The Retreat to Dunkirk

TROOPER EDWARD RICE, EAST RIDING YEOMANRY

My late father, Edward Rice, along with several of his friends, enlisted in the East Riding Yeomanry around the time of the Munich crisis of 1938. They were disgusted by the Chamberlain government’s actions and were certain that it could not be long before war broke out. Like many young men before them they wanted to be part of the adventure and saw joining the Territorial Army as being one of the quickest and most certain ways of ensuring their place.

The Yeomanry was mobilised at the outbreak of war in September of the following year but it was not until February of 1940 that the regiment arrived in France to experience the tail end of the worst winter in living memory and the last gasps of the Phoney War. My father was the gunner/wireless operator in a Vickers Light Tank mark VIB. This was a small, lightly armoured vehicle armed with just two machine guns. It has a crew of three: a driver, a gunner/wireless operator and a commander who, in action, also doubles as loader for the machine guns. In no way was the Mark VIB any sort of match for the German Panzers that they were soon to face.

When the Phoney War came to its abrupt end in May 1940 the East Riding Yeomanry, along with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, left its prepared positions in France and advance into Belgium. My father remembered the cheering Belgian crowds as they passed through their towns and villages on their way to try to stem the German advance.

It did not take long for the allied defences to succumb to the onslaught unleashed by the Luftwaffe and the superior German armoured forces. As the ensuing retreat developed it fell to the inadequate allied armour to try to delay the enemy advances. My father recalled being in action almost constantly from around 11th or 12th May, always falling back after each engagement. He was never able to organise his memories of this particular phase of the fighting into any sort of consecutive chronology; just constant fighting, overwhelming fatigue and the steady loss of tanks and good comrades.

Somewhere near the French town of Valenciennes (I still have the map that he had among his kit) in a battle with German armoured vehicles my father’s tank was hit several times, putting it completely out of action. The first shell entered through the front of the tank, killing the driver and wounding both my father and the commander. Subsequent hits further injured them both, the commander more severely than my father. In an extreme act of selflessness and heroism that went, as far as I am aware, officially unrecognised, the commander used the last of his strength to heave my father out through the turret hatch and off the tank. I regret that if my father ever told me the name of this brave man I have since forgotten it.

By this time my father was badly wounded. Both legs were a mass of wounds caused by shell fragments that has peppered the inside of the tank and he had a serious head wound. From this point on his recollections became hazy and episodic. He remembered being placed on a Bren gun carrier to be evacuated but from where, field dressing station or casualty clearing station, he was uncertain. However, he definitely recalled that someone gave him a bottle of lemonade with which to assuage his thirst.

His story now takes a strange and inexplicable twist. He next remembered being on a stretcher among the sand dunes outside Dunkirk. He could not explain why he was there and had not been taken to the hospital in Dunkirk itself as were the majority of the seriously wounded, most of whom ended up in captivity for the next five years. Whatever the reason, in the dunes he lay, as far as he could remember totally alone. It was there that a Royal Naval Rating discovered him. (From the way my father described the scenario I imagine that the matelot was one of the last of a shore party and that he was making a final search of the dunes to ensure that no one was left behind.) Somehow my father was evacuated from the dunes onto what he thought was a destroyer or a corvette which took him to, he thought, Newhaven. His next clear memory was of being in a bed in a civilian hospital with the remains of his bloodstained uniform lying in a heap under the bed. This caused him some concern as he had a primed mills bomb in one of his pockets. The civilian staff of the hospital had some difficulty finding someone with enough courage and experience to take away the offending piece of ordnance.

It transpired that my father had four major wounds: the one to his head, one in each leg and one in his left arm. This last injury always baffled him as it was caused by a pistol bullet. He always supposed that some German tank commander had taken a pot shot at him after he had been jettisoned from his destroyed tank. In addition he had suffered multiple, relatively minor shrapnel wounds all over his body. As a child in the fifties I can recall his sitting by the fire of an evening using his penknife to ease out pieces of shrapnel as they worked their way out of his hands and arms.

It took several months for him to recover from his wounds and he was left unfit for further active service. However, he refused to his discharge from the army and spent the rest of the war working for the armed forces at his peacetime trade as a printer. He kept on trying to return to active service, volunteering for anything he thought would take him there: the Airborne Force, the Commandos, even manning guns on defensively armed merchant vessels. In the end his commanding officer told my father that if he volunteered for anything else he would make sure that he was discharged as unfit for further service. He was finally demobilised in 1946.

Despite the long-term effects of his wounds that left him in pain for the rest of his life, my father always felt that he had been extremely fortunate to survive the retreat to Dunkirk. Only four officers and around two hundred men of the east Riding Yeomanry made it back from France, many of them, like my father, suffering from wounds. I have a photograph of his squadron, taken just before they embarked for France. I am aware of only three of the men depicted, including my father that made the return trip. My father only ever spoke once of his experiences but he suffered terrible nightmares for the rest of his life. I think he also felt a sense of guilt at his survival when so many of his good friends had died.

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