From 10th May 1940 to end of May 1940 at Dunkirk

We were a 30 man Field Hygiene Section RAMC commanded by a Major who was a medical doctor. We were responsible for water purity, sanitation and hygeine of the troops in the field. After 10th May 1940 when the Germans attacked and cut off the BEF in North Eastern France and Belguim we were used to help to evacuate casualties from the field hospitals and casualty clearing stations to the coast.
About a week after leaving our static HQ near Bethune we were helping at a large chateau being used as a hospital near the Belgium border, run by the Welsh Field Ambulance. Nuns were acting as nurses and our CO was helping in the operation rooms on the first floor up a wide marble staircase. Waiting cases on stretchers were placed on each step. I was full time sterilising dressings in metal crates in our steam disinfector and was up and down the staircase all the time. Amputations were many. Penicillin had not been discovered then. My friend Tommy was digging graves. Another was burning arms and legs etc on a corrugated iron graduated feed incinerator. I remember him eating a raspberry jam sandwitch. He was giving water to the refugees streaming past the back gate in all sorts of carts ect. He also had a huge Alsatian dog and parrots to look after, left by the refugees.
One amulance driver reported being met head on by a German tank on this narrow road. The ambulance driver stopped and attempted to back out of sight round a bend. A German in the turret of the tank waved him past and signalled to two or three tanks behind to move over and let the ambulance, with a red croos to pass. The ambulance driver hesitated, took a chance and drove right past, only a few miles from the hospital. The incident was our first indication that something was wrong. That evening we moved into Belgium, after attending a burial service and left some Welsh lads with their lovely singing of hymns in our ears.We were in a sombre mood until someone got us singing more cheerful songs.
There had been reduced air action and the sound of gunfire had been quieter while at the hospital but the air action really hotted up and we could only move at night. Before leaving the chateau, refugees were seen returning, looking still more weary "Les Allemandes".
We heard a wireless radio set which we were able to listen to the BBC news from London when we were static, but when we moved relied on hearing news form Estamists or places where we were working. Later there were no stamists open and no civilians and we were relying on who occasionally called for news.
During our travels we found definite [roff of being cut off after being held up at a crossroads in a village a military policeman wished we would get a move on, as he said he had just come from watching from the cellar of the house on the corner as German tanks passed through on the other road.
I had a Michelin map and as Boulogne and Calais went by we reasoned unofficially that if a miracle happened we could perhaps get to Ostend or Dunkirk.
Ostend seemed like a second home because as a child i had a holiday there for a fortnight and had watched the Belgium soldiers drilling in the barracks and as it happened i was to pass through thoses same barracks at the end of the 2nd World War on my indefinte furlong (leave) release to my civilian occupation.
One day our transport with drivers were taken and a few days later they were returned and had been carrying personnel and petrol in support of the British tanks breaking through to meet up with the French from the south. When they left they heard the Gerries were in Amiens.

At a village near Ypres, called St Jean, is a large war memorial. If I remember correctly it was called Northumbria Park and was to honour the memory of the fallen of the 50th Division in the 1st World War. My Father was in the Northumberland Fusiliers. He must have been there in 1914-18.

At St Jean the German planes were moving around, looking for targets and we saw a British Anti-Aircraft gun in the middle of the field, blazing away at the planes which started to dive, streaming down at it. We were eating ice cream from the village shop, for which we were readily told off for not have more sense, we may get typhoid. The gun and planes were still going full blast when we left. Near here we sheltered in the old German Pill Boxes from WWI.
In the last post from here I was told of the sudden death of a cousin by accident on the military road in Northumberland. Molly was a year and a half older than me and was like a little mother to me when we were children. She could always be relied upon to help me with homework. I seemed to put the blame of her death on the Germans.

At Steemwork back in France we were helping to load an ambulance train. I was given the job of looking after the wounded in the booking hall of the station before they were put on the train. Those on one side of the hall could have water and those on the other side could not. When the non drinkers saw the others drinking it was not easy. One young soldier was naked except for a blanket which he kept throwing off. The weather was very hot and the sun was blazing down. This young soldier was peppered all over his body with shrapnel, which seemed to be starting to fester. He was just calling for his mother. The waiting ambulances and trucks with casualties were strung out along the road several yards apart with the sun blazing down. The German planes were everywhere but did not attack the train which was visible with Red Cross.

The cows in the field near the station were mooing and upset with the noise and needed milking. An Irishman who lived in London, and being much older than us 20 year olds was called “the Father of us all” and sometimes “the gumless ‘orror” because he lost his false teeth at least once on his return from our trips to the Estamists, being sick. Next morning we would recover them from the gutter.
He found clean buckets and utensils from abandoned railwayman’s house and milked the cows in the field. No-one seemed, even the doctors on the train, to worry about whether the milk was tuberculin tested. Everyone drank it.

The railwayman’s house, which was open and deserted, was so neat and tidy with boots and shoes on each step of the stairs. There were no civilians to be seen. Suddenly a plane came a few feet above the train travelling north east. Everyone dived for cover but it was a French biplane following the railway line, flying low to miss the German planes. Years later I read that the new French Commander in Chief, Weigand took a small French plane and followed the railway to meet General Cort of the British High Command. They missed each other.

At this point I was on my knees in the station urinal, praying that I could just see my Mother and fiancée before I died. After clearing the cooking hall and the train was full we heard as we were leaving that the line had been blown up and so everyone had to unload the medical cases and back into lorries and ambulances they went.

After moving always at night and sometimes the Unit was broken up into two or more parties and we travelled in other kinds of transport. The RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) drivers were always good and most, apart from our own Unit drivers were reservist cockney taxi and bus drivers and they were always “joking and laughing”, perhaps it was nervous tension.

Sunday 26 May 1940

We ended up on a deserted farm on the north side of Lillle and hid under Dutch barns which were nearly empty. Nobody or vehicles passed on the road. I think at this time we were told, after the arrival of a DR, that we now had to head for Dunkirk to be evacuated. We moved in the evening in two trucks though Lille, which was empty of life. We passed large cinemas with their latest pictures displayed outside. We were the only ones alive in sight. There was no bomb damage. South or west of Lille in open country we pulled onto the verge and waited for the last members of our Unit to join us and during this time the whole British army seemed to appear in trucks, two abreast, pouring down the road. Someone saw a NAAFI truck approaching and signalled for them to throw out some cigarettes. Out of the back of the truck fell a cardboard crate of Golden Flake (yellow perils). It broke into packets on the road and hundreds of 20s packets were flattened by trucks following while the lads snatched boxes which had fallen clear.

That night we slept in a poultry hut on a farm which was off to the north of the main road out of Lille. We had left the point of the cigarette incident when our own men had arrived and a large (Flying Pencil) Dornier had landed in the field alongside us and armed Germans came jumping out of the plane. I slept well and got up early with one or two more, had a lovely wash and shave under the pump in the farmyard.

We heard rifle and machine gun fire very close so jumped in the trucks and headed up the dirt track towards the coast.

As we approached a wood into which the track we found it barred by farm implements like threshing machines etc. The oldman (CO) go out and walked towards the block. A British officer appeared and one of the machines was moved and we weaved past the block. Along the side of the wood was a deep ditch and it was manned by Welsh Guardsmen who had just arrived from England. We breathed freely again when we knew we had something between us and the Germans. I am not the only one that wondered what happened to those Guardsmen.

We spent the next night in a wood near a small village which was full of abandoned lorries. We found, in a track, large tins of different jams and “dog” biscuits from our own QM. They were supposed to be the same as used in the First World War and coated with greengage jam, which was my jam, or swapped with someone else’s jam made a sort of continuous meal. Someone had slaughtered a pig and of course we had our water bottles. We had fared quite well up till now for food, but were beginning to feel lack of sleep.

This wood we were in we found was on the Franco-Belgium border wire and we seemed to be there a long time and during that time Gerry planes would pass over so low that sometimes you could see an occupant in the plane and we wondered whether they were going to give us a “salutation” raid. We knew we were near the sea and were on the look out for oil drums and petrol cans and suitable timber to make rafts. During our stay there we had a thunderstorm. How relaxing it was to have natural lightening and thunder instead of gunfire and bombs. I remember Tommy sitting looking out of the back of a truck with furrowed brow. Was this the end of the British Empire? (As my school master used to joke. He had spent a lot of time in India. The Empire on which the sun never sets, because it dare not trust the rascals.) The world is very different in all ways to what it was sixty odd years ago.

Someone had heard that we may be taken further down the channel and landed beyond the German advance.

It was either the 28th or 29th May evening that we were told that we were to move off in single file (through the tangle of vehicles) through the village and road towards the beach and walk to Dunkirk harbour. We were to keep going and not to go into the sand dunes, but if possible keep on firm sand.

We started off after taking the plugs out of the lorry oil sumps and left the engines running until they seized up. I had had my 21st birthday on 1 May and people had sent me tins of fruit, cream and other things which I had put in a wooden box and the driver of the ASH disinfector on which I worked had tied under the chassis when we were ordered to dump everything — this I had to leave for the Gerries.

We passed through the village and empty trucks till we came on to the road which was elevated like a railway embankment. At first it was blocked by abandoned British vehicles then we reached French with the occupants mainly drunk. I accepted a swig of some spirit from one friendly poilu and received a BF from the CO who was bringing up the rear. S/Sgt Clinton was leading at a steady pace. We consisted only of our own unit of 30 having retrieved our own transport and drivers. There were a few Belgium and Dutch vehicles. We cut across fields being flooded and onto roads before reaching the beach. The sky was covered with smoke from oil tanks burning at Dunkirk and everything was very dismal. We walked on the border sand and some troops came from the sand dunes and asked “Where are you going, the boats are coming in here?” We said “We are ordered to walk to Dunkirk harbour”. The driver of which I had worked with on the ASH disinfector had brought his heavy tool kit which he said he was just not leaving for the Gerries. He had driven Royal Blue Buses in the south of England. He was a much older man to all of us. He did not drink or smoke and therefore was nicknamed Pisstank just to annoy him by our joker, Willie who was also played the piano and formed a dance bank when we were static called “Rat McDowell and his Rodents”.

A very welcome sight was a flight of Spits or Harriers patrolling the beach. These were the first British planes we had seen since the fun started. We had seen French planes at an airfield all mangled on the ground before taking off. There was, at this time, no German planes to be seen. We had thought it was the thunderstorms which had kept them off.

Poor old Pisstank was exhausted. We took turns pulling him on his back by his legs along the beach. He ended up losing all his gear.

As we neared Dunkirk it was dark. All the large buildings on the left of us on what must have been a promenade were burning, lighting up the sands.

The Mole was of stone and rounded on the sands side. A commanding voice shouted (quietly) another ten quickly. We scrambled up and no one told us in the dark that there was an eight to ten foot drop on the other side. We were cleared away quickly for the next “drop”. We lay on the concrete pier. Smoking and lighting up was forbidden. Occasional shells came over but did not land near us. We had to keep quiet. Every now and then the oil tanks erupted in flames on the other side of the harbour, lighting everything like daylight.

It was beginning to get light and we were told to hurry to the end of the Mole. All the troops we thought were lying there were gone! We moved quickly and at a bend in the mole was a Pill Box (concrete) and a solitary sailor (Matelot) brewing hot sweet tea with a Hydro burner. He had jars, tins, cups etc. It was like nectar, “Let’s have your jar back, mate”. Thank God for the Navy.

The mole turned from stone to wood and plants were laid over holes with the water swirling below. At the end of the pier was the Scotia an LMS ferry which our CO used to travel home to Dublin from Hollyhead and which had taken us from Southampton to Cherbourg on 1 February 1940.

On the deck of the Scotia we were standing packed tight. We were the last on. On her next trip she was sunk.

We arrived in Dover and four trains were waiting. We got into one and stopped at a wayside station where the WI or MV came forward with sandwiches, buns,
cigarettes etc and tea. We carried on to Aldershot and into a field with bell tents. We were allowed two free telegrams and there we just slept and got up, had something to eat ditto for a week.

Ten of us were at Aldershot. Some of the others got on a Dutch ship which was disabled in mid channel and towed in by the Navy. We were grouped together at Leeds Headingly and unable to pay for anything or go anywhere. My Mother and Bertha came down on the next Sunday afternoon and I treated them to tea in a civilised restaurant.

My prayer had been answered.

We were the lucky ones to get back. What had we done to be treated like heroes?

We were all regrouped at Penwaenmwar, N Wales with our old friends the Welsh Field Ambulance who started a military hospital and I ran the improvised disinfector called a Serbian Barrel, which our tradesmen made at a local garage.

We were given new TASC drivers. We were told all the ones who were in our Unit were back in England.

All the casualties from the ambulance train had arrived safely in England.

Churchill was now Prime Minister and we would fight on.

This Hygiene Section, with six of the original members at Dunkirk, ended the war in Berlin after two members landed on “D” Day in Normandy and the section Public Health Service in Bayeux including water for the Army and Disabled Civilian Refugees with field hospitals, on the build up to the break out and later in Belgium and Holland. I was fortunate to be able to visit old French friends in Albert in 1944. All the young people were forced labour in Germany or in the French FFI.

This 23rd Field Hygiene Section, renamed the 2nd Field Sanitary Section, Royal Army Medical Corps, with six of its original RAMC personnel ended the war working in Berlin.

Two members of the Unit landed on “D” Day in Normandy followed later by the Unit which ran all Public Health Services (with existing French local officers) from
Bayeux during the build up of all troops for the breakout. Besides many refugees too, hospitals and a POW camp which got bigger every day.

Bayeux functioned like a normal country town. There was a charming little Theatre. Noel Coward and other visited in ENSA. There were one or two air raids by German fighter planes which escaped past the RAF and American Army Air Corps. Different to 1940.

Several other incidents have come to mind since writing this but perhaps the above gives an idea of 20 days I shall never forget.

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