Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (2 page)

However despite the ominous silence that had greeted Alexander as he scoured Dunkirk and its beaches for waiting troops, some men were still out there. Somewhere in the darkness were over 68,000 British soldiers who had never reached safety. On the beaches and sand dunes of Dunkirk, in the fields of Flanders, beside the roads and amid the ruins, lay the corpses of hundreds who had not reached the boats. They had paid the ultimate price during the fighting retreat. They were not alone in their defeat. Elsewhere were hospitals full of the sick and wounded who had been left behind to receive treatment from the enemy’s doctors. And further afield – still fighting hard alongside its French allies – was the entire 51st Highland Division, and a myriad of other units, some large and some small, whose war had not finished as the last boats slipped away from the port of Dunkirk.

Also scattered across the countryside were hundreds of lost and lonely soldiers. These were the ‘evaders’ who had missed the boats and evaded capture and were now desperately trying to make their own circuitous ways home independently, whether by walking across France or rowing across the Channel. All that mattered was that they were heading home, no matter how long it took or how far their journey would take them.

But for the majority left behind, now prisoners of war, the journey was not to freedom. Hour upon hour, mile upon mile, day after day, they walked. The feet of the dejected and defeated men shuffled over the cobblestones of the seemingly endless roads. Shoulders hunched, staring at the ground in front of them, they moved ever onward. Beneath the searing summer sun the starving rabble continued their journey into the unknown. Like the remnants of some pitiful ancient tribe sold into slavery, they shuffled forwards. Stomachs shrunken and throats parched, they hardly dared think of the food and water that might bring salvation.

Some were half-carrying, half-dragging their sick and exhausted friends. Others, too weak to help the sick, were forced to abandon their mates at the roadside. Yet most simply trudged on in silence – men like twenty-one-year-old Ken Willats who just five months earlier had been a chef in a London restaurant. Now, not having seen food for days, he was too weak even to raise a hand to wipe a squashed fly from his forehead.

Desperate men summoned up their last vestiges of energy and fought for scraps of food. They dropped to their knees in ditches just to drink from the dirty brown water. At night they collapsed by the roadside, often deep in sleep before their heads touched the bare earth. Then, just a few short hours later, they dragged themselves to their feet again to continue their journey.

As they walked they listened to the shouts of their guards – screaming at them to hurry up – and to the cries of their comrades as blows rained down on those who hesitated. Whips, sticks, truncheons and rifle-butts beat the offenders back into line. For some the end to their misery came quickly, as the marching men listened for the tell-tale rifle crack that meant someone had finally given up and been executed by the roadside.

At last, after two weeks of painful marching across the countryside and through the villages of France, Belgium and Germany, the column of starving men arrived in the once great city of Trier, once the northern capital of the Roman Empire, one of the foremost cities in the ancient world. Yet the marching men, their empty bellies aching and bodies weakened, had not reached civilization. Instead they were paraded through the streets to the taunts and jeers of the inhabitants. Under a hail of spittle, the desperate men kept their heads down and marched onwards. Where once slaves had left Germany destined for Rome, now a vast new slave army was heading eastwards into the heart of Europe’s newest empire, the Third Reich.

These forgotten men had fought the rearguard in northern France and paid the price of enabling their comrades to escape. These were not the legendary men who crossed the English Channel in the ‘little ships’ ready to fight again. Destined for captivity, they would not see freedom for five long years.

These dreadful days were never forgotten by those who endured them. Yet somehow their sufferings never became part of the folklore of Second World War. They had fought the battles to ensure the successful evacuation of over 300,000 fellow soldiers at Dunkirk. Their sacrifice had brought the salvation of the British nation. Yet they had been forgotten while those who escaped to safety and made their way back home were hailed as heroes. It was an indignity that long remained in the minds of that defeated army.

Who could forget that ordeal? Certainly not Les Allan. Sixty years on he surveyed the rows of veterans parading through the streets of Dunkirk. Heads held high, chests swollen with pride and festooned with medals, the ageing veterans had gathered once more to commemorate the anniversary of the miraculous rescue of a defeated army from the beaches of Dunkirk. These were the men whose escape from under the noses of the advancing Germans had become so famous. None among them doubted the achievement of rescuing the forlorn force from the beaches of France, nor would any underestimate their sacrifices in the years that followed. Yet some among them, Les Allan included, had their own, very different, memories of the aftermath of Dunkirk – memories that were once more stirred up at the sight of the parading men.

Though many years had passed since 1940, the gallant veterans still marched in step as they approached the grandstand. Amid the dignitaries Allan – former stretcher-bearer, BEF veteran, and prisoner of war – who had been granted his place as the founder of the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association, found his thoughts were immediately consumed by his own memories of suffering and sacrifice. As the parade came to a halt he leaned forward and called out to one of the men standing near him.

‘Hey, mate, which POW camp were you in?’

‘Twenty A,’ came the reply. ‘What about you?’

‘Twenty B at Marienburg.’

After a brief conversation, the parade moved on. Perplexed, a veteran officer seated beside him turned to ask how he knew this man, among all the assembled ranks, was a fellow POW. Allan allowed himself a smile and replied.

‘It’s simple. Look at his chest. The blokes with the least medals are always the old POWs.’

He was right. There hadn’t even been a campaign medal for those who fought in France in 1940. The Dunkirk POWs – the soldiers that were left behind – were men who had shared all the horrors of war but none of the glory.

Those men, the ones we left behind,
Those beaches would not see,
Those men to whom fate was unkind,
Had set their comrades free.
Those other men who would not see
The safety of our shores,
For five more years would not be free,
But prisoners of war.
Frederick Foster,Royal West Kent Regiment
¹

Surely it was a miracle. Under the very eyes of the mighty German Army the beleaguered British Army had somehow returned home. Day after day, night after night, the evacuation had continued. Their decks crowded with the exhausted remnants of a battered and bloody army, the ships slipped quietly back across the dark waters of the Channel. Even if the waters had parted, like the Red Sea before Moses, to allow the soldiers to walk home, the watching world could hardly have been more surprised.

It was an exodus that seemed impossible, yet it had happened. All across Britain people celebrated – from the soldiers who reached the sanctuary of home, to the mothers, wives and lovers who awaited their safe return. As a nation rejoiced, the reality of what had happened was obscured. A disastrous defeat was somehow turned into a great victory. Yet as in all victories, it had come at a price – the surrender of the truth to a myth that has survived longer than most of the soldiers involved.

At first the evacuation had remained a secret. Newspapers were quite simply forbidden from reporting the events in France. Although the BEF had suffered a crushing defeat, the British people were not to be told of its humiliation. The fact that the BEF had been routed on the battlefield and driven back to the coast was not for public consumption. There was no choice but for the army to withdraw to England to lick its wounds. What followed was indeed a miracle. For an entire week the Royal Navy, and latterly the legendary ‘little ships’, transported 338,226 British, French and Belgian soldiers back across twenty miles of sea.

As the troopships, destroyers, barges, trawlers, ferries and pleasure boats disgorged the vanquished army it soon became clear that the defeat could be concealed no longer. So the news was released and the story turned upside down, with the humiliation of defeat reported as a victorious escape. Even three days in, on 31 May, the first BBC report on the evacuation stressed that the British Army was returning home ‘undefeated’. This was far from the truth, but the public knew no different. Indeed no one – not the journalists, politicians nor generals – wanted them to know different. The news was bleak, but for the people of an increasingly isolated nation this was something to celebrate – their sons had come home.

While wounded, sick and dejected troops were hidden from sight, the British press heralded the men who had returned with a smile on their faces. Those who came home waving from train carriages, clutching their souvenirs, giving the thumbs-up and kissing the women who handed out tea and buns at railway stations became a thing of legend.

News spread across the world that Britain stood alone yet defiant. A haven for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and royal families of Europe’s defeated nations, Great Britain used the escape from Dunkirk as a clarion call for the fight against tyranny. In the skilful hands of Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, the BEF’s return became a propaganda triumph. As he told the world: ‘The battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’

Churchill’s belligerent spirit helped raise the nation. Britain had not folded like its European allies; instead the army had come home. The nation had rallied and was ready to fight another day. Germany’s inability to crush the British forces on the sands of Dunkirk was a turning point in their fortunes. A failure to extract those troops from the beaches would have left Britain defenceless. With no army left to fight, Britain would have been forced to sue for peace or have been an easy target for a Nazi invasion.

Yet this never happened. They had lived to fight another day and Dunkirk had become the springboard to victory. Although there would be no quick win – the battle in France may have been lost but one battle does not make a war – from Dunkirk grew the legend of the plucky British Army, outclassed on the battlefield, withdrawing against all the odds but sailing home across the Channel. It was the classic tale of the British underdog. The ‘little ships’ that ferried the soldiers home grew to symbolize a spirit of improvisation. The Nazis may have created a powerful, modern mechanized army but even all the iron and steel of its war machine could not crush the spirit of the British nation.

The emerging legend was perfectly suited to the mood of defiance that swept the country that summer: 1940 was Winston Churchill’s year – the year of Dunkirk; the rush to volunteer for the Home Guard; the glamour and excitement of the legendary ‘Few’ who defended the skies during the Battle of Britain and the enduring Blitz spirit. This was the year that Churchill and the British people raised two defiant fingers to their enemies across the Channel. In the nation’s moment of peril there was no time to dwell on defeat – or on the defeated.

Yet hidden beneath this tale was an untold story. As time passed, historians revisited the Dunkirk story many times but the public had not yet learnt how the army had been unceremoniously defeated. They did not hear of the failure of BEF officers at all levels. Nor did they read the details of drunken soldiers who refused calls to leave the cellars of Dunkirk and proceed for embarkation. In the mythology there was no room for tales of the failure of a poorly trained army, nor for stories of men scrambling to board boats being shot or forced away at gunpoint. Nor was the full story revealed of how the figures for the miraculous Dunkirk evacuation only talked of men who escaped via one port. Forgotten were more than 100,000 men whose escape to the UK came via a host of other coastal towns, from Normandy to the Bay of Biscay.

It would be many years before the real story of the evacuation even began to be told. Richard Collier’s 1961 book
The Sands of Dunkirk
was one of the first to reveal much of the chaos, indiscipline and terror that had been obscured by the myth. Later works like Walter Lord’s
The Miracle of Dunkirk
and Nicholas Harman’s
Dunkirk – The Necessary Myth
further helped to balance the story.

However, even in all these works one detail has remained missing. These stories ended with the final evacuations from the beaches of Dunkirk, drawing a veil over the desperate fate of those left behind.

As the boats sailed off they had abandoned 2,472 guns, nearly 65,000 vehicles and 20,000 motorcycles. In the chaos of retreat they had also left behind 416,000 tons of stores, over 75,000 tons of much-needed ammunition and 162,000 tons of petrol.

More shocking than all this, however, was a single chilling statistic – 68,111 men of the BEF did not return home across the Channel at all. Thousands were the dead, wounded or missing but almost 40,000 British soldiers were alive and already being marched off into a captivity that would last for five long years.

However, back at home in Britain, rather than mourning for the defeated or lost, people felt they had something to celebrate. There was a genuine outpouring of excitement and relief that the majority of the army had come home safely and were ready to defend Britain’s shores from its enemies. In homes the length and breadth of Great Britain families rejoiced when they heard the news that their sons had returned. The war may not have been over but their loved ones had survived to fight another day. For the moment, that was enough.