The Trip to Dunkirk

This is my father's story, transcribed from a tape he made one day on his own.

DUNKIRK
Thursday May 30th 1940

Ken Whiting’s reminiscences recorded in 1975 or 76

This is Ken having a yarn, which I’ve intended to do for a very long while. I’d like to put on record, somewhere, somehow, my recollections of 1940 and the evacuation of Dunkirk. Suppose that if I go through it how I remember it, it may be of interest; don’t know. Here goes.

I had been in Ramsgate, working with the shore engineers as the crew of our boat had been paid off due to damage, and I was working with the shore engineers and was called up before the engineer …. Engineer captain, and he said, ”Want you to take a boat called the ‘Chantecler’ across to Dunkirk, to pick up some troops,” which sounded quite normal sort of thing, it didn’t strike me as being very much out of the ordinary. On passing through the outer office I passed a Lieutenant RN who I was …. We had a mutual dislike, one of those sort of people, you know, you just can’t get on with, and as I was going out, he said, “Oh, ah, … Whiting,” so I said ,”Yes, sir”, nice and polite.

“Good Luck.”

I said, “Thank you”, and walked out. Stood out in the corridor and thought, “More in this than meets the eye”. So I went out and went to this boat the “Chantecler”, and had a look at her. She was a Dutch boat - and converted to a yacht, I suppose; she was steel, she had about a thirty horse engine in, which made her very under-powered; and proceeded to get the engine going. I went over that boat with a fine tooth-comb, you may depend. And spent I think most of the day doing that.

I can’t help laughing, about the last thing I suddenly thought of fresh water, we must have fresh water, so the water man of the harbour, who watered all the ships, he had his own vehicle and so on and he had all these special keys and hoses and goodness knows whatnot, and you know, if you wanted water you put in for it. So I said, “Can I please water… have water.” Now the so and so said we couldn’t have water because it was knocking-off time. So I thought, “Well, we’re not going anywhere without water”, so I went back and mentioned the fact to this Lieutenant that the gentleman who handled the water was knocking off and we couldn’t get any. When I got back to the ship he was putting the water on board, so something must have moved somewhere; but panic ruled supreme really. The Naval Stores there which normally you required orders at least in triplicate to get a bundle of waste out of there, let alone five gallons of oil, you know, were literally thrown open and the … I think it was an old stoker there who looked after it, you know, … he just said, ”Help yourself. I had my orders,” and you could literally go into the Naval Stores and help yourself and there was everything there. Not that I mean you could take everything, but I loaded somewhere about a hundred gallons of oil and … of vapourising oil and a good bit of lube oil, and I hadn’t got a crew by then so I did this all by myself, got her in the outer … got the boat under way. Looking back on it I don’t know how I did it but when the gates opened, I got her out, and got her into the outer harbour and made fast to some other ships and hung on till the crew turned up, which was a naval crew.

I suppose it must seem a bit funny. I was on T124xs which were a special form which…. You were a Merchant Seaman actually but you were under…. you took your orders from the Navy, but you wore no uniform. They paid you a fairly high salary, wage or what have you and this included danger money so that if anything happened to you that was your bad luck. There was no provision made for dependents or anything, you were just paid… you know, you got your RA to pay and that was the end of it. Anyway, to get away from it and get on a bit, we got our crew who were a Lieutenant , a full Lieutenant, I forget his name, he’s in one of the books here,[T.K.Edge-Partington R.N.] and a crew of about half a dozen ordinary matelots, had already been in one evacuation at Calais or somewhere and had a pretty good time there, I think. And we took off that night from Ramsgate, heading out after dark. We hadn’t gone far before it was pretty obvious that the rest of the fleet, the little boats, the few boats that were going with us could steam about three times as fast as we could, so you know, they said, “You make your own way, we’re going.” So we proceeded on at our steady five or six knots which was all the engine was capable of, I wasn't going to push the darn thing anyway, it had got to go a long way and I wanted to get back, so I thought I'd go at the speed that the engine was comfortable at.

So the first thing that happened was we were nearly run down by a destroyer or cruiser, I don’t know which it was, it was something pretty big and the first we knew of it was a shaded port light and the next thing was, a boat went by us like an express train; but she missed us, so it was all right.

We went on. During the night or during the early morning we were… we could hear this mumbling noise and it was coming closer all the time, slight mist, and no sea to speak of, but it was just a mumbling of engines, you know, it was – and it wasn’t long before we saw two MTBs the only thing, they weren’t MTBs because they weren’t the right shape for MTBs, and they were a much lighter grey than ours were. And they went by ahead of us we were going directly towards them, and they went across our bows, at some … oh, some distance away. We slowed right down so as not to make a bow wave, so that we, you know, we didn’t want to advertise our presence but they didn’t see us, the good Lord looked after us again. [They were E-boats, I believe. NJC] And we went on, we went right the way across to the other side. We had to sort of touch the coast some distance from Dunkirk and go along the coast and the wind was on, which mean that it was a lee shore, and if you broke down you knew where you’d end up, on the shore. For that particular part of the shore was not held by our troops, it was only…. It wasn’t within the perimeter of Dunkirk, it was sort of outside and our reception would have been warm, I would have thought, if we’d had to go ashore there. Anyway, we went along right by the harbour and up to the beach, and loaded… oh, I don’t know, thirty or forty, well, as many as we could carry, I suppose, on this boat. We could have carried a few more, I suppose, if we’d stacked them a bit better [the troops I’m talking about!] but we had to come off in the end, and we came back.

It was a little bit lively on the beach; they were sending shrapnel shells over, which were not nice things. I didn’t know what they were at first, but the sailors, the rest of the crew knew all about them and I really appreciated a tin hat at that time, but apart from that there was a good bit going on and the German Air Force I think had the run of the skies contrary to all the baloney that’s put out that the RAF were doing such great things, we never saw one, not one RAF plane the whole time, I don’t think, until we got back to England. I think it was sheerly to keep the morale up, this story of what the RAF did. WE… There was some very hard feeling at that time, it …pity really, it wasn’t their fault, I suppose, they hadn’t got the stuff. Our politicians and so on had as usual not provided the necessary and they talked big with nothing to back it up. But that’s another story.

Looking back on the whole evacuation story that we had there seems to be an awful lot of chaps who died who shouldn’t have died and listening to the radio now or television, it sounds as though we’re doing exactly the same things as before. I suppose things alter but we still are hopelessly prepared for anything, even to defend ourselves but I suppose this is one of those things that we can do nothing about…

To go back to the actual story of the evacuation, I suppose the extraordinary thing, the engine, the Kelvin 30 horse, Kelvin Ricardo that we had, petrol-paraffin engine, behaved extremely well, I think it must have run, it did run, three days straight off without giving me any trouble at all except blocked filters, I think, but even those I got over without any great difficulty. The actual beach and the actual evacuation was really … the really unpleasant part, I suppose, the steaming back, coming back so far so slow and you know, I think they attacked, I don’t know what sort of ship she was but the German Air Force attacked a ship of some sort just out through the mist away form us, we couldn’t see but we could only hear, and this was sort of a,….. a little bit of a warning of what might happen to you. But fortunately I suppose we were small fry but, er, curious things, we passed a raft coming back, silly things you remember, it was an ordinary raft, a square made up of wood, and something dry I suppose to make it float, tin cans or drums or something, and on this raft there were four posts, one at each corner, rope between them, and the only thing on this raft was a ladder and a bicycle. Now if anybody can tell me what a ladder and a bicycle were doing half way between England and the Continent, on a raft, I'd like to know! But it’s just one of those things, I suppose.

We came back apparently, looking by the charts afterwards, we came back straight across a minefield; so we short cutted and came across a minefield and this was quite all right, I don’t suppose we would draw enough to upset anything.

I don’t know whether I can describe the conditions that we had more or less aboard the boat, adequately, but it seems to turn out that I was the only one who knew how to work a Primus. Therefore I was the only one who could make tea, because I knew how to make the Primus boil the water. Well, the boat inside had lino floor everywhere and there was a certain amount of sea-sickness while we were coming back, and lino is not the best of surfaces under those circumstances. And tea making has its hazards too, because you’ve got to cart it about, but I made quite a lot of tea one way and another. But we did have… we had bread and tinned food and that sort of thing for those who wanted it, and some of the blokes wanted it. A lot of the chaps, the soldiers who came aboard, had got absolutely, you know, soaked like [right] up to their shoulders, and when they came aboard they sort of stripped off, and they were so absolutely wacked out that they sort of stripped off and sort of just lay down and went to sleep and stayed like it… it was quite a sight really, but the only unfortunate part so far as I was concerned was, the toilet obviously couldn’t cater for the number of people we had aboard which led to a number of complications, which I won’t go into! But also another thing that rather surprised me, which I hadn’t seen before on this particular trip was when in the fo’c’sle which was up forrard, I was making the inevitable tea, and you know I was sort of… just looked through into the fo’c’sle, and right up in the bows of the boat there was one soldier, and I said, “What the heck are you doing out there?”, you know; and this chap said that he had… he was one of these unfortunate people I had never met one, he said he had a terrible fear of the sea and because he had this fear of the sea, he felt safer if he could get up in a dark corner and not see it, which he was doing. I reassured him that it was as safe as houses and so on, which he seemed better for, anyway. But to someone who’d been sort of to do with the water for most of my life, to sort of suddenly meet someone who didn’t accept it, well, as water, you know, a thing can frighten the daylights out of you and yet can be as docile as you like, you know, it just hadn’t happened to me. We had one other bloke there, who I think had got … oh, I don’t know what he’d got, he’d got something. Pneumonia or something he’d got and there wasn’t room for him to lie down properly so I had to prop him up in the corner. He would all over and put his face in the paraffin on one of the drums that I had there. I carried, you know, all tanks absolutely full and then as many cans of paraffin as I could swipe when I went ashore because if there’s one thing that I would dislike a lot would be to be adrift for want of fuel, and I thought that’s not going to happen so I had plenty of lube and paraffin which… or petrol for what we required.

I don’t know how long it took us to get back to the South Foreland, not the North Foreland; the skipper, who was an RN man assured me that it was the North Foreland that we could see, and I assured him that it jolly well wasn’t, it was Dover, and we argued a little bit about it, but it was just a question of time before it was self-evident and I didn’t have to argue about it, it was Dover, but he didn’t apologise, this officer, for arguing about it, he came very near it, but he said that his navigation had been very carefully sort of worked out, but he hadn’t realised that the troops had all brought their rifles aboard, and most of them were in the cockpit! This played havoc with our compass, and I think if we’d have maintained our course we should have missed England. We were off down the Channel, I think, we had to alter course to go into Dover. This is just how far the compass had been pulled out by the rifles which were round the… well, I say round, you know, that were sort of about the cockpit; I mean with some of the blokes had got them loaded and some hadn’t because they’d fired them at times just for the sake of it.

But the tide turned just before we got to Dover, so it took us hours to get into Dover, because we hadn’t got sufficient speed to get over the tide, that, you know, sort of reasonably well. But we eventually got in, and discharged our crew. And attempted to clean up ship. We were then told we couldn’t go back to Dunkirk because we weren’t fast enough, that was only fast ships that could do it, so we had to go back to Ramsgate.

But looking back on this whole episode, the thing I think that struck me at the time, and has since I’ve read different accounts, was the fantastic planning done by, I think it’s Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Admiral in Charge of the whole operation of the evacuation. He had it absolutely tied up, it appeared, to the last little bit. I mean, they had gangs of matelots with hand carts in the docks, and each ship had a box and in this box were the provisions sufficient for about two or three days. Now each one had its boat’s name and everything, you know, everything seemed to be worked out.

The other thing I was going to think about was seeing destroyers steaming at maximum speed, this was a thing I hadn’t seen before. The wash from the destroyer really pushing it has to be seen to be believed. We went through the wash of one, and it seemed about as high as a house, the wash; whether it was or not, I don’t know, but it was what it seemed like; but one came in that was damaged, and she’d got a collision mat over her fo’c’sle, way back about abreast of her fore gun, and she was throwing up spray that was curling right over her foredeck, right over her bridge. And yet she was still steaming at this fantastic speed; it’s a fantastic sight and I had a very nice camera aboard the boat which I never took with me. Great pity, been worth a lot of money, those photos, if somebody hadn’t shot me for taking them, I suppose! But the sort of points that you remember I suppose are a bit disjointed, and don’t make a very interesting sort of story but one could talk about the trouble that I had from going over of the weed and stuff on the bottom of the boat going into the sea cock filters and blocking up so that the engine boiled. This was quite a trouble. I had to sort of sit down by the seacocks and, with a long rod, keep them clear by poking it through them, you know. As one clogged up I did that, and then the other one clogged up so I did that, and so on and kept this up for a long, long time before it eventually cleared itself. As I say, we were fortunate we had no mechanical troubles, that the engine didn’t miss a beat, I don’t think,… well, it did stop once in the night, but it was only a filter blocked so… I think I was asleep on the deck, I slept on the deck, I think. Darn boat was steel, and it was a bit cold, you know, and I wrapped myself up in my oilskins and things, and gas mask for a pillow, and had quite a good sleep, but somebody woke me up and told me the engine had stopped, but I was pretty tired so I suppose it was not to be wondered at. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.

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