A DUNKIRK hero who kept the leather boots he walked 1,300 miles to freedom in after fleeing a Nazi camp has died aged 99.
Les Kerswill took the worn out shoes to schools as he gave talks on the horrors of war after he ran from a Prisoner of War camp in 1944.
He trudged through snowy Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany before coming across the advancing allies, months before the Second World War was won.
The brave soldier had been captured when his unit was overcome by Germans as they tried to keep the 330,000 troops evacuating the beaches at Dunkirk safe.
After he escaped and made it safely home to Bournemouth, Dorset, he kept the boots as a poignant memento.
Les was one of the last remaining Dunkirk veterans and passed away just seven days before his 100th birthday at a nursing home in Poole.
He recalled the harrowing details of the bloody three day battle, in which his battalion were decimated and he was captured.
The hero said: "My regiment were in the thick of it. The Germans were coming in their hundreds, if not thousands.
"I found myself with 34 others, including an officer. I later found out we had lost 600 men that afternoon, they were either killed or were missing.
"The firing was like being in a hailstorm. I got hit in the back of the left thigh with a bit of spent shrapnel, but it felt like the size of a drain cover.
What was the World War 2 battle at Dunkirk?
IN MAY 1940 the outgunned British army was cut off from their French allies by Adolf Hitler's unstoppable German forces, leaving them trapped in the town of Dunkirk.
The Germans' ferocious Blitzkrieg tactics had torn through the allied lines and separated the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the French forces.
Marooned in a tiny corridor of northern France the BEF and their allies looked doomed.
However, confident that his army would crush his enemies, Hitler made the decision to briefly halt the German advance, giving the British just enough breathing space to arrange an evacuation.
This was later described as one of the evil dictator's "most critical mistakes" and "one of the great turning points of the war".
Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the BEF from the port town of Dunkirk, started on May 27 1940.
On the first day, just 7,669 troops were saved by the beleaguered British fleet.
By June 4, when Operation Dynamo ended, a total of 338,226 British and French soldiers had been saved from Dunkirk.
However, an appeal for smaller civilian craft to join the rescue mission proved a resounding success – by May 31, plucky Brits had contributed nearly 400 'little ships' to the effort.
At the height of the daring evacuation, over 180,000 allied troops were brought back from France in a three-day period.
"I thought my leg had come off. I found myself commander in charge of five blokes.
"This chap said to me, 'what are we going to do now, corp?'
"A couple of hundred yards away there was a sunken road and I knew we could make our way back to Dunkirk.
"Then the next minute a machine gun opened up and I said 'keep down' but one private got up and he ran and ran and he took three bursts.
"One of the Jerry officers stood up on a tree trunk and he said: "You have got nothing to be ashamed of. You put up one hell of a fight."
"He said he thought his men were up against an entire company when there were just 34 of us."
When he eventually reached the PoW camp in Beutem in western Poland Les wrote to his mother, who had spent 10 months fearing her son was dead after receiving a telegram stating he was 'missing believed killed'.
He asked her to send him some new leather boots which got through.
Les spent the next four years in captivity until the Germans marched them out in Christmas 1944 while the Russians advanced from the east.
He took the opportunity to escape by sneaking off while the guards weren't looking.
He said: "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, my clothing was infested with lice."
After the war Les worked as an engineer. He married wife Eileen in 1946 and they had a son. Eileen died in 1958.
ason Carley, spokesman for the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships, said: "The contribution of the soldiers like Les who stayed behind and fought the Germans to enable 338,000 of their fellow soldiers to be brought back to Britain was invaluable yet it can be forgotten.
"It is so important that we remember them and not just those who made it back on the little ships.
"Les' story of escape and walking 1,300 miles to freedom across hostile territory is amazing yet he told it with such modesty.
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