St Valery: The Impossible Odds

by Bill Innes

The gallant rearguard action which led to the capture of the 51st Highland Division at St Valéry-en-Caux (two weeks after the famous evacuation of the main British army from Dunkirk) may have burned itself into the consciousness of an older generation of Scots but has never been given the wider recognition it deserves. This new book re-examines that fateful chain of events in 1940 and reassesses some of the myths that have grown up in the intervening years. Of the countless volumes about the Second World War, many of them dealing with the experiences of prisoners of war, relatively few were written by private soldiers, far less those who could take a poet’s perspective on the experience. In the prisoner-of-war camps the lot of the ordinary soldier, subjected daily to arduous forced-labour, was completely different to that of his officers who could not be ordered to work. Two of the main contributors to this collection of soldiers’ reminiscences, Angus Campbell from Lewis and Donald John MacDonald from South Uist, were both traditional Gaelic bards. Their work has been translated from their native language and reflects both the richness of the vocabulary they had acquired through the Gaelic oral tradition and their individual gifts as natural story-tellers born out of that tradition. These vivid accounts bring alive the chaos and horror of war and the grim deprivation of the camps and forced marches which so many endured. Many of the survivors were unable even to talk of their experiences till decades after the war. At the age of 89, Archie Macphee could still say of the surrender at St Valéry, ‘It was the saddest day of my life.’ Yet these personal stories resound with the spirit, humour and sense of comradeship which enabled men to fight on in desperate situations and refuse to be cowed by their captors.

Genres: History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love first-hand accounts. This was an episode of which I was shamefully ignorant. Most of the accounts are brief, but do offer a look at life as a POW. The saddest passage was when one of the veterans remembers these Polish women who risked their lives to sneak food and cigarettes to the POW's whenever there was a chance - he stated he didn't think he would have the courage to do the same completely overlooking the fact that, essentially, that's what he was doing before being taken prisoner.

[Isla Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Là a' bhlàr 's math na caraidean.

"On the day of battle, it is good to have friends." The 51st Memorial, St Valery.

254. [On liberation] Within ten minutes, two large Sherman tanks were amongst us. It was the finest sight I had ever seen - or ever will see as long as I draw breath.

75/201. Aon nì a tha cìnnteach, 's e sin gur e cumhachdan uilc is ana-ceartais thairis oirre, agus air rèir reusanachadh feallsanach be sin a chrìoch onarach ris a' faodte dùil a bhi a leithid a thachartas.

One thing is certain: that it was the forces of evil and iniquity and that they were defeated by the power of justice. According to the reasoning of philosophy, that is the moral outcome that should be expected in such circumstances.

[James Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of first hand accounts, mainly posthumously published from three men who were ordinary soldiers in the 51st Highland Division in 1940. None of them were officers (although one was commissioned after his escape and return home). The main part of the book is a personal account originally published in Gaelic and subsequently translated into english as “A Cameron Never Can Yield”. This forms just over half the book and tells the story from the start of the German attack on 10 May 1940 through surrender at St Valery on 12th June 1940, escape on the march into Germany and then life in Marseilles in the winter of 1940-41 followed by a winter crossing of the Pyrenees and time spent in Spanish prison camps before returning to the UK. The other two stories are relatively similar, although neither of the men managed to return back to the UK and they both had different experiences in their prisoner of war camps and work details. All three of them had a horrendously rough time of it, which seems to be the norm for these early POWs (and the later ones too).

Even though I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about the 51st Highland Division and also lots of personal accounts of both combat and POW life this book was different. Each of the accounts started with a potted history of the person and what they had done before the start of the war, and then ended with what they did after demobilisation. That provided a bit of context, but the most refreshing thing about it was that it was about private soldiers and not officers, which is unusual. Most of the books are written by officers (if first-hand accounts) or by those that would have been had they not become history professors. This puts a different slant on life and makes for a whole different side to the story.

Also, unlike other stories of the 51st Highland Divsion in 1940, it didn’t end on 12th June at St Valery, in fact that was where most of the story started.