The lost love let ters of Dunkirk
Brimming with hope and patriotism, they were written to loved ones back home by British soldiers facing oblivion. Tragically, they never arrived and lay gathering dust for 80 years. Until now...
WE MUST keep smiling – four simple words that resonate as much today as when they were written in the heat of battle 80 years ago. George Whayman was a young platoon sergeant major on the beach of Dunkirk when he composed a letter home to his wife Ethel saying with characteristic optimism that, despite the circumstances, ‘with the wind the right way, we shall get through’.
Sadly, the letter was never delivered. As part of a bundle of 50 written by soldiers at the end of May 1940 from the 1st Battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, the postal van carrying them was abandoned in the confusion of battle.
They were found by a German officer who took them home as a souvenir, and they gathered dust in his attic for almost 30 years.
It was not until 1968 that he decided to hand them to the British Embassy in Bonn – and they were then returned to the Suffolk Regiment Association. Nine were passed to the soldiers’ families but the 41 others remained in a council archive until researchers stumbled upon them earlier this year.
The letters are a mixture of fascinating detail from the French front line in the weeks leading up to Dunkirk and heartbreaking descriptions of love lives and family ties broken by war.
One of the most poignant is by a soldier who writes with searing emotion to his wife about his hopes they’ll have a child together.
Another reveals himself as a secret poet and composes an ode – My Loved One – to his ‘darling wife Mabel’.
Of course, there are more mundane observations: the inability to wash, looking forward to a ‘good booze-up’ back in Britain, requests for chocolates, how French girls ‘wear hardly anything at all – just enough to cover up the so so’s’, and many calls to families back home to keep ‘your chin up’.
Revealingly, the soldiers are forthright in their view of the Germans. One says: ‘We’ll give the Boche such a crack one day, he’ll wonder what has hit him.’ Another confides: ‘I’ll do my best to get hold of Goering [commander of the Luftwaffe].’ In one letter, Private Harry Cole, from Hasketon, Suffolk, tells his mother: ‘I have an idea the Jerries will soon be on the run. Hitler’s number is booked all right. The day they catch him, they ought to roast him alive.’
The letters are to be exhibited by Suffolk County Council in a local history project and excerpts can be viewed online.
Meanwhile, The Mail on Sunday has given the correspondence that never arrived to some of the intended recipients’ descendants.
For example, we contacted the family of George Whayman, whose letter to his wife started: ‘Darling, don’t worry yourself, we must keep smiling. Trusting you are all in the pink, keep your pecker up my love…’
He then asked her to kiss their children, Eric and Cynthia. Tragically, he was killed 20 months later in Singapore while fighting the Japanese. Eric’s 65-yearold son, Terry, from Maidstone, Kent, said: ‘At the time he wrote that letter, Ethel was heavily pregnant with their third child, my uncle Michael.
‘Reading this letter now is very emotional. Eric would have loved to have seen it.’