‘They kept pushing us in – and pushing us in – you hear various numbers for how many were crammed in, but no one was really counting. All I know is that once we got in, we sat down with our knees up against our chins. Now, if you had to stand up because you’d got cramp, you didn’t sit down for a long time – because everybody else had moved to fill your space.’

  Within minutes of the doors being bolted, the interior of the wagons became hellish. In the heat of summer it did not take long for the crowded men to feel the temperature rising. It was not too oppressive while the trains were moving but as soon as they came to a stop the prisoners began to suffer. Those strong enough to move through the stuffy crowds to gasp with relief beside the vents did so.

  Almost as soon as the men crowded into the wagons and jostled for space a new and important question arose – where would they go to the toilet? As Ernie Grainger remembered: ‘On the cattle trucks it was a bad time. At least on the barges there was a plank hanging over the rear!’ A few discovered a bucket had been put in with them, but most had nothing. Pages were torn from books, bibles and paybooks and used in place of toilet paper. Some tore the pockets from their battledress and defecated into them. Others used their caps. Some even took their boots off urinated into them, then poured the urine out of the air vents, which was why Gordon Barber had no intention of getting too close to them: ‘Heaven forbid if you sat near them. ’Cause if anybody had gone to the toilet they’d throw it out. So if you were near you’d get backdraught and the wind would blow some of it back in.’

  Jim Pearce recalled his experiences: ‘We were stuck on there – we had to try to pour it out of the window. If not you just went down the side of the truck. Everyone got stomach upsets. We just sat in silence. Everybody was absolutely fed up with life. They didn’t care if they lived or died. You thought “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” I thought my life was finished and that was it. That’s how it looked.’

  Ironically, Fred Coster, who had earlier warned his comrades about the dangers of drinking dirty water, was not immune to the effects of the deprivations:

  There was only standing room and we were in there for about five days – with no food! It was there that I had a bout of diarrhoea. I thought ‘Oh God, what do I do now?’ You still had a bit of dignity and self-respect. I said to the boys, ‘Sorry but I’ve got to do.’ So they made a space for me in the corner. I did what I had to do, then threw it out through the window in a handkerchief. It happened two or three times and I felt awful about it. But then it started to happen to the others so I didn’t feel so bad. But it was degrading. It was horrible, I can’t really describe it. The conditions were inhuman. The Germans were a different breed. They really felt they were the masters of the world. They were the master race and anyone who disagreed with them was to be wiped out.

  As the journeys progressed conditions deteriorated. Not all the sick did recover, as Bill Holmes discovered: ‘We were on there for three days. We had nothing to eat. Two of our lads died during the journey. We just had to tie up the bodies as best we could. They stayed in the train with us until we reached the POW camp.’

  On the first day of his journey, Eric Reeves watched as the doors slid open: ‘They pushed in a bucket of water and about three of their big loaves. Well, if you weren’t near the door, you didn’t get anything. Because you couldn’t get over there – too many people were in your way.’ Despite being too far from the doors to get any food, there was a positive side to the experience – even if it did mean continuing starvation: ‘Through eating this rubbish all the way, these blokes all got diarrhoea.’

  Still without food, Graham King and his fellow prisoners found themselves at halt in the German countryside:

  Sunday morning and the train stopped about a mile from a country village. In the distance could be heard the tolling of a church bell and we could see the religious people of the Fatherland going to church in their finery, especially those who had minor roles in the administration of the Third and Greater Reich. None spoke to us nor jeered, just looked at us as if we were a new species arriving at the local zoo. Consequently I avoid zoos. To be shut up and stared at by strangers is not pleasant and I wonder if the zoo animals feel as we did.

  Their next stop was an altogether more pleasant experience, albeit with unfortunate consequences:

  The train moved off and slowly chugged through the outskirts of a big city and eventually pulled into the hauptbahnhof of Berlin where the German Red Cross was much in evidence, as were the uniformed civil servants, newsreel crews, shouting officers and grinning master race members. We didn’t give a damn. The Red Cross was dishing out extremely thick, hot pea soup, hunks of fresh white bread and lovely, cold water. It didn’t last long and we were soon on our way again. The dysentery sufferers, having ignored all advice, had eaten as starving people will and were suffering again and the stench was unbearable – but bear it one must.

  As the hours – then days – passed, the POWs became increasingly frustrated. Every yard they travelled jolted them, they felt every vibration as the rails passed endlessly beneath the wheels. Seated on the bare boards, with their knees drawn up to their chest, their bodies became numb both from the constant shuddering of the trains and the cramped conditions within. Every movement of the man leaning against them was irritating, as if it was a personal attack on their space.

  Gordon Barber, who considered himself both a survivor and well prepared for the harsh life of a prisoner, finally found it pushed him to the brink of mental tolerance: ‘That was the only time I can remember despairing. I fell asleep back to back with another bloke. All you could hear was “boompty-boom, boompty-boom” – for three days! I thought it was going to drive me mad. You just had to think, it has to finish. We’ve got to end up somewhere!’

  He was right. Their journeys did eventually have to come to an end. As the trains drew to their final halt, the prisoners were completely unaware of where they might be.
Some had seen the names of passing stations as they rolled through towns and villages but the names were meaningless. The small towns and villages of Germany, Poland and East Prussia meant nothing to men whose horizons had been so limited back in civvy street.

  As the wagon doors were finally unbolted, the men inside prepared themselves for the next stage of their ordeal. First the light hit them, cutting through the gloom, hurting the eyes of those who had sat in the dimly lit wagons for days on end. One prisoner described them as appearing like cavemen, who would climb nervously from the dark depths of the train, inching into the light with dark-rimmed eyes and wild hair. As their eyes adjusted, Bill Holmes and his companions had one important job to do, unload the corpses of the two men who had died during the journey.

  Next came the strain of standing up and jumping – or rather lowering – themselves from the wagons. The men who had fought to guarantee the escape of their comrades from the beaches of Dunkirk were transformed into a ragged army of slaves, stinking and starving, defeated and desperate as they dropped down from the filth-filled railway carriages on to the firm ground of the eastern regions of the Reich.