大象传媒

Extract from the diaries of Frank Masters who at the time of Dunkirk
In 1940 was a trained nurse and a Corporal in the Royal Medical Corps.

On the way to my new location an air battle was taking place and when a Spitfire shot across the road in front of us only a few feet above the ground and crsh landed in a field we ran to help the pilot. The plane was short of a wing and had skidded to a halt without going on fire. We got the canopy open and discovered the pilot, a Sergeant, unconscious and injured. He had tried to escape but was unable to open the canopy. He was badly bruised and had broken his arm. We persuaded him to join the land of the living, dressed his wounds and eventually sent him through the system back to Hospital. The next day we had a similar experience, this time it was a German pilot who endured the same experience and was not badly injured. Despite his scowl and look of disgust when we got him out of his plane, he did enjoy the cigarette he was given and acknowledged our concern and treatment. He too went off down the system although he had company in the form of two armed guards when he left us.
The action was hectic and the Stukas had freedom of the skies to dive bomb the thousands of refugees fleeing in front of the advancing German Army. Among the many casualties we treated were a French family who came for assistance as the mother was about to give birth. Fortunately we had been given a little training in this subject and under the direction of a Sergeant in the Medics from the ADS a healthy lad was delivered in a ditch at the side of the road during a heavy raid by strafing fighter planes. Another incident was more terrifying. We were passing through Seclin and when we were forced to stop by the number of dead and wounded civilians lying in the road making it impassable. A Gendarme approached and asked us to go to an Air Raid Shelter about fifty yards away as there was a soldier in distress. When we arrived I found Wilson-Parry in a deranged state so much so we had to tie him to a stretcher and place a pad in his mouth. He had gone mad after entering the Air Raid Shelter and finding as we did two lines of people sitting on benches, all dead, but if you touched any one of them the body would fall to the floor. A French Doctor arrived and he explained death was due to a bomb falling near the entrance and the blast had apparently compressed the brain of each of the men women and children sitting in the shelter. The next days and nights were just as frightening and disturbing but we just seemed to carry on with our job of treating and comforting the wounded.
Then one day we were told to move quickly and our progress was again hampered by the refugees, walking, on bicycles, with hand carts or on horse drawn carts with whatever they could carry of their worldly possessions. By late afternoon we were directed into a large field where we unloaded all our equipment and most of our personal kit, stacked it in heaps and set them on fire. We were then told our only hope of survival was to get to the coast and e evacuated to England. We headed toward Ostend but the convoy got split up in the confusion and although I was in a closed van, we were told by the driver that the convoy was a mixture of guns, wagons and ambulances from a large assortment of units. Early the next morning we arrived at the seaside, no buckets and spades, no kit, no food and nowhere to go unless you were a good swimmer. Most of the houses and shops were empty and some were damaged from the previous days bombing. We entered a house near the seafront, the doors and windows already destroyed and found some food and a bottle of wine.
Some semblance of order appeared when the medics were assembled and given duties. I was to set up a First Aid Post halfway between the promenade and the sea to deal with casualties arising from the continuous bombing and strafing we had to endure during daylight hours whilst the never ending stream of survivors arrived on the shore and made their way to the sea which was dotted with small boats, the large craft lying further off shore. I set up shop with two helpers in a fisherman鈥檚 boat we were able to manhandle to our selected position and with the volunteer help turned it upside down and dug an entrance in the sand. We were at the Belgian holiday resort of La Panne, some ten miles east of Dunkirk.
Planes did not fly at night so we had to go and help in the Hotel Kursell which had been set up as a Hospital. On two occasions during the twilight hours I was to drive an ambulance full of wounded to Dunkirk where the patients were handed over to medics at the land end of the jetty. Also at night when the tide came in the Navy would appear under the cover of darkness in small boats and throw their cargo of boxes of biscuits and bully beef into the shallow water and scurry back to the larger ships from whence they came. When the tide ebbed we picked up the boxes and carried them to the promenade where they were distributed to the soldiers waiting to be evacuated at first light. One night three of us made up our minds to follow the route taken by the soldiers heading back to England because few new faces arrived on the scene that day and all the Officers who had been around giving orders had vanished.
We righted our upturned boat and pulled it down to the sea, the tide was in so it was not far to drag the boat. We also found two oars before we started our task so all we had to do was row out to a much larger boat lying offshore and silhouetted against the sky. We pushed the boat into the sea, jumped in, and started to row only to find ourselves high and dry on the sand as the next wave came in. After half a dozen futile and exhausting attempts we gave up and went back, soaking wet and frustrated, to the Hotel Kursell.
To our surprise a couple of 40mm Bofor guns appeared and volunteers were found to fire them at the German planes that came to sweep the beaches with their deadly machine gun fire, causing many casualties among the soldiers heading for the sea. The guns soon ran out of ammunition but that night the Navy brought replenishments and the next day the 鈥済unners鈥�, some of whom had never fired a gun before had a field day and actually hit a plane which eventually crashed further along the coast. The 鈥淕unners鈥� did not receive any accolades from the Belgian civilians who happened to be around because they were so gun happy the fired at the planes who flew only a few feet above the ground and occasionally for maximum effect one would fly along the promenade and the guns situated on the sands below the promenade turned and fired at them. Most shots missed the planes but scored direct hits on the high rise hotels on the road facing the promenade. When we were evacuated there were not many roofs left intact.
One evening at the Hotel Kursell all the unmarried medics were assembled in the grounds at the rear of the building to draw lots to decide who would stay with the patients we were unable to carry with the only two vehicles capable of moving, orders had been given on arrival at Du Panne to destroy or render all vehicles unmoveable and the roads and ditches were littered with guns and vehicles of every description. Not long after our arrival at the seaside and discovering the water was very shallow to save the soldiers the problem of wading out to the small boats an attempt was made to build a jetty with lorries. Each time the construction became useable the Germans would come and bomb it, or on one occasion an E boat came inshore and fired a torpedo at our jetty, another torpedo came up the each and came to rest about twenty yards from my First Aid Post, but as it had not hit anything it did not explode. It was still there when we left but was always given a wide berth by the fleeing soldiers on their way to the sea. Our only hope was to get to Dunkirk.
I drew an X when we drew lots for those who could go to Dunkirk and for those who would stay with the casualties who could not be moved and with those who were as lucky as me crowded into the two trucks and set off for Dunkirk. A hair raising and frightening ride among discarded and often burning vehicles, refugees, disorganised bodies of soldiers who were just following the crowd not knowing where they were going and surviving two strafing raids that left dead and wounded in their wake. We were not allowed to stop.
Eventually we had to get out and walk along a wall that was the bank of a canal until we came to the breakwater. Whilst we traversed this narrow embankment shells dropped in plentiful supply into the water of the canal. Another half a degree on the elevation and the German gunners would have hit the target and the number of would be passengers on the next ship would have been greatly reduced. The walking wounded looked to us for help and support and when we came to the jetty we found some stretcher cases needing transportation along the jetty to where, we were told a boat would come along side just before dawn to take off any survivors. Carrying the stretcher was even difficult for two exhausted youngsters on the flat surface of the jetty but when we came to the point where a bomb had made a gap of about eight feet it seemed a good time to give up. The water was about thirty feet below, and a large plank of timber about two feet wide stretched the abyss. Anyone in his right mind would have called it a day and hoped a boat could reach us at that point. The explosions, the shells getting ever closer, the three massive fires of the town burning following the constant daytime bombardment, the burning and sunken ships resembling a graveyard in the flickering light of the fires gave us the encouragement, or fear, needed to run the gauntlet along the plank carrying our stretcher and patient and head for the far end of the jetty where we lay crouched shielding our patients and fearing the dawn would bring planes, they were never ours, instead of the ship that hopefully, was to carry us to England. It was also suddenly very cold and damp although the sea was calm.

Continued...
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