大象传媒

My father, Allan Jackson, died about ten years ago and this is his story told to me over the years as I was growing up. All the incidents in this story are true although I may have the chronology slightly off in places. He was born in 1914 in South Africa but grew up in Leyland Lancashire and attended Balshaws Grammar school where the headmadster, Pop Jackson, was either his grandfather or great uncle. His own father Harry Jackson had died of Spanish flu in 1918 while in the Transvaal Scottish regiment and his widowed mother stayed in Leyland where my grandfather had come from.

In 1939 when war broke out my dad was studying dentistry at Liverpool University and probably getting a bit carried away, immediately signed up. He told me that one of the hardest of his early experiences in the Army was when the new recruits had to march to the armoury to be issued with rifles. As all the rifles were Lee Enfields dating from the First WW, they were covered in a thick coating of protective grease. They had to march back to barracks with their rifles held away from their uniform in one hand. I think a Lee Enfield weighs 9 lbs. Grown men were practically in tears with the strain of exertion carrying the rifles this way for the period of the march.

After training he found himself in France with the BEF. Initially the phoney war seemed very enjoyable. Everyone was well fed, in the peak of fitness, raring to go and enjoying the good things in France.

I am not sure where the Border regiment was stationed but I know my dad was at both Albert and Arras during this period. While digging slit trenches at one point they uncovered the body of a Canadian soldier from the First WW which was quite sobering to the new generation of the BEF.

He also told me one tale of relieving a machine gun nest on top of church steeple in Arras or Albert that was damaged.It may have still been under repair from damage in the First WW. The only access to the bell tower was a rickety ladder. Not having a head for heights he gingerly edged his way up the ladder. Half way across the church bells began to ring almost dislodging him. Finally reaching the position, the squaddy he relieved casually slid down the ladder without a care in the world with his boots against the ladder sides like runners.So easy!

My father was a motorcycle dispatch rider at this time and his unit was stationed in woodland ( I am not sure where) when the Germans finally broke through. The German armour was very swift and took everyone by surprise crashing through the woods all around. My father was ordered to ride off to alert the nearby units that the Germans were attacking in force. As he was setting off an officer (don't know what rank)who had up to that time been a real martinet, for some reason in panic tried to climb a tree to avoid the oncoming armour. The last thing my father rememberd of this man was seeing his false teeth falling out as he tried to scramble up the tree.

My father set off on his motorcycle with due haste and his mission was interrupted when a German armoured car suddenly crashed across the track right in front of him and stopped, blocking the narrow track.

My dad braked and tried to unsling his rifle from over his shoulder. Unfortunately or fortunately as it happened, the strap of the rifle became tangled in his gas mask. While he was struggling with this, the commander of the armoured car nimbly jumped out of the turret and strode up to him, grabbed the rifle and very gently removed the bolt and put it in his pocket. He then disentangled the rifle and smashed the rifle butt down hard on the cylnder block of the motorcycle knocking the heads off the spark plugs. In the process the wooden rifle butt itself shattered. He must have been pretty strong because those rifles are very solid.Then in clear English he said something like "You are now a prisoner of the German army and you must stay here until you are picked up by the infantry behind us."

The German officer jumped back in the armoured car and it roared off, leaving my dad on the track with a disabled motorcycle and useless rifle.An extraodinaryly gentle encounter with the enemy.

After a few minutes nothing further happened and my dad did not need an excuse to disappear from there. He jogged further up the track trying to make sense of the sounds of intermittent fighting all around.

Again I am not sure at what stage he realised that he had to make his way to the coast. It may be that he came across other stragglers. He did say that it was very difficult to form any kind of a useful judgement of what was going on and who was firing at whom, over quite huge distances sometimes.

Once he got going to the coast it eventually was not hard to find which direction to take, as by this time the oil refineries at Dunkirk were burning and the pall of smoke was a good if ominous beacon.

I am not sure how many miles he walked to Dunkirk but I know there was nothing to eat or drink and when he finally got to the beaches he was exhausted and hungry. I think during this walk while surrounded by civilian refugees, he saw some retreating French troops chase a man in French uniform who ran up to my dad begging protection. The French soldiers bayonneted this man to death right at his feet and explained to my dad that he was a fifth columnist- i.e. a German masquerading as a Frenchman-who could argue?.

Eventually he reached Dunkirk.For some time he was detailed to spike the abandoned artillery and the vehicles that had been left all around. I think they did this by putting sand in the barrels and sand in the oil intake of the lorries, possibly sugar in the petrol tanks?.

He was among the troops sheltering in the sand dunes along the beach and witnessed the beaches being strafed and bombed by the German airforce. He thought it curious that inspite of the beaches being so crowded, when the troops scattered, how relatively few people went down each time there was a strafing run. Presumably it was because the sand absorbed most of the rounds unless they were direct hits and there was less chance of riccochets. He also remembered vividly the unnerving screech of the dive bombers.

Time and again they would wade out to incoming boats which invariably filled up and became dangerously overloaded. Officers on the boats were threatening the troops to back off on the pain of being shot. This went on for a long period-perhaps two days. Eventually my father resolved that he would get off the beach no matter what. He decided he would swim to a warship that was anchored some way off that was collecting the troops being ferried in some of the small boats he was regularly failing to board. Stripping off his uniform he put his pay book and remaining smokes in his tin hat and began to swim. Of course the ship was further out than it looked from the beach and he had a terrific struggle even though he was a strong swimmer. I think I have read that these ships were anchored a mile out to sea. The sea was cold and no food and little sleep for days had taken their toll. Eventually he reached the ship which had landing nets thrown over the side. However, he did not have the strength to pull himself up the nets and just hung there for grim life still in the cold water. Eventually a sailor spotted him and scrambled down the nets and carried my father bodily up the nets in a fireman's hold and deposited him on the deck. I am sure my dad was grateful for the rest of his life to this man. Either this sailor or another then went away and returned with a spare set of naval overalls for my dad who was cold wet and naked on the deck.

This ship was in fact HMS Hebe a minesweeper and I have since learnt that it was the ship that evacuated General(Viscount?) Gort from France. I also read somewhere that almost the entire ship's company came down with battle fatigue as a result of the horrendous experiences at Dunkirk. I don't know if that is true, but I am sure everyone on that ship was a hero to return to Dunkirk, time after time.

I think HMS Hebe eventually was sunk in the Mediterraean later on in the war. I have never seen a photo of this ship and would love to know what it looked like.

Eventually my dad landed in Dover and was detained by the Military Police. As he was without uniform, separated from his Regiment and inspite of having his pay book he was regarded as a potential "Fifth Columnist" himself. He was sent to an armed camp in Sussex until such a time he could be identified positively.

Luckily for him, being from Lancashire and all and far from home, he had a cousin he knew well who lived in the south. This was Robert Lunt who lived in Sussex or Kent.It was Robert who told me that my dad saved his smokes in his tin hat when he swum out to the Hebe. Robert came down to the camp and was able to identify my dad to the satisfaction of the authorities and he was given leave to return to Leyland in Lancashire to see his mum. We have a photo of him having returned home looking quite tired and gaunt in uniform standing in his mum's garden just after this.

My dad stayed in the Army until 1947. He was commisioned to Captain and I think was in the RASC at the end of the war. He spent some time in Egypt, Abyssinia and in East Africa.He was also part of the British Military Mission to Ethiopia after the war. On VE day he was in Uganda and he lit a beacon on top of Tororo rock which is a dramatic and famous rocky hill on the border of Kenya and Uganda. After demob he joined the famous Groundnuts scheme in Tanganyika where my sister was born and eventually settled in Kenya where I was born. Retired and came back to the UK in 1974 to live in Lincolnshre where he died 10 years ago survived by my Mum Trudie who still lives there.He was a good man.

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