Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

5 Forward The story of the men left behind at Dunkirk in May/June 1940 and their march hundreds of miles east across Europe in 1940 as new prisoners of war (POW) has received scant historical coverage until the 2000’s. Dunkirk is a French coastal town. War was declared between Britain and Germany in September 1939. A British army, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was assembled in France in late 1939 and early 1940. When hostilities began in May of 1940, the German forces overwhelmed the British, French and Belgium allied armies. The BEF was pushed back to the coast of France, with the town of Dunkirk as the epicenter of the retreat. The majority of the BEF was successfully evacuated by hundreds of boats, including small fishing boats: anything that could carry troops from the French coast back to England. This evacuation has been historically portrayed as a “victory”. It certainly allowed Britain to regroup and plan for a future counter to German aggression My father, Thomas Alan Dirkin, was one of the men left behind. My father’s job was in rear guard action. The rear-guard objective was to slow down the German advance, at all costs. The evacuation of Dunkirk gave Britain a chance to regroup and fight another day. The time gained enabled 330,000 troops to get back across the English Channel. The rear-guard role that my father played, left him cut off from the main force of British troops that fell back to Dunkirk. The retreat and communications were chaotic. He was captured in a light house south of Dunkirk on the French coast. The result for my father was five years of hardship, first as a prisoner of war, and later as an escapee fighting with the Russians and the resistance. His first experience of being a POW was to march east for nearly three hundred miles with little food and water, sleeping outside in the rain. The last leg of the journey involved travelling in overcrowded, unventilated cattle cars, standing room only among men who were doing their best to avoid uncontrolled urination and defecation. He spent from 1940 to 1945 as a slave laborer under German control in a POW camp in Poland. He survived a firing squad. He spent months in solitary confinement. He worked in rock quarries six days a week in the winter with inadequate clothing and footwear. He was involved in dealing with