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This document is part of Reg Gill's tape recorded notes. Editors willing, I will gradually post them all onto the site to make a complete history. Note, the spelling may be erratic due to tape quality!
Although Reg was subjected to what was the most concentrated bombing the world had seen in Malta, the visions he had and the experience of diving into ditches already filled with civilian victims of aircraft attacks still upsets him. I haven't asked for more details along these lines.
The RAMC always seemed to split up to travel so that there were some staff with each ship. The practical value of a radiographer without his equipment is a little doubtful!

As described previously, Reg Gill, formerly of Leeds general Infirmary TA, was an RAMC lance corporal working with many of his former colleagues in the 18th General hospital in Etaples. He had just passed a very superficial test as a radiographer and was promoted to Sargeant. An eager crowd of thirsty drinkers awaited him as he entered the sergeant's mess for the first time. This is the story of how those phoney war days went sour and how he nearly slept through the Dunkirk evacuation!

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Luckily at that time (the first month) we still hadn't received any pay because of the communications problem, but the Major Registrar had managed to raise a lot of money. Occupational Francs they were called -printed by the British and accepted by the French. We could buy food which was our main concern being so hungry and cold.

Occasionally I used to go off with the lads on the tram which ran on rails all the way from Etaples to Le Touquet, which was a seaside resort made famous by Prince Edward, Prince Of Wales and Mrs Simpson. It was a yachting centre and as soon as we had our money, off we went, straight into Le Touquet. Bottle of wine, French bread, egg and chips, confiture and of course having demolished the first plateful, "Encore le meme chose"! As it happened, we had been extremely well treated in the rate of exchange. Even as a Lance Corporal, by comparison with a French wallow, I was rich. I think we had 175 francs to the 拢 and when I tell you that a brandy or whisky cost 2 francs and egg chips + wine cost 5 or 6 francs, you can see that we were extremely well treated from that point of view. Anyway we had received our pay and I entered the Sergeants mess. My next weeks pay went within the next 10 minutes.

I remember we had a strange piece of equipment called Whetstone Stereoscope and I could see the point of it. I knew what stereoscopic radiography was. On modern sets, as opposed to field sets, it was quite a simple procedure. You merely took 2 pictures about three to three and a half inches apart. The settings were on the arm of the X-ray machine. When these were mounted up into a stereoscopic viewing device you got a 3D picture.

The point of the Whetstone Stereoscope was foreign bodies, bullets, shrapnel, stones etc. could be spotted. The problem was, on the field set it could become a very difficult procedure and we practised with this to try and get it right. You had to go outside and switch on the generator which sometimes would start and in bitterly cold weather it got a bit awkward. You got frozen stiff outside trying to get it to work and then came back in, with frozen hands, and tried to do a stereoscopic X-ray. Compared to the civilian sets it was a difficult procedure.

One of the things you learn in the Army is that if you see anyone with a red cap, red shoulder pads and gold braid on their hat you cleared off as fast as you possibly could. Red tabs usually meant trouble. I was messing about with the stereoscope one day (I had trouble with the generator) when not one but 2 red tabs appeared at the doorway. One was the Colonel, the Leeds general infirmary chap. I liked him, nice chap Colonel Walley a real gent., and this other chap so I drew myself rigidly to attention, saluted and he said "Er what are you doing sergeant?" So I said "Well, I'm doing a bit of stereoscopic radiography, Sir just practising."
"Oh good man, good man! Er what do you think of the stereoscope. The Whetstone stereoscope."
I said "Not a lot sir. I think I could improve it really. It will produce a stereoscopic radiograph but it's very difficult and I can see that if one had a stream of casualties with foreign bodies, it would be a very slow procedure."
He went a little bit purple. "Er well. All right Sergeant and cleared off."

The Sergeant Major came up to me and said "You BF. Do you know who that was."
I said "No sir." "That was the designer of the Whetstone Stereoscope. You were lucky you didn't get your ****s chewed off."

When the snow went it gradually became warmer and in fact within a couple of weeks towards the end of March the frost went completely, the sun came out and remarkably it became quite warm. Of course there were very few casualties. In fact we didn't have any casualties at all.
Remarkably I was passing a recreation hall in Etaples and I heard the sound of table tennis balls being batted about and I found this irresistible so I went in, in Army uniform to see a bunch of French youths knocking a ball about. Communication of course was difficult but with a few words I asked them what they were doing and they said they were the Etaples table tennis team, they played in the Pass de Calais league and they were practising as they always did several nights per week for matches against teams like Montreuse, Aberville, Bologne and Camier.

They were very friendly and I was awarded the honour of playing their captain and No 1 player. I had a very good game with him. I managed to beat him eventually which impressed everybody of course and I was told they were one short for their next match against Bologne who were No 1 in the First division league and I played 2 matches for Etaples. Bologne beat us anyway but I won my 2 games and of course I was flavour of the month really.

All that was to change. It appeared from the newspapers that we were able to get that things were hotting up on the front line but the French were confident that the Maginot line would hold. The newspapers told us that the British army was the finest that had ever set foot on foreign soil so we weren't unduly worried. We had reached a high state of civilisation. Every morning the local Patisserie would send a van round full of goodies, cream things, chocolate 茅clairs, beautiful bread and cakes which of course we were well able to afford so really there were compensations. It did look a bit nasty towards the front line and patrols were increasing on both sides (this was towards the end of April) but we continued to visit Le Touquet, have nice meals, swim in the sea. I continued to play table tennis though I didn't play in another match. I played with my French friends had coffee with some of the young ladies, life was very good ..and then it happened.
All our faith was in the Maginot line which the French said was impregnable. We had our own army there, small by proportion but we felt it would probably continue much the same course as the First World War ..eventually we would win. I mean Britain always did win and Britain and France together would surely win, but things were nasty.

The Germans had broken through in the Ardennes which is wooded country, hilly, impossible so people said for tank warfare and for that reason it was very lightly defended. The Germans broke through there against a division or two of the French territorial army with very little opposition and from then on things got rapidly worse. The Germans swept through north central France in a wide sweep this time not heading for Paris but heading for the channel ports in a circular movement that took them rapidly down to Abbeville and to the coast just north of Rouen. Then they proceeded to advance up the coast which put us in a very difficult position. This was only one branch of the German army. The rest of it did advance towards central France but as far as we, the British army in northern France, were concerned it looked very sinister indeed.
We were told we had to be ready for very heavy casualties and that, on the way to Etaples, were about 600 French Moroccans or Gooms as the French called them and we had to be prepared to admit this 600. As far as X-ray were concerned most of them were going to have shrapnel and bullet wounds. Whilst we were waiting for these casualties, down from northern France and the Belgian frontier which the Germans had overrun, came streams of refugees in cars, broken down lorries, carts and lots of trains. They were absolutely demoralised. They cluttered up all the roads. Transport was impossible. This great influx of refugees from Belgium and the northern parts of the Pass De Calais was sweeping through the road which led from Etaples

As far as we were concerned the 600 Moroccans didn't arrive and we were told the Germans were 7 or 8 miles away north of Aberville and heading up the coast towards Etaples and Le Touquet. We must immediately leave everything as it was, pick up our kit bags and our equipment, water bottles and everything and be prepared to march north towards Bologne and Calais. We were eventually assembled by the Colonel and told that this was taking place but we couldn't move yet because the order to move hadn't been given.

One or two of us looked rather longingly at some rowing boats across the estuary which were riding at harbour in Le Touquet and thought that if we were indeed to be cut off from Le Touquet, a 40 or 50 mile journey by rowing boat would be a lot better than being in a prison camp for the rest of the war. It wouldn't have been easy, we could have been shot as deserters and as we didn't know what the exact situation was we didn't feel completely despondent. We felt that surely if the French army capitulated the British army would put up a fight. Eventually we did get the order to move. We headed up the coast leaving everything as it was. A great hole was dug in the sands and the Sergeant's mess funds, a box full of Occupational French Francs was put in and buried. I don't know the exact location. I suppose it has been found because there's a housing estate now where our camp was. As the French franc after the war was devalued by a 100 times it wouldn't have been a great deal of use anyway.

We started to march up the coast. In the meantime German bombers were coming over in vastly increasing numbers dive bombing the whole time. The roads were impossible. We were told we couldn't retreat up the road because the roads were being bombed and the were completely choked with refugees, some of whom were now going in the opposite direction so you now had a proper hiatus of poor Belgian peasants in carts with women, children, animals, bikes -complete chaos some heading down the road from the German army in Belgium, some heading up the road from having been cut off by the German army in Abbeville so we were told to march across country road, across fields.

We were each appointed an officer. Mine was my radiologist, Major Lees. I saw very little of him in France actually. He appeared once a week. Said "is everything all right Sergeant?" and disappeared again, goodness knows where. If I know Major Lees, I suspect he had a private practice somewhere!.
We had broken up into parties of about 20 with an officer in charge and set of in the direction of Bologne and Calais. We marched and marched and marched. It seemed to be interminable. We were dog tired. We were hungry but we were also apprehensive.
Overhead were swarms of German bombers, German fighters machine-gunning the roads, anything that moved, swarms of dive bombers Junkers 87s, Junkers 88s, very little RAF. I remember seeing one plane the whole of that first day of our retreat and that was a Lysander scout plane who dived down to have a look at us and buzzed off again.
I think it was probably a very unhealthy place for him to be to. Whenever German dive bombers appeared we always made a dive for the nearest cover hedges. In fact not to be caught in an open field was the thing. If you had some open ground to cover you went like a bat out of hell until you reached the other side, the hedge where you lay down to have a look round to see what was coming.

When it got dark, I'm not sure how it happened, a lorry was parked in the dark on a country lane and Major Lees told us to get aboard We got aboard to find that most of the medical officers including the Colonel, the Pharmacist, Joe Knapton and myself were all aboard It seemed that we were the nucleus of the 18th General Hospital. We were in fact the Territorial Nucleus, the General Infirmary nucleus.
By this time we were to exhausted to be concerned about that and the lorry set off slowly in fits and starts obviously making detours to judge by the swaying and the ruts and I think we crossed a few ploughed fields and despite the bangs and crashes outside most of us slept. I know I did. I remember very little about it. Ron Milburn, our pharmacist produced a bottle of whisky, goodness knows from where and we'd shared it between us.
I really had more than enough and I think the Colonel was very disapproving but I felt a lot better after that. When the lorry stopped, in the small hours of the morning, we were told to get out which we did and we were told to follow our own respective leaders and I think I followed Major Lees to some building which was high up in the town overlooking the harbour. There were fires all around. We went into this building and we lay down on the floor and we slept. I remember everyone was in the main hall of this building I'm not sure where it was. I was told afterwards it was a convent but I'm not sure.

In the meantime, I had wandered off and found a camp bed under which I slept and it was only by a miracle that I didn't get left behind. In the small hours of the morning, we were told to get up and get out and marched down the road to a railway siding where there were a lot of wounded troops, both French and British. We unloaded the train and put the stretcher cases aboard an ambulance, (there was a line of ambulances.) Walking wounded we collected and we all set of for the harbour which was a mile or so away, maybe a bit more. We were in a daze, it was dark, dawn was just breaking and in the harbour which I found out afterwards was Dunkirk, there was a funny looking ship waiting . I was told afterwards it was a Dutch 'skoot' (sic) which because of its shallow draft was capable of entering shallow water, an enormous advantage of course in a tidal place like the English Channel.
The ambulances came right up to the ship . We loaded the stretchers and put the French and British walking wounded aboard. Many of the French didn't want to go. When they were told we were going to 'Angleterre' they didn't want to know. Some wanted to go back down the coast and join in the fighting again but most seemed to acquiess and go reasonably well. The ship was pretty well full. I don't know what happened to the rest of my unit Most of the people aboard the ship -and there must have been several hundred of us -were our own small company -the ones who had been in the lorry, the Colonels, half Colonels, Majors and Sergeants.

The ship was ready to take off. In fact as soon as we had got the last one aboard the captain was extremely anxious to get off and I don't blame him because the harbour was being bombed. Not as badly as it was to be a couple of days later, but it was on fire. Most of the fires were caused by retreating British troops who were burning lorries and petrol dumps and things. The whole thing seemed to be a ring of fire. Of course ships in the harbour were being bombed. We had a destroyer escort, or at least there were destroyers out to sea and they were firing down the coast toward the Germans so the Germans were not very far away. I think they were probably 5 or 6 miles There was a cruiser further out, with a longer range, firing at the Germans. We proceeded out of the harbour -which as far as we were concerned was absolutely splendid- until one of the destroyers dropped a depth charge about 50 yds away from us, which made the whole ship leap out of the water. It petrified us. We thought we had been hit by a submarine or a bomb or something. That was my record of Dunkirk. I should say that up to Dunkirk I didn't smoke at all but those who did smoke seemed to get a great deal of comfort during bombing raids so I did start to smoke then. Everybody had a ration and it was considered the right thing to do, so from smoking nothing at all I smoked like a chimney after that.

We crossed the Channel and sometime about midday we arrived at Dover where we were given a hero's welcome. We were filthy, hungry tired worn out but they were extremely kind to us, gave us sandwiches, and coffee and sorted us all out into units in a big hall. There were seats to sit down, something rather unusual! Within an hour or two we were on a train going somewhere, we didn't know where. We were back in Britain and this was quite marvellous. Of course Dunkirk went on for several days after this. It must have been the 31st May possibly the 1st of June and things got a lot rougher later for the troops who were behind especially for the ones who were guarding the perimeter

I'd lost all my friends. I didn't know anyone on the train from Dunkirk. As I said we didn't know where we were going to. The train headed off. I suppose it would be about midday It was a tiny little train. Lovely steam trains in those days. . .It had a corridor and toilet fortunately and was full of a miscellaneous collection of troops, a few were medical corps who I didn't know. It went along a single track for hours and hours and hours. Up through Hampshire, possibly Dorset All main lines were extremely busy with front line troops and reinforcements There must have been a possibility of troops being rushed to France to try and help the perimeter. It didn't happen but the main lines were being reserved for that reason. As evacuees we were shunted around quite a lot.

After several hours we stopped somewhere. Possibly south of Oxford at a station where we were given food, tea and sandwiches and stretched our legs for 20 mins or so. The train then took off again and eventually in the evening we arrived in Peterborough where we disembarked. I found to my amazement that another train had arrived earlier and most of our unit had been on that one. They were still in the station so it couldn't have arrived very much earlier. I was formed up again with our unit and we marched to barracks known as Lincoln Rd Territorial Barracks.
We were told there would be a meal in the evening and we could go into Peterborough which was about a mile away. I made straight for a barbers shop and was given a first class treatment, shampoo shave hot towel everything. It was really super and the man said it was an honour to serve members of the BEF. His attitude was typical not just of Peterborough but of Britain in general at the time in terms of the welcome given to troops back from Dunkirk. Everywhere we went, shopkeepers didn't charge us anything which was just as well as our pay was several weeks in arrears. I liked Peterborough though there was very little to do but we were given leave. Ten days I think it was.

To me this was just one of those things in the background. We all knew we would win the war. Churchill was speaking regularly on the radio. We just thought it would be a bit more difficult now. But we had the Navy and most of the airforce was intact. In fact it was a regular complaint by the British troops. "Where were the RAF over Dunkirk.?"

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