Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (13 page)

Although the shooting of prisoners was witnessed across the battlefields of France that summer, few incidents were as bloody as the reported killings of British soldiers at Colpaert Farm. The incident was reported by Madame Ghoris, a refugee from Lille. She watched as a unit, led by an officer known to her as Oberleutnant von Pingsaft, found four British soldiers hiding in a barn:One of them was wounded and had to walk with two sticks. The Germans forced him, as well as the three others, to raise their hands and made them march, hitting them with batons. The Germans, in order that we should not witness this, made us enter the houses. A few moments later three Germans came to the house and asked for water to wash their hands and forearms which were covered in blood. The Germans said they had just cut the heads off the four British soldiers.

Denise Besegher was also present when the Germans entered the kitchen, noting how one was carrying a bayonet in his bloodstained hands: ‘He asked for soap, water and a towel to dry himself, and said that the four “Tommies” had had their necks cut, making a gesture with his hand, just as if he had himself done it.’

The horrors did not end there. A local miller, forty-one-year-old Achille Boudry, was forced to bury the corpses of British soldiers who had fallen in the battle around the farm. As he worked he noticed that one of the men was still alive. He reported this to the German supervising the burial. Instead of rescuing the wounded soldier the German simply told Boudry to collect the man’s wristwatch and to continue with the burial.

Whatever treatment they faced, most of the prisoners shared similar experiences. First there were the searches carried out by their captors. Some prisoners frantically scraped hollows in the earth to bury grenades or bullets they had in their pouches and pockets, fearful of the reaction of their guards if they were discovered. Guards walked among the prisoners, knocking off their helmets. One soldier recalled a guard knocking his helmet to the ground, then kicking it. The guard looked down at the dented helmet and declared: ‘That’s how good your English steel is.’ During the searches many prisoners were forced to discard all of their equipment. Small packs, ammunition pouches, belts, greatcoats, gas masks and groundsheets littered the areas in which the prisoners gathered. Many lost their waterbottles and mess tins, meaning they would have nothing in which to collect food and water in the days ahead. So too they lost their army sewing kits – housewives, as they were known – that would be desperately needed in the months that followed.

There was little they could do to prevent the losses. It was a brave man who dared complain to his captors. Most among them were too exhausted, or simply too relieved to have survived, to worry about what they were losing. For most, it was not the concern over equipment that was lost. Instead, all that mattered were their personal possessions. What they did not want to lose were their wallets, watches, rings, letters from home and, above all, the treasured photographs of their loved ones. For those able to save their personal possessions, these would bring immense comfort in the long years ahead. Despite his guards searching for anything that could be a potential weapon, Bill Holmes was able to save a small pair of scissors. These he kept for five years, using them to cut the hair of his fellow prisoners.

For a few, the losses during these initial searches had an effect upon their destiny. Under the Geneva Convention no medical personnel could be treated as prisoners. They were officially ‘protected personnel’, whose duties should only be the treatment of the sick and wounded. Indeed, many medics fully expected to be sent home to the UK after all the wounded had been cared for. For Les Allan there was no hope of such treatment. As the German officer explained to him that he was a prisoner, he tore away the armband and haversack marked with a Red Cross. Likewise, he took away Allan’s army paybook, which identified him as a stretcher-bearer and ‘protected person’. It was an action that would condemn him to years of working in farms and factories, rather than using his skills to care for the sick.

While thousands of newly captured men huddled in barns or sprawled out exhausted on the bare earth of fields – comforted only by the relief they had survived both the battle and the round up by their captors – other prisoners were already facing up to the reality of existence as a prisoner of the victorious Nazi armies. Even before the battle for France was over some unfortunate POWs found themselves forced to start work for their captors. Although such behaviour was expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention, groups of freshly captured men were sometimes made to assist the Germans with their continuing efforts to defeat the Allies. On 26 May, one group of Royal Army Service Corps soldiers were forced at gunpoint to operate a ferry across a canal that was standing in the way of the advancing Germans. They were made to haul rubber dinghies back and forth by way of a rope, allowing enemy troops to cross the canal and continue their pursuit of the retreating British forces. Appalled by the notion of aiding the enemy, some men attempted to resist. All they received for their efforts were bayonet wounds to their legs.

At the end of their labours, the soldiers were finally searched by their captors. When the turn came for Lance-Corporal Stanley Green to be searched he reached out to try to prevent the guard from taking away his family photographs: ‘Thereupon another soldier who was carrying a German hand grenade – of the type carried at the end of a short stick, popularly known as a “potato masher” – struck me across the face with the grenade. I was knocked out and when I came to some time later I found I was bleeding freely from the nose and mouth, that my underlip had been cut right through and that two teeth had been knocked out.’
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Dragging himself to his feet and checking his pockets, he soon realized the teeth were not all he had lost. Also gone were a pound note, a gold ring, a silver cigarette case and the gold watch he had just received from his parents for his twenty-first birthday.

Following the search, Green and his fellow prisoners were made to carry German corpses to a graveyard, while other German soldiers laughed and jeered at them, with scant respect for their own dead. Then, at pistol point, the prisoners were forced to dig graves and bury the German dead.

Whether they found themselves working for the enemy, nursing their own wounds, blessing their fortune to have survived or cursing their fate at being left behind in France, around 40,000 soldiers of the BEF found themselves in captivity by the time the last boats had sailed from Dunkirk for home. In fields, farms and village squares, as the prisoners were assembled ready to begin the long journey into captivity, few really knew what lay ahead. Would they be treated fairly or be tormented as slave labourers? For Bill Holmes, who had ‘missed the boat’ at Dunkirk, the answer would soon become apparent: ‘And then we got five years of hell.’

‘Where’s the officer?’ . . . ‘Dead.’ . . . ‘Where’s the sergeant?’ . . . ‘Killed.’ ‘Where’s the corporal?’ . . . ‘Killed.’ . . . ‘Who’s in charge?’ They pointed to Lance-Corporal Rose, who was in command of the whole platoon.
David Mowatt, Seaforth Highlanders

Along with the last boats, all hope of rescue had slipped away for those men who remained around Dunkirk. Though the heroic men of the rearguard, left behind in France, had marched wearily into captivity, the battle was not yet over. Despite the post-war presentation of the events that summer, the British role in the battle of France did not end as the last of the little ships sailed for home or when the rearguard ran out of ammunition and raised their arms in surrender. Instead, right across northern France remained a multitude of BEF units who had yet to play an active part in the campaign. Many were reserve formations, rear echelon units – supply units, engineers, pioneers, transport companies – but they were all still soldiers, and all still needed to get to safety. If Britain was to survive the fall of France it was clear they would need every available man to defend against the Nazi menace.

However, they were not all the so-called ‘useless mouths’ of the rear echelon, non-fighting units. As the evacuation ended from the beaches of Dunkirk, there remained an entire front-line division whose role in the campaign was not yet complete. To the south, still fighting alongside the French, were the officers and men of the 51st Highland Division. During April the division, under their commander Major-General Victor Fortune, who had served with the Black Watch during the Great War and with the Seaforth Highlanders during the inter-war years, had moved into the Maginot Line, near Metz, and come under French command. It was a move designed to strengthen Allied solidarity, but one that would cost the Highlanders dear.

The 51st Division began the war as home to some of the finest regiments in the British Army, among them the Black Watch, the Gordon Highlanders, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Seaforth Highlanders. Even their divisonal artillery included the proud 1st Royal Horse Artillery, who had sacrificed their beloved horses just a couple of years earlier. By war’s end the division had served in France, in the victory at El Alamein, invaded Sicily and Italy, fought in Normandy and been among the first troops to cross the Rhine. However, in 1940, all that was a long way in the future and the division had plenty of fighting to do before it could win those battle honours.

Like every regiment in the British Army, the Highland regiments were fiercely proud of their heritage, but they also had a distinct identity that made them stand out amid their peers. Each regiment retained its own tartan, either worn on kilts or trews, and displayed distinctive headgear. There were tam-o’-shanters with their distinctive red hackles, Atholl bonnets and glengarries which made them stand out from the khaki-clad crowds. Such was the glamour of the Highlanders that at the outbreak of war large numbers of Englishmen – particularly Londoners -volunteered for Scottish regiments. By 1945 some Scots regiments, their numbers depleted by years of hard fighting, contained less than 50 per cent Scotsmen.

The traditions of the Highland regiments had survived for many years, proudly protected by a succession of commanding officers. Even with war looming they still paraded in their kilts. It was a prestigious world that officers did not intend to sacrifice just because there was a war on, and the traditions applied just as firmly to the waves of conscripts, Territorials and ‘foreign’ volunteers. One Territorial serving in a Highland regiment recalled standing to attention at parade while his officer used a cane to lift their kilts to check the men were not wearing underwear. Since the unit were in makeshift accommodation at the time they did not muster on a parade ground, but instead lined up along the seafront at Carnoustie. Each parade was accompanied by the cheering of the girls from the local jam factory who came to watch the display, lying in the sand to get a good view up their kilts.

Yet the Highlanders were a hardy breed. It would take more than exposing their manhood to deter them. They were known as tough fighters, solid in defence and enthusiastic – some would say bloodthirsty – in attack. By tradition they came from lonely crofts, highland farms and windswept coastal communities. More recently they had come from the great cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

None was more typical of the Highland soldier than nineteen-year-old David Mowatt. Born in 1920, he had enjoyed a hard rural upbringing in one the remotest parts of the United Kingdom. The farms and villages of the Black Isle, to the north of Inverness, were as far away from the bright lights of the big cities as it was possible to get. War had opened the eyes of men like Mowatt to a world far removed from the empty Highlands of their youth:I was brought up the hard way. It was a rough life – no bicycles – I ran everywhere. Across fields, over fences – I was a real country bumpkin. We lived on a big farm – my father was a foreman-horseman – there was a brook near the farm. I lived off the land. In the summertime at 4 o’clock in the morning I’d be away catching trout by hand. At 5 p.m. I’d come back and I’d share my catch with the other houses on the farm. Then my mother would dip the trout in rough oatmeal and fry them. It was as sweet as honey.

When the tide of the Cromarty Firth was out, Mowatt would wade through the waters, feeling for the fish underfoot and catching them. His biggest haul in one day was eighty-two.

A born countryman, he could catch eels by snaring them on the riverbank. In the summer he snared rabbits in the field. In the winter he would trap them by searching where they had burrowed beneath piles of horse dung and diving in to grab them: ‘I’d come home from school with my school clothes covered in dung. My mum gave me a terrible telling off – but she always cooked the rabbit.’ It was an idyllic life, but one that could not last for ever. At the age of fourteen Mowatt left school and began life as a labourer on a local farm. Life continued to be hard, working all hours with just Saturday nights free to enjoy dance night in Cromarty. Cycling the five miles to town, on the bicycle he could now afford with wages coming in, Mowatt met with his mates to drink two pints of beer before the dance. The two-pint limit was imposed since they could afford no more. It was one of these evening trips that would seal their destiny:I was seventeen by then. All ten of us were in the pub and who should walk in but the recruiting sergeant. They were encouraging boys to join the TA. The man behind the bar said to him, ‘By God, cast your net now and you’ll get the lot of them!’ We all signed on, took the ‘King’s Shilling’ and spent it on two extra pints each! We thought we’d join the TA and get a holiday – there were no holidays on farms in those days, it was seven days a week all year round.

They were right, they did get a holiday in the form of a week-long camp outside Dundee, but being a Territorial didn’t change their lives. It simply meant they were even busier than before, spending even more evenings cycling through the empty lanes to Cromarty to attend evening drill sessions. It would be another year before war would finally tear Mowatt away from the Highlands. The news of war came at a fitting moment for a born countryman:I was in the field cutting the harvest. We’d just given up the horses and it was the first – and last – harvest I had a tractor to use. I had cut two fields and I was halfway through the last field. All of a sudden I could see the old farmer walking towards me. I thought, what’s happened? I switched off and he said, ‘Pack up. Go home. Get into your uniform and report to the nearest drill hall.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You’ve been mobilized.’