A Second World War hero who kept the boots he walked 1,300 miles to freedom in has died aged 99.
Les Kerswill was among 600 troops in a last line of defence to block the German army’s advance on Dunkirk in 1940.
Their heroic actions allowed more than 300,000 troops to be evacuated by a flotilla of boats.
Les was captured and taken to a PoW camp in Poland but sneaked away in 1944.
He had to cross Poland and Czechoslovakia before he met advancing US allies in Bavaria.
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He said: “I was foraging for food and sleeping in barns. You couldn’t imagine the snow and ice, the conditions were ter-rible. I got frost bite in my toes.
“If I hadn’t had my mum’s boots I wouldn’t have made it. When I got back to England after the war, the boots were the only thing I had left.”
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Les was a lance corporal in the Royal Berkshire Regiment when he was sent to fight in France in December 1939.
He said of Dunkirk: “My regiment were in the thick of it. The Germans were coming in thousands.”
Despite a heroic last stand, Les and a few survivors were captured. Les recalled: “One of the Jerry officers said ‘you put up one hell of a fight’.”
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After the war, Les became an engineer. He married Eileen in 1946 and they had a son, but Eileen died in 1958.
Les kept the leather boots and used them in talks to schoolchildren in his home town of Bournemouth, Dorset.
He died just a week before his 100th birthday at a care home in Poole.
