Philip attended the RMA Sandhurst on leaving school and upon receiving his commission joined his regiment which had been part of the British Expeditionary Force [BEF] in France since the outbreak of war in September 1939.

On 27^th May 1940 Philip was seriously wounded during heavy fighting with an SS Division in the area of Le Cornet Malo during the retreat to Dunkirk and was to die of his wounds three days later at the age of 19. He lies at rest in Le Paradis War Cemetery, Lestrem, France.

Le Paradis Massacre

His battalion, part of the 2nd Infantry Division, were holding the line of the La Bassée Canal covering the retreat to Dunkirk. Matters became confused as units became separated from each other with the Royal Norfolk’s ‘C‘ and HQ Companies forming defensive positions based at Duriez farmhouse at Le Paradis comprising two main buildings, the farmhouse itself and the byre [or cow barn] which was a few hundred metres from Le Cornet Malo. The company commanders had been told previously that due to their isolation from the rest of the BEF they would receive no assistance, and so either be killed or captured. The remnants of the battalion carried on their defence until the afternoon of the 27^th, by which point many were seriously injured with the enemy constantly shelling the farm and by 17:15 hrs when they finally ran out of ammunition the order was given to surrender.

Those who surrendered from the main farmhouse were taken prisoner and survived to remain as POWs until 1945.  The ninety-nine soldiers who were based in the byre, many of whom had sustained injuries, exited under a white flag and had the grave misfortune to surrender to a unit of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head) Division, under SS Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Knöchlein. They were marched to some buildings on another farm where they were lined up alongside a barn wall. Two machine gunners then opened fire on the prisoners and kept up a sustained rate of fire until all had fallen. Knöchlein then had his men finish off any survivors with pistol shots and bayonets so as to double check all were dead; the bodies were left where they had fallen and the German soldiers left.

The bodies of the dead soldiers were later buried by the local French population, under orders from the Germans, in a shallow pit and where they remained until 1942. The bodies were then exhumed by the French, who managed to identify about fifty sets of remains, and all were reburied in Le Paradis churchyard.

However, unbeknownst to the enemy they had only managed to kill ninety-seven: two had managed to survive against all the odds. Private William O'Callaghan had survived the massacre and pulled Private Albert Pooley alive from amongst the dead after the Germans had gone. Both had then hidden in a pigsty for three days surviving on raw potatoes and rainwater until their discovery by the farm's owner, Madame Duquenne-Creton and her son Victor.  Between them, and at great risk to their own lives, they took care of them. Sometime later the two soldiers were captured by a Wehrmacht unit and spent the rest of the war as POWs, and the reason why this atrocity remained hidden from the world for so long.

Due to his injuries Private Pooley spent his time in captivity in a German hospital, when in the summer of 1943 he was successfully repatriated to England and elements of the atrocity began to emerge. Initially his account of what had happened was met with utter disbelief as it was not thought that the German army were capable of such atrocities; what the authorities had failed to grasp was that the captors were not Wehrmacht but the Waffen SS. However, when in 1945 Private O’Callaghan was repatriated from his POW camp and his confirmation of the atrocity was given an official war crimes investigation was set in motion. This probe took two years to complete during which time the British War Crimes Investigation Unit tracked down and interviewed witnesses including the two survivors, French civilians and police, and SS prisoners-of-war. Once Knöchlein's company was identified as the perpetrators in 1947, he was traced and arrested in Germany and arraigned on charges of war crimes in August 1948.

‘The accused Fritz Knöchlein, a German national, in the charge of the Hamburg Garrison Unit, pursuant to Regulation 4 of the Regulations for the Trial of War Criminals, is charged with committing a war crime in that he, in the vicinity of Paradis, Pas-de-Calais, France, on or about 27 May 1940, in violation of the laws and usages of war, was concerned in the killing of about ninety prisoners-of-war, members of The Royal Norfolk Regiment and other British Units’.

A guilty verdict was returned and he was sentenced to death by hanging, which was carried out on 28^th January 1949. At the conclusion of the trial the Head of the British War Crimes Investigation Unit expressed anger that Private Pooley had not been believed when he was repatriated in 1943; had his version of events been properly investigated at the time the International Court in Geneva would have shone 'a worldwide spotlight on the crimes of the SS'. He considered that such attention might have brought a halt to the more savage breaches of international law before the end of the war and thus saved countless lives.

Had Philip Slater not been wounded earlier on the day of 27^th May and so at, or in the vicinity of, the farm buildings it is more than likely that his name would have been added to the list of those murdered at the ‘Le Paradis massacre’.

Son of Matthew Ernest & Kathleen Margaret Slater, Norwich, Norfolk.

A copy of this story is available to download here.

See also the Commonwealth War Graves Commission permanent digital memorial, ‘Evermore: Stories of the fallen’ relating to:- Second Lieutenant Philip Jim Kaye SLATER