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The mayhem these planes caused to the poor refugees was frightful and sick making; with bodies, legs, arms and blood everywhere. Every few miles we would come across these tragedies, with the additional pathos of dead and wounded animals lying about. I couldn’t keep count of the number of wounded cows and horses my mate and I put out of their misery but it was a losing battle, as we couldn’t use up all our ammunition in case we needed it. Although, come to think of it, a pistol wouldn’t have been much use against a tank or an aeroplane!
Fate had the answer to this in the shape of an officer we came across, all on his own, and he waved us down. This was at the top of a rise in the road and he said that he required our transport, and gave us a ‘Boyes Anti-Tank’ rifle, with the instructions to secrete ourselves there and, if any enemy tanks were to come along, told to stop them with the afore-said weapon.
The naivety shone through again and I let him have the motorcycle. He told us not to go away he had to get some more troops and bring them back to this position, and off he went, leaving two ‘mugs’ behind. Like hell he came back and it slowly dawned on us that we had been ‘conned’ - he never had had any intention of coming back, all he wanted was transport but we noted the direction that he had taken. From where we stood we could see Dunkirk, with Ostend far to our right, and he had headed that way, which is the place we would have gone to, as Dunkirk was well and truly on fire, but Ostend appeared to be quiet. Little did we know that the reason Ostend was quiet was that the Belgians had surrendered to the Germans.
Doesn’t Fate work in a peculiar fashion? If we hadn’t given up our transport to that (unmentionable) officer we would have gone to Ostend to possible death or, at the best, capture. Instead, after rendering the Boyes rifle un-serviceable (you may raise your eyebrows at that - destroying a weapon? Criminal), but not so, the bastard had omitted to give us any ammunition for it, and we, stupidly, hadn’t noticed its absence. We set off in the other direction, towards poor, ill-fated Dunkirk.
By this time I was in a fearful rage and I cursed that sod, the Germans, the Army, which hadn’t taught us how to fight - in fact, I must have put the ‘wind-up’ my mate, who disappeared later on!
When we came across some infantrymen who were setting-up a defensive position well outside of Dunkirk; I decided to throw in my lot with them and my mate went on to join some other waifs and strays, because that is just about all we were. However, the new found mates welcomed me and showed me how to operate a Bren gun and to prime and throw grenades. So far, so good. At last I didn’t feel so utterly helpless and was much happier in my mind.
My euphoria only lasted about a day, as the usual thing happened - we were shot-up by an enemy fighter and that decimated the group quite a bit. All that happened to me was that the heel on my boot was shot off and, happily for me, nothing else. I think there was four of us got away, once again without weapons except for my pistol, the rest were cut to pieces, caught fair and square in the open. It is strange the way you adjust to a way of life; three weeks before we had been living the life of Old Reilly, and now, in a dirty, hungry state, this was regarded as normal. The only thing I was never short of was cigarettes, they were easier to get than food and water.
Miracle of Miracles! My unit had been found; we had reached a sort of collecting point, and there they were, nobody missing and nobody hurt. Was I glad to see them! And they, on their part, had thought I was either in the bag (Prisoner of War) or dead, but they were disabused on that thought by my appearance: dirty, hungry, footsore (have you ever tried walking without a heel on your boot?) and weary, Lord, how weary. Anyway some food and a rest and we were ready for the ‘off’ - but where was off?
We got a briefing, in which we were told that the Belgians had surrendered, the French Army had collapsed (memories of that lot we saw at Cherbourg!) and that only Calais and Dunkirk were in our possession. The enemy was all around us but couldn’t use their tanks, as the ground behind Dunkirk had been flooded and our only way out was by the Channel. It now depended on the Navy being able to get us away.
We were stunned! Our Army beaten? Surely not, but it was true and that night we got a truck, put all our blokes in it, and I drove it to the dunes at Dunkirk without mishap. The troops debarked and under the direction of the Military Police I drove the vehicle to a huge parking spot, full of vehicles, guns, horses (all of whom were shot to deny them to the Germans) and later the guns were ‘spiked’ and the vehicles set on fire, also to deny them to the enemy, and I rejoined my mates who had been waiting for me.

We started trudging through the dunes, soft; dry, shifting sand, which was very tiring to walk on. Two steps forward, one slide back was the pattern and there were thousands of soldiers; British, French, Belgian, also some civilians, all heading for the beach, like a mass of lemmings, rushing to their doom.
As we trudged along a voice called out,
"Is that you, Jock?" It was a young soldier whom I had befriended in Aldershot and he told me he had married in France and had managed to get his wife as far as Dunkirk, but had been separated from her there and was in a heart-broken mood.
"What will happen to her, will I ever see her again? She can't speak English so she won't be able to say that she is a soldier's wife, and if the Germans get hold of' her they will kill her." and so on until he was nearly hysterical.
Poor lad, he wasn't bothered about himself, just about his young wife. I made soothing noises and told him that all would be well but he wouldn't be consoled and suddenly said that he was going to find her, and disappeared. What happened to him and her I don't know, as we've never met since. Did he find her? Were they killed or did they get to England, singly or together? Just a tiny drop in the ocean of tragedies that happened at that time, made worse to me because he was a friend.
We eventually reached the place in the dunes where we were to stay until it was our turn to join the huge queues for the mass of boats that were streaming across the Channel. It was like sitting in a cinema, watching a war movie; all the action was taking place in front of us. To our left was the Mole, where the destroyers and larger ships were coming in to take off, in the main, stretcher cases and walking wounded. It was a never-ending stream as the Mole was subject to intense bombardment, both by shell and bomb; aircraft constantly harried the ships tied-up there and they fired back in retaliation, the noise was unbelievable, and terrible casualties were suffered by both ships and men. I vowed not to go near that particular hellhole. In front, and to our right, great queues of men stretched from in the water back to the dunes and every so often they would be subject to high-level bombing and long-range shelling, which took its toll only too often.
Dear God, I thought, how the dickens will we ever get away from this lot alive? It seemed impossible, but 330,000 personnel were to be evacuated by June 1st; no wonder it was called the 'miracle of Dunkirk.’
It was May 29th when we arrived at the dunes and it was June 1st when I managed to get away. We were all split up some to go to that queue, some to this; units didn't matter any more - only people. During these four days there wasn't any food or water available so we'd take it in turns to go scrounging into Dunkirk, to see if the town would yield anything as we were very hungry and thirsty indeed.
The town was like nothing on earth; fires everywhere, bombs and shells banging off, masonry tumbling down, dead and wounded all over the place. We were frightened out of our wits, but hunger and thirst is a great provider and, having come this far, we were determined to find something. Mainly cafes were quickly searched and yielded a scant couple of bottles of terrible wine (water was no good as it would be contaminated and things were bad enough without getting a dose of the shits into the bargain). Food seemed non-existent, not really surprising as other people had been there before us, so there was only one thing left - the dustbins.
We searched them and found bits of this and bits of that, most of it green mouldy but we collected everything that looked remotely edible and took it back to our mates. A succulent feast indeed when we had cut the peculiar looking pieces off and eaten the rest, washed down by whatever was in the bottles. We found new hope. It is indeed wonderful what a bit of food will do for a hungry man.
The Navy were conducting the evacuation and I will take my hat off to the officers, standing in the water up to their waists, ordering the men forward to the boats, telling the rest to stay - a sight as firm as the Rock of Gibraltar; exhorting, cajoling, encouraging- and not a thought for their personal safety; they were magnificent.
By the time the 1st June had arrived my place was near the head of the queue and the boat out there was hit and sunk. My heart also sank, but out of no-where came a lifeboat and some of us got aboard it and were ferried to a Dutch coal-barge.
The sailors who manned the boats and also the barge were Dutch and Newfoundlanders and, when we were full up, we sailed for England. The panorama was fantastic; scores of little, medium and large boats were out there waiting for the troops to be ferried out; it was a brilliant morning, and then the second miracle happened - a big haze settled over the sea for no reason at all, and the dive-bombers couldn't see their prey; so we got away without being bombed or machine-gunned. Mugs of£ tea and 'bully' beef sandwiches were handed out to us and we gratefully devoured them, then I slept until we reached safety in the form of the seaside town of Ramsgate, where we disembarked. Reflecting, later on, about the carnage and destruction we had been through, it seemed as though I had sat through a long war-movie, remembering in the main the incidents that made one laugh, or think; like the chap who found a tin bath (such as people use who haven't got a bathroom) carrying it down to the water and getting into it and paddling it with his hands, towards the waiting boats, wearing only a pair of shorts - and of all things, his tin hat! He made it, too. Another chap was swimming out to the boats, towing a line with him, the idea being to make a lifeline from beach to boat. He made it as well, but unfortunately too many people scrambled for the line and it parted under the sheer weight of numbers. Or the Naval Officers, immaculate from the waist upwards (the rest of them was in the sea) calmly directing troops with a wave of their walking sticks.
Truly, without them, it would have been a bigger shambles than it was.

When we were disembarked, we were plied with tea and sandwiches by the local voluntary helpers and the thing that struck me most of all was the silence. Nobody spoke above a whisper and it was as if our reception committee were shocked at what they were seeing. My clothes were only a pair of trousers and a complete coating of stinking brown fuel oil from the sea. Most of the men were in a similar state of undress, with only a blanket round them; all surplus clothes were cast away on the Dunkirk side as they would inhibit you in the water, especially if the boat was hit.
The people of Ramsgate were kindness itself, and probably full of pity for the tattered remnants of the keen young men who had left these shores only a few short months ago to sort out the 'nasties' but who, indeed, had themselves received the shitty end of the stick, and certainly showed it. But the spirit wasn’t broken, just a feeling of sullen resentfulness with our leaders, who had failed to tell us just how powerful the Wehrmacht was. These people, whose job it was to train their service-men, had seen it all happen in Abyssinia and Spain and Norway had known of the ruthlessness of total war, yet our airmen were delivering leaflets instead of bombs and the Army was strictly divided into the fighters and the Corps troops, just as it was in the debacle of 1914-18. Don't they ever learn? Were we never going to get beyond fixed lines and wars of attrition? Well, we did, from the Desert onwards, when we had younger, bolder leaders who weren’t frightened to divide and conquer, to outflank, to make the enemy fight on your terms, not his! After all, the Romans laid down the rules two thousand years ago and they were pretty successful.
To get back to Ramsgate; we entrained there (the un-wounded, that is- the casualties were taken off to hospital PDQ) for a reception centre where we were to give our numbers, rank, name and Unit so that we could be forwarded to where our base depots - in my case, Catterick, and from there to where the unit was re-forming- Trowbridge. From there I was promoted to another unit going overseas once more. My mates thought this was hilarious - but as I pointed out to them, it was Wellington who said want a real soldier I'll go to the Guard-Room for him.'
Well I qualified. I was informed then that a recommendation for the Military Medal had been made on my behalf. I'm still waiting to receive it.

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