Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (26 page)

While in the hospital Lister received a daily ration of a bowl of barley but since he was too weak to eat he had to be spoon-fed by a fellow patient. With no treatment forthcoming from the Germans, Lister also had to rely on the French prisoners to change the bandages covering his wounds. United Nations reports into war crimes described his treatment as ‘remarkable for callousness and discrimination against him’.
¹⁷
This discrimination was noted by Leslie Shorrock, who at first found himself in a hospital full of French patients. Here he received coffee for breakfast, then mashed potatoes, meat, sausage, carrots, bread and wine during the course of the day. Only after being transferred to the British hospital at Camiers did he notice the paucity of rations.

A report into the behaviour of the Germans at the British military hospital in Boulogne emphasized the ‘systematic discrimination against and inhumane treatment of British prisoners of war . . . It cannot be too strongly insisted that the actions of the Germans at the time reflected complete disregard of obligation towards prisoners of war for which, it is submitted, they should be made accountable.’
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As the days and weeks passed, military hospitals across France and Belgium began to disgorge the wounded men the Germans considered fit to be transferred to Germany. Though still wrapped in bandages, weak from hunger, and often clad in little more than the ragged remnants of their uniforms, large numbers were forced out on to the roads to begin the march east. One officer captured at Calais spent three months in hospital at Le Touquet prior to being forced to march to Germany. Upon reaching Wesel, he and his fellow marchers were put on a barge that was then pulled down the Rhine by a pleasure steamer.

Not all were allowed so long in hospital to recover. Many of the less seriously wounded men had received little more than cursory treatment before beginning the march. Many of the wounded joined up with the columns of healthy men being led away from the battlefield. Despite his wounded back, Leslie Shorrock spent just ten days in hospital before being sent on the march, joining up with the columns of men captured at St Valery and eventually travelling into Germany by barge. At the end of each day’s marching he had to get someone to dress his wounds. Eventually he found a kindly German guard who allowed him to travel the final miles of the journey in a lorry.

As the months passed, reports reached Britain, via the neutral countries, of British servicemen in hospitals throughout France. There was a group of sixty Glasgow Highlanders in a hospital at Laval, while at Rennes there were thirty-six wounded men who had lost their uniforms and equipment as a result of the bombing of the town. At Tournai 157 wounded Britons were found in a former Belgian army barracks, while a further 420 were found to be receiving treatment in Lille. The reports also began to record the eventual movement of the wounded soldiers. In November 1940 nearly a thousand were moved from Belgium to Thuringia and Hessen in Germany, leaving just thirty-two men in Belgium who were still too sick to be moved.

Such moves often also took the British medical staff away from the most needy of wounded prisoners. The medics knew they were needed by the men being moved to POW camps but they also knew the sick men being left behind were in desperate need of care. At Camiers, Bill Simpson had to say goodbye to a middle-aged sergeant who had been under his treatment. The man’s face was an awful colour, a sure sign that he would not live much longer. As Simpson went to leave the man pleaded with him: ‘Don’t leave us to die, sergeant. Please stay.’
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But Simpson – like so many of his fellow medics – had no choice but to leave.

With so many patients departing, life began to change for those doctors who were left behind. By December 1940 doctors in the Rouen area had the passes which had given them freedom to leave the hospital confiscated by their guards. It seemed they were no longer being treated as protected personnel, more as prisoners. Protected personnel status entitled them to repatriation under the Geneva Convention when their duties were over, so it was essential their identification papers were in order.

When Ox and Bucks stretcher-bearer Les Allan had been pulled from the ruins of Hazebrouck his armband and medic’s haversack had been taken away, removing any way he had of proving he was a protected person rather than a fighting man. It was to cost him dear. Unable to prove himself a member of the medical staff, he was condemned to five years in the farms and factories of the Reich, working like a slave for the Nazi regime.

While those serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps – RAMC – were able to prove their status, many others were not so fortunate. Most stretcher-bearers and infantry medical personnel had nothing to show their duties, their paybooks simply indicating their belonging to infantry battalions. Many ambulance drivers could only prove membership of the Royal Army Service Corps and were unable to show evidence they had spent weeks ferrying the bloody wrecks of wounded men between the front line, aid posts and hospitals. To avoid any confusion some hospitals made efforts to identify the men. At the 17th General Hospital in Camiers a stamp was made and put into each man’s paybook identifying him as ‘protected personnel’. At the same hospital efforts were also made to create new paybooks for some of the wounded. The new books gave them a revised religious identity, no longer showing them to be Jewish and thus preventing the possibility of discrimination by their captors.

The haphazard nature of the reports reaching the UK regarding those men in hospital placed a great strain upon the families of the wounded. Although the Red Cross did their best to record the names of all the men entering Germany’s system of POW camps, passing the names on to the British authorities, finding out details of the sick was not so simple. With the men spread across France and Belgium, many had not been officially recorded as prisoners. The family of one man received their first indication of his fate when they received a photograph of him via Spain. It was a relief to see he was alive, but a shock to discover his leg had been amputated. In September 1940 Geoff Griffin’s family received notification that he was ‘missing, presumed killed’. The army were even preparing to pay out a pension to his family until a letter came via a Red Cross nurse. Relieved by the news, his father ran all the way to the home of Griffin’s fiancee to show her the letter. Eventually, the War Office accepted that he was still alive, cancelled the pension and restarted his pay. With the war in France finished, and the majority of wounded prisoners transferred to Germany, the protected personnel had done their duty and now looked forward to going home, ready to continue their healing work. They would soon have a rude awakening. There would be many long years of work ahead of them before they would be heading home.

Now, without fully comprehending why, we were on our way back to Blighty.
Joe Sweeney, waiting to board a ship at St Nazaire
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The good, the bad and the indifferent.
British infantryman describing the stragglers heading west across France
²

As the last valiant defenders of St Valery were rounded up and marched off into captivity, scattered groups – some in pairs, some alone, some in organized groups – continued to make good their escape from France. Just as the story of the BEF had not come to a close as the last of the small ships set sail from the beaches of Dunkirk, neither had the story reached its climax with the defeat of the Highlanders at St-Valery-en-Caux. In the two weeks following ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’ and a week following the surrender at St Valery, the evacuation of the BEF continued, with over 160,000 Allied soldiers – including British, French, Belgians, Poles, Czechs and Canadians – escaping via the ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg, La Pallice, Brest and St Nazaire. Some were even ferried along the Loire from Nantes to reach open seas. The confusion of the continued retreat across France, the mayhem of the conflicting political and military orders passing between England and France, the chaotic scenes at the evacuation ports, the carnage experienced as German bombers pounded the final boats bound for the UK – all combined to create a series of ignominious events that were initially covered up, then eventually ignored, since they failed to fit into the glorious story of the Dunkirk evacuation.

The BEF had two main bases, the northern one at Rennes and the southern one at St Nazaire and Nantes. St Nazaire was the main storage area for ammunition and frozen meat, while the base at Nantes was the centre for motor transport and drivers. In addition there was the medical base at Dieppe. From these base camps and hundreds of smaller centres, thousands of soldiers were rapidly heading away from the battlefields, either in hope of evacuation back to England or simply in the hope that someone, somewhere, might give them orders. Everywhere the front lines were fluid, with one French commander later admitting that every report seemed to be out of date by the time it could be acted upon. It was little wonder that, on the same day that General Fortune reluctantly surrendered his division at St Valery, the French commander General Weygand told his government they should begin negotiations for an armistice. For the soldiers of the BEF, such political machinations were far from their minds. Instead they were occupied with nothing more than personal survival.

For those men of the BEF left behind in France, just as for those who had escaped via Dunkirk, survival meant one thing – evacuation. The first of the next wave of evacuations was already under way as the Highlanders were being sacrificed in and around St Valery. As the final pockets of resistance were being mopped up by Rommel’s forces, one small group of survivors made their way along the coast to the nearby village of Veules-les-Roses, where they could see a ship offshore. Not knowing if the village was held by enemy, they made their journey by night. When they arrived at Veules they found five groynes – three for the French and two for the British – from which the evacuation was continuing. From there they were able to embark.

Like a mini-Dunkirk, small boats from the larger boat offshore ferried men to safety. As they waited they were bombed by the Luftwaffe and shelled from the direction of St Valery. A few French soldiers comforted themselves by firing rifles at the enemy aircraft. There was little hope of doing any damage but it made them feel safer to know that at least someone was fighting back. When the evacuation was completed, and the small British group had returned to their regiment, they were counted. A total of three officers and seventeen other ranks were all that remained of the entire regiment. The rest had either perished in the battles around Abbeville and St Valery or were already making their way into captivity. In total, more than 2,000 British and 1,000 French soldiers made their escape from Veules-les-Roses.

As some men attempted to escape across the Channel, others tried to escape southwards through France. Most were soon captured but others were successful, reaching the south coast after weeks or months of travelling. Taking to heart his officer’s order of ‘every man for himself’, Gordon Barber and his mate Paddy headed off on their motorcycle.We’d gone about twenty miles and I told Paddy I was thirsty. So we stopped in the next farm. As we pulled up he said, ‘Jesus Nobby – it’s full of Germans!’ These bastards were all 6ft 4 tall – stormtroopers, covered in guns, with grenades stuffed down their boots! They had bloody great motorbikes with machine-guns mounted on them. Paddy said, ‘Let’s get out of here, quick!’ As we turned around I said to him, ‘Stay where you are!’ They had guns pointed at us and I was going to get shot in the back at any moment. I said, ‘Let’s give up.’ These Germans said, ‘For you the war is ended’ and they meant it.

While Barber and his mate began the march into captivity, others fared better. When the Germans had struck at Abbeville, cutting off men like Eric Reeves and Ken Willats, the rest of the 2/5th Queen’s Regiment had escaped across the River Somme. Those who could swim stripped off and swam across, pulling their rifles behind them. The non-swimmers were forced to make the crossing as best they could, using an improvised guide rope made from rifle slings – many perished during the crossing. Eventually the survivors reached Cherbourg and returned to England on the SS
Vienna
on 7 June.

The rail network was soon crowded with slow-moving trains, filled to capacity with soldiers, that snaked their way across northern France. So busy were the railway lines, that most trains moved at little more than walking pace. Soldiers who wanted to urinate were able to jump down, relieve themselves, then run alongside to rejoin their mates.

The problem for the trains was the inevitable attention of the Luftwaffe who roamed, often unchallenged, through the skies above France. Every so often, the men within the trains would hear the roar of engines and the rattle of machine-gun fire as those men stationed on the train roofs to provide anti-aircraft fire opened up. Each time the fighters swooped down, the soldiers would jump from the trains and scatter across the fields in search of cover. The biggest targets for the roaming fighters and bombers were the railway yards where trains carrying both men and supplies inevitably halted. Gunners seldom had time to get their weapons into position to offer covering fire, leaving the trains open to attack, and the soldiers running for cover.

Inevitably, such attacks led to men getting separated from their mates and losing their units. Some would not find them again until they returned home. Men recalled being given orders to do no more than head for Channel ports or to head west until they met someone else who could give them instructions as to where their unit would be re-forming. One man recalled being told to drive by the position of the sun and that if he reached a river crossing that was blown he should simply abandon his truck and swim the river. The same man later found himself directed into Dieppe, riding into the port on the running board of a civilian car. Instead of finding an active military garrison, with a fully functioning port, he discovered a dead town.