It was the last few days of May 1940. I was fighting in Dunkirk, France to support the French from the German takeover. Unfortunately, things were in favour of the Germans. On 25^th March 1940, Four Hundred Thousand allied troops were trapped in a French port called Dunkirk. The fall of France was obvious. What was even worse was that Hitler’s tanks and troops were only 10 miles away. We only had a few days to escape from Dunkirk. The Germans were using Blitzkrieg Warfare, so if we didn’t think of something fast, we would be prey to the Germans. We had no shelter and no supplies. We had guns and tanks but they had very little ammunition left in them. To make it worse, the German Luftwaffe was constantly attacking us. Our only option was to evacuate.

On 26^th May, we got word from the British Admiral, Bertram Ramsey, for evacuation plans. This evacuation by sea was known as Operation Dynamo. He rounded up all kinds of British vessels - from tiny tugs boats to lifeboats and navy destroyers – and sent them to Dunkirk. On their approach to Dunkirk, they were easy targets to German Stuka bombers. The narrow channel was loaded with mines, which made ships even more vulnerable to constant bombardment.

I remember being picked up from the beaches by a tugboat and later transported to a Destroyer, which was in the deeper waters. I also remember experiencing a shocking incident when a German Stuka bomber dropped a bomb very close to our ship. The boat tilted 40 degrees to my right because the force of the blast underwater created a powerful wave. The wave wiped out all the people on the deck into the sea. Fortunately, I was one of the few who were inside the cabin of the ship. Out of the 850 vessels that took part in this evacuation, 235 were sunk.

A few days later, we arrived at Dover, Britain; tired and exhausted. Upon our arrival, the people of Dover greeted us. They called us heroes even though we retreated. The Allies lost more than 68,000 soldiers in the evacuation. However, more than 300,000 soldiers were successfully evacuated making this the greatest mass rescue of all time.