by Sean Longden
The circumstances of each man’s capture were something intensely personal. Every prisoner had his own thoughts and memories of what defeat and capture meant. Yet amid these varying circumstances were certain themes that emerged time and time again. There were the soldiers who, lost and alone, stumbled into the hands of the enemy. There were others who had fought desperate last-ditch battles to hold back the advancing Germans before finally surrendering. For every man who made the conscious decision to lay down his rifle and raise his arms in surrender there was another who was simply dragged, dazed and confused, from the ruins of a defensive position, hardly realizing the battle was over.
In the days leading up to the end of the evacuation, and the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Dunkirk, in an almost constant stream of battles, frightened and exhausted British soldiers became prisoners of war. The rearguard battle at the Mont des Cats, from which Bill Holmes had barely escaped with his life, was just one of many vicious encounters. From the opening defeats in Belgium that had shaken the entire western world, to the bloody battles for vital Channel ports like Boulogne and Calais, or the desperate defence of towns like Cassel and Hazebrouck, British soldiers had found themselves rounded up and herded into captivity.
For the soldiers of the BEF the thought of being a prisoner of war had not entered their minds. Surely, they were far better men than their enemies? The sense of confidence with which they had gone to war meant the sudden discovery they were not invincible had a profound emotional and psychological impact upon them. Graham King, a corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps, summed up the emotions shared by the prisoners of 1940: ‘My world had collapsed around me.’
As the defeated remnants of the BEF went into captivity all shared this sense of hopelessness. In the brief but bloody battles that raged through May, the troops had rapidly learnt the realities of war. Death had become a close companion to all, taking the lives of their friends while fate spared them – for the moment at least. The sickening sight of suffering, the screams of the wounded, the pitiful expressions on the faces of their friends as they realized they were dying, and the sheer exhaustion of war, had soon made the youths, who had spent the phoney war in optimistic expectation, face up to the truth. Just to survive the battle was a bonus. If that meant being torn by bullets but still being able to walk, that too was a blessing.
Such fortune was encapsulated in the memories of Fred Gilbert, a pre-war trainee commercial artist. In the lead up to battle he had not felt particularly scared, but soon learnt the truth. In his very first action he had found his section pinned down in a trench. Raising his helmet above the parapet on the butt of his rifle, it was swiftly struck by two bullets from a sniper hiding in the trees around them. After some time he was instructed to pull his section back to the company HQ. As they retreated bullets smacked into the ground and whistled through the air all around them. Soon they reached an open road: ‘I was waiting for bullets to go by, to tell one man to run. Get up, get out, get down – one at a time. The first one looked at me as if to say “What do you know about it?” He stood up and – bang! – down he went with a bullet straight through him. I couldn’t do anything, he was a goner. Going up that strip of road, the same thing happened to all my section, because they didn’t go when I told them to go.’
Gilbert himself reached company HQ in safety. Finding some other members of the company still in action – including a captain who was standing up desperately trying to clear his jammed revolver – Fred Gilbert rejoined the battle, firing his rifle at the advancing enemy, until he had exhausted all his rounds. At that moment he realized he was helpless, unable to defend himself, yet unable to rise from the ground for fear of being shot, all he could do was remain in position until fate intervened. He didn’t have to wait long, for the Germans had worked their way behind their position: ‘I was hit by three bullets, from behind. I got one in the side, one went through my arm and one went through my ear – I saw that bullet hit the ground in front of me. I just lay still. I knew I couldn’t do anything. My arm couldn’t move. But I was lucky, the bullet in my arm hadn’t hit an artery.’ After a few minutes he raised himself from the ground, still holding a now useless rifle that he couldn’t fire since his left arm was similarly useless, only to see the captain still fiddling with his revolver. As he watched, a German officer and three other soldiers approached. The officer waved his pistol towards Gilbert and told him to walk back down the road along which his ill-fated comrades had retreated.
The wound in his arm was not bleeding too heavily and his senses had been dulled enough to take the edge off the pain of his wounds; however, what Fred Gilbert saw in the minutes that followed brought home just how fortunate he had been:
I went down the road and could see the ditch we had been sheltering in. And in the road I could see my six men who I had tried to tell when to run and when to lie down. They hadn’t done as they were told and now they were corpses in the ditch. That was very sad. I knew them well, they were all men I’d known for some time. I couldn’t do anything for them now, they were just bodies lying on the ground. Also, as I walked, there were fully armed German soldiers walking up the road. I couldn’t go and see the others to see if they were alive because the Germans had told me to go straight down the road. I’d already been hit by three bullets – no thank you, that’s enough! I didn’t want to risk another one. I was all on my own as I walked down to the village. It was hopeless.
This dreadful sense of hopelessness was shared by all the men who survived to make the long journey into captivity that summer, whatever the circumstances of their capture.
As the British Army fought to hold the line of the Escaut Canal, there were large numbers of soldiers who were trapped within the jaws of the German advance. Peter Wagstaff was one of those captured by the advancing Germans. As the Germans broke through the battalions on either side of his positions, Wagstaff and his men continued to fight hard. He tried to explain the feelings of an officer, barely out of his teens, as he received his introduction to the confusion of war:
We were not aware of the attack coming in. There was too much noise, so we didn’t have the faintest idea. I could hear firing to the right and firing to the left. I could also hear firing to the rear and I remember thinking ‘I hope that’s being mopped up by somebody else.’ It’s ominous to hear firing behind you but you have enough to do just holding the front. You are bemused, you are not conscious of anything apart from what is immediately in front of you. You haven’t got time to think and you haven’t got time to analyse. And you haven’t got time to be afraid of anything. You are just swept along on the tide of war.
The pressures faced by Wagstaff and his men were immense as they came under increasing enemy fire:
The gunner on the Boyes anti-tank rifle had his arm shot off next to me. But you got on with the job. Your ‘automatic pilot’ takes over. I do remember our cook went off his head completely – he was absolutely hysterical. I remember he said, ‘I can’t face it, sir. I can’t face it at all.’ He almost fell in the fire. I thought to myself ‘What do you do in a case like this?’ In the First World War it would be a case of. ‘The hero dragged out his revolver and shot him’. I remember that crossing my mind for a fleeting, idiotic second. But what do you do? I left him, but God knows what happened to him after that.
Eventually, orders came through that Wagstaff should pull his men back. In the chaos every second counted. Unfortunately for Wagstaff, vital moments were lost as he waited for his forward section to pull back from the canal. He could not withdraw without his men, but their delay was to prove costly: ‘By the time they joined us I had about twelve wounded with me. We ran up this roadway with a high bank on our left and a wall on the right. We ran right into them. There were twelve of us facing three German machine-guns. There was nothing we could do. I couldn’t go to the right or the left. The twelve wounded men had about two rifles between them.’
As it became clear they were prisoners of war, Second-Lieutenan
t Wagstaff reacted in an unexpected manner:
I let out a short burst of laughter. I remember vividly thinking, ‘Of all the things that could happen to me it wasn’t this!’ It was fear, the build up – it is just hysterics really. I think I was laughing at my own misfortune. Your mind is so muddled that the obvious answer is ridicule. My Corporal – Corporal Thomas – said to me, ‘Take off your badges of rank, sir!’ He later told me I said, ‘I will not. I am a British officer and I will die a British officer.’ But I don’t remember saying it.
Though the battle was over, the suffering was not at an end, as he soon discovered: ‘The German took me to the other side of the road. There was this poor little bugger there. He’d had a hole blown out of his back. He was breathing heavily, except that the air was coming through the torn remnants of his battledress and the back of his lung. Myself and Corporal Thomas stayed with him until he died.’
Despite the last-ditch battles fought through France and Belgium, there were some whose capture seemed to be just the result of bad luck. Typical of those whose capture was almost farcical was Lance-Corporal Eric Reeves of the 2/5th Battalion, Queen’s Regiment. Just nineteen years old, he was typical of the young volunteers that swelled the ranks of the British Army in the late 1930s. Enthused by the notion of being a soldier, he had joined the Territorial Army at sixteen, taking the rank of ‘boy’. He had only been accepted for service after a wily old recruiting sergeant, a veteran of the retreat from Mons, gave him a pair of oversized, double-thick soled boots to put on at his medical. Without the boots, he would never have reached the necessary height. As the sergeant told him, ‘Look at that my lad, five foot, two and a half inches, just the minimum height for an infantryman.’
Undeterred, he had trained hard and thought himself ready for war when his unit was mobilized on 1 September 1939. Despite his enthusiasm, he had little idea of what he would soon be facing:
I was a plumber’s mate. I was at work when I heard we were being mobilized. I was delighted – excited – I couldn’t wait. My thought was ‘Let’s get at ’em’. All the volunteers were like me. We’d have been very disappointed if war hadn’t come. Well, ignorance is bliss! We’d read books at the library about the First World War. We looked at the pictures, we thought it was great. Of course, it didn’t show the horrors of it. Even the guys down at the British Legion never talked about it. We looked at it like ‘Cowboys and Indians’ – all we knew was what we’d learnt down at the pictures. We thought we were invincible, we were the young lions. They couldn’t beat us.
Fired up by such unrealistic notions, Reeves was still filled with enthusiasm for war when his battalion arrived in France in April 1940. He had his mates by his side and felt no fear as they moved towards Abbeville to meet the enemy as their forces advanced up the Somme valley. When he finally faced the enemy he discovered war held little of the glamour he had expected. On 20 May they watched as Abbeville was bombed by Junkers bombers that circled the skies above the town. Next, it was to be their turn to face the forces of the blitzkrieg: ‘At about half four we could hear the war coming towards us – small-arms fire and the bang, bang, bang of tanks. Their tanks were firing at us from the flanks. We couldn’t move our section to face them. There was tracer going over our heads. I could hear the noise of bullets above my head – like whipcracks – we were lucky but a section behind us copped it.’ As darkness fell they were ordered to withdraw along a sunken lane to a hilltop wood. So ended an ignominious first day of war for Eric Reeves: ‘I’d never even opened fire. We hadn’t seen anything to fire at apart from tanks. One or two blokes had “pooped off” at tanks, but all they did was draw their fire. The rounds from the Boyes anti-tank rifle were just bouncing off them. So we’d just lain there and taken it.’
Along with two men from his section, Reeves was sent to a listening post where he spent the hours of darkness watching German flares float down through the air, illuminating the fields around with a sickly red and green light. Even more ominous was the noise of the tanks whose engines could be heard rumbling through the night air. What happened next was a fitting reflection of the chaos faced across the Allied front. As dawn broke, a sergeant appeared and asked Reeves what he was doing. Reeves replied that they were D Company’s standing patrol. What he heard next shocked him: ‘The sergeant said, “They left three hours ago! They went in small parties, they’re making for the Somme river. But I got lost in the dark, like these blokes.” He pointed to the men he had with him. So we teamed up and headed off together.’
The lost soldiers began to make their way across country, hoping to catch up with the rest of the battalion. With the Germans seemingly having departed, the fields seemed curiously quiet. In the dull morning light they could just make out the corpses of cows that had been caught up in the previous day’s battles. When they finally met a French civilian he reassured them the Germans had moved on. Emboldened, the soldiers moved on to the road and continued their march, hoping to make better time. Once again, Reeves and his new comrades were in for a surprise:
After about half an hour we reached a roadblock – it was a hay cart and all sorts of other stuff. There was a bank on one side of the road and a field of clover on the other. Then we heard a voice. In perfect English it called out ‘Gentlemen of the Queen’s, where have you been? We have been expecting you.’ And the sergeant said, ‘That’s a bit of luck, it’s our blokes!’ Then the owner of the voice showed himself. He had a long green coat on, a ‘coalscuttle’ helmet with a skull and crossbones badge and was holding a machine-gun.
For a brief moment there was a stand-off between the lone German and the dozen or so British soldiers. Unconcerned, the British sergeant called out: ‘Hang on a minute, mate, there are more of us than there are of you.’ Remaining calm, the SS officer told the men not to be foolish. At that moment the carts of the roadblock were pulled apart and the British soldiers marched through, to be met by the sight of two Mark II Panzer tanks with their guns trained on them. The German then explained how he had been able to confuse them with his accent: ‘Mummy is English and Daddy is in the German army. And I owe it to my father to support him. I came down from Oxford and joined the German army. So here I am.’
Showing concern for his prisoners, the English-speaking officer told them his men would bring them food and quickly arranged treatment for the wounded. Despite this, Eric Reeves was hit by the realization of his situation:
You didn’t expect to be taken prisoner. It went through your mind that you might be killed or you might be wounded. But being captured never came into the equation. The first thing that went through your mind was fear – we’d all heard about the SS. All the time you’re thinking ‘What’s going to happen next?’ Then next I felt humiliated, I thought ‘What a waste of time!’ I’d not even fired a shot. I was ashamed. I felt indignation – somebody had let me down or I’d let someone down. You don’t know what’s what. What made it worse was we’d gone out there thinking we were invincible.
For so many of the troops their deflation was compounded by the realization of how well equipped the Germans were. The British had discarded their First World War vintage rifles and surrendered to an enemy carrying modern automatic weapons. Some among the prisoners approached German tanks and banged on their hulls. After all, the propagandists had assured them many of the German tanks were made of wood or cardboard. Furthermore, the Germans seemed to have vast amounts of transport for their infantry – with motorcycle combinations and armoured half-tracks appearing everywhere on the battlefield – while the British had been transported in requisitioned and hastily repainted civilian delivery lorries. Sharing the field with Reeves were others of his battalion who had also been captured in the fighting around Abbeville. Not all among them had been as enthusiastic as Reeves. There were plenty of young conscripts and militiamen who had been less than eager to play their part in the war. Indeed, the 2/5th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment had been formed the previous year when the army underwent massive expansi
on. When the l/5th Battalion, the best of the regiment or ‘the creamy boys’, as Eric Reeves referred to them, travelled to France, Reeves himself had been left behind since he was still too young to serve abroad. In the weeks that followed, the new battalion had absorbed men who seemed far less enthusiastic than his prewar colleagues. Among them were recruits from Somerset, including Jim Lee, a Romany Gypsy who had rapidly become one of Reeves’ mates and who happily admitted his pre-war employment had been as a poacher. This was typical of the experiences of regiments throughout the army. When war came the regular soldiers and Territorials were eager to ‘have a crack at the Hun’. They were followed into uniform by a wave of patriotic recruits, equally eager to do their bit. By late 1940 the army began to absorb conscripts who were less than enthused about the idea of war.
Typical of this breed was twenty-one-year-old Ken Willats. A former chef from south London, Willats had no aspirations to military glory. He had not been caught up in the wave of patriotism that had sent so many others his age to the recruiting offices. He was blunt in his appraisal of his military aptitude: ‘I had no ambition to be a soldier. I didn’t volunteer, I wasn’t the military type. Like thousands of others I went because I was told to go.’ Despite this, he accepted his fate and reported to Crawley, where he was sent to join his battalion. He was not over concerned. As Willats remembered: ‘I didn’t realize the importance of the declaration of war. I thought it would be over by Christmas. Then we ended up saying the same thing every year. Eventually we were right – but it took six years.’
Once he found himself in Guildford, training to be an infantryman, Willats soon realized the army was less than ready for him and his new comrades. They had uniforms but no barrack rooms and were forced to sleep on the floors of private billets. Parading each morning at a Territorial Army drill hall, they were marched to receive their meals in the town’s cattle market. It was an inauspicious start to what would be a brief war for Willats.
