Dad was only soldier to survive Dunkirk torpedo ...and I’ve just found out!
Daughter discovers ALL 639 others were killed in tragedy
DESPITE his recurring nightmares of German Stukas dropping bombs on to the beach around him, Stanley Patrick was always happy to talk about his escape from Dunkirk.
His daughter Lesley Lewis and her husband Geoff heard many times how HMS Wakeful, which had plucked him and 639 other soldiers from the beach, had been torpedoed by an Eboat and sunk in the channel on the night of May 29, 1940.
He survived only because he happened to be on deck having a cigarette and was found by another ship, but Mr Patrick and his family always assumed that many more of the Allied troops aboard had also been rescued.
That was until last Sunday evening, when Mr and Mrs Lewis sat down at their home in Kettering, Northamptonshire, to watch a Channel 4 documentary about Operation Dynamo and the Dunkirk rescue.
Historian Joshua Levine said on Dunkirk: The New Evidence: ‘There was one soldier who had been on deck having a cigarette. He got away. All the rest were drowned.’
Of the 640 troops plucked from the Dunkirk beaches by HMS Wakeful that day, Mr Patrick was the only one who survived.
Mrs Lewis, 66, said: ‘We just went cold – that lone soldier, he was my dad. He never knew that he was the only soldier to make it off that boat and live to tell the story.’
Mr Patrick, then in his early twenties, was part of the 13th troop carrying company of the Royal Army Service Corps.
He had queued for hours in the shallow water with hundreds of other soldiers to embark HMS Wakeful, which was making its second trip between Dunkirk and Dover to evacuate the troops.
The exhausted soldiers – delighted to be with the Royal Navy and on their way back to England – were below deck when the destroyer was struck by the torpedo.
Wakeful, which had already suffered heavy damage from an aerial bombardment, split in half and sank within minutes.
Mr Lewis, 67, a retired motor engineer, said: ‘Stan was up on the deck and slid right down it into the sea.’
He was the only soldier rescued from the water, along with 25 of Wakeful’s crew.
His son-in-law said: ‘He was treading water for 45 minutes before he was picked up by a small boat then put on HMS Calcutta, which was on its way to Dunkirk. So he had escaped the beaches, was torpedoed and sunk, then brought right back to where he had escaped from.
‘But he was just glad to be alive. ‘He thought at least 30 people had been saved. He never knew he was the only one.’ Mr Patrick worked as a cook in Kettering for the rest of the war, then became a construction engineer, dying in 1991, a year after his wife Peg.