The pacifist turned into a warrior by German barbarism at Dunkirk
And all the other humblingly modest heroes who don’t figure in the blockbuster new film
DUNKIRK is the biggest film of the summer, a gripping reconstruction of the evacuation of an entire army from France in 1940. Starring Kenneth Branagh as a Navy officer, Tom Hardy as a Spitfire pilot and Mark Rylance as a skipper of one of the Little Ships, it reveals the gallantry and tragedy behind the rescue of 338,000 British and French soldiers. But who were the real heroes whose courage helped save Britain? Here, NEIL TWEEDIE tells their astonishing stories...
MEDIC WHO TURNED INTO A COMMANDO
BILL TOWILL did not fight the Germans at Dunkirk. Raised in the Plymouth Brethren evangelical Christian movement, he was a pacifist and had opted for a non-combat role as an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps on the outbreak of war.
But he more than did his duty. As the noose tightened on the British Expeditionary Force in northern France, his unit set up a field hospital in the casino in De Panne, a Belgian resort just along the coast from Dunkirk.
‘Dunkirk was appalling,’ he said later. ‘ There was shelling and strafing and bombing. Petrol tanks were on fire and there was a thick cloud of black, oily smoke covering the whole area. Dante’s inferno was a picnic compared with it.’
By day, the dreaded Stuka dive-bombers lashed the beaches, the sirens attached to their undercarriages emitting an ear-splitting, couragesapping screech.
At night, the makeshift hospital was plunged into darkness. Orderlies worked on the wounded by the light of shellfire before wading chest-high into the surf, carrying stretchers to waiting boats.
The casino was also a makeshift mortuary. Although there was barely time to mark the passing of those who died, a major managed a few words from the Bible: ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. There will be no more death, nor sorrow nor crying.’
The impact of this on the deeply religious 19-year-old Towill was immense: ‘It has remained with me down the years.’
With the end nearing, the medics drew lots to decide who would get a chance to leave and who would stay with the wounded and inevitably face capture by the Germans. Towill drew a blank — his ticket home.
He was lucky, though it cannot have seemed so as he lay for long, sleepless and terrifying hours in the Dunkirk sand dunes, waiting for rescue. More than once he was buried by the fallout from German bombs and had to be dug out. He finally got away on June 2.
His experiences at Dunkirk changed Bill Towill. Pacifism was put to one side. ‘After what I had seen there — the Germans strafing civilians — I found my objection vanishing. I hit back and hit as hard as I could.’
He joined the Gurkhas and served with the Chindits commando group in Burma. In India, he met his future wife, Pamela. He died in 2013 at the age of 93.
VC WINNER WHO HELD OFF THE GERMANS
‘WE WERE so short of ammunition that we had to search bodies for more,’ recalled Captain Marcus Ervine-Andrews, as he and a handful of men from B Company, 1st Battalion East Lancashire Regiment were pitched into the thick of the fighting just outside Dunkirk.
Their vital job in those desperate days was to slow the German advance as much as possible, to buy time so British soldiers massing on the beaches just a few miles away could escape. This rearguard managed to slow down superior German forces at the Escaut Canal and, as the rest of the company retreated to the sand dunes and the prospect of a ship home, he and eight of his men formed a last- ditch makeshift defence line on the Canal de Bergues, trying to fool the enemy into believing the position was still being held in strength.
From the roof of a barn, the 28-year-old picked off 17 advancing Germans with his Lee-Enfield rifle and Bren gun, pinning down scores more.
‘We had to stop them. It was as simple as that,’ he said later, his words hiding the raw courage that won him the Victoria Cross that day.
Inevitably, the fighting was taking its toll. Below him the barn was in flames and the wounded lay where they fell.
Those who remained could not hold out for ever. As ammunition ran low and the enemy began to outflank his position, he ordered his men to fall back. He and his scratch force of defenders made their getaway to the coast.
There he managed to scramble on to a destroyer, and was dining in a restaurant back in England when a BBC broadcast announced that he had been awarded the VC for his action at the barn.
‘It was a bolt out of the blue,’ he said. ‘I was completely shaken and surprised.’ There was, however, regret that the heroics of his men were not recognised with awards for gallantry.
‘I had a wonderful crowd and without them I could have done nothing at Dunkirk,’ he said. ‘They were splendid. They fought and fought and gave everything they had to give. Many gave their lives. I will never forget them.’
Ervine-Andrews never returned to the scene of his heroism, dying in his adopted home county of Cornwall in 1995, at the age of 83.
‘I never wanted to go back,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Too many sad memories of men killed and left behind.’
SEAMAN WHO ‘SWEATED BLOOD’ TO SAVE LIVES
AS A leading seaman in the Royal Navy, Vic Viner, 23, spent six days and nights in the cauldron of Dunkirk, helping to organise the evacuees.
First, he crewed a ship’s rowing boat from the destroyer HMS Esk, hauling heavily laden soldiers from the sea. His hands bled copiously from pulling on the oars.
‘ We literally sweated blood,’ he recalled.
Then he was posted to the beach itself to pick up men waiting there, with a revolver in his hand and under orders to use it if anyone tried to jump the queue for the boats.
He brandished the weapon on more than one occasion, but thankfully never had to fire it.
The exhausted men he rescued were filled with gratitude. ‘You could hear them say, “Thank God, we have reached the sea.” Some were wading out, as if they were trying to walk to England.’
Viner’s 25- year- old brother Albert was engaged on the same rescue mission and on board the destroyer HMS Grenade when she was sunk in Dunkirk harbour by German Stukas. He was rescued
paddle- steamer Crested Eagle, only to die when she, too, was bombed and sunk, with the loss of 300 lives.
Vic witnessed her demise, unaware that his brother was perishing before his eyes.
He himself survived, but only just: a bomb blast hurled him into the sea.
He was rescued and returned to England, though he was unconscious and had no memory of how he got home.
He died last year, aged 99, never forgetting what had happened and how vital the evacuation was.
‘It was a splendid operation,’ he said. ‘Without getting the troops back, we would have had very little to build on.’
THE TITANIC SURVIVOR WHO SAILED TO HELP
CHARLES Lightoller was one of that brave band of Little Ship owners back in Britain who not only turned over their private pleasure craft to the Navy to assist with the emergency evacuation, but insisted on manning their vessels themselves, right across the Channel and into Dunkirk harbour. Lightoller had already had his fill of sea dramas, or so you would have thought — he was Second Officer on the ocean liner Titanic in April 1912 when she hit the iceberg.
He remained at his post and went down with the ship, only to be propelled to the surface by a blast of escaping air. He was the most senior member of the crew to survive. Then, during World War I, he was a destroyer commander and sank a U-boat.
He was 66 in 1940 and his boat, the Sundowner, was based on the Thames when, on the evening of May 31, he was ordered to sail his pride and joy to Ramsgate to rendezvous with a naval party. But he insisted on being allowed to remain with her on her dangerous mission, and did so with the help of his son Roger and a young Sea Scout whose name is now consigned to history. It was a crew which is echoed in the film by Mark Rylance and two young actors.
‘We pushed over to Dunkirk on our own,’ he later recalled. ‘A couple of enemy bombers had a shot at us but a British destroyer, HMS Worcester, was passing us and drove them off.’
Mooring in Dunkirk harbour under heavy fire, the tiny vessel took on 130 men, 75 of them crammed below decks. Counting them off back in Ramsgate, a chief petty officer scratched his head and said in amazement, ‘My God mate, where did you put ’em?’
Charles Lightoller died in 1952 at the age of 78.
. . .AND THE LAST MAN TO REACH HOME
BILL LACEY was one of 40,000 Allied troops left behind on the beaches when the Germans finally took Dunkirk and Operation Dynamo came to an end. He’d had a chance to escape, but gave up his place for a wounded soldier.
‘I was stranded,’ he remembered. ‘ The gunfire was getting nearer and the Nazis were rounding up the stragglers.’
But rather than surrender, the 20-year-old rifleman from 2nd Battalion, Gloucester Regiment, became a fugitive. He went into hiding for the next four months, foraging off the land and stealing food and clothing from farmhouses to survive. ‘I had to learn to stay alive as an animal would,’ he later said. His weight fell to seven stone.
Eventually, he stole a fishing boat and sailed it solo to Britain — only for British Intelligence officers to conclude he must have been ‘turned’ by the Germans and sent home as a spy. He was cleared when news reports from France confirmed the story of an Englishman on the run who had taken a boat.
Lacey’s resourcefulness earned him a post in Special Forces, and he took part in a number of commando operations. He retired from the Army as a sergeant in 1964 and settled in Portchester, Hampshire, working as a postman. He died in 2011, aged 91.