Halifax Down!: On the Run from the Gestapo, 1944

Chapter I

Early Years and Training

God, it’s cold! Where the hell are the bed clothes? Reaching down to pull the blankets up, my hand just grasped fresh air. What clot’s pinched them? Somehow the bed seemed harder than usual and my pillow had disappeared as well but at least the b------s had left me with the sheet I was lying on.

Flat on my back I opened my eyes and gradually focused. Above me was the sky, dark but clear, with the stars just a blur. Damn! I obviously was not in my quarters and nobody had taken my bedding. But what was I doing here in the middle of a field? This was the first time I’d ended up like this. However much we drank I had always made it back to quarters before, but then there always has to be a first time!

Everything was so quiet. Not a sound to be heard, not a light to be seen, as I lay there endeavouring to collect my senses. Where had I been last night to end up like this? My mouth didn’t taste like I had been on a binge and, anyway, we always tripped into York in Jim’s car. But what were these cords doing tangled up around me? Groping around I traced the cords which were not only attached to the sheet but ended up linked to the harness in which I was still strapped. The penny dropped. I was lying on a parachute. But how did I get here?

Even more than fifty years on, those first few minutes as I came to remain vivid in my mind. How long it took while I gathered my senses together I will never know. Trying to read my watch proved impossible as I was unable to focus properly due to what I was later to realise was the effect of concussion. Gradually my mind cleared and images began to form. Dropping through the forward escape hatch, seeing the black bulk of the port wing and fuselage above, pulling the rip-cord, then – nothing, till I woke up on the ground. The thought that I was in enemy territory had not yet come to mind as I painfully tried to think back for the reason why I had been on the end of a parachute. For a while I tried to convince myself I had baled out over England and all that now had to be done was to find the nearest phone and contact base, but gradually memory returned. We hadn’t reached the target and I was the wrong side of the Channel. Panic! Action was necessary! I must hide the ’chute and get away. But which way? At that moment the question of which country I was in did not seem relevant. If we had been near the Ruhr then there was but one direction to go, south-west. In almost one movement I hit the quick release of the harness, gathered up the parachute and jumped up to run, only to fall flat on my face in pain. Bomber Command could not afford the disruption that proper parachute instruction and practice would bring, with a tally of sprains and possibly bone fractures among its aircrew, apart from the cost and the possibility that aircrew might bale out more readily; there were a few members of the Air Council who were always obsessed with the chance of morale breaking, so the sum total of instruction had been a couple of short sessions a long time ago in the gym on how to collapse when hitting the ground. For the observer type parachute, which was clipped on to the chest, it was necessary to fold the arms across the chest to protect from the whip of the harness straps as the parachute opened. Failure to do that when baling out had allowed the heavy clips to hit me: two perfect clips to the jaw, as the chute opened up, so knocking me out. Being unconscious, I must have landed like a sack of potatoes and my legs and back had suffered. The heavy clouts from the clips had also produced the concussion which was now causing blurred vision.

Having learnt the hard way, I again got to my feet, but this time, more gingerly, keeping my head firmly facing forwards. Moving to the edge of the field where there was a hedge, I found a small depression into which I forced down the parachute and harness before covering it up as best as possible, and, as well as could be seen in the blackness of the night. Having got rid of this encumbrance the pressing problem was to get as far away as possible. At this stage my only recollection was of being a few minutes short of the target when the order to bale out had been given, so I could be in Germany, Belgium or Holland, although my reason had not yet returned sufficiently to think through the latter. (I was later to discover that my aircraft crashed near Gulpen only some six miles from the German border). At the time I probably only reacted with animal instinct to turn and run and so, with a navigational training behind me, south-west seemed the most sensible way in which to head.

But where was south-west? As soon as I dropped my head to read the watch on my wrist there was an immediate blurring of vision, so there was no way it was going to be possible to read a compass, particularly in the dark. I looked up for the Pole Star but as soon as my head moved from the normal position the stars became a blur. Nothing else for it. I lowered myself to the ground, lay flat on my back and, centring my head, was able to see all the sky clearly. Selecting the Pole Star I lined my feet up to point south-west then sat up and again looked skyward to identify the shape of the blur where the Pole Star lay. With this as a reference point, I could now aim towards possible safety.

Dazed and aching, I walked on what I hoped was a south-west line regardless of hedges, barbed wire or roads, although I had to skirt round an isolated house where a dog threatened to awake the dead. There were no sign posts to give a clue as to position and eventually I came to a small river. Taking off my flying boots and socks and walking along the bank testing the water, I eventually found a spot to wade across. The river lay in a small depression and was lined with trees on either side. A little way along, the trees were somewhat more numerous on a bend in the river and about four deep, sufficient to give some cover and time to think and rest during the daylight which was now becoming imminent. In my present state there was no way I could do much running if caught in the open, so, lying down on the grassy bank, I dozed and waited for the dawn.

When the sun rose the time came to assess my situation. I was lying on a sloping bank some twenty feet from the edge of the river. Crawling a few feet further away from the bank I raised my head out of the depression and viewed the south-west line that had to be taken. I was confronted by open fields all around me, with no buildings visible except for a church steeple to the south-east. However, in the distance there appeared to be extensive wooded country. The sight of this gave great relief, for my overwhelming desire was to stay out of sight, at least until I could establish where I was. There was no sign of roads or railways and I felt completely alone. Even allowing for the fact that it was Sunday everything was strangely quiet with nothing to indicate any life around me. Even so it seemed advisable to rest for the day to recover my strength and shake off the concussion before moving on.

With the light it was also possible to take stock of my resources by opening up my escape box. This was one of two packs issued to aircrew prior to any operational flight over enemy territory. The other pack contained silk maps covering the areas over which operations were being carried out. Since I had not yet found any prominent landmarks I left these in my pocket and concentrated on the celluloid box some five and half by four and a half inches and three quarters of inch deep, known throughout the RAF as a ‘Pandora box’. Much of the space inside the box was absorbed by a rubber water bottle but even so there was room left for a selection of Dutch, Belgian and French notes, water purification tablets, a compass and some Horlicks tablets. Going down to the water’s edge I filled the bottle and dropped a purification tablet in just to play safe before breakfasting on very cold water and a Horlicks tablet. Strangely enough, I had no feeling of hunger.

Now I had time to lie back and think about my predicament. Like most aircrew on bomber stations I had sat listening once or twice to escapers who had got back home after baling out but, somehow, it didn’t help the feeling of loneliness as I decided what to do next. One thing was certain; when an aircraft crashed the Germans knew how many crew should be in it and would therefore be out and about scouring the area. I wondered how far away the Halifax had come down and whether everyone had got out. Way back in my OTU days, I had taken part in an evasion exercise when we were loaded into a closed lorry after dark and then dumped in open country with the object of getting back to the airfield without being caught by instructors who were placed at strategic points to intercept us. Playing a waiting game, I timed my run so that I was the last one in with just a few minutes to spare, banking on the instructors getting tired of waiting after they had caught the majority. With this in mind it seemed best to hide up in the day and travel at night, at least until I had established where I was. So I made myself as comfortable and as inconspicuous as possible and tried to get some sleep.

During the day I dozed in fits and starts in the quiet of the countryside in which there was no sound of movement, no traffic, no people, no voices; in fact, it seemed almost unreal, a dream. A sign of movement came mid-afternoon. A man, seemingly searching the river bank, began to move towards me albeit very slowly. There was no cover where I sat on the ground and the trees were rather sparse. Picking the thickest tree trunk, which was just about the width of my shoulders, I put it between me and the man, breathed in, and awaited developments. Peering out from behind the tree the reason for the man’s slow progress became obvious as he drew towards me. He was fishing the river, casting his line and waiting awhile before reeling in, moving a few paces along the bank and then repeating the process. It must have been nearly an hour from the time he came into view before I was able to heave a sigh of relief with his departure. For a time he was barely twenty feet from me and it was probably the only time in my life I prayed that a man should not catch a fish, in case he wanted to dally further in the waters before me. As he disappeared in the distance, an unseen church bell began to toll, but not from the church that was visible. It came from a nearby monastery (Wittem) which, I was not to know at the time, was the only bell in the area that the Germans had not taken to melt down.

As evening came, I re-filled my water bottle and, with the fall of darkness, began my south-west trek. My knees and back still ached and the concussion was still with me, and indeed was to last for at least two weeks. This blurred vision became a nuisance whenever I moved my head up or down, but I quickly got into the habit of turning my whole body to face up to the direction of view and to lie flat on my back to get a bearing from the Pole Star. As I plodded across the fields this trick had to be performed several times as I lost bearings or diverted to avoid a barking dog. Progress was rather slow but eventually I reached the woods I had viewed from the river and with some relief was able to walk without having to worry about hedges, fences, ditches or dogs. The night was black and with no defined path I wandered through the woods trying to maintain something approaching south-west. Just before dawn, reaching the southern edge of the trees on a hill overlooking a village, I settled down to review the position and await the light.

* * *

There is a tendency, when you are in trouble, to look back and contemplate what could have been done to avoid it, however futile the exercise. As I lay in the woods, dozing on and off, it was in such a review that I engaged myself, thinking back over the years that had brought me to this predicament.

Born in the East End of London, I had been brought up during the inter-war years seeing annually the massed RAF squadrons over-flying the capital as they made their way to the great Hendon air shows which were such a feature of life at that time. Nearly all my teachers had fought in the trenches during the Great War and, together with all the illustrated magazines available, had imparted the horror of that sort of warfare. Being an avid reader of W.E. Johns, there was no place I could imagine better, in the event of war, than being in the Royal Air Force. In the second half of the thirties, as I reached my teens and was completing my education, the inevitability of war became a common topic of conversations in classrooms. I was convinced more than ever that, if the time came to fight, I would want to be up and away in the air, free from the mess below.

As the spring of 1939 came I sought to join the RAF as a boy entrant but my mother, persuaded by a non-conformist preacher that if God wanted us to fly, He would have given us wings, would not give the necessary approval, leaving me no alternative but to wait until war arrived. This duly turned up in September, when I immediately wrote to the Air Ministry offering my services, only to receive a reply suggesting that I should renew the offer when I was eighteen. The next sixteen months dragged by as first we endured the ‘phoney war’, followed by the fall of France and then the Battle of Britain. Came the Blitz and living in the East End of London I developed a yearning for revenge against the enemy who was smashing down and burning the London I loved and of which I was proud. I was watching the West Ham v. Tottenham match at Upton Park on that Saturday in September 1940 when the Luftwaffe launched their attack upon the London Docks, interrupting the match and sending us home early with the docks aflame.

For a while, during the night-bombing which followed in the autumn of 1940, I would stay with my family doctor at nights to give him some company and man his telephone when he was called out. This came to an end when my mother had to evacuate our house due to a landmine and went to live with her sister, my aunt, in south Croydon. After fending for myself for a week or so I decided to follow. As far as one could see it was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire, literally, since most of the raids came from the south and consequently overflew Croydon. The area received a fair share of the bomb loads which were shed as the bombers ran into the anti-aircraft barrage of the London defences. In spite of the continuous enemy activity throughout that winter of 1940/41 I always somehow managed to sleep soundly in my bed, except for occasional forays into the night to extinguish incendiary bombs and put out fires in neighbouring empty houses. Due to the houses being large and well-spaced out most bombs managed to find open ground.

Promptly on my eighteenth birthday in January 1941 I applied for aircrew duties in the RAF. I naturally opted for pilot and, in due course, reported to Oxford for selection tests and a medical, ending up before a selection panel who decided that I, in their opinion, would be of more value to the Royal Air Force as an observer, (terminology at that time for navigator), rather than flying one of their aircraft. Having taken the Oath of Allegiance and raring to go, it was with much chagrin that the group I was with learnt that our call-up would be deferred for six months until the air force could cope with us. So I returned to Croydon to sit out bombs, guns and shrapnel raining down for another six months, frustrated at not being able to hit back. Eventually, my call-up came with orders to report to the Aircrew Reception Centre at Regent’s Park on the 19th July.

The ACRC had only recently been set up in London to handle the flow of trainee aircrew which would be necessary to maintain the efforts of the various RAF Commands. Obviously, even at that time of the war, somebody somewhere had done their sums and worked out an estimated ‘chop’ rate which we were likely to suffer; but such thoughts did not enter our heads at the time. The centre was based around Lord’s cricket ground and London Zoo with many of the surrounding large blocks of flats commandeered, emptied and furnished with service iron bedsteads on which were three stuffed palliasses and blankets. The organization was somewhat stretched in these early days but with the issue of uniforms and everything to accompany them we were allocated to different flights and commenced drill in the streets and park. So we began the process of being tuned to meet the requirements of a modern fighting force.

Although some animals had been removed from the Regent’s Park zoo there were still enough left to attract visitors and, as we marched three times a day to the restaurant which was our mess, we became an additional attraction as ‘Feeding time at the Zoo’ took place. Even in wartime the West End of London still kept its allure and most evenings we were able to wander about thoroughly enjoying the theatres and cinemas in the area. After finishing at midday on Saturdays we were able to go home until Sunday night. The only discordant note was the continuance of night air raids. Having slept through them for nearly a year in my own bed it was, to say the least, annoying to be woken up in the middle of the night by the air raid sirens and the strident voices of the NCOs and compelled, in military fashion, to abandon the comfort of bed for the cold of the basement shelter. Still, it was summer and I was in the RAF, so this had to be endured.

At the end of our allotted spell at ACRC we found ourselves posted on 16th August to various Initial Training Wings and I was fortunate to be sent to No.1 at Babbacombe, just outside Torquay. Classified as U/T (under training) aircrew we all wore white flashes in our forage caps indicating our role as cadets. We were all destined to become officers, either commissioned or non-commissioned and the purpose of ITW was to teach the basics of military discipline and drill to enable us to fulfill the role when the time came.

Babbacombe, being a holiday resort, had many hotels and guest houses along the cliff top, all of which had been commandeered by the air force, and a Hawker Hind parked in front to, presumably, connect us aspiring aviators with a flying machine, however obsolete. For eight weeks we marched and drilled, always at 140 paces per minute, sometimes in uniform, sometimes running along the cliffs in PT gear and, occasionally, wearing gas masks. We learnt basic navigational theory, aircraft recognition, the Morse Code and wireless telegraphy to twelve words per minute, King’s regulations and gunnery, in particular, the Vickers gas-operated machine gun, dismantling and assembling the weapon blindfolded. As a sideline, and to learn the rudiments of air gunnery, we were introduced to clay pigeon shooting which, with swimming, provided very welcome breaks from the routine. Of course, this was still a five and a half day week we were working and so, at midday on Saturdays we were free until ‘lights out’ on Sunday nights to get to know Torquay, the surrounding countryside, and the various sights in the area. Not many of us had been able previously to afford such a long and pleasant vacation.

To add to the sense of holiday we also had the occasional use of a launch out of Torquay harbour for a trip round the bay in order to practice basic navigation using compass bearings off various points. And all this at no charge! Not at the time, anyway. The bill was to be collected sometime in the future. That beautiful summer passed all too quickly with the help as well of a do-it-yourself concert in the pavilion on the cliffs which was organised by one of the flight commanders, a peacetime school master, with amateur theatricals as a hobby. With the short time available for rehearsals it was quite