Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (17 page)

With units throughout the division coming under increased pressure, it was little wonder that some found themselves split off from the main force – isolated and seemingly abandoned in the chaos. Two companies of the 8th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders found themselves holding a lighthouse and school buildings at Ault, near St-Valery-sur-Somme. They were soon engaged by German tanks which were able to remain under cover while still being able to bombard their positions. Initially it seemed the assault was ‘frightening but not dangerous’,
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but as the fire increased it soon became clear their position was untenable. Quick-firing cannon peppered the school and lighthouse, causing casualties from shell splinters and causing French sailors within to surrender en masse. Despite this surrender, the enemy did not press home the attack, one officer considering this to be because it was merely ‘an exhibition of frightfulness to give us a sleepless night and a foretaste for the next day’.
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Fortunately for the Highlanders, they did not await the final assault. Instead they withdrew overnight towards Le Tréport in hope of rejoining the division. The orders for the night march were that if attacked they should fight to the last round, then try to escape. Any wounded, if they were unable to be moved, were to be left behind. Luckily they met no enemy resistance during the night and the next day they laid up in open countryside. With little shelter, they were forced to lie in the oppressive sunshine, unable to move for fear of revealing their positions.

At nightfall they headed west, coming under fire from German sentries who soon scattered into the night when the Highlanders returned their fire. Alerted to their presence, the Germans sent spotter planes firing parachute flares across the countryside to illuminate the area. Avoiding the light of the flares, the two companies were able to continue their journey and eventually reached positions held by the Black Watch.

With any hope of driving the enemy back over the Somme at Abbeville extinguished, the division withdrew to attempt to hold the River Bresle. The Highlanders were reinforced by A Brigade, consisting of the 4th Border Regiment, 5th Battalion Sherwood Foresters and the 4th Buffs, who had been sent north from Rouen to help hold the line, along with 900 reinforcements for the infantry battalions. But they continued to come under intense pressure. Again David Mowatt found himself in the thick of the action:It was bloody terrible, it was difficult for me as the company runner. I had to be in contact with the three platoons – we’d be pulling back and re-forming and my first job was to find where they were. The River Bresle was my worst time, but I’d got to get to the platoons. My old platoon, No. 16, were holding the bridge. Word came through that Jerry were on the other bank of the river and the artillery were going to shell them. So our company had to pull back behind the railway embankment for safety. I had to go to tell them to pull back.

He reached the bridge and gave the message to the defenders, then was forced to dash to reach another platoon in an exposed position:I went out but I was under heavy machine-gun fire – there were bloody bullets everywhere. I got behind the iron wheels of an old railway engine. Bullets were coming at me and pinging off the wheels, landing just in front of me. So I crept out. I did the old trick of putting my tin hat out on the end of my rifle. Nothing came – they were still firing at the other end of the train. I was safe! So I got up and ran across this level ground. Suddenly I saw this ditch and dived into it. It was full of old engine oil from the trains! But I was safe. So I crawled down and reached the next platoon. I gave the message to the officer but he warned me it would be difficult to reach the next platoon since they were covered by machine-guns – but I had no choice.

Continuing to crawl along the oil-filled ditch, Mowatt eventually reached the next platoon, where he asked for the officer. The reply shocked him: ‘He’s dead.’

What came next was even less comforting: ‘I asked “Where’s the sergeant?” They said “Killed.” So I said “Where’s the corporal?” and again they said “Killed.” So I said “Who’s in charge?” They pointed to Lance-Corporal Rose, who was in command of the whole platoon. I told him they’d got to get back over the embankment. So we all crawled back so the machine-guns couldn’t see us.’ Reaching the embankment, the lance-corporal – uncertain of his new-found role as a platoon commander – asked Mowatt what he thought they should do: ‘I told him no one had spotted us so far, cause we were in the long grass. I said we should get all the boys over together, if we went in ones and twos we’d be spotted. So we rushed over the top and all of us reached safety.’

If David Mowatt thought he had indulged in enough heroics for one day, he was wrong. With the tide of battle turning against the 51st, every man was required to go beyond the call of duty. Arriving back at the company HQ, he was informed he would have to return to the bridge to collect the Bren guns left behind during the withdrawal. The company commander sent him and a mate, Jock Swanson, to join an officer in a carrier. They were to rush to the bridge and return with the guns to complete the mission:It was a straight road, down an incline, to the bridge. We went about twenty yards and the carrier stopped. I could see paint chipping off from the inside of the carrier – it was armour-piercing bullets coming through. The driver was killed, so was the officer and the sergeant, Kenny Ross, was screaming his head off. He couldn’t get out, his legs had been shot to pieces. I said to Jock, ‘Try to get the sergeant out, I’ll nip down and get the guns.’ So I ducked down over the bank, fetched the Bren guns and ran back to the carrier. When I returned Jock was still struggling to pull Kenny Ross clear. But between us we managed to pull him out. Jock carried him on his shoulders and I carried the guns, and we managed to get back to the company HQ.

With the tide of battle turning against the Highlanders there was no choice but to retreat. Or as Jim Pearce, a loader on a Vickers machine-gun put it, in the words of a song popular at the time, it soon became a case of ‘Run rabbit run’. During the phoney war, when they had sung that song the troops had envisaged Hitler and his forces running away. Now they realized that was not going to happen. As Pearce soon discovered, the only running the Germans were doing was directly towards their positions: ‘I was feeding the gun – we kept firing but they kept coming in waves – they didn’t seem to give in. I felt horrible – think about it, we were killing all these people – but they wouldn’t stop coming. We were just firing and firing. Oh dear. But you do it automatically. Looking back, it doesn’t seem possible but you’ve been trained to do it. Your nerves take over. You have to defend yourself – you want to save yourself.’

It was clear if the Highlanders continued to take casualties at such a high rate they would soon be but a shadow of a division. By 7 June the 7th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders reported their depleted force consisted of just five officers and 130 other ranks. Only the remains of D Company and the men from the rear echelon were still fighting. With their situation reported, they lost two more men killed and eleven wounded before the day was over.

Through the valiant sacrifice of the Highlanders, the division held the line of the River Bresle until 8 June. Then, with the news that enemy formations had broken through in the south, cutting them off from their supply base at Rouen, it became clear their position was no longer tenable. The following morning, the arrival of Royal Navy representatives to discuss the evacuation of the division from Le Havre marked the end of the uncertainty. It was now no longer a matter of how long could they keep fighting, rather how soon could they make their escape.

As the division fell back from the Somme valley, the Highlanders conducted a fighting retreat. Their world was absorbed by the battles they fought. There was no time for thoughts about the rest of the BEF. To them, Dunkirk was just the name of a Channel port – just another French town – the growing legend of the evacuation was unknown and meaningless. Unlike their comrades who had sailed home, they were not yet safe. Their war continued to take a heavy toll. Hour by hour, day by day, the division established new positions, engaged the enemy and then withdrew, always uncertain where they might be heading.

For the soldiers it was a harrowing time. Lack of food, lack of sleep, sheer physical and mental exhaustion, meant few could ever build up a clear picture of all they experienced in those final days of battle. Even if they could summon up the strength to keep marching – walking mile after mile in a virtual daze – all realized they could not continue to fight unless assistance was forthcoming. One battalion reported the daily ration was just two sugar lumps and two tablespoons of mixed carrot and potatoes per man – hardly enough to keep them awake, let alone keep them fighting. Food and cigarettes would have cheered them but without replenishing their ammunition supplies the battle would be a foregone conclusion. So it was with despair that officers of the battalion admitted they had been unable to find the trainload of ammunition that had been destined to supply the Highlanders for their retreat to the coast.

As they marched, fully exposed, along the straight roads – with nowhere to shelter but beneath the flanking poplar trees – the Highlanders faced the same hazards their comrades to the north had faced during their retreat to Dunkirk. ‘We got quite a few German planes coming over,’ recalled Seaforth Highlander Jim Reed, ‘and they dive bombed us. I began to take things seriously when one or two of the lads got killed. Someone would tell you “So and so got shot this morning.” So you’d think, I’ve got to be a bit careful here.’

Like their comrades who had fought in Flanders, the Highlanders were affected by these aerial attacks. As Jim Charters, a machine-gunner in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers recalled: ‘Seeing refugees being machine-gunned and bombed was the worst moment of my whole war. The Germans did it to impede our retreat. It was a shock to see it, but after the first few days we got used to seeing people getting hurt. Mortars and Stukas were the things we feared the most. The bombs had their sirens on and howled when they were coming down at us. But during the retreat I think we were in a stupor most of the time.’

For many it was the terrible sense of helplessness that had the greatest impact upon them. Seaforth Highlander Jim Reed also watched as dive bombers destroyed columns of refugees, machine-gunning the women and children as they scattered to reach safety. When the attacks were over there were civilians – old men, women and children – all crying for help. There were upturned prams scattered amid the corpses and wounded people pleading for assistance from the British soldiers. But there was nothing they could do, there were no medical supplies to be given away and no time could be lost on the retreat. Jim Reed’s words expressed the sense of regret felt by the troops as they left the civilians to fend for themselves: ‘They were helpless. You want to help them but there’s nothing you can do. It was the saddest day of my war.’

As most soon realized, there was little point concerning themselves with the casualties they saw; there were more pressing issues for them as they retreated. Dick Taylor, whose first experiences of enemy fire had been treated lightly, noticed a change in attitudes as the retreat progressed: ‘It wasn’t serious until the retreat started. We were being harassed, we were chased all the way. It was all pretty quick – we were taking up positions trying to help anybody who was in trouble. But I wasn’t particularly nervous, it was just one of those things you accepted. It was just when shells dropped close by you’d get quite a fright.’

For the exhausted but undeterred men of the 51st Division, any light-hearted moment, however brief, was something to be savoured. As the Seaforth Highlanders fell back towards the coast David Mowatt did his utmost to provide some relief for his comrades:There were times when I could see the humorous side of what was happening. I was getting up to all sorts of tricks. I would go into a house and pinch a bottle of rum. I’d always get something for the lads. They’d be waiting for me – ‘What you got us this time?’ – I’d get loaves of bread, I’d search wagons that had been blown up. I’d find tins of bully beef and fill my jacket up. But by this time we were on our bloody knees. Marching – pulling back – holding the line. One night I went to this big house, went up to the attic and found three brand-new bikes. I thought ‘I’ll take those back to the company.’ Let the boys cycle rather than march. I showed them to the company commander and he said, ‘Mowatt, do as you bloody like!’ So by the time we got back to St Valery every man in the company had a bike.

As Mowatt and his mates cycled towards the coast all they could think of was reaching safety. It may not have been perceived as in the finest traditions of such proud regiments to be withdrawing from the battlefield but it was the only way of surviving. To fight on was tantamount to suicide. Escape was their only option. Yet even the hope of escape was diminishing by the second. They did not know it, but Major-General Fortune had already made a fateful decision. When he had been told to withdraw to Le Havre he made the conscious decision to do so side by side with his French allies. He was part of a French Corps and believed that if they could fight and die together they could withdraw together. As a result, with the French relying on horses in place of mechanized transport, it would take longer to reach their destination. With their trucks, carriers and artillery tractors, the Highlanders could have made a lightning retreat to the port; however, this was not a time to be sacrificing their French comrades. It was a noble gesture that would cost the Highlanders dear in the days that followed.

The 51st Highland Division at St Valery

Our officer, Captain Wright, said, ‘Barber, you were a signaller. See if you can get a frequency on that set.’ I still remember it. ‘This is the BBC’ – you know, the old toffee-nosed way of talking – ‘The BEF have been successfully evacuated from Dunkirk.’ I thought what a load of bollocks.
Gordon Barber, Royal Horse Artillery,