Leslie Jakob with his son Eric on his knee before he left home for the last time.
LESLIE Jakob left the family home in Grove Road, Walthamstow, in May 1940 and never saw his family again.
Reported missing in the little-known Battle of Calais, he does not even have a marked grave.
Many years passed before his son Eric, left growing up in Walthamstow during the Blitz and the rocket attacks that followed in 1944 and 1945, found out what had happened to his father.
More than 50 years later he contacted the King's Royal Rifle Corps.
The regiment's association secretary uncovered a set of documents which had been sent from a prisoner of war camp in 1941 from a soldier who was with Leslie Jakob when he was killed.
The regiment was able to put him in touch with the former prisoner, who vividly recalled Mr Jakob's father saying he had a baby son.
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The veteran revealed that Mr Jakob senior was shot dead on May 26, 1940, in the final hours of the three-day battle.
He provided Mr Jakob with fresh insight into the Battle of Calais and its importance, which he believes has become overshadowed by the saving of 360,000 allied troops from Dunkirk in an operation named Operation Dynamo.
Three battalions, totalling around 1,000 men, were deployed to hold off a German Panzer division while British troops massed further up the coast.
The regiment's efforts helped ensure the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, but at the cost of 300 British fatalities and a further 700 wounded.
Only a handful of men escaped and most of those were captured and marched to Poland, where they would spent the next five years as prisoners of war.
However Mr Jakob's father's place in history was assured when Sir Winston Churchill recognised the contribution of those who fought at Calais. The Prime Minister said he was in no doubt that the battle helped buy vital time for the subsequent evacuation from Dunkirk.
Sir Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War who also later became Prime Minister, also spoke of the operation's importance.
Mr Jakob says his efforts to trace his father's final days have helped him come to terms with his own early life.
He said: "All through my life I couldn't understand how people can just disappear.
"Because he didn't have a marked grave, it was always bugging me - what happens to one's father.
"I had never been able to go over and take flowers, and I had always wanted to find out what happened.
"It was a satisfaction to finally have the facts and to know that someone was with him at the end."
Mr Jakob has written his own autobiography, Just a Boy from London's East End, in which he describes his search for information about his father.
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