CHRISTMAS Eve 1914, war has broken out and Sergeant John Kennedy is on stage jollying up the troops at the regimental concert.

As they all sing lustily along with him to the words of the music hall classic I’m Not Particular, Kennedy and his men could have no idea of the horrors to come.

Nor could he possibly foresee how he would later survive the slaughter of Gallipoli before being decorated for bravery on the most notorious killing fields of France and Flanders.

Later, not even his wife and family would know anything about his decision to join up again in 1940 to fight the Nazis — aged 61 — before being evacuated amid the Miracle of Dunkirk.

The incredible tale of courage is one of many being commemorated in the run-up to the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One on Armistice Day 1918.

Military historian and author Paul Reed said: “The story of Sergeant John Kennedy is a truly unusual and remarkable one.

“The increased interest in the First World War has encouraged people to go up into their lofts and find diaries, photo albums and all sorts of treasures that have told us so much we didn’t know.”

This is one of those extraordinary stories about an ordinary family man — my great grandfather “Pop”, an East London labourer who became a double world war hero.

Born John Luke Kane on June 13, 1878, he changed his name to Kennedy before joining the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1898, aged 20. Brit troops were caught in a shooting gallery

Posted overseas, Pop spent some time guarding the Empire in India before being transferred to Africa where his regiment served in both Sierra Leone and the bloody Boer War in South Africa.

He was eventually discharged on his return to England in 1910. But following the outbreak of World War One, Kennedy immediately re-enlisted, leading men as a sergeant in 6 Battalion (Pioneers) in their preparations.

By July 1915, the battalion had received the order to sail to the Aegean Sea to take on the Turks, who had sided with Germany.

They headed for the peninsula of Gallipoli — a key Ottoman Empire stronghold — and straight into one of the greatest disasters in British military history.

Exhausted by the beach landings at Suvla and being forced to march over rough ground in darkness for miles without water, Kennedy and his men in 6 Battalion were nevertheless then ordered to attack a ridge called Tekke Tepe as part of the catastrophic battle for Scimitar Hill.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, had insisted that capturing Tekke Tepe was crucial to the success of the Gallipoli Campaign.

As a sergeant following orders, Kennedy had been forced to drag his shattered and desperately thirsty men out of their trenches and into the face of the enemy.
But the poorly planned attack turned into a shooting gallery as Turkish snipers easily picked off the British.

Kennedy had landed in the early hours of August 7 alongside 22 officers and 750 men. After three days of slaughter, his battalion had lost 15 officers and 347 men.

In total, more than 130,000 troops died and 262,000 were wounded in the 13-month Gallipoli Campaign. Thousands were killed by disease.

An unofficial history of the East Yorkshires says: “If it (Tekke Tepe) had been held, the Gallipoli Campaign would have succeeded. The 6th East Yorkshires, who stormed the hill with limited support in difficult conditions were used in (arguably) the most important assault of the campaign.

“They were bravely led and were decimated within sight of their ultimate objective.

“The story of the 6th East Yorkshires at Tekke Tepe is not a particularly well researched or well understood part of the campaign, but it encapsulates everything in one small action that was wrong about Gallipoli.”

Kennedy had been extraordinarily lucky to survive. But after a short period of recovery in Egypt, he and the rest of 6 Battalion were then thrust into some of the biggest and bloodiest battles in France and Belgium.

In tiny, crabbed handwriting, his Soldier’s Paybook lists the scenes of slaughter that he incredibly survived, a litany of death — the Somme, Thiepval, Ypres, Messines, Lens and Loos and the Hindenburg Line. Kennedy and his Pioneers fought with distinction at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, part of the First Battle of the Somme, where 1,113,000 men died, and where tanks were used for the first time.

During 1917 he served on the Hindenburg Line, digging forward trenches, often under heavy shelling from the Germans.

As historian Everard Wyrall noted in his 1928 book The East Yorkshire Regiment In The Great War, these men endured “days and hours spent in a spot where death may come”.

Sergeant Kennedy wrote himself into Wyrall’s history with an astonishing act of bravery in June 1917, which earned him the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Building a huge railway line to carry British guns towards the German trenches at Messines, the Pioneers came under heavy bombardment.

Wyrall wrote: “All of these areas were under direct observation from the enemy’s lines and the work of the Pioneers was of a most trying nature. Shortly before the battle opened, about 20 yards of the railway was blown up by shell fire.

“But a gallant corporal, with ten men, working from 8pm to 4am the next morning, succeeded in running up 15 truckloads of rail and material, every bit of which had to be unloaded and carefully concealed.”

The railway line had been saved and the planned British offensive could begin.

Wyrall’s description, taken from regimental war diaries, almost exactly matches Kennedy’s official citation for the DCM published in the London Gazette the following year.

After a period of fighting and digging trenches at the Battle of Polygon Wood, the second Battle of Arras and at Lens and Loos, Kennedy was finally — after more than three years of service amid the slaughter — handed a typewritten note giving him orders to return to Blighty.

More than 886,000 British men had died on those blasted battlefields. Incredibly he had not been one of them. Most men would have been content to slip back into civilian life and do their best to forget the horrors of war. But Kennedy was not most men.

When Britain declared war on Germany again in 1939, the East Londoner went straight down to a local recruiting office in Leyton. Asked his age, he lied and said 47. In reality he was 61. He casually told his wife Mab he was going away “for work”.

He was signed to the Royal Fusiliers 14th (Overseas Defence) Battalion, consisting of men aged 35 to 50, who had seen service in the Great War. The battalion left for France from Southampton early on February 22, 1940 on the SS Fenella, landing at Le Havre.

Forming part of the 12th Brigade in the 4th Division, the 2nd Battalion moved into the Brussels area on May 13. On May 17, the Germans attacked and the blitzkrieg forced them back towards the French border and eventually to Dunkirk.

A measure of the horrors which the men faced at Dunkirk is revealed in C Northcote Parkinson’s history of the regiment, Always A Fusilier.

It tells how they were shelled repeatedly as they scrambled from the beach and waded chest-deep in seawater to reach some of the hundreds of “Little Ships” which had come to rescue them.

Again, Kennedy — nearly four decades older than many of his comrades on those Dunkirk beaches — had defied all odds to survive. Arriving in Dover, he did not have a penny to his name and had to ask a shopkeeper if he could use his phone to let Mab know he was still alive.

Earlier that day his son Jack had got married, not knowing if Pop was alive or dead. Dunkirk proved one campaign too many. Found out for being too old and declared “no longer required” by the Army, he went home to the relative peace of Walthamstow, this time for good, from where he watched Luftwaffe bombs fall on London during the Blitz.

Historian Paul Reed said: “John Kennedy would have forged documents to show he was younger than he was to re-enlist.

“If you were a recruiting sergeant major sitting at a table and a guy comes in with the Distinguished Conduct Medal, you think, ‘He’s going to be a really useful guy to have’.

“He probably used the old trick of putting some boot polish in his hair to hide the grey. John’s battalion were in France to guard petrol depots, ammunition supply points and communications. They weren’t meant to be involved in the fighting.

“He would have been part of an orderly withdrawal but when he got to Dunkirk, I would imagine someone like him is not just going to stand by and do nothing. The Miracle of Dunkirk was part of the propaganda of 1940. John would have been a hero of Dunkirk in the eyes of the public.”

After the war, Pop went back to labouring and was still working aged 84 in 1962 when he tore a heart muscle lifting a heavy ladder and died — a tragic end to a life of bravery and devotion to duty.

There is one regret that hangs over this story, however. I never got to tell him what a hero he really was.