Percy Smith's War Diary - Part 5

The war starts

This story, for what it is worth, up to now has been about my own experiences in the British Expeditionary Force, up to the time of the outbreak of hostilities. It is perhaps fair at this point to look at one or two facts about the military situation at that time.

The B.E.F. consisted of about 10 divisions in Northern France and few of them were armoured. The French commanded about 40 divisions with a great many of these manning the Maginot Line, which ran from roughly the southern tip of Belgium down to almost the Swiss border. It was at the southern end that there was the 51st Highland Division, which was detached from the B.E.F. and came under full French command. It therefore followed that the commander of the B.E.F., General The Viscount Gort VC, DSO and two bars, was subordinate to the French command and took his orders from the French, while at the same time he was responsible to the British government for the care and welfare of the B.E.F.

Facing all this were about 50 German Divisions, many armoured and highly experienced from the recent Spanish Civil War. This was backed up by the most powerful Air Force that at that time the world had ever seen. Our only superiority was the Navy. Many other things came into it but these are a few facts of the time, the point was that it wasn’t an ‘even playing field’ as it were.

So, back to 4.30 a.m. on 10th May, 1940. Except for those on guard duty we in the Nissen hut were mostly fast asleep, but turning over I heard the distant sound of an engine and five or six thuds. For my part, I thought it was probably some farmer having trouble with some machinery so I turned over and went to sleep again — until our mate, coming off guard duty, came crashing through the door with his rifle and all his kit, saying “Come on, get up you lazy buggers, the bloody war’s started”, to which he got a suitable response as no-one at first believed him. However, it seemed a German plane had dropped five bombs over Doullens not far down the road. So we were very forcibly awoken that morning.

We soon completed our ablutions and went down to the cookhouse to make sure of breakfast at least. The cookhouse was in the vicinity of Company HQ, where it seemed all hell had let loose, rather like Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army — ‘Don’t panic’. NCO’s seemed to be shouting at chaps , saying ‘Come on, move, there’s a war on’, which seemed rather early for that particular remark. However, it appeared that we had orders to move out of the village and camp in the nearby woods, lorries and all, which was completed in fairly quick time.

We soon settled in our camouflaged surroundings but it was not very long before we received one or two lectures on subjects that were not exactly morale boosting. One was about how to disable your vehicle if it became necessary, another to look out for ‘Fifth Columnists’ who were apparently being dropped by parachute during the night and acting as German spies. Some were said to be dressed as nuns, which was a bit of a problem if you did happen to see a real nun walking down the road — do you ask her to take her clothes off - also difficult if you don’t speak the language! We were constantly on guard duty and had to keep an eye out for this.

After about a couple of days, ten of us drivers, about the same number of loaders, an officer and a sergeant were detailed to report to a large building in Arras with full kit for being away overnight. Here, our lorries were loaded mostly with office equipment, one vehicle was even loaded with quite a lot of booze — to the great satisfaction of the driver. We were not told anything about the journey, just to follow the one in front, but after being on the road all day we eventually arrived in a place called Raubaix in Belgium. Everyone in the towns and villages along the way had been cheering us, as though we had won the war — it was almost embarrassing. Our vehicles were unloaded and we stayed the night. It was almost as we were leaving that we found out we had moved the general headquarters of the Commander-in-chief, Lord Gort, and drunk some of his booze.

The main army seemed now to be moving towards the ‘front’, as on our return journey, everything seemed to be going in the opposite direction and there were constant military traffic jams. It would have been when we were about halfway back, we came to a halt, and looking up into the sky we saw a large number of aircraft. They were quite high, yet low enough for us to be able to see that they had black crosses on the wings. I don’t think we were particularly scared as they were obviously not very interested in us, and would have had orders for a particular target, nevertheless it was our first sight of the enemy, a physical reminder that it was no longer a phoney war and that these were the chaps who would blow us to bits if they could. And so we made our way back to the woods without any further excitement.

Before going further into the Battle of France, I should say that news of what was really happening at the front was anything but reliable. There were no newspapers, no mail, plenty of rumours and whenever there was a radio you could not always count on the news. For instance, instead of saying we had been forced back, they would say we had ‘retired’ to more strategic positions, or that heavy losses had been inflicted on the enemy. It was a case of trying to keep up everyone’s morale in an impossible situation.

We had not been back in the woods for very long before we had orders to move out. I was transferred to the workshops section to carry some of their stores. Here again I was fairly lucky as a number of the chaps were sent to various units and we didn’t know what became of them. We never again had a permanent location in France. It was either on country roads, in farmyards or villages, but generally in the northward direction. The campaign started fairly quietly, but after the first few days we got more and more German attention as time went on. We lived and slept in tin hats all the time. During the three weeks of battle we didn’t take our clothes off or have a proper wash.

We pulled into a small farmyard just south of Hazebrouck for about a day. The German planes seemed fairly active, we were on high ground and could see the railway marshalling yards about half a mile away. Then German planes flew up and down he lines of trucks at low level, dropping bombs, which looked rather like a vehicle going down a dusty road at high speed. While this was going on, some of the chaps were more interested in leaning over a pig sty watching a couple of pigs having intercourse. I thought there must be a moral in this somewhere, the pigs didn’t seem at all bothered about the air raid.

On another evening, we had pulled up in a small village and were taking a walk when some of us saw, in the distance, about twenty or thirty German bombers approaching. They were keeping strict formation when suddenly a squadron of Spitfires appeared and a first class fight began. There must have been six or eight Germans shot down and the rest were very disorganized. All the villagers turned out to watch, and the whole thing took on more the feeling of a football match, as a cheer went up every time a German plane was shot down. After it was all over some of them came up and shook us by the hand.

I have mentioned before how ignorant we were of some of the things that were going on. From time to time there had been private cars passing us with a mattress on the roof and most heavily loaded with goods and people. I suppose it did not occur to us that the campaign was going against us so badly that these people could be refugees. As time went on, the numbers increased more and more. The cars were the lucky ones to get away first, gradually there were worn out farm carts, people with bikes, prams, barrows, anything they could use and mothers carrying babes in arms, on foot. Like everyone else they had to keep a lookout for German planes. All this increased over the three weeks as the battle went on. We could not imagine where they would all finish up.

One morning, when the column was parked in a country lane, I think we had just finished a bit of breakfast when suddenly two German planes flew over the hedge and machine-gunned something in the next field. They were so close we could see the pilots quite clearly — one of our chaps said ‘Look, the bastards are laughing at us’, he could have been right.

Fortunately, the kind of French countryside we were in most of the time did give some degree of safety against the increasing attention of German aircraft. There were long, rough roads with a deep ditch each side (handy for taking cover), mostly dry in summer. Also at fairly short intervals there were large, tall Poplar trees with trunks up to two or three feet thick, which, if you put yourself on the opposite side to which the plane was coming, would give quite good protection against its machine guns. The fact was that, although the army had courses for all sorts of things, self-preservation was learnt very quickly. In fact, it became a second sense in that all the time you would carry on what you were doing with one eye on the nearest cover.

You may wonder why we did not make some effort to shoot back with rifles, as they were all we had, but this was generally discouraged as there was a much better chance of giving a position away than ever hitting an aircraft. Also ‘trigger happy’ soldiers could sometimes be a bigger danger to their own side than to the enemy.

Something else we noticed after a while was that a German plane would sometimes come over and it looked as though it would identify a target. It would draw a smoke trail across the sky and not long after there would be a squadron or two of bombers come and carry out a raid. Just another of the things that were possible because there was little or no allied aircraft around. Actually these smoke trails were quite useful to us because as soon as w saw them we would be extra vigilant in keeping an eye-out for a suitable ‘bolt hole’.

Perhaps at this stage, it could be half-way through the campaign, it was becoming obvious that there was a lesser number of our commissioned officers to be seen. I cannot say there was any particular significance in this, but the fact remained they did appear when we eventually re-formed in England, though most of them were posted elsewhere.
It would be about this time that one afternoon, when we were parked up beside the road, that an NCO came along with a tin of white paint and I was told to paint the round cover on the back axle (the banjo) white and then pass the tin onto the next driver. I was also told to take a side light off and fix it so that it would shine on the axle at night. The idea being that we move at night instead of day, if required, but in total darkness. When we finally did this we soon found that being very tired, you get to a stage when you don’t really know how far away you are from the vehicle in front, and you are kind of mesmerised and you fall asleep. We found the only way to stop this was to keep singing!

Some of the spare time during the day was used in trying to camouflage the lorry as much as possible, so that after a few days, with all the rubbish stuck into the camouflage net covering the lorry, it looked like a travelling compost heap.

One of the moves took us through the town of Cassel, which is on a hill. French soldiers were digging into the side of the hill to make gun emplacements to defend the town. There had evidently been a recent raid as a number of cottages were on fire.

For some time now, artillery bombardment had been noticeable in the distance, during the day. It was also noticeable that if the sound got louder we soon got orders to move. This did not exactly make us very confident that we were winning the war. I think at this stage of the story, I would ask the reader to bear with me that from now until the events at Dunkirk itself, things got so confused that while they most certainly happened, I could not guarantee as to the right order.

It was soon after breakfast one morning that we got our first direct attention from a German plane which flew down and machine-gunned down the line, by which time everyone was in the ditch. It was quite a miracle that no-one was hurt. A small staff car got shot up the back and some of the pots and pans in the cookhouse were shot up — much to the annoyance of the cook. I was trying to have a shave at the time, but that took all morning, so for the next fortnight, like so many others, we didn’t shave again. Something else that was getting us down was the terrible screaming noise of the Stuka dive bombers, so that if you didn’t get hit they would do their best to frighten the life out of you and after about three weeks of this it could be very demoralising.

One afternoon, a friend and myself had to make a dive for the ditch when a Stuka was obviously heading in our direction. He had evidently picked out some old building about thirty yards or so on the other side of the adjoining field. With the bomb, the screaming sirens from the plane and the rubbish being thrown up from the building, some of it coming in our direction, it was a bit too close to be pleasant.

We got out of the ditch, shook the dust off ourselves and a little later an Army Padre came along the road and gave us both a chat and a small prayer book which I have to this day. (Padre, by the way is an Army Chaplain). It all seemed to add up to the seriousness of the situation and also made us realise that these chaps are expected to give counsel and consolation when they themselves are subject to the same dangers, and although we don’t think of them fighting, they are worthy of great respect.

By now the campaign had been going on for about a fortnight and we still had no idea what was really going on except for the fact that it was obvious that things were not going our way. Someone came along and said that President Roosevelt had said that if the fighting didn’t stop he would send the Americans in. Another rumour was that we were going round to another part of the coast to regroup. We couldn’t really accept that the British and French were losing.

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