2 SEPTEMBER 1944. A concert was held in the mess hall. ‘Jock’ Campbell was one of the solo singers. No water available in the evening as the system had ‘gone for a burton’.
3 SEPTEMBER 1944. A cold but fine day. The 3 pm parade was prolonged when one man was found to be missing. A search revealed him fast asleep in his bunk.
Roman Catholic service held by Bob Lloyd.
Trupp 29 (two men) arrived – Sergeant R.F. Gannon, and Sergeant Brian Wynne-Cole. Ronald Gannon had been shot down on 18/19 July 1944 (Revigny).127 Two others of his crew – F/S E.H. Wells and F/S S.R. Ashton – had already arrived at Luft 7 in Trupp 27. Brian Wynne-Cole was lost on 5/6 June 1944 on Special Duties over France during the grandly-named Operation Titanic in support of the D-Day landings in Normandy.
As Gannon’s POW number was 70445 and Wynne-Cole’s 70217, it is possible that these were allocated at the same place, a camp in France. Another Luft 7 POW, F/Sgt D.A. ‘Don’ Farrington, had POW no. 80140, which was issued at Frontstalag 133 (Chartres), France, while Frank Collingwood, whose POW number was 80059, had spent some time at Frontstalag 122 (Compiègne). At least six other Luft 7 POWs, all captured in France, had POW numbers in the 80015-80162 range.
Don Farrington had been on the run for over three months when, on 11 June 1944, ‘he and five other British servicemen were captured in woods’ near Romorantin-Lanthenay, ‘after they and the Resistance were surrounded by a force of 2,500 German troops, tanks, and artillery’.128
*
4 SEPTEMBER 1944. Labour Day, USA. All-day sports carnival in the camp. Began at 10 am and finished at 4.30 pm. John Tomney won the 100 metres and came second in the 200 metres.
Trupp 30 (thirty-nine men) arrived.
*
Flying in support of main force on the night of 25/26 August 1944 (Rüsselsheim) were one or two of the specially-equipped B-17 Flying Fortresses of 214 (SD) Squadron based at RAF Oulton, Norfolk. The ten-man crew of Flying Fortress HB763 were in for a nasty shock when they were intercepted and shot down by a night-fighter.129 Four were killed, and six taken prisoner. The pilot, W/O J.R. Lee, went to Stalag Luft 1 (Barth), and the wounded Sgt P. Barkess to Lazarett IXC (Obermassfeld). Navigator WO2 Gerald Gibbens RCAF suffered a compound fracture of the third lumbar vertebra on landing, though not sufficiently bad to warrant hospitalisation. Just over a week after being shot down he was at Luft 7 (POW no. 706). Three others of the crew joining him at Bankau were F/S John E.M. Pitchford (754), Sgt Patrick J. Curtis (697), and F/S A.C. Smith (720). Curtis and Smith were also in Trupp 30, but Pitchford for some reason followed them a fortnight or so later in Trupp 33.
*
South African squadrons, 31 SAAF and 34 SAAF, equipped with B-24 Liberators, flew fifty-five Warsaw supply missions between 13/14 August and 21/22 SEPTEMBER 1944, completing twenty-one for the loss of nine aircraft.130 A few flights had already been made earlier in August before it was the turn of ten Liberators of 31 (SAAF) Squadron on the night of 13/14 August 1944 to fly their first hazardous mission from Foggia to Warsaw.
Liberator EW105, flown by 2/Lt R. Klette SAAF and second pilot 2/Lt A. Faul SAAF, reached Warsaw, which the crew could see burning from forty miles away, without undue difficulty, but for the drop Klette had to come in at the detailed height of only 500 feet (150 metres) and at the slow speed of around 130 mph. Over the burning city the Germans opened up at the proverbial sitting-duck with everything they’d got, from pistols upwards. On board EW105 was the twenty-year-old English-born wireless operator, WO1 Eric Winchester SAAF: ‘On fire and completely out of control the aircraft did an old-fashioned “belly flop” on what we later found out to be an airfield. We were machine-gunned on the ground and lost crew before being captured trying to reach the Poles.’
By 17 August Eric and his colleagues were at Dulag Luft. Eric’s memories of his time there were bad:
‘For instance, to be told that you are going to be shot as a saboteur because you won’t or can’t tell them what they want to know, and then to be taken back to a different cell than the one you had been in previously, and convinced that it is a cell for the condemned, you spend the next two or three days with your mind in dreadful turmoil while waiting to be taken out and shot. Eventually you realise that it was all a part of getting you to tell them what they wanted to know, in my case information about the acoustic mines we had dropped in the River Danube, and about which I knew absolutely nothing, and they never intended to shoot you anyway.’
On 29 August Eric and two of his crew, Henry Upton SAAF131 and Ted Davis, were on their way to the Wetzlar transit camp, and on 1 September were escorted to Luft 7 in Trupp 30.
*
F/Sgt Daniel Dunkley, shot down on the night of 25/26 August 1944, landed some fifteen kilometres from Darmstadt. After walking for a few hours he was captured at around 3.30 am on 26 August. He was beaten up, and hit over the head with a rifle by the Bürgermeister of Leeheim. Another man, Adam Doerr, used his fists, a spade and a rifle butt so violently that the butt broke, while a third man, Wilhelm Reinhardt, viciously kicked him. Daniel, needless to say, was knocked unconscious.
Several hours later he was put aboard a passing lorry and taken to the outskirts of Darmstadt, where he was made to get out of the vehicle. As intended he was, again, attacked by the local population, but was rescued by a uniformed policeman and, at about 6 pm, handed over to a Luftwaffe Obergefreiter. Again attacked by this NCO and by yet more civilians, he was fortunate to reach the safety of Dulag Luft, where it was discovered that he had two broken ribs.
After the war Daniel’s ill-treatment became the subject of a minor War Crimes trial, which resulted in Doerr and Reinhardt receiving five and two years’ imprisonment respectively.
*
5 SEPTEMBER 1944. Red Cross parcel issue.
6 SEPTEMBER 1944. A very hot day. Den Blackford was sitting in his hut, reading, when he heard a voice saying: “Hello Den. How are you?” He looked up and there, standing before him, was Theo or ‘Ted’ Davis who, in happier times, lived at No. 89, Yew Tree Road, Southborough, Kent. Den lived at No. 69. Small world.
7 AND 8 SEPTEMBER 1944. After the first tunnel had been dug in July/August, a second was found in the refuse pit and under one of the huts. As a result, the camp was patrolled twenty-four hours a day, with more guards and dogs doing the rounds.
10/11 SEPTEMBER 1944. ‘My gosh, it was cold last night and this morning (what’s it going to be like in the winter? – hell’s bells!)’ (Tom Glenn.)
11 SEPTEMBER 1944. Just after dinner the air-raid siren went, and a large force of ‘Yanks’ were heard but not seen, flying high above the clouds.
12 SEPTEMBER 1944. Albert A. Kadler made another inspection of the camp, and was not unimpressed by what he found: ‘Once the shortcomings, materially speaking, have been overcome by the removal of the prisoners of war to the new barracks, this camp can no doubt be considered as very good.’ Kadler was told by Behr that the prisoners ‘should be able to move to their new quarters on 20 September, 1944’. Kadler also observed that ‘once completed [the new barracks] will give the best accommodation so far found in any prisoner of war camp in Germany’.
At Luft 7 on this day there were ‘890 British prisoners of war, RAF, RAAF, RCAF personnel (non-commissioned officers), of which seven are at Lamsdorf Lazarett, one at Kreuzburg hospital and one mental case at Loben hospital [Bruce Davis]’. Another prisoner, F/S Stan Silver RAAF (see page 102), was shortly to go to Stalag 344 (Lamsdorf) Lazarett for an operation on his left shoulder ‘since the nerve specialist, Major Henderson, is again at Lamsdorf’.
*
13 SEPTEMBER 1944. After lunch the air-raid sirens went, and hundreds of American aircraft were seen, closely followed by heavy flak. Sure enough, one of them was hit, and the prisoners watched in horror as the stricken kite, in flames, dived vertically towards the ground.
Trupp 31 (forty-three men) arrived.
*
Beaufighter-equipped 227 Squadron began disbanding on 15 July 1944. Four weeks later, on 12 August, the squadron would ‘disappear’, only to be re-born as 19 (SAAF) Squadron at Biferno, near Termoli, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. Though now officially a South African squadron it began its reincarnation much as before, that is to say with the RAF contingent leavened by South Africans.
Two days after the change, four of the squadron’s Beaufighters, led by S/L Joseph Blackburn (43196), flew as fighter escort to 39 Squadron RAF on an attack on shipping in Senj harbour, across the Adriatic Sea in what is today Croatia. During the attack the starboard engine of the squadron leader’s aircraft was hit, and he and his navigator, F/S Cecil Boffin, were forced to ditch about three kilometres east of Prvić Island. They were captured and interviewed in Sinj, and then in Budapest on 20 August. Ten days later Cecil was at Dulag Luft, Frankfurt, where he remained until 10 September. On 13 September he was walking through the gates of Stalag Luft VII in Trupp 31.132
*
BETWEEN 14 and 17 SEPTEMBER 1944. Trupp 32 (one man) arrived. F/S C.J. Collingwood was hot and tired after his long walk from Kreuzburg to Luft 7: ‘As there were no other arrivals I was given a thorough search… I was billetted in a small wooden hut with six others who had all been captured since the invasion in June.’
Bert Collingwood had been shot down on the Schweinfurt raid on 24/25 February 1944 in Lancaster LM310, 61 Squadron. Most of the crew were on their twenty-ninth trip – just one more and they would have been tour expired: F/L Norman Webb DFC (pilot); P/O Pat Walkins (navigator); F/S Jack Bailey (bomb aimer); Cuthbert Collingwood (wireless operator); Sgt Johnny Brown (flight engineer); F/S Frank Emmerson DFM (mid-upper gunner); and F/S Jimmy Chapman (rear gunner). Emmerson, who was on his second tour and who had flown with F/L ‘Jock’ Reid VC, was a replacement for their usual mid-upper, ‘Bluey’ Purcell RAAF, who had been wounded on the Leipzig raid a few weeks earlier.
They were half an hour from Schweinfurt when trouble started: ‘The only warning we had was the rattle of guns beneath us and we were in flames.’ Bert Collingwood ‘saw a flash, then something hit me in the face’. He managed to bale out, but remembered nothing until he found himself ‘standing over a table with a uniformed German close by’. Soon the rest of his crew appeared, all that is except for Johnny Brown, who was killed, and Jack Bailey.
When Bert’s face and head were heavily bandaged, he appreciated that he was in a bad way. After interrogation at Dulag Luft he was taken to the Hohe Mark hospital for treatment, but had to go to a hospital in Frankfurt for an operation on 17 March. After a further spell at the Hohe Mark he was sent to Obermassfeld, to be looked after by ‘British’ doctors, notably Major Cuffley and Captains Barley, Cooper and Leake (all Australian). With his eyes requiring attention, Bert was moved again, to Bad Soden hospital where Major Charters, a Scottish eye specialist, was in charge. Eventually, considered well enough to go to an ordinary POW camp, Bert left by train for Luft 7 with a solitary guard for company.
Somewhere along the route, having to change trains, Bert met a group of British soldiers. With Bert’s home town being Hull, he asked them if anyone was from Yorkshire. It transpired that one amongst them was also from Hull, and he asked Bert if he knew anyone there called Collingwood. When Bert replied that that was his name the soldier said: ‘Was Corporal Aidan Collingwood a relation of yours?’ Yes. Aidan was Bert’s brother, and had been killed in the fighting in North Africa on 14 or 15 June 1942. The soldier and Aidan had been pals together in the East Yorks Regiment.
Down the line the train stopped at Breslau, where the guard made it quite clear that this was his home town and that having a POW in his charge wasn’t going to stop him from nipping off to see his wife and child. Bert went with him, and slept on the sofa in the guard’s flat. In the morning the pair of them finished the journey to Kreuzburg, one no doubt happier than the other.
*
16 SEPTEMBER 1944. Percy Sekine won the Stalag Luft VII Table Tennis Championship.
An evening concert given by the camp band and by a mouth-organ band was deemed to be a great success. Frank Sturgess sang a few songs, Jock Campbell sang The Holy City and Trees and, amongst other acts, there was a comic monologue on The Second Front.
18 SEPTEMBER 1944. Some deer were seen wandering past the camp. ‘A nice piece of venison would go down very nicely right now’ was the thought of Tom Glenn.
An England v Scotland soccer match ended in a 2-2 draw. It was reckoned by some to have been the best match ever seen at the camp, others that England were lucky to get the draw.
Trupp 33 (forty-three men) arrived.
Rear gunner F/S Jim Bray thought that flak was the cause of their demise, but bomb aimer Sgt Lloyd Brooks RCAF reported after the war to his home-town newspaper, The Paris Star, that ‘suddenly a plane rose out of the darkness and crashed into us’. The damage was serious enough, however, for the skipper, F/O Ralph Arnold RCAF, to give the order to bale out, which all seven of the crew were able to do. Lost in Lancaster LM638, 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron, on the night of 12/13 July 1944 (Culmont/ Chalindrey), they crashed near Recey-sur-Ource, a dozen miles north west of Mortière in eastern France, having possibly collided with Lancaster LM221 (F/O W.A.M. Hallett RCAF), 9 Squadron.
Five of them – Arnold, Bray, Brooks, Sgt Bill Lamb RCAF (mid-upper gunner), and Sgt Leslie Wharton (navigator) – managed to evade capture. Sgt Ken Green (wireless operator) and Sgt Ron Royle (flight engineer) did not. Ron:
‘landed unhurt in a thick wood near Langres at about 0200 hours. After hiding my parachute etc., I lay up until first light and then made my way along a path through the wood until I reached a woodman’s hut. Here I lay at a safe distance until a man came out and walked along the path in my direction. I intercepted him and told him who I was. He was quite friendly and took me to his hut where he gave me some food and articles of civilian dressing.
‘A few hours later he fetched his brother who was a member of the local Resistance movement. Unfortunately he spoke no English, so he left after promising to return in the evening with an interpreter.
‘That afternoon I went out with my friend, who was a charcoal burner, to help him with his work and on our return a patrol of about ten German soldiers surrounded the hut and I was captured.’133
During his evasion Ralph Arnold was ‘told by members of the FFI that Sgt Green of my crew together with two of his helpers had been captured by the Germans’. It was on 17 August that Ken ‘entered the bag’. A month later he was at Luft 7 in Trupp 32 or 33. Ron’s progress, though, had been much swifter, having reached Bankau on 26 July in Trupp 15.
*
When crossing the Jylland peninsula on the return flight from Königsberg on the night of 28/29 August 1944 Lancaster PB436 was hit by flak and crashed at Gunderup Gaard farm, Denmark, just after 2 am. All seven crew managed to bale out before the aircraft crashed. Sgt E. Harris (flight engineer), Sgt F.E. Finch (bomb aimer), Sgt D.A. Bragg (wireless operator), Sgt J.C. Longhurst (mid-upper gunner) and Sgt W.G. Winkley (rear gunner) were soon captured and, after about a week at Dulag Luft, were sent to Luft 7, possibly arriving with Trupp 33 on 18 September.
The other two of the crew – F/Sgt B.F. Loneon RAAF (pilot) and Sgt H.W.D. Wilson (navigator) – were helped to Sweden on 12 September 1944 by members of the Speditørerne group, specialists in helping people to escape to Sweden.134 Within days the British Consul had arranged for them to fly back in a Mosquito to Britain.
*
19 SEPTEMBER 1944. Camp visited by German generals.
22 SEPTEMBER 1944. More Red Cross parcels arrived. Another tunnel was found in one of the school rooms. The Germans simply boarded it up, and the commandant said that if it happened again he would close the library and remove all musical instruments.
23 SEPTEMBER 1944. ‘We have a lot of air raids around here and the other day, while a formation of American Fortresses was going over, one of them got hit by flak and came straight down. I don’t think anyone got out because we didn’t see any parachutes. So I guess another good crew went west.’ (Laird MacLean RCAF.)
This B-17 has not been identified, but at this time they were being used on supply missions from England to Warsaw. For example, B-17G 43-38175 (1/Lt Francis E. Akins USAAF), 390th BG/568th BS, Eighth Air Force, was shot down by flak on 18 September 1944 over Poland flying on the seventh and last of the Frantic supply missions to Warsaw. Six of the nine crew were killed in action, two became POWs, while the ninth (the tail gunner) was murdered on the ground.
24 SEPTEMBER 1944. ‘Low-hanging clouds, rain and very cool. These conditions will be no help to the boys already down with colds and the flu... An alert at noon. The Forts were heading north-east. During the alert someone made a dash for the latrine. A guard shot at him.’ (John McConnell RCAF.)
25 SEPTEMBER 1944. A strong gale blew in the night, prisoners wondering whether or not their huts would take off! It was later reckoned that this was the coldest day so far.
Trupp 34 (around eighty men) arrived.
*
‘I can still remember quite clearly the perfect weather conditions, and the parachute descent was like being in the front stalls at the theatre!’ Thus observed former navigator Dr Deryck Lambert almost fifty years after he had had to bale out of his Lancaster. With F/O George Bradburn at the controls Lancaster ND702 ‘G-George’, 35 (PFF) Squadron, was airborne from RAF Graveley, Cambridgeshire, at around 4.30 pm on the afternoon of 11 September 1944 on a daylight raid to the oil refinery at Gelsenkirchen. It was a measure of the Allies’ aerial supremacy that RAF Bomber Command was now able to fly over Germany in broad daylight, just as the USAAF had been doing for two years, though latterly heavily escorted by fighters.
Nearing the target F/O Bradburn took ‘G-George’ up to 18,000 feet, but then:
‘… as we started our run on to the target, diving to 17,200 feet, the flak began to come up at us – huge brown puffs of smoke. We could hear the dull “woofs” and felt the concussion of the explosions – it was very near. The bomb aimer reported that he could see the [target] markers and we started our bombing run, being continually hit by flak. At 1826½ we bombed our target and started our photo run. The flak was too accurate for this so we turned for home, weaving all over the sky.’ (Deryck Lambert.)
The two gunners – twenty-year-old Sergeant Frederick John Feakins (mid-upper) and F/S Randolph ‘Dusty’ Rhodes (rear) – reported that the ‘kite [looked] like a pepper pot full of holes’ and that one of the engines had stopped. Then, at 6.31 pm, immediately behind ND702, another bomber blew up (probably Lancaster ND534, 156 [PFF] Squadron, with no survivors). The terrific explosion shook G-George. A fire broke out behind Deryck’s navigation table, and by the time that the skipper had ordered the crew to bale out the aircraft was in a dive. As it was too hot in the nose for Deryck to bale out from the front hatch he made his way with extreme difficulty to the rear door. Just as he reached it Dusty Rhodes jumped out, leaving Arthur Britchford (wireless operator) and Freddie Feakins ‘frozen’ by the door. Deryck signalled frantically for them to go but, when they didn’t, he ‘knelt on the step, put my hand on the rip-cord and let myself go’.
As he came down ‘the noise from the ground and the sky around was terrific. I saw the kite flying in a shallow spiral dive towards the target, but no more ’chutes appeared. I could see Dusty’s ’chute about fifty feet below.’ Despite the tremendous volume of flak shells bursting all around them and, nearer the ground, small-arms fire passing very close to them, Deryck and Dusty were the only two to survive. It will never be known why the mid-upper gunner and wireless operator never jumped, but they died with their skipper, bomb aimer and flight engineer.
ND702 and ND534 crashed close to each other. On 27 December 1944 the Air Ministry Casualty department wrote to George Bradburn’s wife regretting that they had no news of her husband: ‘Reports have been received from the International Red Cross Committee at Geneva regarding the occupants of two aircraft which were missing as a result of the attack on Gelsenkirchen.’ The Air Ministry letter added that, unfortunately, ‘the reports have mixed the crews and state that Flight Sergeant R. Rhodes and Flight Sergeant D.M. Lambert were captured on 11 September…’
Deryck Lambert landed in a wood, surrounded by flak batteries. His only problem, physically, were his hands, which were numb from the cold and which were agony when blood started to flow through them again. Managing to light a cigarette, he was contemplating his future when he heard shouts and whistles, and made off deeper into the wood, his progress slowing somewhat as it grew darker. After three or four hours he emerged into a clearing but, without realising it, had stumbled into a German sentry guarding one of the searchlight batteries. The guard took him to a hut where ‘in one corner of the floor lay a heap of flying clothing with Dusty’s name on it’.
Another guard was summoned, and he ‘put one up the spout’ in such a way as to make it quite clear to his prisoner, as they began to walk off into the distance, that he would stand no nonsense. Deryck for his part thought that his last hour on this earth had come. Happily, he was quite alive when he was taken to the HQ of 24th Battery, 4th Flak Division where, to his delight, he found Dusty, who had already been there for two hours.
In the morning, having spent a very cold and uncomfortable night on the hard floor, they were put in a lorry and taken to Essen. With them was a very badly-wounded French airman whose condition – he was wounded to his head and hands and had a badly-strained side – made their ‘blood boil… as he should have had medical attention long ago’. The Frenchman was probably Adjutant R.N. Oger, rear gunner of Halifax NA606, 347 (Tunisie) Free French Squadron, which had also been shot down on the Gelsenkirchen raid.
Oger’s survival was something of a ‘miracle’ (‘…se sauva par miracle’). Only able to extricate himself from his turret with difficulty he free-fell thousands of feet from his doomed Halifax while attempting to clip his parachute onto its harness. Barely feet from the ground he succeeded – ‘quelques secondes avant le contact fatal avec le sol’.135
After they had been searched and questioned, to no effect, the three were taken to an airfield near Düsseldorf where, at last, the Frenchman was removed to a hospital. On 13 September Deryck and Dusty ‘were taken by two Luftwaffe goons through Düsseldorf to the station. It was a wizard sight. Every building had been hit and the place was in a hell of a mess.’ Next day they were in Frankfurt, which had had a visit from Bomber Command only the night before. It was, as Deryck noted, ‘worse than Düsseldorf – the only bricks that were left standing were those in piles on the roadway! Here a goon officer said he would take no responsibility for the actions of the civilian population, one of whom gave me a hell of a kick up the backside.’ These were bad times for Allied aircrew in Germany, when many a prisoner was lynched by civilians and soldiers, deliberately provoked to take such action by their demented leaders.
At Dulag Luft, Deryck and Dusty were given the usual interrogation and the ‘if you don’t tell us everything, I’ll have you shot as a spy’ routine. They both went to Wetzlar transit camp on 18 September, before reaching Bankau on 25 September in Trupp 34. It was a shock to see that their quarters were ‘huts the size of hen huts, six men to a hut’.
René Oger, after a spell in hospital, arrived at Luft 7 with Trupp 39 on 12 October.
*
After all he had been through one man who was, perhaps, quite glad to be at Luft 7 was Czechoslovakian fighter pilot Karel Valášek, another to arrive with Trupp 34. His harrowing story began on the morning of 21 May 1944, when he took off in Spitfire MJ663, NN-B, on ‘Ramrod 905’ to northern France (basically, an authorised rampage against a number of enemy targets). The primary objective of Karel and his fellow 310 Squadron pilots was Caen airfield, after which they were free to attack German transportation – goods trains and lorries etc – in the Caumont-l’Eventé area. His day’s duty done, Karel was on his way home at zero feet when the engine of his Spitfire was hit by light flak near the town of Balleroy. With smoke billowing from the now useless Merlin engine, Karel was forced down in the Forêt de Cerisy.
A little bruised, but otherwise unhurt, he hastily departed in a southerly direction. After two days he stopped a lady cyclist in a country lane. When he enquired about the number of Germans in the area she asked why he wanted to know. Telling her that he was an RAF evader she cycled to a nearby village and, about three quarters of an hour later, came back with a man with a horse and cart. Hidden in the cart with straw and potato sacks, Karel was taken to a farm where he was met by three slightly nervous men: ‘They questioned me, fed me, and then locked me up in a room in the loft. The following evening, I was brought down, and introduced to the chief of the Resistance in that area, named Monsieur Pique.’136
Once his identity had been confirmed, Karel was welcomed and invited to stay, but when German troops were billetted in the area after the Normandy landings he decided to head for Gibraltar, as one of his flight commanders had managed to do in 1942.137 On 20 June M. Pique showed Karel and two evading Canadian soldiers the way to Caen but, after M. Pique had left them, a German officer and a number of soldiers suddenly blocked their path. The officer demanded to know who they were and what they were doing there. Karel replied that they worked there. Not satisfied with that, the officer had them put under guard in an empty house.
They had gone in through the back door, which was then watched, leaving the front door without a guard! Seizing their chance the three prisoners simply crept out through the front door. When the alarm was quickly raised Karel jumped into a thick hedge, and never saw the two Canadians again. He spent an uncomfortable night there, with Allied artillery bombarding nearby fields. In the morning, as he crawled away, he noticed that he was on the edge of a minefield, in which there were a number of dead animals. Hearing German voices he tried to hide once more in the undergrowth, but his feet were sticking out, and he was caught – on the front line in civilian clothes. An SS officer who had been brought to interrogate him handed him over to the Gestapo as a spy. The future for Karel did not look good. Put in the dungeon of a fort at Alençon, he spent ten days ‘in a black cell with unpleasant bouts of interrogation’ before being moved to Fresnes prison, Paris. He endured further interrogation at the Gestapo HQ in Avenue Foch, Paris before he and a number of other ‘civilian’ airmen were taken to a prison in Wiesbaden, Germany. Finally moved to a civilian prison in Mainz, by which time there were about forty of them in civilian clothes, Karel’s weight had fallen dramatically from fourteen stone to barely eight.
At the end of August the forty or so airmen were taken to Mainz railway station, handcuffed in two ‘chains’ of twenty. Despite instructions from a member of the Feldpolizei to go to another part of the station, the Gestapo man in charge of Karel’s chain mistakenly put them on a train which already had POWs aboard. The train eventually took Karel and his fellow prisoners to Frankfurt, and to Dulag Luft. As for the other chain of twenty, Karel was informed after the war by the Air Ministry that they were sent to a civilian concentration camp where they perished.
By the time that Karel finally reached Luft 7, on 25 September, he was officially an officer. He had been commissioned (176089) by the AOC of 84 Group, 2 TAF, a month before he was shot down, but this was not shown in the London Gazette for fear of compromising family and relatives in his homeland. It is likely that the Germans never got to know that he was an officer, and should, therefore, have been removed from Luft 7.
Joining him there in due course were two more of his countrymen, Antonín Ocelka and Gustav Prístupa, both shot down by flak whilst serving on 312 (Czechoslovakian) Squadron. Ocelka had been escorting Dakotas to Moerdijk Bridge at Eindhoven on 18 September, and Prístupa was strafing two trains on 11 August 1944 when he was hit. His drop-tank was still attached when he went in to attack, and as a result he was unable to recover from the spin induced by the flak blast. His Spitfire, ML240, turned over when it touched the ground and came to rest upside down and on fire in a field. Though injured, he managed to get out, but was taken prisoner. After treatment at a Lazarett he was released to Luft 7 in what was possibly Trupp 41 (22 October).
Antonín Ocelka had arrived at Luft 7 a fortnight earlier in Trupp 38 (7 October).
*
Lancaster ND613, 103 Squadron, was barely 2,000 feet above Normandy on 14 August 1944 when it blew up. The only survivor was F/S Dugald MacTaggart, the bomb aimer. Their targets, which they were told to bomb from a height of only 6,000 feet, were enemy Panzer units at Fontaine-le-Pin.
As ND613 arrived over the target a fierce bombardment was under way on the ground. Needing to achieve accuracy following an earlier bombing attack that had gone wrong, the skipper, F/L J.P.D. Bartleet told his crew that he was taking ND613 down to 2,100 feet, and bombs were dropped.
Dugald MacTaggart: ‘Within seconds [Sgt K.] Chiles, our mid-upper gunner, called out that the a/c had been hit and the starboard engines were on fire. It was immediately evident that the situation was hopeless, and the pilot gave the order to bale out.’ After removing the escape hatch with some difficulty Dugald jumped, but no sooner had he pulled the parachute’s rip-cord than the Lancaster exploded. None of the others stood a chance.
Unfortunately for Dugald he landed on the wrong side of the lines, and was quickly captured. At a nearby château, which was being used as a medical centre, Dugald was treated for minor burns to his left leg and right hand. He was still with his German captors when they slipped through the so-called ‘Falaise Gap’, eventually reaching a hospital at Bernay: ‘There I met up with five Allied troops including S/Ldr Tommy Brannagan, an RCAF pilot who had operated from an airfield at Bayeux.’138 Several days later the wounded, under constant attack from the air, found themselves at a hospital (St Katherine’s?) in Brussels: ‘This hospital,’ said Dugald, ‘had a ward in the form of wooden huts for Allied airmen.’
They were evacuated on the very day on which Brussels was liberated, 3 September. Despite the Belgian Resistance believing that they were Germans and giving the Allied wounded ‘some hair-raising experiences!’, MacTaggart and Brannagan were escorted via Venlo, Holland, to a POW camp at Düsseldorf, before going to Dulag Luft (then in the park in Frankfurt-am-Main) and to Wetzlar. Here they parted, Tommy Brannagan going to Stalag Luft III (Sagan), while Dugald MacTaggart arrived at Luft 7 with Trupp 34 on 25 September.
On 13 June 1944 the first Fieseler Fi103, the V1 ‘buzz bomb’ or ‘doodlebug’, exploded on English soil. 9,521 V1s were fired at England, until the last site in range was overrun in October 1944. A further 2,448 were then directed against the vital port of Antwerp and other Belgian targets, and it was only on 29 March 1945, when the last site had been captured, that the V1 attacks finally ended, having caused almost 23,000 casualties, mostly civilian.
On 28 August 1944 550 Squadron, at RAF North Killingholme, Lincolnshire, was ordered to put up ten aircraft for an attack on the flying-bomb site at Wemaers-Cappel, in northern France. For the crew of Lancaster PA991, ‘E-Easy’, it was to be their tenth attack on a V1 site, and their thirty-third whilst on the squadron, after which they would be tour expired.
P/O S.C. Beeson (pilot); Sgt K.J.R. ‘Red’ Hewlett (flight engineer); Squadron Leader Kevin MacAleavey (navigator, and ‘A’ Flight commander); F/S Derrick ‘Ted’ Neal (bomb aimer); Sgt J.K. Norgate (WOP/AG); Sgt H.S. Picton (mid-upper gunner); and Sgt J.A. Trayhorn (rear gunner), had joined 550 Squadron from No. 1 Lancaster Finishing School on 24 May 1944, and had flown their first operation on 5/6 June (Crisbecq coastal battery) in support of the Normandy landings. Kevin MacAleavey had been commissioned on 5 May 1942. Already a flying officer by December of that year, his promotion to squadron leader came in March 1944.139 Stanley Christmas Beeson was commissioned (175515) on 13 June 1944.
It was still daylight at about 7 pm on the evening of 28 August 1944 when the skipper of E-Easy made a ‘dummy’ run over the target at 9,000 feet. Coming in again the Lancaster received a direct and fatal hit from a flak shell on its port side. For the three crew in the rear of the aircraft – Norgate (aged twenty), Picton (twenty-two) and Trayhorn (age not known) – it was the end of their young lives.140
Bomb aimer Ted Neal baled out at around 6,000 feet. His first contact with something solid proved to be the window of a French farmhouse near the village of Esquelbecq, a dozen kilometres north of Wemaers-Cappel, near Dunkirk. Though he saw the farmhouse looming large before him and tried to break his fall on a small bush, he overshot and hit the window with his head and right arm. Suffering cuts from the glass to his head and wrist, he was otherwise OK when captured by German soldiers.
Two days after the loss of E-Easy, Esquelbecq was overrun by the British Army, too late for the four survivors, who had been captured. The two officers went to Stalag Luft I (Barth), while Red Hewlett and Ted Neal went to Luft 7 in Trupp 34.
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28/29 SEPTEMBER 1944. The POWs finally received their ‘dog tags’. Mail also arrived for the first time for the first seventy kriegies.
Trupp 35 (possibly two men) probably arrived around the end of the month. It is believed, whoever they were, that they were given POW numbers 828 and 829. The latter, though, may have been given to F/S J.S. Tames RCAF, who lost some of his toes after falling asleep in snow after he had baled out on 19/20 February 1944.
30 SEPTEMBER 1944. Weather getting noticeably colder. Another concert was held, and again it was well received.