Ernest Arthur Braithwaite

Braithwaite was a machine gunner with 4th Battalion Cheshire Regiment attached to 2nd Bn Royal Warwickshire Regiment during the Dunkerque retreat. Around 100 men from the Warwickshires, 8th Bn Worcester Regiment and the Cheshires were captured by 1st SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and herded into a barn near Wormhouldt about 20 miles south of Dunkerque.

The SS began throwing grenades into the barn until Sergeant Stanley Moore and Company Sergeant Major Augustus ‘Gus’ Jennings threw themselves on the grenades to protect their men. Indiscriminate machine gunning followed and most of those inside the 21 feet x 10 feet building were killed.

Remarkably, a few men survived the massacre. Captain James Frazer Lynn-Allen dragged Private Bert Evans into a nearby pool (see photo). Concealed for a while, the pair were discovered and shot, Lynn-Allen fatally. Evans was seriously wounded and left for dead although he lived to become the longest surviving victim of the mass murder.

In 1988, Jeff Rooker, then a Birmingham MP (now Lord Rooker) tried to instigate an enquiry into this incident but was told insufficient evidence existed. Despite the SS commander's strenuous denials, many believe that Hauptsurmfuhrer Wilhelm Mohnke was very fortunate to escape prosecution. He died peacefully in August 2001.

A day before the Wormhoudt massacre, a separate SS unit mudered 97 unarmed surrendering men from the Royal Norfolk Regiment and the Royal Scots. They were herded into a farmyard and machine gunned. Remarkably, two men Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan survived the shooting to become wounded pows.

After the war, thanks to Pooley's persistence and captured SS documents, it was established that SS commander Fritz Knochlein had ordered the killings. By this time married with four children and apparently a respectable citizen, Knochlein was tried in late 1948 for committing a war crime and hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hamelin Prison on January 21st 1949.