On battlefield Why I wrote this story…
Buffs were surrounded. At 2pm a patrol told HQ that all frontline companies were cut off and it was assumed all men would be killed or captured.
The battalion’s war diary says that from that point 5th Buffs ceased to exist.
However, Doullens was still held by the 6th West Kents. The troops came under shelling and machine-gun fire soon after midday but forced some of the attackers back.
The Luftwaffe bombed and strafed Doullens; Panzers pulverised the defences; buildings blazed.
A corporal rescued three seriously wounded men while under machine-gun fire.
Road blocks were overrun. By 2pm the Kent lads began to withdraw to the town centre to make a desperate last stand.
The shelling was described as “merciless” but they held on until 8pm when they surrendered, 14 hours after their 7th battalion colleagues began fighting for their lives in Albert.
Some of the 6th battalion did escape under cover of darkness and a few eventually reached Cherbourg.
It is thought that only 75 got back to Kent.
Was it worth it? Approximately 1,000 of the West Kent Territorials and 500 of the 5th Buffs were reported missing, either killed or captured.
They were sacrificed by generals who knew they didn’t have a chance.
But rear-guard troops were desperately needed to slow the German advance.
And they did; it was estimated that the German advance was delayed for up to eight hours and every hour was valuable. Lord Gort, the BEF commander, said that despite inexperience and lack of equipment the Territorials proved they could hold their own against a “better-found and more numerous enemy”.
The Nazi’s war diary said they only made ground slowly “with continual fighting against an enemy who defended himself stubbornly” – a tribute to the courage of untrained soldiers pitched into a battle already lost.
My dad, Ron Green (I was given the same name), was a private in the 5th Buffs and captured as he tried to defend the Arras road outside Doullens with what he thought was a First World War rifle.
Two of his company officers and some of his platoon were shot around him.
He thought he was going to die too, but was one of the many who became a prisoner of war. VE day was five years away. Dad, who was 22, endured shocking conditions as a prisoner in Poland.
He was made to work in coal and lead mines, harvest sugar beet from frozen fields and forced at gunpoint to dig up bodies and remove gold teeth from the remains.
In January 1945, he was one of 30,000 Allied prisoners forced to flee the approaching Russians.
Some of the unfit and poorly clothed PoWs died of exposure, exhaustion and hunger in the bitter Polish winter. Somehow my dad got to Salzburg in Austria.
He was repatriated by the Americans and sent home in May 1945.
Back in Kent he discovered that bombing had flattened his family home in Station Road, Strood, and he had a new sister. He had also developed TB [tuberculosis] and a few years later lost the best part of a lung in a life-saving operation.
For my lovely dad the war never really ended. He had terrible nightmares.
As a boy I became accustomed to being woken by his cries.
In his 60s he told me the nightmares were triggered by talking about the war or war films – that was after 40 years. He was only 66 when he died in 1984, soon after retiring as a wholesale newsagent.
Bits of this story are based on what little he told me. The rest comes from war diaries, the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Museum in Maidstone, internet forums and two books.
Retreat and Rearguard, Dunkirk 1940, by Jerry Murland, says the plight of the
Territorials was a “massacre of the innocents”.
The War in France 1939-40 by Major LF Ellis describes them as “pawns set out on a board”.