75th anniversary of Dunkirk

Commemorative events are taking place this week to mark the 75th anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk during WW2. The famous evacuation of Allied servicemen from the beaches of Dunkirk was conducted from the 26th May to the 4th June 1940. The commemorative events include a voyage by surviving ‘Little Ships’ from Ramsgate to Dunkirk and back and British veterans revisiting the beaches at Dunkirk. The wrecks of some of the vessels destroyed during the evacuation are still visible on the beaches.

The 27th Field Regiment RA (Royal Artillery) was stationed at the Artillery (Le Cateau) Barracks in Colchester in 1939. (The Trust’s building is the former NAAFI or recreation building of the Artillery Barracks.) The 27th Field Regiment had been stationed here since at least 1937. In December 1937, they paraded with horses for the last time and, in January 1938, the unit was mechanised. In 1937, it consisted of four gun batteries: the 21st, the 24th, the 37th and the 47th (ie 21/24 and 37/47). Sergeant Jim Goodman was in the 24th Battery. He was the father of Don Goodman, who is a well-known local archaeologist and member of the Colchester Archaeological Group. Sergeant Goodman moved to Colchester garrison and married a Colchester girl, Gertrude Sealey: Don was born in 1938. The 27th Field Regiment RA were in the 4th Infantry Division in I Corps of the British Army, along with the 30th Field Regiment RA, who were also stationed at Colchester garrison in 1939 (Colchester was the home station of the 4th Division).

Britain and France declared war on Germany on the 3rd September 1939, after German forces invaded Poland. The 27th Field Regiment were sent to France on the 17th September 1939 as part of the first detachment of 300,000 men of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force), to join the Belgian and French Armies. Apparently they left Britain on the troopship Brighton, departing from Southampton at 00.30am and arriving at Cherbourg at 8 o’clock in the morning of the same day. According to the British Army’s Order of Battle, the 27th Field Regiment was still in I Corps on the 9th May 1940, but I Corps now consisted of the 1st, 2nd and 48th Divisions: the 27th’s 21 Battery was serving in the 5th Division on the 28th May.

The Battle of France started on the 10th May 1940 when German forces launched their attack on Belgium with the ‘Blitzkrieg’, followed by their attack on France on the 13th May, and it was a ferocious battle between the Allied forces and the German forces. The Belgian army surrendered on the 28th and the British and French forces retreated to the northern coastal ports of France, fighting a rearguard action all the way. The Battle of Dunkirk and the evacuation from Dunkirk both took place on the 26th May-4th June 1940. The 27th Field Regiment was one of the British units trapped in the ‘Dunkirk Pocket’ on the 30th May 1940 (Dunkirk 1940 – Operation Dynamo, by D Dildy, 2010), when I Corps was now defending the western half of the British sector, from Dunkirk to the French border (‘The war in France and Flanders 1939-1940’, by Major L. F. Ellis, 1954). Apparently, 21 Battery of the 27th Field Regiment fired the last shell on the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge on the 29th (The road to Dunkirk: the British Expeditionary Force and the Battle of the Ypres-Comines Canal, by C More, 2013). The 27th Field Regiment was still in action on the 31st May.

The evacuation from Dunkirk was a major operation, code-named Operation Dynamo, which began on Sunday 26th May and ended on the 4th June, with the fall of Dunkirk to German forces. Operation Dynamo involved a fleet of Royal Navy, French Navy and British Merchant Navy ships and also over 850 ‘little ships’, which were small civilian vessels from Britain, many crewed by civilians. This fleet sailed between Ramsgate, Margate and Dover in Kent and Dunkirk, and evacuated large numbers of British and French servicemen from the beaches of Dunkirk and back to Britain. Operation Dynamo became the largest evacuation in military history, and it was regarded as a triumph snatched from a serious defeat. It was a very organised and successful operation, and it saved the British Army. The fleet of vessels and the thousands of Allied servicemen stranded on the beaches were under heavy attack by German land, sea and air forces. During the evacuation, 338,326 Allied servicemen were rescued, but there were also heavy losses, with over 60,000 men killed, wounded or captured by the German forces, and all the equipment left behind. Many seamen died, 228 ships were lost and 45 were badly damaged, as were many of the ‘little ships’. Of the RAF’s ‘planes, 177 were destroyed or damaged during the evacuation. (26,402 British troops, including 4,992 casualties, and 1,534 Allied troosps had been evacuated in British ships before Operation Dynamo started.)

The unit war diary of the 27th Field Regiment is held by the National Archives although the entries are, apparently, very brief for May 1940, and some battery diaries are non-existent. There seems to be some confusion about the evacuation of the 27th Field Regiment from Dunkirk. The artillery and support units of I Corps (which should have included the 27th) are said to have been evacuated at 3.00 am on the 2nd June on HMS Whitshed and HMS Winchelsea, the last two destroyers to officially leave Dunkirk with troops aboard (Dildy 2010; World War II sea war, vol. 2: France falls, Britain stands alone: day-to-day Naval actions April 1940 through September 1940, by D A Bertke, D Kindell, G Smith, 2011). However, the evacuation continued on the 3rd and 4th June. There are also conflicting eyewitness accounts of the evacuation by soldiers of the 27th Field Regiment, so soldiers of the unit must have left Dunkirk on different vessels and, perhaps, on different days. Apparently, some of them also got their guns as far as the Bray Dunes at Dunkirk, and spiked them there.

One group of men from the 27th Field Regiment had to find their own transport at Dunkirk, according to an eyewitness account in Forgotten voices of Dunkirk (J Levine, 2011), by Lieut. Col. Eric Griffith-Williams of the 27th Field Regiment: ‘… We walked down to the beach at Bray-Dunes. Towards the docks, we came across battalions of French walking across our paths, heading for a destroyer. I met a chap I knew, General Percival, who said, “I’m afraid that’s the last ship, you’ll have to go down to the beach and see if you can find anything afloat that you can get into.” We found a barge, sitting on the sand, so we got on board. We waited for the tide to rise, but before we were afloat, other troops arrived and asked if they could come on board, and so we ended up with lots of Royal Army Service Corps and others …’.
The Lieut.-Colonel’s Adjutant got the engine going, and another man on board got the sail up. They seem to have transferred to a destroyer later, which took them to Dover. The barge must have been the SB Glenway **, which was still abandoned on the beach at Dunkirk on the morning of the 1st June *. Larry Coley of the 27th Field Regiment described a different experience of the evacuation in his memoir  ***.

After Dunkirk, the campaign in France continued until the 18th June 1940, and France signed an armistice with Germany on the 22nd June 1940.

Don Goodman recalls his father’s experience of the evacuation. Sergeant Goodman injured his back while lying in a trench in the dunes at Dunkirk. He just managed to run across the beach under fire, to embark, but his best friend was shot down beside him as they ran. Sergeant Goodman and other members of the unit were brought back to Britain on a destroyer. Sergeant Goodman survived the Battle of France, the Battle of Dunkirk and the evacuation, and got back to Britain, but the injury he sustained on the beaches at Dunkirk caused him to be invalided out of the Army in 1940. There is a small display of photo.s of Sergeant Goodman in the Roman circus centre. The 27th Field Regiment served in Britain until 1942, when they were moved to Burma. They were still in Burma at the end of the war in 1945.

The men of the 27th who were killed during Dunkirk are buried in the cemeteries of Oost-Cappele, Les Moeres and Dunkirk town; some are commemorated on the Dunkirk Memorial; some, who died of wounds, are buried in the UK.

Many thanks to Don Goodman for generously allowing us to use his material on and memories of Sergeant Goodman.

The images show Sergeant Goodman in the 1930s and a plan of the Battle of France and Battle of Dunkirk, from the 10th May to the 1st June, from History of the Second World War, vol. 1, published by Odhams in 1951. Two video clips of the evacuation can be viewed on YouTube and three at the British Pathé web-site at www.britishpathe.com/ .

.