One of the British soldiers holding up the Germans on the southern side of the corridor to the French coast, in the village of Le Paradis, 31 miles south of Dunkirk, was Bob Brown, a 19-year-old private from Newton Flotman, who was serving in the 2nd Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment.
From May 26 to 27, 1940, the first two days of the Dunkirk evacuation, he was part of the signalling section of the Battalion's headquarters company which was holding a series of farm buildings in Le Paradis grouped around an open courtyard known as Duriez Farm. The Battalion's front-line troops were a short distance to the south holding the La Bassee Canal.
When the Germans recommenced their advance on May 27, Brown had his finger on the pulse of the Battalion: because he was the switchboard operator in the Duriez Farmhouse cellar, the messages from the front line companies reached him first before the calls were passed through to the officers in the farm's kitchen overhead.
A similar pattern of signals emanated from each company. First of all messages were rung through to say they were holding. Then a more desperate voice which could barely be heard above the firing in the background would inform the commanding officer that they were involved in hand-to-hand fighting. The signalman at the other end of the wire would sometimes have a personal chat with his mate in the battalion signal office.
When B Company was about to be overrun, Alf Blake, its signalman, confided in Bob Brown: 'I'm afraid we're for it. Don't forget me. We've had some good times together. I don't know whether I'll ever be seeing you again.' It was one of the last messages from B Company, and it was the last time Bob Brown ever heard Alf Blake speak. He must have been killed shortly afterwards, joining the many who did not survive for long enough to surrender. There was no time for Bob Brown to be sentimental. As soon as the line went dead, he shouted up the stairs to the officers in the kitchen: 'The line to B Company's been cut!'
As the German attacks strengthened, those who could be spared were ordered to take their place around the farm's perimeter, and that eventually included Bob Brown. First, however, he was sent to an outpost to act as a look out. While there, a corporal who was with him shouted out that there was a motorcyclist and side car approaching. 'You take the side car and I'll take the motorcyclist,' he ordered. He and Brown fired their rifles simultaneously, killing the two Germans. The motorcycle crashed into the ditch beside the road.
After reporting back to the officers in the farmhouse, on the southern side of the courtyard, Brown joined one of his comrades in the barn on the northern side. They lay on bales of straw that had been piled up against the outer walls so that they could fire through the loopholes they had made for that purpose.
Brown could not but be impressed by the way Corporal Tom Warren, one of the men located in slit trenches just outside the barn's northern wall, carried on laughing and cracking jokes until the very end. Warren was mad keen on films about the Wild West, and rather than being terrified of the approaching Germans like some of the men, he had decided to act as if this was his opportunity to play a starring role. Each time Warren thought he had brought down a German with his rifle, he would exclaim: 'Another redskin bites the dust!' Then Brown would say: 'I hope you are still notching it up on your rifle,', to which Warren would respond 'Yes I am. There's not much of it left now.' And so it went on, inspiring all those around him to 'keep their peckers up', and to carry on fighting.
Bob Brown reported later: 'We realised the situation was pretty desperate. We saw Germans crawling up a ditch towards us until we fired at them. We had to tell one of my friends who was firing with a Bren gun to restrict his shooting to single shots since he was drawing enemy fire in our direction. When mortar bombs began to fall on the Farm, Dick Priest, was wounded at the top of his leg. I asked him if he was OK and gave him a cigarette. When the farmhouse caught fire, he was placed outside in the courtyard. 'Don't let the Germans get me,' he said. I replied: 'I'll do my best.''
One reason why Brown was worried was because he knew that Major Lisle Ryder, the acting commanding officer, had told the quartermaster that they would not need his transport. Ryder and his men were evidently going to fight to the finish.
However during the late afternoon Major Ryder walked round the courtyard and said in Brown's presence: 'We've held up the Germans for a long time. What do you think about surrendering?' Brown replied: 'We're all right. Let's carry on.' His comrades agreed. They did carry on for a while. But subsequently Ryder announced from the courtyard: 'We have to surrender. Anyone who wants to can escape. And if you do, you won't be accused of running away.'
On being told this, Brown slipped out of the side entrance of the burning house, taking advantage of the smoke emanating from the burning farmhouse, and made for an adjacent ditch. There he and two other men joined the battalion medical officer, who volunteered to see whether the coast was clear. Unfortunately for all of them, it was not, and they were captured by a regular army unit.
At the time Brown did not realise he had actually been very lucky. 'I felt like crying when I was taken prisoner,' Brown reported later. 'I felt humiliated, and was very dazed.'
It was only much later that he found out what had happened to the men who had walked out of the outer door of the stables on the western side of the courtyard. They had been arrested by a different unit: a company belonging to the 1st Battalion of the Totenkopf Division's 2nd Regiment, whose commander Hauptstürmfuhrer Fritz Knöchlein wanted to avenge the killing of so many of his own men. Just under 100 British soldiers, most of them Royal Norfolks, were then put against a wall and - with the exception of two survivors - massacred.
Bob Brown only found out about the massacre in 1948-9 when Knöchlein was in his turn arrested, convicted of murdering the British soldiers and hung. It was a bitter blow since the murdered men included one of Brown's closest friends. For a period of around ten years starting in the 1980s he marked the anniversary of the battle by going out to Le Paradis each year to remember those who had died. Now aged 97, he is too frail to travel to France again, but his memory of what he witnessed has not faded. 'Sometimes something happens that makes me think about the men who did not make it back, but I am trying to let my memory of it fade away,' he told me sadly.
The paperback and a new audiobook of the updated version of Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's Dunkirk: Fight To The Last Man are published by Penguin. The paperback of his book on the Battle of the Somme will be published in November
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