- Contributed by听
- kiteman
- People in story:听
- kenneth Dawson
- Location of story:听
- Dunkirk
- Background to story:听
- Army
- Article ID:听
- A2317916
- Contributed on:听
- 20 February 2004
my Dad's passed on now, but i remember he told me about his experience at Dunkirk
he was only a young bloke like a lot over there at that time, "I had my 21 Birthday in France" he said proudly , while we sat over the kitchen table one night,i had heard him tell me this story before but i did 't mind hearing it again, i never did,
He served in the Royal Service Corps and was driving a 4 tonner at the time, dont ask me the make though, Leyland or ERF i suppose?
From what i remember he was ordered to drive to Dunkirk, on reaching here the orders where to take a hammer from the toolkit and smash his truck and any equipment, so it would not be captured and used by the enemy, i noticed a little regret in his voice recalling that,he must have liked his truck!
He mentoned the Stukers, when the pilot decided to dive, screaming earthbound ,but did not go into any more detail after that.
"The bigger ships would drop anchor further out to sea" he explained so they would not gound on the seabed, "and the smaller boats would come in as far as they could to pick us up.
It must have been a destroyer or a frigate that my Dad found himself on, he used to laugh at this point saying "i was going to a lower deck and all of a sudden there was a massive explosion and in one second i was at the top of the stairs ,the next i was lying at the bottom i thought we had been hit, but it was only one of the ships big guns firing" he chuckled.
In the sentence before or after his big gun experience, he told me of the ship that had sailed out before his, she had been hit directly and everyone had lost there lives on her, that made the war more real to me at that moment, thinking if he had been on that ship we would'nt be sitting in our kitchen..
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