too. That I should meet a fellow pilot was no end of a tonic. We alternately sat and lay flat in a semi-underground shelter for the next few hours, until we were told to make our way to the mole under our own steam. This was a painfully slow business for Jock, and we had to shelter two or three times under vehicles whilst the mole was subjected to continuous shelling and dive-bombing. On one side of the road were blazing railway trucks, goods yards, and shipyards, whilst away on the right was the huge cloud of black smoke rising from the oil tanks in the distance on the other side of the mole.
Once after sheltering in a “casualty station,” we looked out to find a lorry which had sheltered us two minutes before now a mass of twisted wreckage spread over an area five times its normal size. All in the day’s work to the Army boys, but a sensational “birthday” for us.
Eventually the docks were reached and we were greeted by a very cheery bunch of Tars, who seemed to have established permanent residence amongst a pile of sandbags. Another revolting sight was unfolded when some French soldiers began shooting all the stray dogs, insisting they were message-carriers. They did it in the painful way, with about four shots, afterwards dropping the tormented things into the water. I suspected that more than one of the Tommies would willingly have set to on the French had it not been for the futility of it all in the circumstances.
At about 8.30, after about 12 hours or more on French soil, Admiral W——W——instructed Jock and myself to jump aboard a launch which had moored alongside some 50 yards farther down the quay. Not being master mariners and with Jock wounded, the game of descending 30 feet or so to water-level proved quite a problem, but once aboard, the Senior Service made us extremely comfortable. We went to sleep in luxurious bunks (for a weapon of war). An hour later we were awakened and transferred to a destroyer which with two more of its kind had come alongside to take off what was the rear party of the British evacuation. Even the G.H.Q. was finishing, and after that night Dunkirk would be totally French. So 12 hours later would have even more seriously curtailed our chances of rescue had we baled-out the next day.
The five-hour journey to Dover wasn’t entirely without incident. Twice the ship’s guns blazed at an aircraft, probably laying mines in our path, besides which some curious chap on the deck above had tried the trigger of his rifle, with rather disastrous results for a second-lieutenant who sat in the chair of the mess-room below, which the officers and wounded were sharing. I myself had given up the chair only a bare fifteen minutes earlier. Another of those miracles of fate which in these troubled times seem an everyday occurrence.
2 a.m. saw us back on English soil and given every help by a bunch of hard-working civilians and service folk.
Some sandwiches, tea and then to the Lord W. Hotel, where we communicated the news of our return from the dead to a very sleepy controller at our parent base. After that in brilliant moonlight we made our way to a rest centre for a few hours’ sleep after a day crammed full of excitement and suspense. Truly a “Channel packet.”
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