Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  It really got hit! The first time was in June 1944. They hit the place while we were working – but we weren’t allowed in air-raid shelters. Then they bombed us each month until Christmas. At that time the Germans were so desperate for manpower that we were working every day for four weeks then having a weekend off. We’d just finished our shift and got back to the camp on Saturday afternoon and over the bombers came and hit our camp with five bombs. That’s when we lost blokes.

  With the commencement of the bombing raids on Blechammer the whole atmosphere changed for the prisoners:

  The civilians you used to talk to stopped saying ‘good morning’. The offices were all at one end of the camp. They had a line of buses waiting for the air raids. So as soon as the sirens went all the boftins could get in the buses and get away. We were working near there one day and as the sirens went we waited for the buses. When they turned the corner we ran out and climbed up the ladder that took you on to the roof rack. We went about ten miles out while the camp was being bombed – we had a grandstand view of the bombing from this hill. But one time we did it and the bombers actually bombed all round the hill we were on. They were bombing the antiaircraft sites around us! This German said to us, ‘You will have to walk back!’ I was cheeky, I said to him, ‘Yeah, and from here we can run away.’ So he let us back on the bus to go back to the camp.

  Although the air raids helped to reassure the prisoners the Allies were winning the war, they also put them under the psychological pressure of worrying that bombing might turn the guards against them:

  You were always in a certain amount of danger that one of the guards was going to run amok. One of the guards went home on leave and previously he’d treated all the blokes well. He’d been fair to them, they’d even given him fags and coffee to take home. But when he came back from leave he was a broken man because his family had been destroyed in a bombing raid. He was a different man after that. He was spiteful to the prisoners. You could see the difference in him. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to turn on us.

  By 1945 there still remained thousands of POWs – in varying degrees of health – who had been in captivity since the dark days of 1940. Almost to a man, they had developed a ‘stalag mentality’ in which their prime concern was for their personal survival. They had grown cynical and increasingly accepted anything the world threw at them as long as their own lives were not affected. Les Allan recalled how, in the latter days of the war, long-term prisoners would feel less bitter about violence by the guards, pointing out that the victim had probably brought the violence on himself by his behaviour. Effectively, they had developed a protective shield that helped keep them sane in a world that had grown increasingly mad. As Jim Pearce remembered, as their fifth year of captivity drew to a close: ‘Life was getting tough and the Jerries were getting tough as well!’

  The discovery of just how mad the world had become would include a final trial that was to be faced by the victims of Dunkirk – it was a trial that allowed them the right finally to return home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Going Home

  I met him just after the war and he was a very cynical, very embittered young chap.

  Patricia Wagstaff on the effect of five years’ captivity upon her husband

  Everything you do in life leaves a scar and those five years left many scars . . . There were about twelve people captured with me and only about six of them came back home.

  Peter Wagstaff on the psychological impact of five years’ captivity

  As 1944 drew to a close the men left behind at Dunkirk were deep in the midst of their fifth winter in captivity. For six months, since the joyous relief of the D-Day landings, the prisoners had waited for the army that had escaped in 1940 to repay the favour and rescue them. If the summer and autumn of 1944 had been filled with good news, as the Allies advanced on the German frontier, the winter was very different. Every winter had been a miserable experience for the prisoners. Working prisoners spent days out in the bitter cold shovelling snow, cutting ice, digging sugar beet from frozen ground. With no protective clothes they wrapped themselves up as best they could and prayed to avoid frostbite. Yet this final winter was something else.

  With Germany facing defeat, its economy was slowly collapsing. Rations deteriorated, often falling back to the starvation levels they had known in the sickening summer of 1940. Back in their first year of captivity they had been saved by Red Cross parcels, but by late 1944 the supply of parcels had begun to dry up. As the Allied advance cut through the supply routes previously used for parcels, the prisoners’ future began to look increasingly bleak. With the icy hand of the war’s worst winter gripping the prisoners, they once more began to face the awful realization that if something did not happen soon they might not live to see liberation.

  What did happen was not something any of them would have hoped for. In early 1945 the stalags and workcamps across the eastern regions of the Reich – East Prussia and the former Polish and Czech lands – began to close. For all the prisoners had long dreamt of camps closing so that they could head home, this was not the end they had hoped for. While five years previously they had been crammed into stinking cattle trucks for the journey east, the journey west would be different. This time they were heading west on foot. There was an irony in these circumstances. In 1940 they had endured the blistering heat of summer as they marched into captivity. In 1945 they were again sent out on to the roads, this time on roads deep in ice and snow. Yet, though the weather conditions were so different, the prisoners soon realized their real enemies were the same – starvation, exhaustion and the murderous behaviour of some among their guards. It was a journey that drove the prisoners to the very brink of survival.

  Most of the prisoners knew that their camps would have to be evacuated. Those in the east could hear the guns of the Red Army as it blasted its way westwards. Those working on the railways had long seen the trains crammed with wounded Germans heading home and then watched as increasingly young and nervous soldiers headed east to face their nemesis. Yet when the word finally came that the camps were to be evacuated it still came as a shock to the prisoners. At a workcamp in East Prussia Les Allan and his mates were called out in the middle of the night for a roll-call. They lined up in the biting cold – huddling deep into their overcoats – desperate to get back in their bunks. Then the word came they were leaving. No warning, no time to prepare, just line up and march out of the gates. All they had were the clothes they stood up in.

  Les Allan cursed his luck. He had been fortunate to survive when the convent at Hazebrouck had collapsed on him back in 1940. Then he had no idea what lay ahead. This time he knew what to expect – only this time it would be colder. He well knew that he would need every ounce of his energy to survive. There was one problem. When they were called outside, Allan had left his boots beside his bunk. When they went outside they only took things they thought would be stolen; as a result Allan had taken his chess set. He knew no one would dare steal his boots since they were marked with his name. To be caught stealing a man’s boots would have been far too risky. If caught, it would have resulted in a severe beating – or worse. As a result Les Allan found himself facing a march of hundreds of miles along icy roads wearing just a pair of rough canvas-topped clogs.

  As the men left they soon realized they were not alone on the roads. There were thousands of German families who were also heading west – fearful of the revenge they would face from the Poles and Russians once the German Army had retreated. There was also another vast wave of humanity forced out on to the roads alongside the POWs. As Graham King left Thorn he first noticed them:

  On the 19th January 1945, we were very rudely awakened by the shouting of our guards. We were to get our things together, food for three days as we were to move out of this camp to another in Germany. We could take only as much as we could carry and rations for three days . . . We fell in outside the compound on the main road, quietly smoking and chattering away. There was a fee
ling of suppressed excitement as individually we realized that we could be making our first few steps towards Blighty and home. Not far from where we stood was a column of people who appeared to be dressed in striped pyjamas, both sexes. We moved towards them but they retreated and their guards shouted at them to move away. The guards wore Brownshirt uniforms and one kid about sixteen had a whip with which he started beating some of these poor sods, so we took his whip away and threatened him with it. He and his friends shouted to our guards who told them shove off, or words to that effect. We discovered later that they were from a concentration camp. During the next months we were to see many abandoned by the roadside.

  The columns of marching men soon discovered the conditions had conspired against them. One night, Graham King was told by a guard that the thermometer on a farmhouse had read — 35°C. He later described how, as the moon rose and the temperature dropped he could hear the ominous ‘crackling silence of a land freezing under a Polish winter’. Such temperatures would have tested even the best prepared of men, let alone a bunch of men tired after five years of captivity. Many found themselves dressed in nothing more than their battledress and an overcoat. Some had blankets they could wrap around themselves like a shawl. Some had hats, gloves and spare socks, others had nothing. They simply turned up their collars, stuffed their hands deep into their pockets and shuffled along in hope that they would survive.

  By night they slept out in the open, unless they were fortunate enough to be herded into a barn. Those with blankets wrapped themselves as best they could, scraped away some snow and curled up, just hoped for the best, as Calais veteran Bob Davies remembered: ‘You just stopped in a field, dug a hole in the snow to keep the wind out and – with a bit of luck – you woke up in the morning!’ After a day’s marching, with snow swirling around them, they dropped to the earth as their desperately exhausted bodies fought a perplexing battle with their minds. What mattered most – rest or food, sleep or protection from the cold? Was it better to take off their boots and risk them freezing or should they keep their boots on and risk frostbite as a result of poor circulation?

  Having left his final working party, Jim Pearce joined the march and spent ten weeks on the road. He remembered the conditions:

  I wore two sets of clothes and had a blanket over my head like a shawl – no gloves – it was shocking. My boots soon started to wear out. I remember the first time I took them off – next morning I couldn’t get them back on, they were frozen! I fainted – so a bloke rubbed snow on my face to revive me. I never took them off again after that. We slept outside every night, we tried eating raw sugar beet but it was too bitter. I thought I wouldn’t survive. People were dying with dysentery. Sometimes they dug latrines but men sometimes fell into the pit – there was nowhere for them to wash! Some men dropped out and they got shot; you’d see bodies by the roadside. Maybe it was better they did shoot them, otherwise they’d have just frozen to death. We despaired – we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. Some days we didn’t care if we lived or died – life was finished.

  One of the men who gave up the will to live was Ken Willats. Always a reluctant soldier, Willats lacked the physical strength to endure the plummeting temperatures of the Polish winter. After his first night sleeping out in the snow he was unable to continue:

  The first night was horrendous. We walked all night and all day. Then we were marched into a field late at night. The temperature must have been 30 degrees below zero. There was no cover . . . When we got up in the morning I was so exhausted I could hear music playing and see houses – I was hallucinating. I saw these houses that weren’t there. It was then I decided I would sit down and have a sleep . . . My survival instinct was gone. It was as if I had been anaesthetized. I was at the limit of my endurance.

  Fortunately for Willats he had not been forgotten. He was part of a group of five, including Gordon Barber, the regular army gunner who had been captured at St Valery. Though men from very different backgrounds, the two had become firm friends during the two years they had spent on a Polish farm. When Barber noticed Willats was missing he turned back to find him:

  He was by the tree. We got hold of him, he was fucking cold. His teeth were chattering. I said, ‘You’ll die if you stop there. You won’t be tired any more.’ So we put our arms round his shoulders and off we went and caught the others up. We were lucky that night we found a barn to sleep in . . . The next morning it was sunny. I went out and found a horse-drawn wagon the Germans were carrying the sick on. Ken was just frozen so we got him on this wagon and they went. I never saw him again until we got home.

  As medics, Graham King and his mates knew something about circulation and survival. To cope with sleeping outdoors they implemented a rotation system devised by explorers in the Antarctic:

  It was essential to clear the snow from the ground, lay down a covering on which to lie as this would act as a kind of insulation. The party then lay down in a row like spoons and covered themselves up. Every fifteen minutes, the guy at the right of the row got up and moved to the other end and everybody moved one place to the right. In that way everyone spent some time being sheltered by the rest of the group and so kept reasonably warm, although sleep was at a minimum. To ward off frozen feet, it was essential to slacken off all fastening so that the blood circulation would not be hindered, in fact it was even better to remove shoes and socks, dry off the feet and wrap them loosely in some item of dry clothing. Next morning, of course, the damp socks and boots were frozen solid . . . however, you get frostbite only when feet are frozen. If your boots and socks are damp then the temperature is above freezing and you need not fear frost-bitten feet. I explained all this to the group from 16 and, amazingly, they all followed this routine. Of course to thaw out the socks you had to use the warmth of your own feet and gradually ease them over the old tootsies and pull them on, then slowly force on the boots. This took about an hour. Once shod we began to move around to get the circulation going in order to move on the way.

  Of course, not all the marching men were aware – or physically capable – of looking after their feet in this manner. As a result, frostbite became a severe problem for them. Graham King helped as far as he could:

  At this time another bloke asked me to look at his feet. I asked him what was wrong and he replied he could not feel anything. He took off his boots and socks, displaying a pair of feet as black as ink. I felt them and they were as cold as icicles, frost-bitten right through and would be gangrenous very shortly. He needed emergency surgery or he would die. Unfortunately we had no means of carrying out what he needed. I asked his friend if he would let the patient put his feet on his bare body under his jacket in the faint hope that this might get some circulation going. Next day, passing through a small town we left him at a civilian hospital where the nursing sisters of a religious order promised to care for him. Before leaving, I asked him when he had last taken off his boots. Not once since we had left Thorn . . . I never knew what happened to this poor chap; I hope he got home eventually.

  Not all were so fortunate. Plenty of men, their feet ravaged by frostbite and unable to march another step, simply collapsed by the roadside. The lucky ones were dragged along by their mates, others were ignored by the men around them, each one of whom was engrossed in his own personal battle for survival. The sound of rifle fire became an increasingly common factor in their lives, as men who had fallen out were executed in cold blood at the roadside. Hardly bothering to look up, the prisoners simply trudged past as the snow covered the corpses of their murdered comrades.

  As the marchers moved on, the effects of the shortage of food began to bite just as much as the wind. In 1940 the problem had been thirst, with the Germans refusing to allow them access to pumps and ponds, yet they had survived by stealing whatever was growing in the countryside around them. In the winter of 1944/45 the situation was reversed. They had no shortage of water, since there was an endless amount of snow that could be melted. The difficulty was that there
were no vegetables growing in the frozen fields. As Graham King noted: ‘Signs of malnutrition were now appearing. Sunken cheeks, haggard looks, baggy clothing and tickling throats all spoke of the lack of essentials in the diet. In effect we were walking ourselves to death and there was little that could be done.’

  It was not long before King had his one personal encounter with the dangers of marching week after week on starvation rations. In desperation he picked up a small piece of frozen carrot from the roadside. Knowing that even the smallest piece of food could help ward off hunger, he rapidly consumed the carrot. Minutes later he was gripped by an agonizing pain in his stomach. He fell out by the roadside, unable to move any further. One of the guards, accompanied by two English soldiers, soon arrived to hurry him on:

  He told me to move on, I refused. He told me again, still I refused. He drew his pistol, cocked it and told me to move or he would shoot me. I blew my top, ripped open my battledress blouse, bared my chest and told him to shoot; I’d had a gutful of Hitler and all the bloody stupid Nazis and didn’t care any more. He looked at me, slowly secured his gun and placed it in the holster. ‘The SS will be along soon,’ he said, ‘they’ll shoot.’ And off the trio went. About ten minutes later, I started to retch and suddenly out popped two small, hard pieces of semi-frozen carrot.