The Lost Band of Brothers (3 page)

It was the loss and self-destruction of the cars and lorries under his own command that one particular subaltern, 24-year-old Second Lt Geoffrey Appleyard, RASC, found particularly shaming. Vehicles, after all, were to that particular corps what field guns were to the Royal Artillery and field dressings were to the Royal Army Medical Corps. A Cambridge University Engineering graduate with First Class Honours, Appleyard had heeded the climate of an increasingly war-nervous Europe and volunteered to join the Supplementary Reserve of officers in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1938. On 1 September the following year he and his fellow Reservists were mobilised. He soon found himself at Bulford Camp, Wiltshire, commanding the skilled mechanics, fitters, turners, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, drivers and mobile workshop personnel who made up his forty-five-strong unit in the Workshops of ‘E' Section, No 6 Sub Park, 11 Ammunition, RASC. A week earlier, on 23 August 1939, Molotov and von Ribbentrop had stunned the world by signing their two nations' non-aggression pact, thereby virtually guaranteeing both the German invasion of Poland and the world war that would follow. Appleyard was one of those who permitted himself to peer into a bleak future, writing home to his family in Yorkshire:

So Russia is in. How awful. And what a swinish
thing to do. It means a long war, but I'm sure we must win. I'm certain we've got right on our side and I even feel we've got God on our side – if God could conceivably be on any side in anything so bloody as a war. We
must
win. Funny how relative everything is – you don't really appreciate a holiday till it's over. The same way you don't really appreciate your liberty until it's threatened. But I'll
never
be
made
to say ‘Heil Hitler'. I'd sooner die.

The Germans invaded Poland, Britain's ultimatum ran its course, the war began and a weary, self-pitying, lacklustre Neville Chamberlain addressed the nation on the wireless. On 29 September 1939, crammed with 1,500 other mobilised troops into the SS
Lady of Mann
, one of the early vessels to be pressed into service to carry the BEF to France, Appleyard and his unit endured a rough crossing to France. There they joined the rear echelon in support, for they did not form one of the front-line fighting units: they were tail, not teeth. They spent that long, cold and muddy winter moving from billet to billet behind the static front line repairing vehicles and supplying various artillery units with ammunition from the railhead and waiting for something, anything, to happen. Transferred by his colonel without the option from Workshops to Ammunition Section and then to Headquarters, Appleyard was an inveterate letter-writer to a loving family back home in Linton-on-Wharfe, near Wetherby, Yorkshire. Prohibited by the censor from disclosing his exact location, he left them in no doubt about conditions, writing in October:

With the arrival at this village quite a lot of the fun has gone out of this war. Quite suddenly winter has come with a bang, and there is mud everywhere. Mud, mud, mud wherever you go. It rains off and on all through the day and the sky is heavy, misty and overcast. Cheerful prospect! The village here is much smaller than Linton and consists solely of farms … The first night here the men were billeted in a cowshed – absolutely filthy.

He added a little later: ‘I'm not learning to love this mud-soaked corner of Europe any more – it must be the most utterly God-forsaken piece of land in the world. Did someone say something about “
La Belle
France”? I prefer La Bl… France.'

As the months dragged by, Appleyard's thoughts turned increasingly to home and an overdue leave. In April 1940 he was writing: ‘My leave prospects are very bright! There is every chance that I should get home on my original date; that is, leaving here the 8th May, home 9th, which is sensational.' On 25 April he felt confident enough to write:

Hurrah! My leave date is now definitely confirmed. I am leaving here May 7th, arriving home May 8th – possibly very late as it is a late boat that day, I think. That's terrific, isn't it! I'm thrilled to have so early a prospect of seeing you all again … Just think – only twelve days hence! And the date is quite definite unless leave is suspended again, or something else very untoward happens!

Unfortunately for Appleyard and his eagerly anticipated home leave, something very untoward
did
happen. The British anglicised it to
blitzkrieg
but it meant the same thing: lightning war – the German thunderclap advance into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France by a co-ordinated force of tanks, motorised infantry, artillery and on-call air support. As German mechanised units smashed across the Belgian border and headed deep into France to start their swing towards the Channel coast, Appleyard and his unit were caught up in the initial advance to contact. He wrote about those dangerous days – perhaps with an eye to an anxious family waiting at home – in terms that suggested he might almost be on some sort of private Grand Tour:

I am very well, fairly comfortable (at times) and having a terrific experience. There will be masses to tell you when I am home again, but I am afraid it must all wait until then. Sufficient to say that my days are very full and very interesting. I am very brown with continually being out in the open air in the open car … You know, in spite of everything, this is an amazing and invaluable experience for me and in certain ways will be of immense value in later life. I had better stop – things are beginning to happen again.

No mention, then, of wailing, gull-winged Stukas or of thundering German armour hacking into soft-skinned British columns; no mention of collapsing French armies amidst rout; of valiant last-ditch, last bullet stands by both French and British troops; no mention of British units in chaos or nervous officers relieved of their command and sent home, or British rifles being turned on fleeing British officers and soldiers with orders to shoot to kill.

Appleyard's RASC unit had reached Armentières just before the evacuation of Dunkirk began. By then the chatty letters home had ceased. Armentières was at the western edge of the Gort line of five interlinked British divisions that hooked in a sickle of their own to the north and east protecting Lille. Armentières was bombed into ruin and Appleyard and his men did what they could to help, then headed north-west down the corridor towards Dunkirk taking with them all their vehicles and ammunition stores. It says much for his early skills as both leader and young subaltern that not a man of his unit was lost in what is arguably that most difficult of all military manoeuvres, the fighting withdrawal. His letters do not describe that fighting retreat to the coast, nor the eventual link-up with the crescent-shaped, shrinking perimeter that guarded Dunkirk itself. When he got there, every lorry and car lovingly intact, his CO told him to take his vehicles to a nearby canal, destroy them with fire and pick-axe to make them useless to the enemy and then tip them into the canal. Appleyard's father was to write later:

The Commanding Officer later, with some amusement, recounted to Geoff that he seemed dazed by the order, that his jaw dropped, his eyes opened wide with horror and, forgetting military discipline, he ejaculated ‘What? Me destroy
my
cars,
my
lorries!' On these vehicles Geoff had laboured through days and nights of the long rigours of winter and the rains of spring, to keep them in the pink of perfection on the road. The shock of the order was to him as to a father told to ill-treat his children.
2

Second Lt Appleyard followed his orders. Then, on foot, he led his men into the Dunkirk perimeter. On 30 May, that perimeter stretched from Mardyck, 5 miles west of Dunkirk's west mole, to Nieuport Bains 23 miles to the east and inland to a depth of 6 miles. Three days later those 23 miles of British-held shoreline had shrunk to a perimeter just 10 miles long and, at its maximum, 4 miles wide. Amidst the chaos of the evacuation from Dunkirk we do not know exactly where or when Appleyard and his men entered the perimeter down roads lined with wrecked vehicles, spilled stores and guns of every description as they straggled down to the beach in the hope of possible evacuation. But we do know from contemporary accounts that, by then, the once-pleasant summer resort that held fond memories for thousands of European holiday-makers had descended into a vision of Hell itself. More than a thousand of its civilians were dead, many lying bloated in the heat, disfigured and stinking in their own streets. Under incessant German shelling, hundreds of homes and municipal buildings had been shredded and blasted into ruin. One French officer wrote about entering Dunkirk:

Entire columns of soldiers have been annihilated by the bombardment. Not far from Bastion 32 lay a line of corpses who had fallen on top of each other. It was as if a gust of wind had blown over a row of wooden soldiers. The dark road was so full of obstructions that it was impossible to avoid some of the corpses, which were run over by my car.
3

Now, shattered glass crunched under hob-nailed boots; bricks, piles of rubble and tangled telephone wire lay everywhere, impeding progress. There was no electric street light or running water, the town was lit at night by the lurid flickering glow of many fires, the streets were thick with the cloying, throat-greasing, back-of-the-mouth taste of death and burning oil that drifted in on the wind from the storage tanks to the west of the town. Another French officer observed approaching the west mole:

We walk along the beach which is obstructed by isolated soldiers, cars, English cannons, dead men and horses … This suburb is sinister. It is completely ruined, and burned, with more dead horses and unimaginable disorder. None of the cars have tyres anymore; they have been taken and used as lifebelts.
4

No 3 Brigade's headquarters was moved to the beach at Bray Dunes just inside the eastern perimeter on 31 May. The unit's war diarist recorded:

The scenery provided a … picture of the abomination of desolation. Ruined and burnt out houses … salt water spreading everywhere, vehicles abandoned, many of them charred relics of twisted metal on the roadside and overturned in the ditches. Light tanks and guns poking up out of the floods. Horses dead or dying from want of water. Here and there civilian or French army corpses lying in the open. An unforgettable spectacle.
5

A few days later a German Officer would concur as he reviewed the abandoned beaches after the last grey British warship had slid back over the horizon:

It's a complete mess. There are guns everywhere as well as countless vehicles, corpses, wounded men and dead horses. The heat makes the whole place stink. Dunkirk itself has been completely destroyed. There are lots of fires burning … We moved to Coxyde Bains by the beach [4 miles west of Nieuport] but we cannot swim since the water is full of oil from the sunk ships, and is also full of corpses … There are tens of thousands of cars, tanks, ammunition cases, guns and items of clothing.
6

Above all, Dunkirk was, as it had always been, a place of beaches and sand dunes but with this difference: now it was also a place of patient and sometimes not-so-patient evacuation where long black lines of soldiers, three or four abreast, waited their turn for salvation. Weary, thirsty men were standing up to their chests in water or queuing for hours on life-saving piers of lorries: these had been driven out into the sea, lashed together with their tyres shot out, filled with sand and then topped off with planks to provide a shallow-water jetty for the heroic ‘little ships' that had put out from a dozen English ports to ferry what remained of the BEF to deeper-draught vessels waiting offshore. Others, crammed with troops, sailed straight for England. German aircraft and artillery had bombed the beaches incessantly, lobbing bomb and shell into the packed clusters of waiting troops. They could hardly miss. Many men had died there on the beaches within sight of rescue. But if there was a third miracle, it was that the beaches at Dunkirk were soft. Many bombs and shells had simply buried themselves deep in the sand before exploding.

One of those who had taken shelter in the sand dunes from the incessant bombing whilst awaiting his turn to get away was Geoffrey Appleyard. Crouching in one of those deep sand holes as the bombs rained down, Appleyard was suddenly sent sprawling into the sand by something hitting him hard in the middle of the back. ‘As he lay, his mouth full of sand, thinking: “Well, this is it – they've got me” a voice sounded in his ear: “I say, I f-feel a bl-bloody coward, how about you?”'
7
It was a startling and unorthodox introduction to Capt. Gustavus March-Phillipps, Royal Artillery, a man who would shortly become his commanding officer. Crouching there in the sand dunes of Dunkirk during the long hours of fear and boredom that followed as they dodged the shells and waited for evacuation, the two officers formed a bond of friendship that was to last a lifetime.

At its inception, Operation
Dynamo
had hoped to lift perhaps 30,000 British soldiers off the beaches at Dunkirk. In the event, 338,226 British and French servicemen had been saved. Amongst them were Appleyard and March-Phillipps. Had the German High Command realised just how much trouble the stuttering gunner and the Yorkshire engineer who liked writing letters home were about to cause the German war effort, they would have been justified in diverting an entire Stuka
Geschwader
to ensure their particular and personal destruction. But they did not.

And so Gus March-Phillipps and his new friend Geoffrey Appleyard came home to the country they loved: England.

  
1
.  
Dunkirk
, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, 19.

  
2
.  
Geoffrey
, 45.

  
3
.  
Dunkirk
, 450.

  
4
.  Ibid., 453.

  
5
.  Ibid., 435.