Snapper

I know Ian from Just Ordinary Men is making the jump. Maybe this is who you mean. Brilliant. I've never been to Arnhem - a big hole in my battlefield visit list. Maybe 2008 will be my year. Have a great time all of you who are going. Take lots of snaps for us to admire later.

True - but most of us don't have the time. I do weeks with my mob - and casual days with the less diehard element, but we find we can have a nice day for a simple visit and it always turns out well.

The massacre at Wormhoudt/Lendringhem/Esquelbecq (twenty miles outside Dunkirk) actually happened in a field outside Esquelbecq on 28.05.1940. British rearguard units of artillery and infantry held up an LAH SS unit, causing casualties. Once the various British groups had surrendered the SS marched perhaps 100 Brits to the field and then killed nearly all of them, some civilians and a single French POW with grenades, bullets and bayonets. The British units were 210 Anti-tank Regt RA, 4th Cheshires and 2nd Royal Warwicks. About ninety men are thought to have died. They had their ID's removed beforehand. At the site only around forty men are commemorated because so many could not be placed at the scene. A man called Bert Evans escaped and was one of the main witnesses. He had been rescued by his officer Captain Lynn-Allen, but they were found by more SS and the officer was shot dead. His body was never found and is thought to be in a mass grave at the site. The identified dead are buried in Esquelbecq with the others commemorated on the Dunkirk Memorial. Sepp Deitrich never faced trial for leading the men who carried out the massacre Le Paradise is nearer to Lille. Here another SS unit - the Totenkopf also came up against stiff defences and lost heavily on May 29th 1940. An SS officer, Fritz Knoechlein was in a huge rage and men from his 2 Kompanie lined up 96 British soldiers from the Royal Norfolks and Royal Scots plus others and machine gunned them. There is a photo of the scene showing the dead.The wounded were bayoneted and beaten to death. Knoechlein then travelled the area shooting individual British wounded and there are some perhaps wild claims his men murdered Wermacht witnesses. After the war a survivor Bert Pooley, sought justice, but he had trouble. However once he had convinced the British that the massacre had actually taken place (!) he was able to identify Knoechlein who was tried in 1948 and hanged the next year. I'll add some more site pics soon. These crimes perhaps pale in to insignificance compared to the concentration camps, Babi Yar, or to be balanced the Hamburg fire raids by Bomber Command. But they deserve mention. Both sites are very eerie and painfully sad places to visit. Since I was last at Equelbecq a lot more work has been done to smarten it up.

I think it is time i put together a Flanders day out in early 2008. I've started discussing it with my "team" of regulars and would like to develop a plan to do this trip. In essence we make a long day of it, driving our car thru the chunnel and back - starting around 0430 and getting back to England by 2300 approx. It is tiring, the weather can dominate - but we have a fantastic day. At the moment a day trip for a standard car costs £39. on top of this you will want gas. We usually picnic on the usual bread and cheese affair during the day and finish with steak and chips and a beer in Ypres ahead of the Last Post. After this we race to the tunnel to get the chunnel. This is the optimum way to do it. The obvious idea is to avoid a slow coach and get a string of motors to convoy. Costs can all be shared. a day will cost very little - the steak and chips and beer in Ypres (or a flemish stew!) will only cost you £14 approx. I haven't discussed this with my wife, but think she would acquiess and suffer some boarders in Westcliff, or there may be Kent/Sussex based chaps who could stage any north or westerners. I plan to visit the WW2 massacre site at Esquelbecq first (Dunkirk is a nightmare - but interesting) and then go to Ypres. There are many places there, hundreds, but new visitors would probably like to see Tyne Cot and the museum at Hooge is brilliant. The craters nearby are accessible. Polygon Wood is also very atmospheric. I might even factor in somewhere I haven't been. There really is so much, Ideally we would be in central Ypres late afternoon. The Ramparts offer a nice walk and you would want to see the Menin Gate in daylight, especially on a crisp bright day. The Menin Gate ceremony is at 8pm. We allow 90 mins for dinner, usually. By 8.45 we should be pulling out of the city. Once you've done it, you will want to go back again and again. John, Richard and I are not professionals, but we love the experience. There are WW1 afficianados on the forum who may add a whole lot more. Think about it, give me ideas of numbers and how practical this would be to do. I don't need an excuse to go at all. cheers, Mark B

graves and details

the barn and memorial tablet

Here are some views of Esquelbecq

An interesting story. Were these RM commandos or an Special Service Brigade unit? We would all have to be totally naive to assume our chaps didn't murder German prisoners. I make no apology for not caring less. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Heat of the moment killings, however inexcusible, do not compare with the events of Wormhoudt/Esquelbecq, which was cold blooded murder or Le Paradis, which was probably a mix of the two. Fritz Knoechlein was executed in 1949 for his leadership of the massacre at Le Paradis.

I'm still likely to have the Iltis - so we could make a display pair if you like. Mungas are great. Nice to see two at Odyssey - old favourites. The owner knows his stuff.

Yep - he was disappointed not to see you. We'll miss Chelmsford thanks to my work. But, there are always plenty of other opportunities. Keep up the good work.

No worries. I gave one of the "ground crew" my business card (no kidding, I have one) so they could get in touch with me to send them the snaps I took. Which hopefully means I'll see your MP18 at some point. Just finished reading Martin Middlebrook's old gem The Kaiser's Battle, I'd like to see someone representing that earlier era of Stormtruppen. Much less controversy. I know one of your blokes in passing - Barry, the Machine Gun Corps bloke. Hopefully see you to do some proper snaps one of these days.

Harry - good snaps. Watch it!!!! Tony B - I was there Saturday with James...we had a good walk round and I wished I'd seen your MP18....maybe another time. WW1 stuff was great. Got great pics of German Germans wearing Pickelhaubes and blue striped bathing suits and there was a wonderful RFC display with two actor chappies doing a recce flight over the Arras front in 1917. Pure magic - light hearted but making a serious point. It was, dare I say it, educational. James and I don't watch the battles. Can't be ar5ed. I was asked to stop snapping some SOSKAN blokes - it was suggested to me that this was due to the Sweeney effect. Hmmm. Met Karl Joynes and his Pinky mob, Clive Stevens and Phil Benham from Bolero, Cara and Mick from 514 and Nick Halling was strolling around doing his thing. Didn't see Zoomer Phil or Stu Gould, but found the Rolling Thunderers and even Colin Tebb from Essex MVT. Shame you weren't there Saturday Harry, James would have loved to have met up with you. We managed to spend....£9 in the market. Mess tins, 58 pattern compass case, and a skrim net. Happy days. Mark

I have to say my favourite Pacific War film is John Huston's They Were Expendable about PT boats with John Wayne and Donna Reed and various others popping up. This to me is one of the great American war films of the period showing the US at it's best. Tough and stoic in adversity. There's a great bit when the news of Pearl Harbor comes over when Wayne and co are in an officer's club. The Filiipina singer and a little dance band immediately sings the Star Spangled Banner. Priceless - it a genuine God Bless America moment. Shot in black and white it is a long film ending with the loss of the Philippines and even has Wayne and his crew taking Douglas McArthur and his family to safety. It is bloody fantastic. It gets shown on rainy afternoons at weekends on the BBC. I keep meaning to find a copy on DVD.

Interesting ideas....good stuff.

More quality work from Lee. I've read a lot of these and I would suggest the storm in the tea cup may allow itself to recede. But as I said: don't be complacent.

I think some of the impetus may go after 2018 but not while the RBL and groups like the WFA keep going honouring our people. I agree - 11/11 is for all wars. I think we should recaall all our people going back as far as you like. Remembrance is personal. 11/11 for me means my grandfather, my great uncle, my uncle and even my own father, who did not die until 1992 but was wrecked by the war. I remember the young people who have died for us since. 11/11 is for them all. For us all. But we live in a fast changing country where demographics and progressive media blitzes are changing everything. I don't believe a great many people will stop to think of 11/11, let alone wear a poppy. Old Men Forget And All Shall Be Forgot..said Shakespeare - but then he added But We Few Shall Be Remembered, We Few, We Happy Few - We Band of Brothers. He was right. The light will never go out completely.

A brave response. I don't doubt for a minute that there were brave and noble men in the SS who did their patriotic duty and behaved like soldiers are supposed to in the eyes of the wider world. Sadly, the horrific nature of the SS's behaviour towards it's own rank and file, to POWs, to the Heer and masses of civilians will never help them. Perhaps the grim behaviour is a bit like we imagine a 1920s French Foreign Legionaire might understand and the pre WW2 British army was no place for softies. This must also be true of the pre-war small American army, barely mechanised doing frontier stuff just like a century before. They were hard men in hard times. The Japanese, who we see the odd soul kitted out in representation at W&P, were appalling to their own men - making them totally brutal towards their enemies. But it will always come back to the Nazis. The Heer, or Wehrmacht, committed war crimes, so did the Luftwaffe - but the SS will always bear the brunt. So they should. Maybe this is not considered fair in the face of a pan-German collective guilt imposed on them by fact, by their own post war assertion and by the victors. We know the victors committed war crimes. But the only people happy to dreg them up are the very same class of people anxious to capitalise on the work of the John Sweeneys of this world. I'm not saying he is bad - his clattering of Scientology appealed to my sensibilities 100% He goes for subversives. But whether there is comparison between a faith (sic) that claims human life was brought down by an alien race with all the mumbojumbo attached is a bit different from a crack at a predominantly harmless bunch of eccentrics is a moot point. Maybe we need more powerful lawyers like Tom Cruise and chums. I agree totally about the Russians. Ordinary soldiers were flesh and blood, but when you think of the NKVD and the political officers driving men on to their deaths and treating liberated zones and people like criminals, it makes them no better. But they reacted to the scorched earth policy and rapine committed on them by the Nazis. There were beasts a plenty under the Swastika or Hammer and Sickle. I repeat my view that we do not need to see a ban on German re-enactors or their regalia, Maybe John Sweeney thought that Rex Cadman and the senior management of W&P had a duty to educate the public about German war crimes. I thought that was what schools were for. The way the simple name of the event War & Peace was subverted by Sweeney from it's original IMPS days meaning to do more harm was an easy hit. But the show will survive. Vote with your feet - some of us don't go to W&P for a raft of reasons separate from people "dressing up" as General Von Klinkerhofen. Let the dust settle and see how the sometimes strange marriage between simple MV folk and re-enactors develops. I hope it continues to do so, But don't be complacent. "They" hate our guns, they hate our motors, they hate our devotion to a history which is white British in essence. We do not conform. "They" does not mean Labour or Tory or whatever. It means that cabal of influential people in our country who do not rest. They like easy targets and being associated with the evils of Nazism, however loosely - even accidentally is not a good place to be. Bullseye.

Fat chance. PW all the way for me.

I'm in. May have swapped the Iltis for something else by then. Presuming I've made my mind up and found a buyer!!

Marc is the webmaster of the event who worked his ar5e off this year. He is a good bloke and really enjoyed himself in the mud buying cheap boots and mainlining on coke (the soft-drink not the powder). Military motors were not his cup of tea, but he liked some of them and was a whizz with the cherry picker. I'll try and get him out of bed so we can do a bigger photoshoot with the thing next year - if Rex rents another one. I was surprised to see him on here - but I'd told him all about us and he must have liked the baseball cap I was wearing. Marc spends most of his time working with balloons in sunny locations like Vegas and....Belgium. He may reappear.

Les in Malta at the end of 1914. The Battalion were there to garrison the island - presumably releasing a Regular unit to go to the front. They arrived in France in May 1915 and moved up to Flanders in time for Les to die on Aug 23. He was a good looking lad and would have been 21 on December 20th.

An early colour image of the cemetery. The old wall is long gone and so have the trees from memory. It looks a bit generic.

second grave registraation card. This shows a good view of Divisional Cemetery as it looked in 1918 or just after. Les, Fred Lunn and PJ Ryan were all eventually given separate graves. This belies the obvious notion they were blown to bits. We assume the letters put a nice slant on the image of the men blown up in a dug-out by a large shell. Who knows. In normal circumstances remains would be put in a sack. Maybe they just put up three stones for them. In the cemetery are 23 men of the Duke of Wellingtons Regt who were killed in a gas attack. They have separate gravestones although it is a mass grave in almost a whole row, Poor sods.

Obituary from the Territorial Gazette

Les and his mates in Flanders (we think). He is bottom left.