大象传媒

TONY鈥橲 DUNKIRK
(By his beach signalman)

When in 1998, after 58 years, I finally traced the Royal Navy officer, who had been the beachmaster in charge of my group at La Panne during the evacuation of Dunkirk (see: A WEEK IN BELGIUM), he replied to my letter of introduction with the following:
鈥榃hat a nice surprise to receive your letter this morning forwarded from The Association of Naval Officers. It was indeed I at La Panne鈥�.

He enclosed for me a copy of an article he had written some years previously for the NATO Staff Bulletin, which he thought I might find interesting.

This then is the story by the late Lt. Cmdr. G.A.J. Goodhart DSC R.N., who passed away on 28th May 2003.

SUMMER ON A BELGIUM BEACH
By a NATO pensioner
This article does not unfortunately refer to the joys of the seaside but, instead to the harrowing days of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in May 1940.
This remarkable achievement 鈥� if an all-out retreat can be called an achievement 鈥� was made possible by; first, exceptionally calm and warm weather and; second, by the German Army鈥檚 temporary halt in its amazingly speedy advance towards the North Sea and the English Channel. It had apparently advanced so fast that its supply train had been unable to keep up with it.
Although secrecy was fairly strictly observed in England, it was soon generally well known that things were not going too well with the Army in Europe; it was thus no great surprise when a dozen young Royal Navy lieutenants were called together in Portsmouth one morning, each issued with a revolver and a tin hat and sent post-haste to Dover where they were immediately embarked in a destroyer and 鈥� equally speedily 鈥� disembarked at Dunkirk.
Some of the group remained at Dunkirk while others (including myself) were told to spread out along the beaches running northeast from Dunkirk as far as La Panne just over the border in Belgium. As I was the most junior of the group, I found myself having the furthest to walk and ended up as beachmaster at La Panne (now, I believe, called De Panne).
The task of the beachmasters was loosely described as, 鈥淒o what you can to help the Army get away by boat and ship, but preferably do not get taken prisoner yourselves鈥�.
The chief beachmaster responsible for the whole area was Captain Tennant and, soon after our arrival on the beaches, he called us all together, including other officers, many of them RNVR lieutenants, who had already been on the beaches for several days, and told us to reduce our numbers by half.
We agreed among ourselves that those who had already done several days and those married (very few of us were) should leave 鈥� which they did either by boat from the beach or going back to the beach to Dunkirk and thence to Dover by ship.
Among those leaving was a young RNVR lieutenant, Stanley Nettle, who had preceded me as beachmaster at La Panne. Many years after the war he was instrumental in setting up a memorial at De Panne in remembrance of the dramatic days of 1940. He also published in, 1985, a most interesting book called 鈥淒unkirk 鈥� Old Men Remember鈥�, a collection of anecdotes by a wide variety of Army and Navy officers and men who had been involved in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force.
The whole operation, code-named Dynamo, was organised by Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey from Dover Castle where he had set up underground offices in the old gun emplacements and magazines. As is now very well known, an appeal had gone out in England for little ships, yachts and even rowing boats to come to the rescue of the Army and a huge number of crafts of all shapes and sizes speedily came to the Dover area to be (to some extent) marshalled and sent across the Channel where they achieved almost incredible successes in taking off thousands of troops either the whole way back to England or ferrying them out to larger vessels lying offshore 鈥� some of them naval, but very many merchant coastal craft and pleasure vessels.
On the beach at La Panne, groups of soldiers were arriving for embarkation, most of them in good order with officers or NCOs in charge.
The task of the beachmaster was to collect suitable numbers for the very wide variety of small craft, mainly rowing boats, to make sure that they were not unduly overloaded and, hopefully, find some of the soldiery capable of rowing out to the larger vessels lying offshore.
In many cases, small motorboats helped in towing them out. Getting the boats back for the next load was sometimes a bit of a problem as, not unnaturally, once they had reached a seagoing ship there wasn鈥檛 exactly competition to row back to the beach.
Although occasional bombs were aimed by the Germans Air Force at the ships lying off the beaches, their main effort was directed at the port of Dunkirk, which was heavily and continuously under air attack. A certain amount of light shelling occurred from German Army guns further up the coast, though I do not remember any casualties. I do, however, remember being one of many on the beach who remarkably rapidly dug individual foxholes when the shelling became unduly aggressive 鈥� it was surprising how effective a tin hat could be when used as a shovel!
On about the third day, a boat came in from a destroyer bringing a petty officer with whom I had served before the war. We greeted each other with pleasure and some surprise and he then said he had been sent in with a hand message for 鈥渟ome army bloke called Gort鈥� and did I have any idea where he might find him. So I quickly took him up to the seaside villa being used as the headquarters by General Lord Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, to whom he delivered the message.
We then sent the petty officer鈥檚 boat back to his ship with as many soldiers as could be squeezed in.
Some ten minutes later, General Gort appeared with his Chief-of-Staff, saying that he had to get out to the destroyer lying offshore. So I rowed the pair of them out in a little dinghy.
It later transpired that the message had been an instruction from the Chief of General Staff in London for General Lord Gort to return to England rather than be taken prisoner. This message was so secret 鈥� in order to conceal from both the German and the British forces that the C-in-C had been called home 鈥� that it was hand-carried rather than being sent as a signal. By then, anyway, radio communications had mostly broken down.
When the German air activity and surface shelling became rather more of a nuisance, the embarkation of soldiers took place mainly at night and Army engineers managed to build several makeshift piers by driving lorries into the sea at low tide, thus enabling larger motor boats to come in and take soldiers onboard directly.
I remember a particularly smart company of fully equipped French troops, which marched along the beach almost as if on parade and halted near me.
Their commanding officer came up and requested that his men be embarked for England. Then came the most tragic moment of my time as beachmaster; we had been given very strict instructions not to send off any non-British troops; so I had to regret that his men could not be embarked. He saluted and, without further comment, marched his men back towards Dunkirk, still as if on parade.
Early in the night of my fifth day of the beach, it became all too apparent that the Germans were beginning to advance from the north-east in the direction of Dunkirk 鈥� the shelling had increased considerably and machine-gun fire was getting distinctly closer.
So mindful of my instructions preferably not to be taken prisoner, I decided that the time had come to leave. I therefore collected the tiny dinghy I had previously used for Lord Gort (which I had kept a careful eye on for my later use) and, together with the able seaman who had been a terrific help to me, and two soldiers, we rowed out at about 2am) towards England. In fact, we were quickly picked up by a destroyer and delivered to Dover soon after dawn.
Having been in and out of the water all the time getting the boats off the beach and through the surf, I had changed clothes several times and ended up in miscellaneous khaki garments so that I must have seemed a bit out of place when I had to report to Admiral Ramsey that the La Panne area was no longer feasible for the evacuation of Army personnel.

The above account by Commander Anthony Goodhart was printed in the October 1992 edition of the NATO Staff Bulletin.

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