The fire-fight was furious and deadly.
Shell upon shell rained down on the men, exploding in mid-air and showering them with shrapnel.
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| Just a stone's throw away: the advancing Germans |
Private Bert Evans - along with 100 fellow soldiers - were fighting against impossible odds. It was May, 1940, and their task was to block the advancing German army so that the encircled British Expeditionary Force could be evacuated from Dunkirk.
The longer they kept the enemy at bay, the more Allied soldiers would be saved by the Royal Navy.
Evans, 19, had arrived at Wormhoudt, a small village near Dunkirk, on 26 May, 1940. His commander’s orders were clear: ‘The division stands and fights.’
Evans and his comrades from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – along with the remnants two other regiments - fought with all the weaponry at their disposal. They hid in farmhouses and kept up a hail of fire against the Germans.
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| Hitler sent in his elite SS forces |
But after two days of constant fighting it was clear they could not hold out forever. The SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hilter regiment was drafted in to attack them and by early afternoon on 28 May, Evans and his comrades were overrun.
‘It was endless,’ recalled Bert in his last interview. ‘I was captured with a group of ‘D’ company soldiers. We knew we were up against Hitler’s elite. But we could never have expected the treatment they would mete out.’
First, the SS soldiers confiscated all their letters and photographs: clearly they did not want the captured men to be identified. Next, they rounded up some of the men and took them to the village square.
Using the English guns, they opened fire on the unarmed prisoners.
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| Evans (left): the sole survivor |
Another group of men were stripped and machine-gunned to death.
Evans and some 80 others were marched out of the village and taken to a remote cowshed outside the village of Esquelbecq.
The men naively assumed they would be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Instead, they were forced inside the cowshed.
‘We were jammed inside,’ said Evans. ‘They pushed more and more in. No one could breath. Our wounded were falling and we were falling over them.
The British prisoners begged their captors for water. Captain Lynn-Allen, the most senior officer, banged on the door and shouted: ‘For the love of God, there’s no more room in here.’
A German officer outside laughed scornfully and said: ‘Where you’re going, there will be a lot of room.’
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| Those who were killed |
Private Evans shared his cigarette with his friend Charlie, who said: ‘This is it, Bert. We’re finished.’
Seconds after he spoke, all hell broke loose. One of the SS men pulled a stick grenade from his boot and lobbed it into the barn. It exploded instantly, killing many of the prisoners and maiming the rest with shrapnel and splintered wood.
A second grenade was followed by a third, turning the interior of the barn into a slaughterhouse. But there were still some men alive so the SS men began pulling them outside in batches of five and shooting them.
Evans’s right arm was all but blown off by the blast and he looked in horror at the scene of carnage. But Captain Lynn-Allen was unharmed and saw that all was not quite lost.
He grabbed Evans and made a run for it. They dashed from the rear of the barn and - under heavy fire - dived into a nearby pond. Pursued by an SS soldier, they were peppered with shots.
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| I visit the cowshed where death reigned |
Captain Allen was shot in the forehead at point blank range and died instantly. Evans was also hit - in the neck - but he was not killed. He feigned death until the soldier departed and he then crawled to a nearby farmhouse.
He was seriously injured from the grenade explosion, with his arm in shreds and hanging limply from its tendons.
But his life was to be saved - ironically - by a caring German soldier who was appalled by the actions of the SS. He nursed Evans and then drove him to a local hospital where his arm was amputated. He spent the rest of the war as a POW.
Now 90, Evans is the sole survivor of the massacre He still has vivid memories of what happened on that grim day in May, 1940.
‘I’ll never forget what happened or what I saw,’ he said in an interview three years ago. ‘I can’t help but think of all my comrades who aren’t here.’
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UK paperback |
NOW PUBLISHED IN PAPERBACK
And for my American readers, it is now published under the title: The Boy Who Went to War: The Story of a Reluctant German Soldier in WWII available here
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Newly published US edition |
'Idiosyncratic and utterly fascinating... an extraordinary tale of hardship, horror and amazing good fortune' James Delingpole, The Daily Mail
