Charlie Vahey at Dunkirk

My father, Charlie Vahey was in the RAOC and was at Dunkirk as a driver. As he was in the TA at the onset of the war he was called up on the second day of the war. Told to take a convoy of Bedford lorries to the Belgian border to pick up stranded BEF soldiers he warned his drivers to set fire to their lorry of they were dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe, and to scatter. They were dive-bombed and his drivers were all together and were killed. My father was in another field but was buried alive by the Germans. Later he was dug out by the French Resistance and they were amazed to find that he did not have an army uniform as there were none to issue him before France, but he wore a Birkenhead Bus Driver's uniform. They hid him in a farm for a considerable time till they got him a measured British Army uniform.
To the day he died he would never say where he was hidden. He would fondly refer to 'Maman' but said that even when de-briefed back in England after repatriation by small boat, he would never disclose who his farming hosts were as many French people supported the Nazis and they would have executed Maman and her children. His body had a tremor till the day he died - except when driving! He tried to claim a war pension as he spent years in Military Hospitals but the Army did their usual tactic by moving him from one hospital to another and then said that his spend the years till demob in 1946 without any medical or other Army records! That was not an isolated incident as many will testify.

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