Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (10 page)

For so many of the troops their deflation was compounded by the realization of how well equipped the Germans were. The British had discarded their First World War vintage rifles and surrendered to an enemy carrying modern automatic weapons. Some among the prisoners approached German tanks and banged on their hulls. After all, the propagandists had assured them many of the German tanks were made of wood or cardboard. Furthermore, the Germans seemed to have vast amounts of transport for their infantry – with motorcycle combinations and armoured half-tracks appearing everywhere on the battlefield – while the British had been transported in requisitioned and hastily repainted civilian delivery lorries. Sharing the field with Reeves were others of his battalion who had also been captured in the fighting around Abbeville. Not all among them had been as enthusiastic as Reeves. There were plenty of young conscripts and militiamen who had been less than eager to play their part in the war. Indeed, the 2/5th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment had been formed the previous year when the army underwent massive expansion. When the l/5th Battalion, the best of the regiment or ‘the creamy boys’, as Eric Reeves referred to them, travelled to France, Reeves himself had been left behind since he was still too young to serve abroad. In the weeks that followed, the new battalion had absorbed men who seemed far less enthusiastic than his prewar colleagues. Among them were recruits from Somerset, including Jim Lee, a Romany Gypsy who had rapidly become one of Reeves’ mates and who happily admitted his pre-war employment had been as a poacher. This was typical of the experiences of regiments throughout the army. When war came the regular soldiers and Territorials were eager to ‘have a crack at the Hun’. They were followed into uniform by a wave of patriotic recruits, equally eager to do their bit. By late 1940 the army began to absorb conscripts who were less than enthused about the idea of war.

Typical of this breed was twenty-one-year-old Ken Willats. A former chef from south London, Willats had no aspirations to military glory. He had not been caught up in the wave of patriotism that had sent so many others his age to the recruiting offices. He was blunt in his appraisal of his military aptitude: ‘I had no ambition to be a soldier. I didn’t volunteer, I wasn’t the military type. Like thousands of others I went because I was told to go.’ Despite this, he accepted his fate and reported to Crawley, where he was sent to join his battalion. He was not over concerned. As Willats remembered: ‘I didn’t realize the importance of the declaration of war. I thought it would be over by Christmas. Then we ended up saying the same thing every year. Eventually we were right – but it took six years.’

Once he found himself in Guildford, training to be an infantryman, Willats soon realized the army was less than ready for him and his new comrades. They had uniforms but no barrack rooms and were forced to sleep on the floors of private billets. Parading each morning at a Territorial Army drill hall, they were marched to receive their meals in the town’s cattle market. It was an inauspicious start to what would be a brief war for Willats.

In keeping with the desperate need to get infantry battalions to France, the Queen’s received just ten weeks’ training before they were sent to France in April 1940, as Ken Willats remembered:Things were going berserk at that time. It was frantic. You can’t learn much about being a soldier in ten weeks. We drilled, did route marches, went on the rifle range, had kit inspections – lots of squarebashing. It was just getting us into the ways of the army. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. I just went along with things. Basic training couldn’t have been more basic. No one had great patriotism or enthusiasm. We were mostly twenty-one-year-old working-class boys. None of us had a military bias. All the enthusiasts had already volunteered. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel and we were the scrapings!

What made matters worse was that, just before the Germans launched their attack on France, Willats had been told he was going to be sent back to England to be posted to the School of Army Cookery as an instructor – a better use of his talents than being a cook in a front-line battalion. But his orders had never come through and as the Germans reached Abbeville he had found himself in a farmhouse holding a rifle rather than a wooden spoon. For all the good his rifle did in the next few hours, the wooden spoon might have been just as effective.

Although Willats knew the Germans were advancing towards Abbeville, the realization of how close they were was a tremendous shock:We looked out of the back of the farmhouse and saw tracer bullets being fired towards us. There were about twenty or thirty of the crack tank regiments of Hitler’s Panzers in front of us on the heath. We had a rifle and five rounds of ammunition each. We fired – not knowing who or what we were firing at, I think we probably never killed any Germans, we just fired blindly in the direction of the tanks. When you’d used those five rounds, you went back to Colour Sergeant Davey and asked, ‘Can I have five more rounds please?’ It was ridiculous. But I don’t remember being frightened. I just did what I was told.

What Willats didn’t know was that these tanks were from the German 2nd Armoured Division, the spearhead of von Rundstedt’s Army Group A. This was the force that had punched through the Ardennes, crossed the River Meuse, then headed north to endanger the BEF from the rear. Such strategic considerations, and the implications for the BEF, were far from Willats’ mind as the battle for Abbeville continued: ‘The Sergeant Major sent me to help a chap manning a Boyes anti-tank rifle. I went out to fetch him because he’d been wounded. It was strange. The road was as quiet as a tomb. I found him. He was wandering about, very badly wounded. His eye was out hanging out on his cheek. So I led him back to the farm.’ Safely back, Willats continued to fire at the tanks but soon realized the situation was hopeless when they heard the sound of German vehicles entering the farmyard: About thirty Germans appeared, led by an SS man. We knew there was no hope so we came out. That was the end of my military career, it was all over in a flash.’

Uncertain of their fate, Willats and his four comrades were marched away to a barbed-wire enclosure that had been hastily erected in a nearby field. What happened next was the natural reaction for men who had been on the move for days: ‘The first thing I did was to fall asleep. I’d been awake for two nights and sleep was the biggest enemy of the soldier. The body can only go so far without rest. I was completely exhausted. It was uncontrollable. I just went to sleep.’

For the men within this enclosure, surrounded for the first time with barbed wire, there was a terrible feeling of emptiness. It was the same for all the men taken prisoner in the battles across France and Belgium. They were physically, and often mentally, exhausted. Many had not eaten for days, or washed and shaved – but it was not a time for NCOs to start berating men for being unshaven. Some had mates around them, others had seen their mates die and were left alone among unfamiliar faces. Each of them began to learn the skills that would help them survive through all the trials that lay ahead. Some tried desperately to find someone they knew. Others retreated into a state where the mind focused entirely on self-preservation. Fighting for a comfortable place to sleep became as much a part of their lives as showing discipline or defiance of the enemy. It was the beginning of the dog-eat-dog existence that would follow them through their lives within Germany’s prisoner of war camps.

Those taken prisoner around Abbeville were marched from their makeshift enclosure. Their journey took them northwards, spending the first night in the grounds of a local gendarmerie. Once again they dropped to the cold, bare earth and slept where they lay. Those still with blankets blessed their good fortune. Those without were too exhausted to care, since there was hardly a man among them who would not have swapped a blanket for a hot meal.

In the final days of May and the early days of June, groups of prisoners were collected all over the battlefields. The battered and bloodied survivors of the defeat and the rearguard actions were slowly herded together, ready to begin the long march into Germany. In twos and threes, men stumbled out with their arms raised and were marched to large pens with hundreds of others. Then the crowds joined up with other crowds until thousands were bundled together into vast khaki-clad hordes. It was not long before the men captured at Abbeville were joined by similarly dazed and desperate survivors from one of the most vicious encounters of the entire campaign.

Of all the battles leading up to the Dunkirk evacuation none was more significant than the siege of Calais. What made it so important was that the soldiers sent to the port only arrived in France on 23 May. With the BEF already retreating, the 1st Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, the 60th Rifles (officially known as the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps), the Queen Victoria Rifles and the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment were sent to Calais to help secure the route back to Dunkirk. However, when they arrived it was soon clear there was little they could do to help the BEF. Instead it would be a miracle for them to survive.

One of those who did survive was Bob Davies, a former Harrods clerk and pre-war Territorial. He was so typical of many young Territorials who had joined, not out of a sense of patriotism but because it was like a club. In his case, he loved motorcycles and had joined the TA’s only motorcycle battalion, the Queen Victoria Rifles. The irony was they arrived in France without their transport, which, had been left languishing in Kent: ‘When we unloaded all we had was our rifles and the ammunition we carried – bugger all else. We just had Bren guns and no heavy machine-guns. That’s all we needed. What can you do with a rifle against a tank?’ When he first reached the front line Davies found himself firing at every opportunity: ‘Every time I saw a bird fly I thought it was a German and fired at it.’ He was soon able to calm himself, finding that his training had worked and military discipline meant he was able to follow orders without question.

For four days the battle raged through the town. Stukas rained down their screaming high explosives. Artillery fire poured down into the British and French positions. German Panzers advanced and blew apart the buildings held by the desperate defenders. Like its northerly neighbour Dunkirk, Calais was pounded to prevent its use. However, unlike Dunkirk, no ships came to rescue the soldiers. Instead they were to fight on, holding up the advance on Dunkirk.

Valiant British tank crews attempted to advance from the town, only to be destroyed by the far superior enemy armour. All manner of makeshift units, including anti-aircraft units and searchlight crews, found themselves, rifle in hand, manning strongpoints and trenches. The lightly armed infantrymen did their utmost to hold off the enemy advances, slowly pulling back towards the port. Every hour brought fresh casualties who made their way back to the safety of the sixteenth-century citadel, where they sheltered in deep, vaulted cellars, listening to the rumbling of gunfire above them. The citadel, with its formidably thick walls, along with later bastions added to protect the port from attack from the sea, were Calais’ main defences. Fortunately, there was also a series of canals and basins protecting the port area. As the defenders were forced back, these played an increasingly important role in holding off the German advance.

The pounding of Calais took its toll on the defenders. From his position on the eastern edge of town – with little enemy activity in front of them – Bob Davies counted his blessings. He could see the flames rising above the town and could hear the constant roar of explosions, knowing that plenty of his mates were fighting and dying. As the Germans took control of large parts of Calais, they occupied the imposing Hôtel de Ville, from where their snipers were able to cover vast swathes of the port area. As the battle raged above them, desperate doctors did their best to treat the wounded, despite a shortage of equipment. In order to amputate limbs, the doctors attempted to use knives until a rusty hacksaw was found in the corridors of the citadel cellars. This was soon sterilized and put to work.

For four days the defenders hung on. Short of food, water and, above all, ammunition, their position became desperate. By 26 May there was no longer a cohesive defence of the town, rather pockets of men were still fighting. Determined young officers and the remnants of their men fought on, some even attempting to counterattack the enemy, until their ammunition was exhausted. Extraordinary acts of heroism were performed by men whose actions were never rewarded since there were no witnesses to report their deeds. Stretcher-bearers defied machine-gun fire to run out into the open to rescue the wounded. In desperate hand-to-hand encounters, the defenders used fixed bayonets to prevent the enemy overrunning their positions. Throughout the shrinking perimeter, machine-guns were fired to the very last round, mortars fired until they were out of ammunition – and then it was hopeless. With the bastion surrounded there was no point in fighting on. Any further resistance would only endanger the wounded men sheltering underground. And so with a heavy heart, the British commander, Brigadier Nicholson, finally surrendered Calais.

At the end of the four-day battle, Bob Davies found himself walking about in a dream:About six of us went down to a boat and rowed across to this flat, marshy area that went out to the sea. We just headed for the sea. I don’t know why, I suppose we thought that was the direction of home. We found an old cargo boat washed up on the beach. We thought there might be food on it, so we climbed up on to the deck. There were the dead bodies of the crew everywhere. We searched everywhere – through the cabins and the wheelhouse – looking for food. It was a real mess. Then all of a sudden we heard a yell, turned and saw a Jerry at the top of the ladder.

Then Davies heard the words dreaded by soldiers: ‘For you the war is over.’ Looking over the side of the boat, they could see a tank with its gun pointed towards them. Worried they might be shot, Davies and his comrades descended to the beach. They were immediately marched to a field where they gathered with other survivors of the battle. There was little chance to think about what was happening, as Davies admitted: ‘I don’t know what my feelings were. Everything had happened so quick. One day we were tucked away in a hop farm in Kent, then we were in Calais with no hope of getting home again. But it didn’t sink in. Maybe if we’d been older and more worldly wise we would have understood it better. It was like a dream gone wrong.’