Dunkirk II

The crimes began as Dunkirk was being evacuated. On May 28, the SS Totenkopf Division marched about 100 members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which had just surrendered, to a pit in a farm in Le Paradis and murdered them with machine gun spray.

A similar atrocity unfolded on the same day with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, which had been captured
 near Wormhout. They were forced into a barn and massacred with grenades. Two men survived, only because the volume of bodies they were buried under shielded them from both the explosives and from detection by guards who were looking for survivors.

Time-Life, 2008

Twelve months earlier

The nights at this time of year were still pleasant. It was summer and many a sunny day slipped gently into a clear night. In one particular period in one particular English county even the moon shone. Didn’t it know there was a war on?

2am was an interesting time of night in most counties of England in the early days of World War II. For one thing, there were exceedingly few people about—only bakers, milkmen, drunks unable to find their way home, and giggly lovers. Anyone with the intention of doing something illegal just about had the village or town to themselves. Certainly, there were no police around at that time; all the good policemen and their wives, girlfriends and mistresses were tucked up in bed, dreaming of promotion and polite, quiet children. So, for a three-week period in the Spring of 1940 no one was around to witness this: Someone breaking into a jeweller’s shop and re-emerging eight minutes later. They would be carrying a black Gladstone bag and although it looked like it didn’t weigh much when they entered the shop, it certainly looked heavy when they carried it out.

For three weeks this certain someone enjoyed complete freedom to plunder asunder in this particular Home County and surrounds. All jewellers stored their valuable items in safes, of course, but effective safes were expensive to purchase, so most jewellers settled for a safe that looked secure. To the professional thief they were extremely easy to crack. So, for three weeks this someone plundered their way across the country and amassed a very sizeable haul of fine jewels and expensive watches, all up worth around £34,000. That’s £2million in today’s money. And they’d been making a living from quietly, nightly entering jeweller’s shops up and down Britain for quite a few years now, so no safe was unbreakable. And the someone was now rich—very, very rich.

One day they received an official letter from London letting them know that in a month’s time they were to report to the station at ___, catch the 8.45am to Norfolk and report to the Britannia Barracks. So, they did. Upon arrival, they and their new companions were marched to the Quartermaster’s barracks and issued with their kit, wherein they were then members of the prestigious Norfolk Regiment. The someone didn’t know how long they were going to be in the army, or for how long the war would last, but they had taken the precaution, after the last jewellery store adventure, of storing their latest haul in an abandoned, heavily rusted open-top Armstrong Siddeley Cotswold Tourer. They had managed to hide it deep inside a forest, where ramblers and locals were so unlikely to find it that the large stash of goods was only lightly hidden underneath the wreck. Sure, still hidden from the amateur and innocent, but not impenetrable by a fellow professional.

Twelve months later

‘Damn! We’re bloody sitting ducks, lad!’ swore Lance Corporal Harry Giles to the man lying at his side. That very young soldier, from the Norfolk Regiment, was lying face up, tears streaming down his face and neck, softly murmuring to himself. ‘Mother’.

The fear of the men stranded on the beach, under intense fire from the Germans, was written in blood on their faces. The warm blood of their comrades and friends was splashed across the faces of the nearby living. Well, living-for-now.

And you could certainly smell Dunkirk. Death. Seaweed. Sea. Shit. Lots of shit. Piss. The metallic odour of blood as it mixes with oxygen.

The sand on which the men lay cowering, gathering what shelter they could, was cold to the touch, and of course wet. Wet from the sea and wet from the blood that lay in pools before slowly sinking into the sand. The threat that the next bullet or shell would have their name on it kept the dread of a bloody and painful death very much alive. The men were far away from the calming voice of Vera Lynn and her promise to meet them again on the white cliffs of Dover.

Up from the cold, wet sand of the beach lay the hillocks that offered such little protection from the German guns that pummelled and pushed the expeditionary force back to the ocean. Slightly higher up the surrounding hills, German soldiers and snipers sat in bunkers, relatively comfortable. All the Allied men—some 338,000 of them—were convinced that this was the beach on which they would finally get to meet their maker.

Within the deafening noise, they mouthed their bravado to each other, scared to admit they were scared. Scared of what? Well, of dying of course. But not just dying—how they were going to die. Was it by a sniper rifle? Or was it a larger shell that was going to break their bones and shatter their existence, blast apart their insides? Were they going to bleed to death slowly and in pain, or quickly and almost pain free? Were their bones going to be smashed irrevocably, or would they be taken out by a sniper splitting their skulls with a bullet slicing through the useless tin helmets?

Some mustered up the courage to fight on anyway, even though they were pinned down by ceaseless and relentless fire. Accurate fire.

Here and there, brave souls who probably figured out they had nothing to lose crawled inch by inch to the bedded-in Germans. Most of these Allied soldiers were killed just feet from their target. A few threw hopeful grenades into the small units that housed equally scared but better positioned German soldiers, soldiers that wielded rifles that spat hellfire and delivered a burning hot and permanent exit from the war.

Lance Corporal Harry Giles, ‘Lance Jack’ to his mates and subordinates, was definitely a ‘glass half full’ kind of soldier, but not so enthusiastic and optimistic as to be unrealistic and deemed a fuckwit. ‘Jack’ was military slang for someone who didn’t carry their weight. British military banter being what it is, calling Harry ‘Jack’ was the highest praise.

Harry certainly carried his weight. Especially on a heavily overcast day like today, when morale had been shot to bloody pieces, just like his men. He shouted out encouragement, offered sympathy and, for humour, attempted to replicate the bearing of his Second Lieutenant’s stiff upper lip and ‘Carry on, chaps’ tone-deaf speeches. Officers were on much safer ground than the ‘sweats’, who were currently pinned down by German guns and Stuka pilots who strafed them relentlessly and were probably thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Harry turned his head to Gunner Mulligan, the comedian of the barracks. ‘Spike, can you push this section of pipe a little further up the embankment?’ Spike raised his head as much as he dared and peered over the hillock they were all hiding behind.

‘What? I can’t hear you,’ he replied above the bullets zipping just above their heads. Harry bloody well knew he could.

‘You heard. Do you reckon you can push the pipe further up the embankment towards Jerry?’

‘I’m happy to push my pipe up most things, Jack, but I draw the line with Jerry right at this moment.’

‘Oh, go on, there’s a good chap,’ Harry responded in his best ‘Clueless Posh-Git Officer’ voice.

‘Fuck. All right, I’ll have a go.’

‘Well done, that man. Tally ho!’

Spike slid slowly back, keeping his head down. In his left hand he held onto the long piece of pipe that needed screwing onto the much longer piece of pipe that lay just out of reach. I’ll have to move to my left and try to hook my foot around it and somehow drag it towards me. That’s going to put me in sight of Jerry and his guns. Fuck.

Spike thought for a moment, then figured if he was going to die it might as well be on a French beach with real sand, unlike Brighton in the south of England where he would holiday with his young family every year. Bloody awful pebble beach there. Don’t know what anyone sees in it.

Spike remembered the ‘knee trembler’ he’d quickly but thoroughly enjoyed with his young wife against the rear wall of their local pub. It happened on the eve of his deployment when the next morning he and several hundred other conscripts would leave from the train station to an unknown destination to eventually board ships to somewhere. No one knew where except the senior officers and they weren’t telling. ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ said all the posters up, down and across Britain.

Stanley reached into his left breast pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of Woodbines—bloody awful cigarettes but all he could afford. His hand dove back in and returned with a broken box of matches. That knee trembler could be my last, might as well have one last ‘gasper with Jasper’ before I die.

Leaving Dunkirk. Or not.

The Dunkirk myth tells us that around 230,000 Allied men made it off the beach and onto a tiny boat heading for Blighty. This is true. What the myth doesn’t divulge quite so readily is that around 55,000 Allied men stayed behind, to give the others a chance to escape.

And didn’t the Germans have fun with those who remained.

In amongst the remainers was that mysterious someone—Corporal Harry. The memory of his jewels stashed in both the forest and also in various hiding spots around England and Scotland gave him an extra incentive to live.

He ended up captured by the Germans after being denied an escape off the beach and was locked inside an empty fortified German bunker with no avenue of escape. His tongue was cut out by a particularly cruel German SS officer, because Harry repeatedly wouldn’t divulge any information other than name, rank and serial number. So even when, days later when it seemed like the Germans had left for other parts of the countryside, and he heard some of his men, including Mulligan, searching for him, he was unable to let them know where he was. He had tried desperately to get off the beach, but each time he was denied by either German fire or his own superiors. So, he sat with ten other tongueless Allied soldiers in a dank bunker. Before the Germans left the area, he heard them round up other remainers and shoot them dead or march them off to God knows where. Harry couldn’t help but think that maybe it would have been better to die on the beach than to face whatever fates still awaited him in this dark place.

After three days of no guard appearing, he was hungry. Very hungry. The best he had received, even on good days, was three pieces of bread and a cup of water. Until there was no one left to give him the bread and water.

If I’m going to live, I had better find a way out of this bunker.

He dropped to his knees and started searching the floor for a rock, or anything that could scratch into the concrete bunker. His best hope was for finding something that could be used as a lever, but he knew as soon as he had the thought that it was impossible, the Germans would have cleared the floor of any such implement.

Wait, what’s this? There’s light seeping through a crack in the wall. If I can find a large stone or rock, maybe I can…

Meanwhile, deep in a forest, a young man who was running away from the war and refusing to join the Army as he had been directed, a man who was not Harry but was just starting out in the same extracurricular night-time profession, stumbled upon a broken down, rusty open-topped car while searching for somewhere to securely hide from the Military Police. He lay under the car as a way of hiding and as a way of catching his breath—both physically and mentally.

It was when lying under the rear of the car that he noticed something odd—a bulging black Gladstone bag locked in a metal cage attached to the underside of the car. He removed the bag from its cage and had a crack at opening the lock. Ordinary mortals would have no chance, but the Conscientious Objector had few problems opening it. He found himself stunned at what was inside.

For every seven soldiers who escaped through Dunkirk, one man became a prisoner of war. The majority of these prisoners were sent on forced marches into Germany. Prisoners reported brutal treatment by their guards, including beatings, starvation, and murder. Of the Allied troops left behind by Operation Dynamo, 11,000 died and 40,000 were captured and imprisoned (a handful were able to evade capture and eventually make their way back to Allied or neutral territory).

‘We shall fight on the seas and oceans… we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be… we shall never surrender’

Winston Churchill