- Contributed by听
- North Yorkshire County Council, Library and Information Services
- People in story:听
- Sloan McNair
- Location of story:听
- Dunkirk and environs, France
- Background to story:听
- Army
- Article ID:听
- A4431755
- Contributed on:听
- 11 July 2005
My uncle, Sloan McNair, came from Ayr. He was in the building trade when war broke out. He waited for the inevitable conscription papers to arrive, but volunteered before they did. "I got fed up with waiting!" he told my grandmother.
He served as an Army 'sapper', and after a spell of filling in airfield runways while under attack, was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force. When the tide of war turned against us, he and others in his unit attempted to make the Dunkirk beaches, at one point trapped by enemy bomber aircraft while hiding in a knoll of trees.The German advance was so intense and rapid that they failed to make the beaches before the withdrawal of the Navy and the flotilla of small craft.
In the course of just staying alive and free, the group split up according to which route each had chosen to take. My uncle never heard from the 'other half' of his comrades again. His group met a French airman, whose plane was now in German hands but visible on the airfield.
As they were all starving, the little band enacted a desperate plan of escape. Under cover of darkness, the Frenchman managed to climb in the cockpit and start the engine. Germans are very methodical, and they must have fuelled it. Before the startled garrison realised what was happening, the British soldiers raced through the boundary, leapt aboard and hung on as the pilot roared along the runway and took off. My uncle was, in modern parlance, 'laid back' about the adventure; the little plane made it back to English soil, and he went on to serve in North Africa and Italy. He was, however, so emaciated that the
government department involved refused to re-unite him with his family for some time.
As told from family memories by Anthony Atkinson (nephew).
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