Free Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind by Sean Longden Page A

life.
    Fate had also brought Noel Matthews to the evacuation beaches. Unlike the other wounded who had been left to face the shelling of the monastery at the Mont des Cats, his ambulance had taken him the thirty miles towards safety. Still shaken by his experiences on the battlefield, Matthews trudged over the dunes, little knowing what to expect: ‘I got there late afternoon to be greeted by the sight of hundreds of chaps shooting at aeroplanes in the sky. I was with these two chaps and we moved along towards an empty ambulance. We kipped down there for the night. Next day I went around the back of the sanatorium and asked a French soldier for food. We hadn’t eaten for three days. He filled my mess tin with wine and gave me bread.’ With De Panne under fire, Matthews walked towards Dunkirk: ‘After a day of waiting a bloke came along yelling out for any blokes from the Queen’s Regiment, because the colonel was collecting men. There were about twenty of us there. He gathered us together and said, “Wait here while I get us a boat.” That was the last we saw of him. So we just dispersed.’
    He waited another day on the beaches, uncertain whether he would ever get away. At times it hardly seemed worthwhile attempting to find a boat: ‘You saw these chaps standing all day waist deep in the water, waiting for boats. Plus the German planes were trying to knock the boats out. So all the time you were on land you were safer. I decided I wasn’t going to swim out into the sea unless I saw the Jerries coming over the dunes.’ Eventually, after hanging around the beaches, Matthews made his way to the quay and took a running jump on to a ship. His fears about aerial attack were justified when the ship was dive bombed three times on the passage to Dover.
    Also experiencing the hell of Dunkirk and the beaches was Bill Holmes. While some among his comrades had arrived in Dunkirk within a day or so of leaving the Mont des Cats, Holmes and his pals had been wandering through fields and lanes for three or four days, surviving on eating raw vegetables they dug from the fields. When they finally arrived within the Dunkirk perimeter they had little idea of what might happen next. Such was the ferocity of the German assault that it seemed there could be little hope of survival: ‘It was so fierce you didn’t know what was going on – there seemed to be a constant drone of aircraft above us. One of the saddest things was seeing the blokes who got on boats and then the boats got bombed. It was mass murder. It made me feel lucky. At Dunkirk there was nothing else but bodies.’
    While Bill Holmes took four days to reach the fiery wasteland of Dunkirk, not all his comrades were so unfortunate. Despite his wounded face, Sid Seal reached the coast just one day after leaving the Mont des Cats. As luck would have it he arrived in the Belgian seaside town of De Panne. At the far eastern end of the evacuation beaches, the scenes in De Panne were not like those in Dunkirk. For a start there were fewer soldiers awaiting evacuation and, more importantly, there were fewer German planes overhead:It was the 30th of May when we got there and we could already see Dunkirk in flames. We could see crowds of troops at Bray Dunes, there was plenty of panic there, thousands of men were on the beach. But where we were wasn’t so busy. We were just fortunate. On the night of the 31st we found a rowing boat. It had probably come off one of the ships that had been bombed. The Germans were shelling and bombing De Panne, so it was get into the boat or stay in the town and get blown to pieces. So seven or eight of us – just one of them was a chap from my battalion – got in and rowed out into the Channel, just hoping we were going in the right direction. Fortunately we were. A fishing boat picked us up and took us back to Ramsgate.
     
    In contrast to the situation at De Panne, the apocalyptic scenes in Dunkirk left Bill Holmes utterly despondent. There were