My grandfather Thomas Campbell was a driver with 23rd division BEF. 233rd (Northumbrian) field company royal engineers. He arrived overseas on 19th April 1940 and I can see he would’ve been at the battle of Arras and was evacuated from Dunkirk. He didn’t leave until 7th June 1940 And everything I read tells me the evacuation ended on 4th June. I’ve looked at website showing Dunkirk ships 1940 going up to 7th June but can’t make much sense of it. He arrived home on 8th June Could anyone help me find out how he got home? Much appreciated
Where does the 7th June date come from ? If it's from service records, the first date could well be his first pay parade in the UK. My Grandfather's shows 17th June but his battalion came out of Dunkirk on HMS Malcolm on 30th May according to the War Diary.
Can I suggest obtaining the War Diary, which is available at The National Archives: ROYAL ENGINEERS: COMPANIES: 233 Field Company. | The National Archives. If you can’t get there, Drew5233 may be able to help. Mark
Military history sheet says overseas BEF from 19/4/1940 to 7/6/1940 then HOME from 8/6/1940 to 19/5/1941 Wow! Nearly a year at home. Just noticed that. How would that be? Just got his service records through and they are fantastic but filled with more questions than answers
From Ellis' official history, 368,491 British troops were evacuated from France back to the UK in 1940 after hostilities had commenced - 198,583 came out via "Dunkirk". That means 170,126 were evacuated from places other than "Dunkirk". Hardly a number to be sniffed at. And yet, popular history seems to record/remember everyone as being part of the "Dunkirk miracle". Perhaps he was one of the 170,126 rather than the 198,583.
'Home' means UK so could have been on Home Defence duties as well as refitting & training awaiting further overseas deployment.
Just to add another ditty to my previous post. Ellis records 144,171 being evacuated AFTER the "Dunkirk miracle" with the last evacuee pulled out by the RN on 14 August.
If he did then he would have left Dunkirk by 4 June 1940 or else he would have effectively become a POW Dunkirk evacuation - Wikipedia The Dunkirk evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo and also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers during World War II from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between 26 May and 4 June 1940 Before and around the 7th June, when the records state he was 'Home', other northern French ports were still open, from Dieppe through to Cherbourg, along with all the Brittany ports TD
Many moons ago, an old bugger in my local used to regale us with stories of how he had been pulled off the Dunkirk beaches. Wouldn't talk about anything else about the war except Dunkirk. Eventually, a local historian decided to follow his story to see whether he was just an old gassbag making it all up as so much of his story didn't add up. Dates didn't tally. Places didn't tally. Units and events didn't tally. After a very long period of painstaking research he, the amateur historian, established that the old bugger had not come out of Dunkirk but was one of a very small handful who slipped away from St Valery. All of his story was true. Every date, every event, every unit. It was just the wrong French port. His 'real' story was even more interesting and of historical note than the version he told. The old bugger would have none of it. He remembered coming out of Dunkirk and that was that!
Bearing in mind 23rd Division's locations at Arras and on the Canal Du Nord and the timescale, they were isolated with the main BEF and there would have been no possibility of them evacuating from anywhere other than the Dunkirk pocket. The chap in question could only have evacuated further south if he had not been with his unit, such as returning from leave or allocated elsewhere but the chance is small. The date discrepancy is common. Although dates of embarkation to France are usually precise on records, evacuation records weren't. Hundreds of thousands had to find their units again and facilities put in place to record them all. That he doesn't appear in UK records until a week later than his departure from France is really not a surprise.
I agree with Rich - dates of events and locations at that time are often inaccurate. I read POW questionnaires from men who believed they'd been captured in one place at a particular date when in fact they were miles away and days or weeks out - or who show very little geographical knowledge of where they spent their service. Fair enough to granddads everywhere, they're often relating events at a distance of 50 or more years and if they weren't too sure where they were in the first place then memory isn't the most reliable method.
The company war diary is pretty poor. It stops on the 21st May and starts again on the 22nd June back in the UK.
The later evacuations were Operation Cycle, from St Valery and Le Havre, when 14,557 British troops were saved between 11 and 13 June. The old gas bag in the pub was lucky, as most of the Brits were only taken down the coast to Cherbourg, not to the UK. As you will see elsewhere on this site, the 51st Highland Division were encircled and ordered to surrender, they were force marched back to Germany. Operation (later called Plan, as the burden was shouldered by the Merchant Navy) Aerial; this final organised evacuation was between 15 and 25 June, when 139,812 British troops were saved, mostly through Breton Ports. This figure seems to include reinforcements who were sent to man the proposed Breton redoubt and the Cycle lads from Cherbourg. About 3,000 were lost when the liner Lancastria was bombed and sunk. Many Polish and Czech servicemen, and civilians, were saved, from further down the coast, More Czechs and civilians were saved from the south of France. Roy