Rollo Kingsford-Smith was not the only member of his family fighting the Nazis. Soon after war was declared his elder brother, Peter, aged twenty-five, applied to join the RAAF and was accepted as a pilot trainee. After training in Canada, in August 1941 he joined 58 Squadron RAF, flying the already obsolete twin-engined Whitley bombers. Holed by the Germans on a raid, his aircraft crashed into the North Sea at night. Peter was rescued by a Royal Navy patrol, but some members of his crew were killed.
In January 1942, Peter joined 138 Special Duties Squadron RAF, which conducted clandestine low-level operations in support of civilian resistance forces in occupied Europe. Flying Halifaxes, the squadron flew as far afield as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and even North Africa, dropping special agents, guns, ammunition, food, radios and explosives. They flew wherever their help was needed to sabotage German military activities.
One night in February 1943, Peter, now a flight lieutenant, set off to drop an agent, along with radio sets and ammunition, at a safe location south of the French city of Lyon. As he flew his Halifax over the drop site at just under 500 feet, Resistance members flashed a light up at him, indicating that it was safe to fly another circuit before doing the drop. But as Peter flew back, German groundfire blasted the Halifax, disabling two engines. Too low to bail out, he successfully crash-landed the crippled bomber on a field eight kilometres away. The Resistance men picked up Peter and the crew. For the next three weeks the Underground moved him from house to house as he made his way towards the Spanish border. But as he waited for a guide to lead him over the Pyrenees and across the border, he was betrayed to the Vichy French police and captured while hiding in a farmhouse.
Peter spent the next two months in a concrete-floored cell so small he could not stand up in it. Unable to wash or shower, he soon became filthy. One day, the Vichy police dragged him out and told him he was going to be shot. Instead, they shot the prisoner next to him. He was then handed over to the Gestapo, who took him to Paris.
There he has thrown into an open-roofed cell, where a guard standing above him ‘showered’ him with a fire hose. The Gestapo fed him properly but threatened to kill him unless he told them what he had been doing in France. Peter refused to speak. Finally, he was sent to Stalag Luft III, the POW camp for captured airmen near Sagan, about 180 kilometres south-east of Berlin.
Pilot Officer Charles ‘Chuck’ Lark, a twenty-four-year-old Sydney-sider, was already in Stalag Luft III when Peter Kingsford-Smith arrived. A German night fighter had shot down his Wellington over the Netherlands on his fifth op with 460 Squadron. He was the only survivor.
Chuck had been forced to leave school early because of the Depression, and had worked in a brewery delivery office and then the Commonwealth Bank while he studied accountancy. Called up in January 1941, he trained as a pilot. Originally posted to Coastal Command in England, he requested a change to Bomber Command, and was posted to 460 Squadron after an urgent call for volunteers. Chuck was one of six who stepped up, but when they arrived at 460’s base they found pilots were no longer needed; instead they became spare gunners, bomb aimers or observers. Setting out for Bremen on the night of 2 July 1942, Chuck joked with his best mate, Gordon ‘Stumpy’ Lee, that if he did not return then Stumpy could have his bicycle. He took off on the raid, the Wellington climbing to 16,000 feet without incident.
I was in the middle of the plane at the astrodome when suddenly all hell broke loose. I heard machine-guns and cannons drown the noise of the engines; saw hails of tracer bullets streaming up around me; cannon shells exploding and incendiaries setting the fabric on fire. Felt myself hit in several places, fell—or rather collapsed—to the floor, and remember wondering when the shower of bullets would stop. Then I noticed that my right arm was powerless and I could not see from my right eye. I spoke into the microphone to the crew, but got no answer. The plane seemed out of control.
Finding I was too weak to disengage myself from the oxygen tube, I pulled off the whole helmet, grabbed the parachute and somehow stumbled back along the burning fuselage on hands and knees to the exit hole. Then I noticed that the right-hand clip of my harness had been shot off, so after engaging the chute to the remaining clip, I jumped.
It is a funny feeling just falling through space like a stone, and watching the aircraft fly on without you. I lost little time in pulling the ripcord and in a moment the jerk was so terrific that I’ll swear I bounced. Then I felt quite helpless, and very cold, except for something warm dripping down my cheek and pain in various places.
As Chuck drifted downwards from 12,000 feet, attached to his parachute by just one harness clip, the Wellington disappeared, never to be seen again, along with its crew. Chuck concluded that it might have blown up when it crashed, since it was on fire and carrying a full bomb load. It was just after 1 a.m. when he landed in a lake. His Mae West life vest kept him afloat as he kicked out for the shore, keeping a straight course from the star Altair. Two hours later he reached land, stumbling from his injuries.
He was soon taken in by a Dutch family. They called a doctor, who told Chuck he would live but lose his right eye. Transported to a Dutch hospital, he was cut out of his clothes. He recalled ‘having cocaine poured into my right eye, several injections and the tedious business of having the eye removed’. He later wrote home: ‘The bullet entered the right side of my face, knocked a few splinters off my cheekbone, high up, drilled a hole clean through the eye, and, on its way out, just grazed the bridge of my nose. The doctor said that had the bullet entered half an inch higher it would have meant “finis” for me.’
A cannon shell had passed through his shoulder muscles, making ‘two nice holes’ about 30mm in diameter but miraculously avoiding bone. Another bullet entered his left leg just above his knee and travelled up the thigh to his groin. The doctor decided to leave it there. Chuck was put under a Luftwaffe guard to prevent his escaping.
When he recovered after seven weeks in hospital, Chuck was escorted to Amsterdam for interrogation and then sent to Stalag Luft III. He later wrote a comprehensive account of what the camp was like for him and the other 4000 Allied airmen who were imprisoned there. Set among ‘dreary looking pine woods’, the Luftwaffe-run camp was divided into four separate compounds. No visits were allowed between compounds, except for an occasional concert or football match, when a few prisoners were escorted to and fro under guard.
The camp was guarded by troops as well as Alsatian dogs. Two outer camps contained the medical and dental barracks, where British doctors and dentists worked under German supervision. A sick parade was held daily in the sick bay, where Russian prisoners served as orderlies. A prison within the prison camp known as the ‘cooler’, was used for punishment: escaped prisoners served two weeks there upon recapture. In the same building was a shower room, where each prisoner could take one hot shower per week. Two barbed-wire fences about two metres apart enclosed each compound. Between the fences was barbed-wire entanglement. Raised wooden guard boxes were placed at intervals of about 150 metres, each containing a rotating searchlight and one guard armed with rifle, tommy-gun, and fixed scatter gun. At night, sentries also patrolled outside the fence. Day and night, special intelligence guards known as ‘ferrets’ snooped around inside the camp, searching for tunnels or information. About five metres inside the fence was a wire with notices warning that anybody who crossed it would be shot.
The prisoners were quartered in wooden huts, each with twelve rooms, a fuel stove at one end and a toilet at the other. The lighting and heating were inadequate, and each room had from six to eight prisoners, who slept in double-decker wooden beds. In the centre of the compound was a communal kitchen where hot water could be obtained four times a day. German food rations were also issued from the kitchen. A loudspeaker on the roof relayed German news and music. Chuck thought that the canteen was ‘more or less a farce, as practically nothing useful can be purchased there’. He continued:
The sanitation is rather poor, with insufficient taps or washing conveniences. Frequently the water is cut off for hours without warning. The latrines are primitive and objectionable—especially in summer.
Thanks to the Red Cross, sports facilities are not lacking; a variety of games are played with enthusiasm. A miniature theatre is set up in each camp by the boys’ efforts, the standard of entertainment in plays, concerts and orchestra recitals is high.
The libraries in the compounds are usually in three sections—Technical, Reference and General. Quiet rooms are set aside in certain huts, and there is opportunity for study. Lectures and exams are also held in many different subjects although concentration is very difficult in the circumstances.
A shop called Foodacco is open once a day, for exchange of goods—food and tobacco mostly. Values are quite different from the outside world; each article is worth a certain number of points; for example, a sixpenny cake of chocolate is worth forty points or one hundred cigarettes.
The inmates took up many different hobbies, and every few months an arts and crafts exhibition was held. Model aeroplanes and gliders were popular, and there was no lack of ingenuity. All news was closely followed, and a map room kept well up to date. A weekly paper, composed and typed by prisoners, was exhibited each Monday behind the canteen windows. There were at least two roll calls each day, when everybody was paraded in the sports area for counting.
When Stalag Luft III became too crowded, railway trucks shifted about 1000 POWs, including Chuck, to another camp, Oflag XXI-B, on Poland’s Baltic coast. While there, Chuck dropped and broke his glass eye. The commandant sent him to Berlin, accompanied by two guards, to have a new eye fitted. Chuck made use of the opportunity. ‘I was able to note details of camouflage, gun emplacements and even regimental numbers of German troops, and upon my return this information was relayed back to England. It was amusing to be constantly saluted by German soldiers or airmen whilst walking down the Unter den Linden and other streets.’
Conditions were bad at Oflag XXI-B, and Chuck breathed a sigh of relief a few months later when he was among POWs shifted back to Stalag Luft III, where new compounds had been built. At the end of November 1943, he was one of several POWs to take part in the first exchange of injured prisoners. Transported to Barcelona, they boarded a British hospital ship that took them to Egypt. After ‘a glorious month of freedom’, Chuck sailed home, to become one of the first POWs to be repatriated from Germany to Australia.
He arrived home not long before the so-called Great Escape occurred at Stalag Luft III. On 25 March 1944, seventy-six men escaped from the camp via a tunnel that had been fifteen months in the making, eight metres below the surface and 102 metres long. Among them were six Australian airmen. Twenty-two-year-old Squadron Leader James Catanach DFC, from Melbourne, was a member of 455 Squadron RAAF, where he flew Hampden bombers in Coastal Command. Flight Lieutenant Tom Leigh, twenty-five, from Sydney, was an air gunner with Bomber Command 76 Squadron RAF when his Halifax bomber was shot down in August 1941. Twenty-seven-year-old Pilot Officer Albert Hake, from Sydney, was piloting a Spitfire with 72 Squadron RAF when he was shot down over France in April 1942. The mastermind of the compass-making operation for the escape, he played a crucial part in preparations. The ingenious compasses were made from melted Bakelite phonograph records, slivers of magnetised razor blades, glass from broken windows and solder obtained from the seals of tin cans.
Twenty-nine-year-old Flying Officer Reginald ‘Rusty’ Kierath, from Narromine, New South Wales, was from 450 Squadron RAAF, which flew Kittyhawks in North Africa. At Stalag Luft III, he helped create fake walls to hide forged documents, Albert Hake’s compasses and other material vital to the breakout. Twenty-four-year-old Squadron Leader John ‘Willy’ Williams, from Sydney, was also a member of 450 Squadron when his Kittyhawk was shot down during a strafing raid in North Africa in October 1942. Willy, who took to the skies in baggy khaki shorts and shirt and leather sandals, earned a formidable reputation and a DFC. As digging went on for the Great Escape, he helped collect wooden slats from the bunks to shore up the tunnels. The final Australian was Paul Royle, a pilot with 53 Squadron RAF whose Bristol Blenheim bomber had been shot down over France in 1940. A prisoner of war for nearly four years, Paul had made several unsuccessful escape attempts. A mining engineer in civilian life, he always favoured tunnelling.
The tunnellers managed to excavate more than 200 tons of earth and reinforce the tunnel walls with 4000 bed boards taken from the prisoners’ bunks. When one tunnel was detected, they continued working on others. But the German guards discovered the breakout as it was happening. Only three of the seventy-six escapees made it safely back to England. All of the Australians were recaptured. Five were killed by the Gestapo on Hitler’s personal orders. Only Paul Royle survived. After interrogation, he was returned to Stalag Luft III.
Peter Kingsford-Smith was not involved in the escape operation. He would spend the rest of the war as a POW surviving on Red Cross food parcels.