Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (33 page)

Not all the evaders were able to make a safe crossing. After weeks of walking, Derrick Peterson and his comrades passed safely into the unoccupied zone of France. It seemed they were free, but five miles into Vichy they were picked up by French police, marched back to the demarcation line and handed over to a German patrol. After thirty-two days in a POW camp Peterson made good his escape in the company of a French artilleryman. From October 1940 until March 1941 he managed to evade detention within France. After arriving in the unoccupied zone for the second time, his French companion was forced to rejoin his unit and sent to North Africa, while Peterson teamed up with a fellow Briton who had escaped from a POW camp via the sewers. During this period he was assisted by the Americans. A letter from the American consul in Lyon detailing his escape from the stalag had actually reached the Peterson home before his parents had received official notification that he was a prisoner. In October they wrote to the Home Office, asking if it would be possible to forward money to their son. They received the reply that the Americans were funding him to the tune of £10 per month. Peterson’s relieved parents immediately offered to repay all the American money. In April 1941 the two men crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and walked to Gibraltar. That month another two soldiers reached Gibraltar. It was Second-Lieutenant Parkinson of the Sussex Regiment, accompanied by Private Bertie Bell, the only survivor of the massacre of British prisoners in the Forêt de Nieppe.

The Americans were not the only nationality able to help the evaders from the BEF. As a neutral state, the Irish retained diplomatic facilities within France. This opened up an obvious course of action for some evaders. Those with Irish heritage were able to request Irish passports. By claiming to be civilians trapped in the south of France they were able to acquire the necessary documentation to make the journey out of France, through Spain and into Gibraltar.

Arriving in Marseilles, the evaders had a number of options. Some men went straight to the Red Cross for assistance, visiting their canteen to get a hot meal. After days and weeks of walking, a hot meal was the one thing they needed more than anything else. Once that was finished they gravitated to the American Seaman’s Mission at 35, Rue de Forbin, where they were able to collect money from the amiable Church of Scotland minister who ran the institution. Reverend Donald Caskie had been the minister at a church in Gretna, Scotland, prior to moving to France in the late 1930s. Following the fall of France he had moved south to Marseilles to assist the stranded British merchant seamen, airmen and soldiers who had congregated at the Seaman’s Mission in hope of shelter before finding a way home. Though a sign outside the mission read ‘Civilians and Seamen Only’ it had become a beacon for soldiers arriving in Marseilles. Indeed, 100,000 French francs had been made available to Donald Caskie by the British government for the relief of the British soldiers. Once settled at the mission, the evaders gravitated towards the port to seek a way out of France by boat. But although the quaysides were full of ships, each one was guarded by French police and troops. There seemed to be little chance of either stowing away or finding a berth on a ship.

From the mission the kindly minister used his own money to forward mail to the UK via American diplomatic channels. It was a vital channel to ensure that the families of the evaders received the welcome news that their husbands and sons were alive and safe. The wife of Lance-Corporal Fred Verity, of the East Lancashire Regiment, received a telegram sent from Marseilles on 10 August 1940. It informed her: ‘Fred safe in Marseilles’
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and had been sent by someone named Osborn. The message amazed Mrs Verity since she had already been officially informed of her husband’s death. One officer used the minister’s mail service to request the Foreign Office repay £17 he had borrowed from the American consulate to aid his journey to Marseilles. He need not have worried since they had already requested financial assistance from the Americans. In addition, the Foreign Office asked the American embassy in France to hand over $100,000 to the representative of the Quakers in Marseilles in order that he too could assist the evaders.

In the early days following the defeat of the BEF, some evaders who reached Marseilles made contact with Polish soldiers in the city. In August 1940 the Polish legation reported that there existed a group of fifty destitute British soldiers in the city who were entirely reliant upon the generosity of their Polish allies. The Polish camp, in the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, became a haven for men who intended to escape since the Poles had no intention of handing anyone over to the French authorities and – unlike the French – had little interest in whether their behaviour upset the Germans. They even attempted to establish an escape network involving sending Britons to Spain on passports provided by the Polish consul.

Also assisting evaders to leave Marseilles was Captain Charles Murchie of the Royal Army Service Corps. He ran a team of twenty-five guides who operated from the area around Lille. Their task was to send evaders on to a ‘reception centre’ in Paris. From there, the men made their way into the unoccupied zone. Initially, Murchie sent men from Marseilles to North Africa by boat, until London requested he begin to send them via Spain. By early 1941, the system he had established operated smoothly. Captain Murchie’s northern guides brought men across the Vichy border and submitted to him expenses claims for costs incurred during the journey. He also gave the guides money for their fares home. So successful was the system that Murchie was forced to give up his endeavours. He had simply become too well known to be able to continue to operate. He found men arriving from as far away as Brussels and asking for him openly by name. When French attention became too great, Captain Murchie was himself forced to flee to Spain, taking with him a British sergeant who had been his assistant and André Minne, a Lille cafe-owner who had made five journeys to Marseilles as a guide to evaders.

When John Christie arrived in the unoccupied zone he took a train to Marseilles and then telephoned the American consulate. By February 1941 the US consul had provided assistance to 400 British soldiers who had escaped from the occupied zone. However, not all the men seeking assistance received the advice they desired. When John Christie and his companion finally reached the port, the consul advised they hand themselves over to the French authorities at the local barracks of the French Foreign Legion.

The barracks to which they were sent became a vital waypoint in the evaders’ journeys to freedom. Located in the old port, the Fort St Jean was famed as the Foreign Legion headquarters and its main recruiting base. Entered via an iron bridge across the harbour waters, the seventeenth-century fort was on a rocky island, totally surrounded by water. By January 1941 Fort St Jean was home to eleven British officers, forty-nine NCOs and 175 other ranks.

Some evaders initially found themselves interned in the Ste Marthe barracks, a detention barracks for the Foreign Legion. Conditions within the camp were appalling and there were no toilet facilities. Instead they had to use the prison yard that was swilled down each morning. Other evaders were interned in the Fort de la Revère in Nice where the senior British officer, Captain Whitney, reported to the Foreign Office on the ‘absolutely unbearable’
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conditions, the cases of tuberculosis and the suspicion of German infiltration. A similar situation was found in the internment camp at St Hippolyte du Fort, near Perpignan, where a soldier turned up calling himself MacBrendan. Back in the UK checks were made on his identity. No records could be found of his birth, or his claimed service in the British Army during the Great War, or of his having been involved in military intelligence with the BEF.

Once inside Fort St Jean, John Christie found himself directed to the room that was to be his home as an internee. He would be sharing it with about twenty other ranks, including a fifty-five-year-old veteran of the Great War, while three officers were housed in a separate room. Others within the fort slept in cells, to which the doors were fortunately left open all day. Each morning the men rose at 7 a.m., ate breakfast at 8 a.m., then paraded at 9 a.m. For the rest of the day there was little for them to do. The internees were allowed to give their parole and go into town, with officers allowed out at any time and other ranks allowed out between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. Once in the town, they were free to visit the Seaman’s Mission and were able to collect the money that was available via the Reverend Donald Caskie.

Although it was a vast improvement on sleeping in woods and barns, life in the fort was far from comfortable. The internees reported they were in desperate need of extra blankets and winter clothing. The treatment experienced by some of the sick internees was also not up to accepted standards. One soldier, a Private Street, was interned in the hospital at St Hippolyte du Fort. He had lost an arm during the battles in northern France and had also suffered serious chest wounds. Fellow internees noted his health was failing fast since French doctors were unwilling to operate on him.

In general, however, conditions of internment, while not comfortable, were at least not onerous. As the French described it, this was a case of
liberté surveillée.
In the words of escaping Britons, it was ‘rough and ready’.
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After weeks or months of scrounging food they could at least expect French military rations that included a litre of red wine per man per day. At St Hippolyte, two British soldiers even requested permission to marry local women they had befriended while on visits to the town. In particular, the other ranks were pleased that the officers made little effort to enforce order upon them. Instead of taking control, they appeared to live their own lives until the time came for them to disappear and head towards freedom. It was just as well, as John Christie noted: ‘We remained very much a collection of individuals. We had reached Marseilles very much under our own steam, either singly or in pairs and none of us was very inclined to give up any part of control over our own destiny.’
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The independent nature of the men who had made their way safely through occupied France to the unoccupied zone meant that few among them were prepared to sit out the war in the stupefying boredom of an internment camp – especially when the camp was filled with lice and some French guards were stealing their food parcels. When they went into the town many faced a hostile reception from locals, especially French sailors who were angered by the British sinking of French ships at Oran. One or two, in particular the sick and wounded who had been promised repatriation, made no attempt to escape the fort. However, for the majority leaving France remained their aim. Using the same independent means that had brought them south, the internees gradually slipped away to make their way home. One officer approached the commandant at Fort St Jean and informed him he wished to withdraw his parole. The commandant understood exactly what he meant and replied: ‘So you’re off again – good luck.’
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On another occasion, when the commandant met up with a British medical officer who had been returned to the fort following an unsuccessful attempt to stow away on a ship, he told him: ‘Better luck next time!’
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The nearest British territory was Gibraltar. From there, escapees knew they would be able to report to the authorities and eventually rejoin their units. The preferred route of escape from France to Gibraltar was via Spain, paying up to 1,000 French francs per man to be smuggled over the Pyrenees to Barcelona. Some evaders even found themselves accompanied by French guides who did not ask for money; instead they requested the soldier assist them to reach England in order that they might join the Free French forces of General de Gaulle.

The aim of the evaders was to be able to reach a British consulate or the embassy in Madrid before they were detected and interned by the Spanish authorities, but they were to discover that it was not simple either to cross the border or to remain anonymous once within Spain. First they had to reach the border in safety. It was not just a case of joining a train in Marseilles and alighting once it had crossed the Spanish frontier. During the summer of 1940 the American authorities had been able to assist by passing word to an American representative in Port Bou, just over the frontier in Spain, giving the likely time of arrival for escaping British soldiers. However, the French authorities soon became aware of the numbers of men attempting to escape into Spain and made sure that thorough checks were made on train passengers. As a result it became necessary for men to leave trains a few stops before the border and continue the journey on foot. One group even took a train to Perpignan, then hired a taxi to take them to the Spanish border.

Although routes could be found that avoided French police patrols, the problem was that the border ran along the Pyrenees, forcing men thousands of feet up into the mountains to avoid checkpoints at road crossings. Following cart tracks and rough mountain paths, they trudged for days to cross the mountains. Even in the summer the temperatures dropped as they climbed up the rocky mountainsides. From the dizzy heights of the mountains they could look down to the blue of the Mediterranean – to a world of fishing boats and seaside cottages – and wonder how it could be so cold where they were. When the skies were clear, the piercing sun seared their skin, leaving it dry and burnt. Then when the clouds closed in on them they were chilled to the bone in their inadequate clothing. In the upper reaches of the mountain range they could at least find plenty of water – as long as they first broke the ice on the rocky pools. Those who engaged the services of local shepherds were guaranteed a journey that took in familiar paths and winter shelters. For the men who travelled alone it was simply a case of going up one side of the mountains and hoping they could find a safe path to descend into Spain.