Rescued from Dunkirk by a fishing boat

James Murdoch, my grandfather and known to his friends as Jim, was a regular soldier who spent most of his early army career in North Africa and the Middle East. He returned to the United Kingdom with his young family in 1936 ready to take up a civilian post at the Army College in Chepstow. The British Army had other plans, however, and once they explained their concerns about the worsening situation in Europe he agreed to stay on in the army.

In the early summer of 1940, Jim was sent to France in command of a small troop of soldiers charged with identifying possible locations where machine guns might be sited on the Normandy coast. The work was progressing well, and they had driven quite a long way down the Normandy coast when they received a signal telling them to abandon the mission and drive straight to Dunkirk to be evacuated. The return trip was fraught with difficulties and at one point the soldiers had to remove the wooden doors from a barn to replace a detonated bridge.

Jim and the other soldiers eventually reached Dunkirk and spent several days on the beach. The Royal Navy ships finally arrived and anchored off the coast. Jim swam out to some of the ships to try and secure a place on board, without success. Eventually, he managed to board a destroyer heading for England, but unfortunately the ship was bombed and sank a couple of miles outside Dunkirk. Jim escaped the sinking ship and was left to swim around in the sea. He soon realized that his army uniform was dragging him underwater and swiftly removed all his clothes. To his immense relief, an English fishing boat - one of the 'flotilla of little ships' which volunteered to help rescue the troops - finally spotted him and pulled him out of the water. "Naked as the day I was born" was the expression he always used when telling us the tale. The fishermen found Jim an old pair of trousers, and one of the crew took off his sweater and insisted on donating it.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was starting to get worried. She knew Jim had been sent to France and she was aware of the Dunkirk evacuation. The family lived in a garrison town in Hampshire and whenever my grandmother spotted any soldiers walking past the house she would rush out and ask if they had any news. Eventually, she received a Red Cross postcard from Jim saying he was safely back in England and uninjured. Once he had been de-briefed about his mission to identify the potential gun emplacements, he was able to return home to his family.

Following the D-Day landings, his army unit joined the fighting across France and into Germany. After the German surrender, he was part of the army of occupation in Germany situated near the River Rhine. He used to tell us tales of how the river had frozen during the winter.

Jim was always full of bravado about his experiences, but it was only after his death in 1982 that my grandmother spoke about the aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation and the terrible nightmares about swimming around in the sea convinced that he would not be rescued that haunted Jim afterwards.

My cousin now owns the donated sweater and as an act of homage he wears it when he goes fishing.