大象传媒

This story was submitted to the site by Steven Greaves on behalf of Burt Price.

When Dunkirk was cut off, the Black Watch took over the Royal Marine Commandos who had been in position around Dunkirk.

The first night we were there I was handed over a German spandau machine gun, which was in a position covering a small road leading down into Dunkirk. With me having that, my company commando took away my group and put them on a big road about 500 yards away from me to cover this other road. And it was then we were on our own. I had two men with me on the German machine gun, myself and a lance corporal, a member of the marquee, that's the French fighting interior force, and he was armed with a German rifle.

When it got dark in the evening we heard noises outside. I climbed up on to a chair and looked out the small window which was above the front door. This was a French bungalow type house, no back door, just the front door. One bedroom, one living room and a kitchen. And we were in this building and we were using it as our base. And when I looked out the window, what I saw just about frightened me out of my skin. There were between 30 and 50 German soldiers spread out of the area outside. We were trapped inside the house and couldn't get out.

I organised everything inside the house because I was a corporal at that time, and there was only myself and this French lad. What happened to the two lads outside we didn't know, it was only the next day we found out that they had been taken prisoner by the Germans. We didn't know what was going on and we just stayed there where we were. We daren鈥檛 breathe in case they heard us. I organised things, I said to the other lad that was with me, I said here you take over my sting gun. And I took his rifle and a 36 grenade. I pulled the pin out of the 36 grenade and I said to the other lad, I said that if they come near this door, I鈥檒l swing the door open, I鈥檒l throw the grenade out, and when I do that you open fire from back there, he was a yard behind me. Once you get outside I'll run round after you once the grenade goes off. And he said right we'll do that. I stayed by the window looking out, they were smoking cigars, talking, they were carrying machine guns. It started to look like they weren't going to approach the door at all. They grouped together and started to move off. I didn't know what to do, we were just stuck there. I opened the door a little bit, just about three or four inches, and as I did so, they all turned round and started coming back... I thought this is it. But thankfully they didn't come near the door, they just walked right past and down in towards Dunkirk.

Daylight started to break, and I suddenly saw Sergeant Bird, one of our company sergeants, with a couple of lads with him approaching the bungalow. We had stayed in the position all night. I still had this grenade and I couldn't find the pin, so what I did was I put a safety pin in where the grenade pin should have been and that saved the grenade from going off. And it wasn't until morning we were able to tell everybody what had happened. It was then we learned the fate of the two lads that were outside. They had been taken prisoner, and I never saw them again. To this day I don't know what happened to them.

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