The local newspaper also had my story on the scarecrow trail which I'm looking forward to doing when we get home. Next thing is to get a bumper edition of the Hethersett Herald out.
Yesterday I mentioned a second massacre the day after that at Le Paradis. This didn't involve Norfolk soldiers but was no less shocking.
It resulted in a large number of soldiers losing their lives when Nazis hurled grenades into a barn.
There isn't a great distance between Le Paradis and Wermhout. Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the Wermhout massacre.
After their surrender, a large group of soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, 4th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, and gunners of the 210 Battery, 53rd Worcestershire Yeomanry and others as well as French soldiers in charge of a military depot were taken to a barn near Wormhout and Esquelbecq on 28 May 1940. The Allied troops had become increasingly alarmed at the brutal conduct of the SS soldiers en route to the barn, which included the shooting of a number of wounded stragglers. On arrival at the barn the most senior British officer in the group, Captain James Lynn-Allen, protested, but was immediately rebuked by an SS soldier.
When there were nearly 100 men inside the small barn, soldiers from the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, threw grenades into the building, killing many POW. The grenades failed to kill everyone, largely due to the bravery of Sergeant Stanley Moore and Company Sergeant Major Augustus Jennings, who hurled themselves on top of the grenades using their bodies to suppress the force of the explosion and shield their comrades from the blast. Upon realising this, the SS called for two groups of five to come out. The first five came out and were shot. Concluding that these methods were too slow, the SS troopers simply fired into the barn with their weapons.
Several British prisoners were able to escape, while a few others, were left for dead. Captain Lynn-Allen died while trying to escape, although he enabled Private Bert Evans to escape; Evans was the last survivor of the massacre. A total of 80 men were killed. While 15 more were wounded, their wounds were so severe that within 48 hours all but six of them had died.
The SS troops were under the command of Sepp Dietrich with Wilhelm Moncke in charge of the men who carried out the atrocity. Both men would have been well known to Fritz Knoechlein, the butcher of Le Paradis.
And as I have said Le Paradis and Wermhout aren't a million miles away - in fact less than 50 km. It isn't beyond possibility that those who were responsible for the Wermhout massacre may have known about what happened at Le Paradis the previous day.
Today's photographs are of Ypres. Tomorrow I will conclude my short Belgium/France travelogue by telling you about a possible relative I stumbled across in Dunkirk.
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We can get BBC One over here in Belgium and on Sunday night I watched some of the previously unseen footage shot by the royal family. I found it both uplifting and sad.
Uplifting because it showed how much frivolous fun our present queen had whilst growing up and how close she was to her father and grandmother. But at the same time it was sad because all her youthful zest has been replaced by old age. She is still remarkable for somebody approaching the century mark but she must at times look at her young vivacious self and think, as we all do, where did those years go?