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Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind - Sean Longden - 24/06/09
The retreat from Dunkirk and the heroics of the 'little ships' which helped so many of our stranded troops to escape from the hell of occupied France in 1940 have been well documented ...
But what of the 41,000 British soldiers who did not make it back to our shores and were either captured or killed by the advancing German troops?
Many of these men never made it to the beaches at Dunkirk but instead were rounded up further south around Calais, Le Havre and St Nazaire; some, like the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk regiment, were notoriously butchered by the SS.
Sean Longden has opened a new chapter on those who survived the first onslaught of Hitler's advancing army and endured forced marches across thousands of miles to the POW camps in Germany.
For these men, Dunkirk was not Churchill's 'miracle' but the beginning of a long struggle for survival ... and sanity.
Hour after hour, mile after mile and day after day they walked, shuffling over cobblestones, moving down seemingly endless roads and heading into the unknown.
It was summer and the heat was searing. With their stomachs shrunk by semi-starvation and their throats parched by thirst, they half-carried and half-dragged their sick and exhausted friends.
Often the only drinking water was from muddy ditches and sometimes they fought for scraps of food. Most simply trudged in silence and at night collapsed at the roadside, falling asleep before their heads touched the ground.
Those who were too exhausted or ill to continue were executed on the roadside by guards who wielded whips, sticks, truncheons and rifle butts.
The dreadful days and weeks immediately after their capture were never forgotten by the men who went on to endure five long years of privation, indignity and suffering in POW camps across Germany.
As Longden so eloquently states: 'Their sacrifice had brought the salvation of the British nation. Yet they had been forgotten while those who escaped to safety and made their way home were hailed as heroes.'
After the war, former POWs always recognised each other at remembrance parades because of their lack of medals.
Their suffering was never recognised ... the authorities never deemed it necessary to issue a campaign medal for the men who shared all the horrors of war but none of the glory.
Using new research and interviews with veterans, Longden's moving account of these forgotten heroes fills a shameful gap in the history of the Second World War.
(Constable, paperback, 8.99)
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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