Jennings, Augustus Edward

Augustus Jennings was a career soldier, joining up when he was just 17 and serving first in Egypt and India. In 1936 he returned to England to live with his wife Florence in military accommodation at Budbrooke Barracks, Warwick.

Their daughter, Diane, tells us “When my father was despatched to Belgium in 1939, my mother, sister and I moved to my grandparents’ house in Rugby. I was too young to remember my father very well, but my mother said that before he returned to the front after a short leave over the new year, he told his father-in-law, ‘Look after the girls; I’m not going to get out of this one’.”

In May 1940, Augustus was the Company Sergeant Major with a unit of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment holding back overwhelming German forces in order to allow 330,000 British troops to be evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk. They had been ordered to ‘fight to the last bullet’. At Wormhoudt near Esquelbecq in France, when they had run out of ammunition, they surrendered, expecting to be sent to a POW camp. But their captors were soldiers from the elite Waffen SS ‘1st SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’. Nearly 100 British and French soldiers were herded into a small barn. Some were shot, then grenades were thrown into the barn. When the first grenade was lobbed in, Sgt. Maj. Jennings threw himself on top of it to protect the others and was killed instantly. The SS troops then machine-gunned the barn. Eighty-nine were killed but six survived and were taken to hospital by the regular German soldiers. Further information about the Warwick men killed in the Wormhoudt/Esquelbecq massacre can be found here.

For more than 3 years, Florence knew only that her husband was missing. Confirmation of his death, as ‘Killed in action’, came at the end of the war in a letter also stating the cost of having his name on a gravestone in France. According to Diane, “My mother was furious. She was struggling to bring up two daughters alone. She had received the service scroll from the King sent to all the troops, and just one medal, The Long Service Good Conduct Medal. The truth about the massacre emerged only in 1988 when the survivors began to talk about it and the media took an interest. Diane has campaigned to be given the campaign medals that her father was due and has taken the occasion of this year’s anniversary to write to the MOD Minister for Veterans, asking why the family did not receive any campaign medals and seeking a posthumous bravery award for her father.