大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Chris Greenfield from Bodsham Primary School and has been added to the website on behalf of Wyndham John Stapylton Fletcher with his permission and they fully understand the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was 29 when the war started and living in Bodsham with my wife and children. I was in the Territorial Army as a 2nd Lieutant in the Gunners, Royal Artillery based in England to start with and then had the awful feeling that one must get to France because all wars are fought in France and it might finish before I got there. So I volunteered for a regular regiment which I joined in January 1940 and still nothing was happening until 10th May 1940 I was sleeping in a French field and was woken by a machine gun from a German Aircraft. We then moved on and it struck us as curious that we were not bombed or shelled along the way. But then eventually fighting started and we heard anti-aircraft guns. As we never saw British Aircraft we shot at any aircraft we saw and succeeded in bringing down a French Aircraft. It was very unfortunate that this was a French plane seeing as the French were our allies.
The battle then commenced in full force and we started retreating and someone had a pocket wireless radio and they heard on it that we were being prayed for at Westminster Abbey. We continued to retreat and obviously things were not going very well and the magic word 鈥楧unkirk鈥� was heard for the first time. As we came closer to Dunkirk we could see these enormous columns of burning oil from the tanks and received the deadly order for a Gunner 鈥榖low your guns up and also your transport鈥�. We then had to walk and stopped off at a Belgium Cafe for bacon and eggs! Whilst we were eating there was a lot of noise, a band was playing and we looked out and there were Belgium Troops passing by with white bits of rag in the mussel of their rifle and they said the words of Nous Avons Rendu which means 鈥榳e have surrendered鈥�. We returned to our eggs and bacon! We were getting near Dunkirk and as we approached it we found shelter in the sand dunes and out at sea there was on British Destroyer zigzagging like mad and being bombed but not hit. One soldier said 鈥渢he Navy is here now we shall be alright鈥�. We were in the sand dunes maybe two days and thankful that we didn鈥檛 have to wade out to sea because there was a wooden jetty starting at the sand and going out to sea and under German shell fire and British Destroyers were willing to tie up to this although they then became sitting targets for bombers. Eventually a whole regiment was formed up and we marched over the sand dunes onto this jetty and onto the Destroyer. We came back safely across the channel at thirty knots.

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