Peter Moore: Secret diary of a soldier

85 years ago, on 10 May 1940, my father was on leave in Newton Abbot when news came through on the “wireless” that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.

Luckily, he kept a diary which gives us an insight into his emotions at the time. He was a captain in the Royal Army Service Corps, overseeing a convoy of lorries. He was also twenty-four and just out of university.

His first reaction was to be “thrilled and excited” but also disappointed. He had spent nine months in France when nothing happened, and now he had missed the “glamour”.

He was to report to Victoria Station in London on 13 May, so he travelled up on the 12.

The next day the train took him to Southampton. They did not sail until it was dark, which he saw as another day “wasted”.

From Cherbourg he took a train which “ran through country not unlike Devon with wooded valleys and hills”. It was a sunny day with “delicate green shades of spring”, but he kept thinking this beauty was about to be mutilated.

When the train reached Arras, he had his first glimpse of war. A great red glow was lighting up the sky with sparks and smoke.

His destination, Denderwindeke Village, was chaotic, but eventually he found his men. The next day they all headed off and passed a crashed German plane with an “evil-looking swastika” on the tail. Although he did not know it at the time, this was the last time he would be travelling in the right direction.

His parent’s generation had fought in the First World War only twenty-five years earlier, and they were all expecting this war to be similar. They would halt the German advance and dig in for a long war of attrition. The roads were crammed with tragic refugee families pushing handcarts packed with as much of their belongings as they could take.

One local family asked whether they should stay in their house or evacuate west to avoid the war. He suggested that they stay, as the Germans “would not get this far”. In his diary he commented that this was the right advice for the wrong reason.

In one Belgian village he heard gunfire, but this was not a German advance. There were some very drunk British soldiers firing. As the only officer, he arrested them and took them to their senior officer. He then had to write a report for a possible court martial, which he found annoying.

There was so much happening that having to waste time writing a report for these idiots was not helpful. Surprisingly these drunks did not appear in the movie “Dunkirk”. Looking back over eighty-five years, should we have more sympathy? Were these just frightened young men?

At one point he arrived with his convoy at a fork in the road. He had no idea which way to go until another officer passed in the opposite direction. “It’s that way, Moore.” He did not know who he was or how he knew his name, but the other route would have taken him into the German lines, and so this advice might have saved his life.

While driving, he did not know whether he was asleep or awake. He passed a large country house ablaze. Eventually they came to the town of Poperinge. Raging fires lit up the outlines of the buildings. It could have been a picture labelled “1916, Flander’s village in background”.

An elderly man ran out of a garage carrying a child who was about six. She did not look scared, as she probably did not understand what was happening. He was very angry and hated the Germans. As my father commented, the Vichy government will never persuade these people to support the Nazis.

Arriving just outside Dunkirk, he was given orders to destroy the lorries to stop them from falling into the enemy’s hands. His men had managed to keep these vehicles on the road and found it difficult but knew it was important.

German bombers filled the air, but their main interest appeared to be the British destroyers. On the beach he was near a Bofors gun as he watched the tracer shells fly into the air. Most of the planes were too high, but there was one time when he was “cheered more than anything else that day”.

A flight of six German Dornier planes came in low from the sea about a mile away in a V formation. The British guns were fired into the “thick of it”, followed by a loud cheer from the troops. At first the planes continued in the same formation, but then one lagged behind, losing height. Black smoke came from the exhaust as it circled out, facing the sea. It came down at the water’s edge, followed by a blinding flash.

“A shot of flame a good 100 yards enveloped the beach.” It must have had a full bomb load. He saw two white specks in the air when parachutes opened up, so two of the crew must have survived.

As it started to rain, he was given a raincoat by his French interpreter. On the beach he saw men lining up in rows of three.

He wrote, “The British soldier is not easily scared, and nothing could be finer than these ranks of three ignoring the blitz going on around them, but their faces betrayed the ordeal they had been going through.

In spite of still being cheerful and cracking the same old jokes, they were all very tired.” He added that they laughed, as they had always done: “A British soldier has an unquenchable sense of the ridiculous.”

The small “whalers” could only take fifteen men at a time. It was clear that he would not get off that day, and so he took his men to the small boarding house in the town where they bedded down for the night. There was no hot water or food apart from some biscuits.

Overnight he found it difficult sleeping in a wet coat when “every now and then the house would shiver as one (bomb) fell rather near”. He thought of home, only a few hundred miles away. “The West Country would be sleeping peacefully … the rich scents of early summer flowers would be heavy in the night.” And then “crump, crump", the house shook again, and windows and ornaments rattled.

“What was our chance of ever seeing England again?” The longer he stayed, the less chance they had of getting away, although he knew that destroyers lay off the coast, ready to take them off. He commented, “If we had been given another job to do on the battlefield we were ready and willing but, it seemed, that it was all over.”

Eventually there was a tap on the window. It was his job to organise something for his men. It was still very dark. He managed to approach the senior officer, a colonel, to get some guidance, but he was “dazed and sleepy.

Being deaf, he was quite incapable of understanding what was going on”. He was also told by another senior officer that there would be no more embarkations until tomorrow. As there were naval officers coming onto the beach taking people off, he knew that this was wrong, and so he waited with his men.

The beach was chaotic, but eventually a naval officer appeared who was “like a breath of fresh air”. He could only take fourteen on his boat, which was ferrying troops out to the ships. My father allocated the men, thinking how lucky they were, and waited for the boat to return.

They waited all night. Nothing. The following morning eight bodies were washed up. The boat must have overturned. With them was the body of a dog. One of these men had tried to take a dog with him, which probably led to the boat capsizing.

Eventually he joined the long queues and waded out to the small “whalers”. He was up to his neck before he was dragged on board and taken out to the “King William”, a paddle steamer from Weymouth. They realised that he was a British officer, even though he was still wearing a French raincoat.

He was given a scalding hot cup of tea and taken to the cabin of a young naval officer, where he was given the freedom of his wardrobe. They left at 12.30 pm and arrived in Dover at about 7pm.

Reading the diary again gave me a renewed insight into the tragedies happening today in Ukraine and Gaza. 85 years after Dunkirk is a good time to remember that in the real world, war is evil.