大象传媒

The image above shows my great Uncle, Len Fagan. He was a very taciturn man, quite Victorian in manner, and he spoke very little about his wartime experiences. This is a shame, because of the four second world war servicemen of my family he was the most widely travelled. He went through most of the major campaigns from 1939 onwards and survived without a scratch!

The photograph is dated on the back February 1940, so just four months after it was taken he would have been one of the tens of thousands of men desperately trying to get aboard a boat or ship at Dunkirk.

My uncle was a pre-war territorial and on the outbreak of hostilities he went straight into the RASC as a sergeant. He was a keen motorcyclist, so it must have suited him quite well to be motorcycle mounted for most of the war. It was as a result of being aboard a bike that he was issued with a .38 Enfield revolver, when he came home and my grandfather saw it he said 鈥渢hat鈥檚 no damn good, you won鈥檛 stop a jerry with that pea-shooter鈥�. Grandfather had been with the Machine Gun Corps, behind a Vickers .303 for most of the First World War, and joined the Military Foot Police in the later part. He now went upstairs and came back with his service issue .455 Webley and handed this to his younger brother. This was the revolver Len carried with the BEF in 1940, and was still carrying four years later when he went back to France on D-Day.

His Dunkirk experience is really the only episode of his war that I know anything about, and I got that from my father. As a member of the RASC, his duties included disabling the transport which was turning up with the retreating troops. This involved simply taking the drain plug out of the sump of the vehicle, flooring the accelerator and waiting for the engine to seize up. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of transport had to be destroyed and left behind in this manner.

Some of the larger vehicles were run out into the sea nose to tail and were used as a make-shift pier to enable troops to board deeper draft vessels which couldn鈥檛 get right into the beaches. I believe Len got away from Dunkirk without even getting his feet wet!

Sadly the rest of his service story which took in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany are now lost to me, and only the medals remain as testimony. The group shown should include the France and Germany star, as this is present on his ribbon bar.

My father once saw a piece of newsreel shot at the Anzio landings. In it a sergeant with a pipe gripped between his teeth is seen struggling up the beach pushing his sand clogged motorcycle. He swore it was uncle Len, but now I suppose we will never know...

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