Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (3 page)

At the Reeves family home in Reigate, a mother, father and siblings celebrated the safe return of their eldest son, Les, from France. For them, the nation’s collective relief had been a very personal one – their boy had survived. The joyous mood in the house continued for a few days until a lone voice cut through the celebrations. It was Ivy, the soldier’s sister. She had been thinking and had suddenly realized something was missing. Finally she asked the question that had been troubling her: ‘But hang on a minute, didn’t our Eric go to France as well? Where’s he?’

In all the excitement their younger son had been forgotten. As they spoke, nineteen-year-old Eric Reeves was trudging forlornly along the roads of northern France, destined for a German prisoner of war camp. It would be five years before he would return home to tell his story. Like almost 40,000 of his comrades, he was one of Dunkirk’s forgotten heroes – one of the men they left behind.

The truth of the last day will never be published.
Major R.L. Barclay, 44th DivisionRASC, writing to his wife in June 1940following his return from France
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Looming high above the fields of Flanders, this seemed to be an obvious vantage point. Like some wooded island crowned with a medieval monastery, the Mont des Cats gave its occupiers a vast and unrivalled panorama both eastwards into Belgium and westwards across the landscape of France. But as the month of May 1940 drew to a close there was only one view that really mattered. Twenty miles to the north-east plumes of smoke were rolling skywards – rising above the flames of Dunkirk.

A few days previously this had been a depot for the British Army, a dump for vehicles and stores. But with the spearpoint of the German blitzkrieg plunging through Belgium, pushing back the Allied armies ever westwards, the Mont des Cats was no longer a rear echelon sanctuary. Instead it had become a hastily improvised strongpoint. With his troops forced back into France, Major-General Edmund Archibald Osborne, commanding officer of the 44th Infantry Division, had assembled them on the only available high ground. Originally an officer in the Royal Engineers, who had served with honour in the fields of Flanders during the Great War, Osborne was the very picture of the old-fashioned British general. With his service dress, riding breeches and boots, grey hair and clipped military moustache he seemed to epitomize just how out of date the British Army had become. In the era of blitzkrieg, of air support, carrier-borne infantry, paratroopers and tanks, Osborne seemed to reflect the days of the static trench warfare of his first conflict.

To the senior officers of the British Expeditionary Force, men like Major-General Osborne, this was the textbook defensive position. It had everything they needed, a commanding view of the lands around, plenty of cover for the troops and, most importantly, it sat immediately in the face of the enemy advance.

For others that was exactly the problem. Footsore and weary after days of fighting and retreating in the face of the advancing ‘lightning war’, the men of the 4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment were less impressed by the sight. Certainly this was a fine defensive position – any fool could see that – but there was something far more important to them. Sitting high upon the only hill for miles around, they were conspicuous – they were a target. For twenty-two-year-old Private Bill Holmes it was a relief not to be marching, but war had entered his life swiftly and viciously and it was about to get worse. As he would later describe it, with the deliberate understatement so common to the British infantryman: ‘We really had a dose there. The British Army really did some silly things – for one thing, we were right on the top of the hill. So the Germans just kept bombing it! It was the most stupid thing they could have planned.’

These were strong words for such an inexperienced soldier. Just nine months earlier Holmes had been working on his father’s farm in East Sussex. His had been a simple life, one so common in the countryside of pre-war Britain. There were few luxuries, he worked hard from dawn till dusk, tending the animals and maintaining the orchards that provided the family with its income. But along with the hard work came a slow pace of life that made the long hours tolerable. In many ways it was an idyllic existence, one which none in the village had realized would soon be over. In these final days before war, horses still worked the land, many homes were still without electricity or relied on pumped water. Through the spring and summer of 1939, as war had approached, the young men inhabiting this world were slowly caught up in political machinations that seemed so far removed from their own world. When Holmes and his mates went to the cinema in nearby Haywards Heath, they saw newsreels revealing what was going on in Europe, but still it all seemed so distant. What did the Sudentenland, the Munich crisis or Hitler’s insistent sabre rattling mean to them?

Then in summer 1939, with war seemingly inevitable, the outside world finally took a grasp of the towns and villages of Britain. The government’s announcement that it was to form a militia from more than 200,000 men, aged twenty and twenty-one, was a firm declaration of intent. It may not have been a full-scale mobilization, but it was one more step on the road to war. Each man called up to the militia was told he would serve just six months and then be released back into civilian life as a trained infantryman, ready to be called up in the event of war. Like all his mates, Bill Holmes had registered for the militia in July. Now he was certain war would come. This knowledge could not help but affect their lives: ‘I had a summer of freedom, but in the back of my mind I knew what was going to happen.’ It was the calm before the storm.

When his call-up papers had arrived, falling ominously on to the doormat of the family cottage, Holmes’ father had made him a stark offer. He could apply for his son to be excused service, to register as an essential worker, since farming could be classed as a reserved occupation. The youngster had considered the offer but realized he could never accept. Quite simply, he knew that to remain at home would seem like a betrayal of his mates, all of whom would themselves be going to war. It was a decision that would trouble him many times in the five long years that followed.

Sitting atop the Mont des Cats, with shells bursting around him and machine-gun fire raking the hillside, it was easy for these thoughts to return to his mind. Just eight months before, he had said goodbye to his mates and headed off to the barracks at Chichester. Life in the army was a shock to most of the new recruits, but for those from quiet villages it made all the more impact upon their lives. ‘Suddenly nothing was private any more – like showering with other people. That took a bit of getting used to, but in the end you were as bad as everyone else. The others were nearly all London lads – a rough old bunch, but a good bunch. You couldn’t be a weakling among them.’

These new soldiers may have learned to live together but they had still not learned all the skills of the infantryman. Compared to the well-trained forces heading towards them the British soldiers were, in the most part, mere novices. That said, they were not fools.

In the world of the tacticians and military theorist, of the generals and staff officers with their grandiose plans and years of experience, the views of novice soldiers like Bill Holmes were ridiculously simple. Such men did not understand the art of war. And yet he was right when he pondered the wisdom of their positions on the Mont des Cats. Every German gunner could range his shells on to the hill. Every Luftwaffe pilot could spot the monastery or the windmill and unload his deadly cargo with hardly a chance of missing. And every soldier of the Wehrmacht, from the lowliest private to the mightiest general, knew the British Army would occupy the hill.

As Holmes and his comrades in the 44th Division awaited the German assault on their positions, they had a brief moment to look back on all that had happened in the previous weeks. The British Army had been engaged in a valiant attempt to stall the German advance. They had held hideously exposed positions on the riverbanks and canalsides that crisscrossed the low-lying fields of Belgium and northern France. As a review of the campaign commissioned by the War Office later revealed, defensive positions on canals and rivers caused immense problems for the defenders: they could not patrol, did not hold the high ground, were unable to camouflage their positions competently and could not counterattack. All they could do was dig trenches, blow bridges, fortify houses and pray they might hold off the rampaging force that had launched itself across the Low Countries.

Britain’s almost total lack of preparedness seemed reflected in the situation experienced at the Mont des Cats. Just a few short months earlier, this vast new army of regular soldiers, reservists, Territorials, new recruits and conscripts to the British Army had laughed at their situation. Following the declaration of war, thousands of new soldiers had arrived at barrack rooms and drill halls across Britain only to be issued with uniforms, weapons and equipment that seemed like museum pieces. Many had started their military careers in uniforms little changed since the last great conflict: boots that had been date-stamped ‘1920’ and packed in grease for nearly twenty years; rifles that had last seen service in their fathers’ hands back in the Great War; ‘pisspot’ helmets; cloth puttees – all relics of some long forgotten era of warfare. As they stumbled across the parade grounds and agonized over polishing brasses, boots and buttons, they had taken some comfort in the constant claims that war would last no more than a few months. All could laugh at ill-fitting uniforms and the caps that seemed to litter the parade ground every time the drill-sergeants shouted instructions.

Yet there was a sober fact behind this comic spectacle. Following the Great War the British Army had been allowed to run down to a state in which it was hardly equipped for modern warfare. Only in 1932, after more than ten years of neglect, had the government admitted that something needed to be done. Even so, it took two further years of talking before any real changes began to be made. As the British government discussed rearmament, its potential enemies had pushed forward with modernizing their fighting forces. Even after rapid expansion and investment in the armies following the Munich crisis, the British Army had still been left lagging far behind its enemies. As Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF, wrote in a report about the territorial units under his command: ‘The standard of training is low and in my opinion, against a first-class enemy they are as yet fit only for static warfare.’ He was blunt in his assessment that they ‘possessed little more than token equipment’.
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Gort’s assessment was spot-on: one officer in an anti-aircraft unit recalled that after four years in the Territorial Army he had learned no more than basic drill and knot-tying. In one tank unit the crews were only allowed to attend lectures on tank warfare after they had perfected sword drill. A War Office report of early 1939 had given a stark indication of the problems faced by the army:The instruction is incompetent. The instructors almost without exception, lack general intelligence; they have learnt the lessons parrot fashion and can only teach in that fashion; they cannot answer questions which are not in the drill book, and finally their method and speed of instruction is entirely ill-suited to their audience. They take in fact an hour to teach what their hearers can all fully grasp in five minutes . . . the system of training throughout the TA seems to have been designed to suit the stupidest class of recruits i.e. the rural ploughman.
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There had been no more than a few short months of vigorous training to realign the mentality of the pre-war army and mould the expanding force into something fit for the modern battlefield. Despite the rigorous efforts that had taken place during 1939 – doubling the size of the Territorial Army, introducing new weapons and equipment and the induction of 200,000 men into the militia – it was easy for the men of this new army to realize that the nation was unprepared for war. Every man among them had watched in awe as the weekly newsreels displayed the might of the German war machine – modern aircraft, column after column of vicious-looking tanks, row upon row of field artillery, deadly machine-guns, tracked troop-carrying vehicles and unflinching belief in both the might and right of their cause – everything an army could need to guarantee victory.

Despite the visible might of the German Army there remained a dogged self-belief within Britain’s armed forces. After all, by the end of April 1940 there were 394,165 British soldiers in France, with more still on their way. More than 235,000 were in the main fighting force, over 17,000 were training in France to join the main force and nearly 80,000 were performing duties in the lines of communication. In addition there were also 9,000 men on their way to join their units, over 2,500 unallocated soldiers and over 23,000 serving at various HQs. On paper, though small compared to the French Army, this seemed a formidable fighting force.

For almost a year the media had fed the public a diet of propaganda about how their troops would ‘Hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ and myths about how the tanks they had seen on the German newsreels were actually made of cardboard. Such stories had boosted public confidence, but by 1940 their light-hearted tone was no longer appropriate. Almost from the very moment the Germans had launched their assault on 10 May, the smile had been wiped from the collective face of the British Army. As one NCO noted in his diary, his company went to war with just fifty rounds of ammunition per man, one box of hand grenades and only seven rounds for their Boyes anti-tank rifle. There was no longer anything humorous about being part of an army that had gone to war in requisitioned delivery lorries and butchers’ vans that had been hastily repainted as machines of warfare.

Awaiting the assault at the Mont des Cats, Bill Holmes realized war was no longer a joke. Like all his comrades he had heard the tales of cardboard tanks and aircraft – he’d even listened to lectures on them back at his barracks – but now he knew the truth. They were real, made of steel and very, very dangerous.