Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind by Sean Longden Read Free Book Online Page A

among the troops. There were brief interludes where the beauty of the early summer landscape was heightened by the juxtaposition between war and nature. Living in hedgerows and on riverbanks, the soldiers were drawn briefly into the natural world. Peter Wagstaff, of the l/6th Battalion Queen’s Regiment, later wrote of a night awaiting the inevitable enemy assault: ‘Over the river hung a thin pall of mist which had spread over the meadows in front of our battle positions, there the cattle waded almost belly deep, as if in some stream. There must have been half a dozen nightingales, all singing their heads off oblivious to the rattle of machine-gun and small-arms fire. What a fantastic world it was – nature could not have been lovelier and the face of man more brutal.’ 10
    Yet such scenes were soon eclipsed by the reality of their situation. It was not just the vast columns of refugees and retreating infantrymen that clogged the roads. Thousands of military vehicles also joined the retreat. With few Military Police to organize the columns, units became mixed up in the traffic jams. As drivers became increasingly exhausted, the usual convoy discipline was abandoned. All that mattered was to keep moving. Crowds of tired soldiers seemed to hang from anything with wheels and an engine. Alongside the overcrowded vans, trucks and lorries, moved soldiers pushing their kit in wheelbarrows. Every village seemed to have hastily constructed roadblocks that were little more than farm carts and barrels piled in the roads, then abandoned. If they could be dismantled by an exhausted army in retreat, they would surely prove no barrier to the headlong advance of the German Army.
    As lorries carrying men of the Gloucestershire Regiment became bunched up in a traffic jam, they were the ideal target for enemy fighters roaming the skies in search of prey. As the weary troops slumbered under the canvas of the trucks, nine Messerschmitt fighters swooped upon them: Approaching from the rear in threes, they first bombed then machine-gunned the column. Wheeling, they repeated the attack without bombing, once from the front and once from the rear, flying very low in each attack.’ Stunned by the speed of the attack, numbed and sleep-sodden, the troops struggled to dismount and find cover. The tarpaulins covering the trucks made escape difficult, trapping some unfortunate souls within. Nothing could be done to save the wounded trapped within the burning lorries. Of the five that received direct hits, two were carrying troops, one was carrying the cook’s equipment and one contained stores. The final vehicle was loaded with the battalion’s spare ammunition. As the ordnance ignited it became too dangerous to approach the flaming vehicles, sealing the fate of those trapped within. Once the fighters had flown off in search of more prey, the Gloucesters assessed the human cost of the tragedy. Around one in seven of the battalion’s total strength – 104 soldiers – were killed, wounded or missing.
    The impact of aerial attacks was obvious to the retreating British Army, nor was the lesson lost on the Royal Air Force. In a desperate attempt to stall the enemy advance, the RAF threw its bombers into action. They targeted bridges and railways across northern Germany and the Low Countries, hoping the damage they inflicted might win a breathing space for the hard-pressed army. Their valiant efforts cost the lives of many of the crews. In one afternoon the RAF sent seventy-one bombers against enemy targets; just forty returned to their bases – a loss of 56 per cent.
    If the dive bombing of the clogged roads was not enough, the Allied forces had to contend with the constant attention of the highly mobile enemy reconnaissance units whose motorcycle patrols often followed just in the wake of the retreating forces, and who engaged the British with terrifying mortar attacks and deadly sniper fire almost as soon as they attempted to form defensive