Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

There were simply not enough established hospitals to take all the patients. As a result, the wounded were treated in whatever buildings were deemed suitable. Conditions were such in one hospital that the wounded men who were able to walk were forced to use an open latrine above which they had to perch while holding on to a rope suspended from the ceiling. At Le Touquet the wounded were housed in the local casino, with operations taking place in what had been a rich man’s playground. Within the casino’s plush rooms the figures of French nuns who were treating the wounded seemed strangely out of place. They were joined in Le Touquet by captured British medics, among them Ernie Grainger and his comrades from 10th CCS who had been marched from Belgium: ‘We were on the wards with German medical staff. The patients were a mixture of French, German and British. There were lots of French colonial troops. The Germans didn’t treat the French Africans very well at all – they were just left to die. I don’t know why. They were segregated, we weren’t allowed to go near them to give any treatment. I guess their attitude was “What the hell are you doing here fighting us?” But the Germans were still treating us well.’

  The role of the religious orders cannot be overstressed during this period. All across the region Catholic nuns provided medical services for the wounded soldiers, often in their own establishments that had been taken over for the military. One detachment of the RAMC reported how the Germans transferred them to a French Catholic college where all the wounded were given beds with mattresses and neither medical staff nor patients were interfered with by their captors. Others in hospital noted how gas gangrene patients were rapidly separated, so that the stench of their wounds did not affect the rest of the patients.

  Geoff Griffin, wounded as he fought to hold back the Germans from the Dunkirk perimeter, was one of those whose hospital treatment was as good as could be expected in the circumstances. He was initially taken to a convent in Bruges, where he heard French-speaking doctors discussing the possibility of amputating his arm. He argued against it, insisting they attempt to save his arm in order that he might one day be able to return to his pre-war job as a coach-builder. They informed him that the shoulder joint was shattered, the muscles severed and there was just skin holding his arm in place. But as a result of his pleadings, they agreed to attempt to save it.

  From the convent he was sent to a military hospital staffed by British medical personnel. On the staff were British nurses who were married to Belgians. Griffin noted their names – Mrs Somerlink, Jenny Williams, Helene Boudens, Madame Lams – so that some day someone might be able to repay their kindness. Although the German guards prevented the nurses bringing food to the soldiers, they did not interfere with medical care, meaning the men were able to begin the long, slow process of recovery.

  The misery and physical incapacity of the prisoners was reflected by the measures Griffin was forced to go to in order to help his fellow patients. With food in short supply, one of the guards allowed him to scrape the insides of the soup pot, although it was not easy: ‘encased in plaster from neck to waist, with my left arm at an angle of ninety degrees, it was no easy task climbing into boilers to extract perhaps a tiny bowl of soup to share amongst twenty starving men’.12

  Although large numbers of the German medical staff showed the utmost respect to the wounded men left behind in the aftermath of the defeat of the BEF, others held them in contempt and deliberately mistreated them. In July 1940 the first reports of the poor treatment given to some of the British wounded began to reach London via the Red Cross in Switzerland. The Swiss stressed that the reports came from more than one source and that the British were being badly treated and often given no care at all by their captors. Even those friendly civilians who attempted to give water to the wounded prisoners were forced away. A Madame Odier of the Red Cross reported that the condition of wounded British soldiers in French hospitals was ‘deplorable, because of lack of food’.13 The following month reports from the still neutral Americans also reached London. When a representative of the American embassy in Brussels had attempted to visit the wounded receiving treatment in Belgium the Germans refused permission for the visit. Using information gleaned from local sources, the embassy staff were able to report: ‘Owing to lack of food, the condition of British wounded prisoners in northern France was deplorable.’14

  At the hospital in Boulogne rations were no more than a daily issue of soup and biscuits. Furthermore, two-thirds of the British medical supplies were confiscated by the Germans, as was the hospital’s entire stock of cigarettes. At Malines Captain Ironside – the son of General Ironside, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff – died as a result of his mistreatment. Despite his cries for help, the assistance that could have saved him was not forthcoming. Instead the other wounded men in the hospital had to listen to his cries while being forbidden to help him.

  Between June and October 1940 around a thousand wounded Britons were treated at the College of St Augustin at Enghien in Belgium, where Allied doctors used whatever French and Belgian medical supplies were available. There were too few beds so some patients had to sleep on stretchers, and they were constantly hungry. However, that was not the worst of the problems for patients and staff.

  Dr Peters, the German administrator, quite wisely left the treatment of the wounded to the Allied doctors and medics. However, by leaving one particular German in charge at the college, Dr Peters ensured that the treatment given was not as good as it could have been. Feldwebel Walter Scharping was a middle-aged man from Stettin on the Baltic whose behaviour made life a misery for some of the patients. He stopped some of the wounded from receiving any treatment at all, leaving them in a fly-infested room. The list of his offences did not stop at refusing treatment. He was even seen to punch one patient, and the wife of the local mayor, who was attempting to make arrangements for the Red Cross to assist the wounded, reported: ‘I myself saw him kick one of the prisoners with his feet in the belly and drag him into a cellar . . . On another occasion I saw Scharping beating the interpreter . . . Scharping hit the prisoner with a book on the head.’15 When one prisoner escaped from the hospital and was later returned, Scharping also beat that man, leaving him with severe bruising. The German told civilians he wished he had a machine-gun to make his prisoners march faster. At another hospital this behaviour was matched by a German guard who fired a machine-gun at any prisoner who dared to approach the hospital windows.

  In one particularly vicious display, Scharping was seen to beat up a patient and then force French prisoners to join in and complete the beating. Such was his control of the hospital, the Frenchmen were unable to refuse his orders. The German’s attitude towards the patients was also shown when the local population attempted to bring in food for the wounded prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. As a result he simply stopped giving the men their rations. Such was the vindictive nature of Scharping that he left bread to rot rather than issue it to his hungry patients.

  However, one thing that was clear was that he did not discriminate – he treated British, French and Belgian prisoners with the same severity. Others made deliberate efforts to discriminate in their treatment, seeming to attempt to cause resentment and factional disquiet among even the sick and wounded. In one case two wounded Britons were forced to clear out latrines by hand, while French prisoners looked on. If it was disgraceful that the Germans discriminated between wounded soldiers on the grounds of their nationality, it was even worse when French medical staff behaved in the same way towards their allies. One man reported how he and his fellow wounded had their wounds dressed by a French medic. He attempted to get all the British men discharged from hospital while offering impeccable care to his fellow Frenchmen.

  One of those who suffered discrimination was Ernest Lister, a member of a supply company of the 51st Division. He was wounded while driving an officer from his company. Lister was unconscious for three days and then awoke in a hospital at Bruyeres, near Epinal. He discovered he had been wounded in both the leg and head and that whil
e unconscious he had undergone trepanation. He was then transferred to St Dié. When he arrived at the hospital it was discovered that he was British. Lister later reported the treatment he received from the German officer who received incoming patients: ‘His attitude seemed sympathetic. At that time I was wearing the jacket of an old French uniform. The officer asked my nationality in French which I understood sufficiently. When I replied that I was English he threw the charts and photographs away and went on to the next case.’16

  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.’18

  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.’19 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The First Men Home

  Now, without fully comprehending why, we were on our way back to Blighty.

  Joe Sweeney, waiting to board a ship at St Nazaire1

  The good, the bad and the indifferent.

  British infantryman describing the stragglers heading west across France2

  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 port
s 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.