The Falls

<p class=ql-align-justify>In the early hours of the morning of June 3<sup>rd</sup> 1949 General Harold Alexander was alongside the quay at Dunkirk as he lifted a megaphone and called Is anyone there? Is anyone there? There was no reply. He had directed the evacuation and was the last to leave Dunkirk.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>The very next day Churchill stood at the dispatch and gave his We Shall Fight Them on The Beaches speech.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Tradition tells us that the dramatic events of the evacuation of Dunkirk in which 300000 BEF servicemen escaped the Nazis was a victory gained from the jaws of defeat.  Rather than telling the tale of those who escaped Peter Smith reveals a story of those sacrificed in the rear-guard battles.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>For us the Battle for France was not over. In Jun-1940 there were still 41000 British soldiers fighting the Germans alongside their French allies. Mounting a vigorous counterattack at Abbeville and then conducting a tough defence between the Somme front and the Seine Peter was fighting a very uncertain battle for mere survival for an even more uncertain future.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Peter Smith tells his own story and captures the drama of those military operations and subsequent capture by Rommel's 7<sup>th</sup> Panzer Division (the infamous 'Ghost Division') who moved with clandestine stealth towards their objectives.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Nothing prepares a man for war and there can be little doubt Peter was not prepared even less so for a life as a POW. I lost my freedom that day on the June 8<sup>th</sup> 1940 when we were told it was every man-for-himself and didn't regain it until April 1945 when I was rescued by Americans near Halberstadt having walked 1600km along the Baltic coast from East Prussia.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Silent for nearly 80 years Peter tells his story about his five lost years: the terrible things he saw at Thorn Stuttoff Stettin and Halberstadt; working on farms Peter experienced first had the East Prussian way of life; his period in solitary confinement for 'stealing apple'; the disintegration and collapse of a whole way of life in East Prussia in the face of the Soviet invasion; and the terrible Long March when 80000 British POWs were forced to trek through a vicious winter westwards across Poland alongside 2 million East German refugees as the Soviets approached.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>We were all prisoners as POWs and refugees alike embraced a dance with death in the coldest winter for 50 years as we all trudged west and similarly the German Army as it battled to save its population.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Peter's story is also about friendship of physical and mental resilience and of compassion for everyone who suffered. It was a difficult march undertaken in unimaginable wintery arctic conditions where lack of food the cold and death were constant companions.</p><p><br></p>