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My father later in his life would talk of the Second World War in snatches, his experience with the BEF in 1940, being a POW for almost five years and the awful ‘long march’ across Europe from the eastern Stalag 344 to the western Stalag Moosburg VIIIA in 1945. But the event that resonated with me was one that touched my sense of fear and panic, the flight from Cassel.

I have tried to put my father’s story into the written word with his resonant West Country/Gloucester voice inhabiting my memory. However, as the narrative relies on the memories of father and son, forgive me if some details are in error.

My father had been a soldier from boyhood until 1937 and as a reservist was re-called to his regiment in 1939. So he was not a raw recruit and the army found him employment organising the collection and delivery of hurriedly converted coal lorries for army transport, as apparently in 1940 not many soldiers knew how to drive.

The German advance in May 1940 was to shatter his comfortable ‘phoney war’ farmhouse billet with an early disagreement with the enemy at the Albert Canal. This encounter had sharpened his senses as to the seriousness of belonging to a war-time British Army.

Later at the hilltop town of Cassel he was ordered to drive one of the company vehicles for desperately needed ammunition/supplies. This became more dangerous with each successive run, the last particularly so as he was to find his lorry punched with canon holes - guessing what lay ahead he was only thinly impressed with his survival.

He was sent back to his company who were still defending Cassel, giving the troops at Dunkirk precious time to evacuate. The prospect of being left behind was not given much conversation - too dispiriting, especially as he found the company was now a mixed lot with soldiers from other units. Orders on how to hold Cassel as long as possible were a little vague but resistance to the Germans continued from this miscellaneous soldiery. With the enemy finding their target with ever more accuracy, ammunition running low, virtually no food, stale water, tiredness and the claustrophobically hot weather my father thought it must have been getting near the time to ‘bugger off’. The order came at last that they were to withdraw, but it would be every man for himself as the structures for an orderly retreat were just not available.

At some point during the withdrawal he found himself in a wood with other soldiers, some he knew and others he didn’t. Hushed discussion was wrenched from them by sudden amplified instructions from the Germans to surrender and promises to respect the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. My father was able to dimly see a German soldier with a megaphone silhouetted at the edge of the wood, who in English was announcing ‘Tommy you are surrounded, you have fought well but your position is hopeless’. My father at this time, in his dehabilitated condition, was inclined to agree and was about to disable his rifle when a loud crack at his left ear drew his sight directly at the megaphone and the herald violently parting company. The Welsh soldier who had been sitting next to him had shot the German dead.

Surprise was an emotion that was soon extinguished by naked terror. The enemy unleashed a furious array of weaponry at the wood, small arms fire, machine guns, grenades and mortars that literally distorted normal means of spatial awareness. Branches and leaves raining down, spinning lumps of wood and stones flying up, both up and down becoming indistinguishable by a choking fog of directionless earth dust. All encapsulated with the sounds of battle filtering into an exclusive dull thudding scream. He had no thought to direction, only a basic desire to avoid the orange ripping blasts that penetrated this soup of potential death or maiming. Running with fear as his fuel and panic as its close sibling, the vicious brambles clawed with their unwelcome embrace. The repeating, tumbling thought of what he would do to the Welshman if he should survive kept my father in motion and just this side of complete dislocation.

Crumpling ground flung him into a drainage ditch with other grunting bodies, a splinter of comfort as he recognised the smell of British squaddies. This blind, khaki caterpillar clumsily began to paw its way along the foetid ditch away from the danger of the wood. As the air became clear and the noise of battle receded the ditch became the men’s escape highway. Moving swiftly and with little sound my father and others made good their distance. Eventually, believing it safe to climb out of the ditch and onto an adjoining road, he noticed his uniform was virtually shredded and with a foulness he was not altogether sure was solely from the stinking drainage ditch.

With no specific order as to what, where or how he was to find the rest of the British Army he made his way westward. After walking for a while he was gladdened to find two Gloucester men he knew lying by the road, they were the Dainty brothers. Albert Dainty was being cradled by his brother Jack, and as my father approached he saw a sucking, bubbling red hole in his chest as big as a fist. He urged Jack to join him in his search for the retreating army as he thought Albert was a ‘gonner’, but Jack felt he could not face his mother if he left Albert to die alone. My father wished him luck and continued westward. He was not to get very far, for he was captured by the Germans close to the French/Belgium border at a place called Watou/Wateau and so began five years of POW captivity in Poland and Germany.

A footnote to this story is that after his release my father was back home and walking in Gloucester town centre. He was curious to see a vaguely familiar figure on the opposite pavement, but was severely shaken to see that it was Albert Dainty striding towards him. The two men had a pint or two at the nearest pub to marvel at their good fortune on surviving that fearful day.

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