Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (42 page)

The celebrations indulged in by the local population as Reeves and his comrades entered the city were not an isolated incident. The prisoners’ memories were centred around the physical and verbal torment they suffered. The final days of the march may all have blurred into one another but the experience of reaching Trier remained etched in their minds. The vast, swaying swastika banners, festooned above the baying crowds as they celebrated the subjugation of these remnants of the British and French Armies, all served to heighten their dejection.

It was as if everything had been designed to humiliate the prisoners. Old women spat at them, youths raised their arms in Nazi salutes and mocked the pitiful wrecks that shuffled through the city. Even the stark contrast between the Sunday best worn by the civilians and the filthy attire of the prisoners just served to deepen their misery. As Les Allan trudged through the streets on his way to the railway station, these scenes made a distinct impression upon him:The reception from the civilians was horrendous. The British never kick a man when he’s down but they were the opposite. We were being humiliated. It was the period of the march that I shall never forgive them for. They were mostly women and children. You don’t expect it from them. They were enjoying their victory. They were on Cloud Nine. But funnily enough, I never lost faith that we would win in the end. That was the one thing that kept us going. We said, ‘Keep smiling lads – one day we’ll get our own back.’ And it was worth it in the end.

Also arriving from Abbeville was Ken Willats, who was struck by the scenes: ‘The reaction was awful. They were lining the pavements, spitting and swearing. We were presented as hostages of their success. It was a total picture of the Nazi regime. There were big flags hanging across the road. The civilians were at the very top of their enthusiasm – venting their hatred of us. They were jeering as if they had been whipped up. We were despairing.’

After just one night’s rest, Graham King and his exhausted comrades were raised from their slumbers and marched downhill into the city of Trier. Once again they were given no food and sent on their way with empty bellies. The reception they received as they headed for the railway station was the same as that given to the others who had been greeted by earlier crowds: ‘In spite of the early hour, the good German citizens of Trier were lining the streets to welcome us with stones, insults, manure, ordure, eggs (rotten) and anything else that could do us harm, the more serious the better.’

In the last days of June – almost a month after the completion of the Dunkirk evacuation and weeks after the first prisoners had passed through Trier – some of the 8,000 prisoners who had marched from St Valery arrived in the Belgian town of Lokeren. At Lokeren they were relieved to find themselves transported in small, open wagons on a narrow-gauge railway, packed thirty men per wagon. The train moved so slowly that civilians were able to approach and openly hand them food. Gordon Barber recalled being thrown a sweet cake that resembled cold Christmas pudding. In these wagons they crossed into the Netherlands.

When they arrived at their destination they were herded towards a coal barge. After an issue of bread, its surface dry and lined with mouldy cracks, they were crammed on board in conditions that would become familiar to so many of their comrades. Tommy Arnott watched as one group refused to enter the darkness of the hold: ‘So the Germans turned their fire hoses on them. When the water and dust subsided they came out like the proverbial “niggers” – I shouldn’t be using that word nowadays but it was OK then – and it fitted the description.’
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Those remaining on deck blessed their good fortune. Those forced into the holds were trapped below in the darkness, since the ladders had been removed to prevent their escape.

Memories of these latter stages of the journey tend to be sketchy. Even those who had faithfully recorded the towns they passed through could do nothing once locked inside the holds of filthy coal barges. The journeys by narrow-gauge railway went from either Moerbeck or Lokeren, taking the prisoners to Terneuzen or Walsoorden, both on the River Scheldt. From there they travelled upriver, then through canals to reach the Rhine.

On the seventeenth day of their march, some of the men captured at St Valery eventually reached the Dutch town of Maastricht. Here they were allowed to receive food from the local branch of the Red Cross. What they received was like manna from heaven. Each man ate as much as he could, desperate to recover a little of the strength he had exhausted in the weeks before.

One of the groups greeted by the Dutch Red Cross reported that the half-inch-thick slice of bread they received was all they had to sustain them on a five-day journey by barge. For the whole of the journey the prisoners, who were so tightly packed they were unable to sit down, were not given any water. Just as on the march, this group noted how the Germans had fed the French prisoners. This led to inevitable friction between the two factions since the British prisoners locked in the holds began to faint due to thirst and hunger.

At Walsoorden on the Scheldt, a group of 1,000 prisoners, including 300 British officers, were marched on to the Dutch paddle steamer SS
Konigin Emma
to complete their journey into Germany. Once they were all on board there was hardly any room to sit down. Both the holds and the unventilated decks were crammed with men. There was no food available for them except for an issue of mouldy bread. From the Scheldt they steamed through canals, then into the River Waal, through Nijmegen, then joined the Rhine before disembarking at Hemer forty hours later. The British officers were moved in groups of between twenty and forty men to a building where the rooms gave just enough space for each man to lie down on the straw-covered floor. For five days they shared the basic toilet facilities with a group of French colonial troops. After that ordeal was over they were sent, without rations, on a thirty-four-hour train journey to the stalag that would become their home.

Another group of 1,000 prisoners that travelled by river spent forty-eight hours in a coal barge travelling between Lokeren and Emmerich. Once again the British were sent in the company of French colonial troops. United Nations war crimes reports later stated that the racial mixing of the British troops with the French Africans was a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. Jim Pearce was one of the prisoners who travelled on a barge that had already been used for transporting men into Germany: ‘It was shocking. The French Moroccans had been on it before us, they’d been to the toilet everywhere. It was filthy. It was awful. Then we got the fleas and lice.’ Gordon Barber, his spirits lifted slightly by the help received from local civilians, found the next stage of the journey returned him once more to a state of extreme discomfort: ‘They loaded us into the hold of this barge. That wasn’t a pretty sight ’cause most of us got diarrhoea.’

Jim Charters recalled the toilet facilities being no more than a pole on the edge of the barge: ‘By this time some of us were so weak that several of the men fell off the pole into the canal and had to be fished out.’ As the boats sailed past watching civilians, they had to drop their trousers, hold on the edge of the boat and do their best to hang on as they emptied their bowels. Cyril Holness remembered his journey from the Netherlands on an old coal barge: ‘This was when I started to feel really lousy. They degraded us. You just hung over the side of the barge, whilst people were walking past on the towpath. It was disgusting. We were all in a right state. That was my worst time.’

Fred Gilbert, still nursing the wounds that were wrapped in increasingly filthy bandages, remembered the cramped conditions:They’d certainly forgotten how many people were supposed to go on a barge! There was room for everybody on the barge. A few people even found room to sit down – they were lucky. If you got space to lay down you were extremely lucky. I had my two feet of space and squatted there. You couldn’t leave that space because someone would take it. Then you’d be stuck standing up. After a while I ambled about a bit and went down below decks. Two lads – silly things – got up from under a ladder. So I got their space and sat in that. They came back and saw me sitting there. They said a few things – I expect they wanted it back. But I wasn’t moving. So I stayed and slept there.

Although the exhaustion of the march had been relieved by the chance to sit down and rest, the question of food was still foremost in the thoughts of the prisoners. Dick Taylor and his mate Stuart Brown realized it was vital to keep their strength up at all costs: ‘We were down below. It was horrible – pretty rough. But you put up with it and make the best of things. We got an issue of raw potatoes and some of the lads started to peel theirs. I said to Stuart “Let’s collect all the peelings” because I knew that later on we’d get nothing. So as they threw them away we got them and kept them. It was astute because it meant we still had something to eat. It makes the difference between keeping on or going under.’ Fortunate enough to be travelling on the upper decks, Fred Coster was able to make contact with the crew of his boat: ‘We were lucky to be on a ferry. The captain was Dutch. I had an army watch with a luminous face. I heard he was flogging food so I went up to him and said, “What will you give me for this watch?” He said one loaf of bread. I said, “What about two?” He agreed so I said, “What about three?” But he wouldn’t budge. So I got these two loaves and took them downstairs and shared them with my two mates. That was our first food for ages.’

As the barges and ferries made their way through the waterways of Belgium and Germany, the prisoners celebrated these issues of food, however meagre. Dry bread was better than no bread – scraps were better than nothing – and just to be able to sit down as they ate, rather than devour raw root vegetables as they walked, was blissful. Fred Gilbert remembered the two ‘meals’ he enjoyed on the Rhine trip: ‘We got bread with cheese and even butter. They were tiny pieces, but because we’d had nothing the day before, that was a jolly good meal! The second day we got the bread and butter, but no cheese. That was the daily ration. But it was food – hooray!’

As they travelled by boat many of the desperate prisoners began to notice some new companions had joined them. At first they scratched at their filthy bodies and thought it was just a reaction to being so pitifully filthy. Then they started to notice movement in each other’s hair. They had lice. This was a new experience; some had known head lice as schoolchildren but it was nothing compared to the invasion of lice that arrived as prisoners of war. Leslie Shorrock, taken prisoner in a hospital beside the Dunkirk beaches, wrote of the lice: ‘We were now in the grip of a savage tormenter, for we were all thoroughly lousy. Lice live and breed on the body, biting and drawing blood, invading every part, especially those covered in hair. We constantly scratched and scratched, but these lice concealed themselves in seams of uniforms . . . it would take us almost a year to fully rid ourselves of these vermin.’
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For some, the arrival at their first proper stop in Germany was marked by an ominous greeting – the town’s air-raid sirens were wailing, and they watched as RAF planes flew overhead and the local population scattered. It served as a warning that as prisoners within Germany they would have to contend both with the violence of their guards and the attentions of the Allied air forces. In time it would become a terrifying combination.

Disembarking from the barges into Germany, many of the veterans of St Valery faced the same treatment that their comrades had faced in Trier. Some recalled how groups of Hitler Youth arrived to goad and beat them. Arriving in Dortmund, where they were sent to a sports stadium, one group recalled the ‘devilish torture’
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by guards who seemed to enjoy every chance to humiliate them. Leslie Shorrock wrote of his first experience of being greeted by German civilians: ‘As we approached a village the inhabitants were all lined up ready to receive us, nearly all old men, young and old women and detestable children. As we passed this unhappy crowd they hissed and spat upon us, tried to kick us, unrestrained in their affectionate welcome by the sadistic guards.’
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As Bill Holmes later admitted, he simply resigned himself to being abused and spat at by civilians. Others were less accepting of their fate. Ronald Holme, of the East Surrey Regiment, recalled the abuse heaped on him by Brownshirts when he disembarked from the barge in Wesel: ‘As our morale got lower our hate for the Germans became more intense.’
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This was a common experience. Jim Charters, who received the same treatment when his barge reached Germany, wrote: ‘I would like to have been there in 1944 when the Yankees arrived. I’d like to know if they were trying to kick them!’

One of the groups disembarked from the barges at Emmerich found themselves spat at, washed down with buckets of water thrown by locals, and immediately sent on a sixty-mile (100-kilometre) march to Dortmund. The prisoners could hear church bells ringing in the distance and realized it must be Sunday morning. As they marched Tommy Arnott had a stroke of fortune:As our straggly line of POWs hiked on, we came to a field in which an elderly German lady stood, holding a basket of rye bread. She must have been terrified at the sight of this horrible lot approaching, so she fled as fast as she could, dropping the bread. Now, hunger is a terrible thing. It becomes the survival of the fittest and you do things you never imagined you would. We were starving – there was a basket of bread – so Ned and I ran over and grabbed a loaf. Other POWs were starving as well and they weren’t going to stand by and watch us eat it. I was knocked down in the rush and had my loaf grabbed out of my hand. By now the German guards were getting worried and fired over our heads to bring us back into line.
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At the sports stadium in Dortmund the prisoners discovered there were groups of wounded British officers who had been transported from France without ever having received treatment. Some were allowed inside the stadium while others remained in a field surrounded by barbed wire. The misery of the scene was enhanced by the piles of steel helmets that had been left on the ground outside the fence. French, Belgian and British helmets had been abandoned there since the guards had decreed they were no longer to be worn by the prisoners. As the already dejected prisoners watched, a guard marched around the fence, casually sticking his bayonet into helmet after helmet, piercing them with a deliberate action as if to underline the magnitude of the German victory. Then he reached one particular British helmet. At the first thrust his blade simply slid off the helmet. He tried again and again, until with one almighty thrust steel met steel and his bayonet snapped in two. A great cheer came up from the watching crowds. It was as if this simple act had helped instil some small glimmer of hope for their future.