Le Rue de paradis H.Q. 2nd Bn. Royal Norfolk Regt 27 May 1940

This sketch depicts the last stand of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment just outside the village of Le Paradis, France, 1940.

When Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940, the 2nd Battalion was among the units tasked with holding off the advancing enemy forces as long as possible, buying time for the rest of the British Expeditionary Force - the army which had been stationed in France since the outbreak of war - to escape via the port of Dunkirk.

On 27 May, the Battalion commanders were informed by radio that their units had become isolated and would receive no assistance. They fell back to their headquarters at a farmhouse outside the hamlet of Le Paradis, holding out until they ran out of ammunition at around 5:15 pm and were forced to surrender. It is this desperate final defence which is captured in this sketch.

The survivors were marched by their SS captors to a paddock, where they were lined up against the wall of a barn and mown down by two machine guns, after which any survivors were stabbed or bludgeoned with bayonets. Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan miraculously escaped with injuries, and hid on a French farm before being captured by the German Army and transferred to a military hospital as Prisoners of War. The SS officer who directed the massacre, Fritz Knochlein, was finally tried and convicted of war crimes in 1948, and was executed by hanging the following year.