The weather over England and northwestern Europe on April 28 had been appalling, with rain and storm lashing airfields and fog reducing visibility to next to nothing, grounding Allied aircraft and putting paid to Eisenhower’s plan to commence food drops over Holland at once. But overnight the weather cleared, and early on the morning of Sunday, April 29, a day later than planned, two Lancaster heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force’s “special duties” 101 Squadron sat on the tarmac at the Ludford Manga bomber airfield, northeast of the city of Lincoln in the East Midlands, with their engines roaring, ready to start the mission.
Andrew Geddes’s plan for the Dutch air drops called for two guinea pigs to test the credibility of the stated intention of Seyss-Inquart not to interfere with relief efforts for the civilian population of western Holland. These bombers were those guinea pigs. If the Germans had not been genuine, or if Seyss-Inquart was unable to prevent German troops in Holland from firing on the two low-flying aircraft, this would be a suicide mission for the crews involved.
One of those crews, in the lead aircraft, consisted of five Canadians and two Britons. Their commander was a twenty-one-year-old combat veteran of two years, Royal Canadian Air Force Captain Robert “Bob” Upcott from Windsor, Ontario. His Lancaster was nicknamed Bad Penny—stemming from the old saying “A bad penny always returns”—with the crew hoping and praying that their aircraft would always bring them safely back to base. For the airmen of 101 Squadron, returning safely from their missions was particularly difficult, as this top-secret special squadron had the highest aircraft loss rate of any bomber squadron in Britain’s air force.
With the USAAF flying daytime bombing raids over Nazi targets in Europe, RAF Bomber Command flew most of its raids at night. Aircraft of 101 Squadron flew with the night bomber stream carrying one more crewman than the ordinary bomber. Sitting in a curtained-off section near the rear of each aircraft was a German-speaking radio operator. He was in charge of the top-secret “Airborne Cigar” radio equipment aboard, and it was his job to locate the wavelength of the Luftwaffe’s ground control radio and either jam it or lock onto it and give German night fighter crews false instructions for intercepting the bombers. The problem with Airborne Cigar was that its equipment gave out powerful radio waves on which the radio direction–finding equipment aboard German night fighters could home in. As a result, 101 Squadron aircraft were often the first to be shot down.
For this mission over Holland, the Airborne Cigar equipment had been stripped from the two chosen aircraft so that, should they be shot down, the state-of-the-art equipment would not fall into enemy hands. Today, each Lancaster carried the normal bombing raid crew of seven. Its payload was far from normal—food for the Dutch, bagged in readiness for being spewed from the bomb bay and onto the drop zone. Behind Bad Penny on the tarmac sat a Lancaster with a mixed Australian-British crew commanded by Peter Collett from Sydney, Australia. Like Upcott, Collett was just twenty-one, yet a veteran of several years of the air war over Europe. Like Bob Upcott’s crew members, Collett and his crew were nervous about the mission but impatient to get on with it.
Both aircrews’ patience had been tested to the limit the previous day by the atrocious weather. Three times the crews of the two Lancasters had walked out to their aircraft when there was a break in the weather and taken their places for takeoff, only to be ordered each time to stand down as the weather closed in again. The two crews had risen the next day after a sleepless night to a better forecast, and, as the sun rose, a break in the clouds began to appear. The mission was on. It was only when the two crews had received their flight briefing that they knew where they were going and why. At the briefing they were told that ground crews had loaded their ships with large bags of food by climbing in through a small opening in the bomb doors and stacking the bags on the top of the doors.
Sitting at the controls of Bad Penny, waiting calmly for the signal to take off, Bob Upcott was habitually chewing gum. He knew that his crew was tense, worried about the mission ahead. At least they knew what to expect with a bombing mission. The flight ahead was a flight into the unknown. And nothing is more scary than the unknown. Still, there had been the usual banter as they prepared for the mission, led by the crew’s joker, bulky mid-upper gunner Orval “Ozzie” Blower from Lakeville, Ontario. Little did Upcott know that Blower had been putting on a brave face. Blower was convinced he was going to die that day.1
A green Very light arced into the sky from the control tower. The flare from the flare gun, invented by American naval officer Edward Very, was literally the green light for the mission to finally proceed. The four Merlin engines of each Lancaster raced, and first Bad Penny and then the second Lancaster lumbered down the runway and slowly clawed their way into the air. Once the bombers were airborne, they found themselves in thick clouds and lost sight of each other. Bad Penny was still over England when an 8th Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress suddenly appeared out of the murk on the Lancaster’s starboard side, on a collision course with it. Bob Upcott instantly took evasive action. He had two choices—dive or climb. If the B-17 pilot made the same choice as he did, both were dead men. Upcott put the Lancaster into a dive. The B-17 climbed. Bad Penny’s radio operator, Stan Jones, calculated that the two bombers missed each other by inches. As Upcott leveled out, there was not a sound from his crew members. They were too shaken to speak.
Upcott crossed the North Sea flying only on instruments, following the heading provided by navigator Bill Walton, a heading that kept them in the “safe” corridor specified by Andrew Geddes and the Germans at the Achterveld meeting two days earlier. The clouds parted, revealing the Dutch coast ahead, and in the clear sky Peter Collett’s Lancaster eased in beside Bad Penny, flying off its port wing and a little behind. Upcott was keen to get in under German radar so as to not be seen coming, and together the two airplanes dropped to less than fifty feet above the choppy waves. They flew so low that at one point Collett’s right wing dipped and the propeller on his starboard outer engine clipped the waves. The engine began to shudder. Collett corrected and flew on. He could have aborted the mission at this point and flown back to base with the excuse of a damaged prop, but there was no way he was pulling out. “He continued on with the engine running a little bit rough,” Upcott would later say of his Australian colleague, also noting that a prop damaged in this way could shake an engine from its mounting. And this was enough to bring an aircraft down.2
Gaining a little height with land looming ahead, the pair crossed the heavily fortified coast of Holland. Upcott could see not only the barrels of the guns of the German coastal flak posts pointing up at them, he could see the faces of their crews. More than once Upcott found himself literally looking down the barrels of 88 mm guns that could have knocked Bad Penny and its companion from the sky. Relieved by the fact that the German guns had remained inactive, Upcott and Collett turned north and flew across the flat Netherlands landscape.
Their target, the Duindigt Racetrack, was a little over six miles north of The Hague at the quaint village of Wassenaar, which grew to become one of the most affluent outer suburbs of the Dutch capital. As recently as the previous month, Wassenaar had been receiving visits from Allied bomber aircraft with more lethal payloads than those being carried by the two Lancasters today—until then, the village had been a German V-2 rocket launch site. To reach his target, Upcott was flying on instructions coming from navigator Walton, who, at the flight crews’ briefing, had been given specific man-made landmarks to navigate by—instructions now coming over the intercom.
That morning, in the weak but welcome spring sunshine that was bathing western Holland, fifteen-year-old Dutch boy Peter Buttenaar was walking across a field. Peter was on his way to attempt to steal a little food from a nearby German garrison, something he had succeeded in doing previously. Hearing approaching aircraft engines, he turned to see two Lancaster bombers hurtling toward him, seemingly just feet above the ground.3
Running for a ditch, the youth dove in. From the ditch, he looked up just in time to see the two bombers pass overhead and Canadian Bill Gray, bombardier, in the nose of lead aircraft Bad Penny wave to him. Years later, Peter Buttenaar would emigrate to Canada, where he would one day meet up with members of the crew of Bad Penny and tell them of his experience on that day. He told him that, terrified and convinced that the two bombers were about to crash, killing all on board, he ran all the way home to tell his parents and two elder sisters.4
Lead pilot Upcott was looking for a major landmark that was reported to be right beside his racetrack target—a five-story Dutch hospital with a large red cross painted on its roof to identify it to Allied bombers and ward off air attacks. Spotting the hospital up ahead, Bob Upcott eased Bad Penny down to just fifty feet. Beside him, Collett did the same with his bomber. The deserted expanse of the racetrack loomed up on the Canadian more quickly than he’d expected, and he was almost too late in telling Gray to let their payload go, for the bomb bay doors opened slowly. From the bowels of Bad Penny, and moments later from the Australian’s airplane, spewed burlap bags filled with flour, margarine, tea and chocolate.
The loads missed the clear space of the track where they were supposed to land and rained down instead on the bleachers beside the finish line, crashing into the wooden tiers of seating, bouncing and sometimes bursting open. But they were down, that was the main thing. As Upcott and Collett applied full power and pulled up the noses of their Lancasters to gain height, they banked left, turning for the coast. At this moment Upcott spotted eight Dutch nurses on the flat roof of the hospital below. From somewhere, the nurses had acquired a large British Union Jack flag, and they flew it, waving excitedly at the bombers climbing away toward the sea. Meanwhile, Upcott’s bombardier Bill Gray caught sight of a German tank located beside the hospital. The tank’s turret was turning, following the bombers, with its cannon trained on one of them.5 But it did not fire. Now, as the two Lancasters hastily departed the scene, astonished civilians began to appear at the racetrack and set about collecting the manna from heaven.
Upcott ensured that he was flying the safe corridor out of Holland specified by the Germans and, as they crossed the nearby coastline and were over the North Sea and able to climb to several thousand feet, he followed orders received during their briefing that morning and instructed radio operator Jones to break radio silence and send a message back to base. The message was that the mission had been completed successfully, without incident.6
As the two bombers returned to base, completing a flight of a little over two hours, Bomber Command reported to SHAEF that the mission had been a complete success, and SHAEF issued a statement to be released by the BBC when it broadcast the usual eleven-minute Dutch segment that lunch hour, and also by US Armed Forces Radio. In occupied Holland, tens of thousands of Dutch civilians listening on covert radios heard the statement, which announced that, as a result of an agreement between Allied authorities and the German occupying forces in the Netherlands, hundreds of Allied aircraft would that afternoon drop food to the starving Dutch people at six specified locations in western Holland. The broadcast also urged the Dutch people to organize the orderly collection and distribution of the food.
Listening via headphones to the BBC announcement on a secret crystal set radio in the basement of his family’s house in Rotterdam’s Dunantstraat was teenager Henry Ridder. As his younger brother Willem, or “Wim” as he was known in the family, joined him and asked what the latest news was, Henry took the headphones from his ears and excitedly told Wim that General Eisenhower’s headquarters was sending hundreds of airplanes to drop food to the Dutch, at Rotterdam and other places, that very afternoon. The airplanes, he said, must already be on their way! The pair ran upstairs to the kitchen, where the rest of the family was huddled around a tiny stove in their winter coats, trying to get warm.
When Henry blurted the news, no one would believe him. The boys’ mother was especially disbelieving. She could not imagine how it could be done and was convinced that food dropped from airplanes would fall apart. She shook her head. “They won’t do that.”7
But Henry could not be discouraged or dissuaded. He reported that the BBC had said the airplanes carrying out the food drops would be flying at rooftop height. They would be easy to see, he declared. Between them, the boys were able to convince all the family to go out onto their balcony, which had a wide view of the surroundings. And there they waited, with ears pricked for the sound of aircraft engines and eyes peeled for signs of the air armada promised by the BBC.
The German authorities in Holland had also heard the radio announcements from London. In response, the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht rushed antiaircraft guns and troops to four of the six locations in case the drops were a cover for landings by paratroops, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) sent men to all the locations with instructions to open food-drop packages at random to make sure they did not contain weapons for Dutch Resistance fighters.
At 2:30 that afternoon, 240 Lancasters laden with food took off from bases throughout southeast England and flew to the six Dutch targets, including Rotterdam, preceded by sixteen twin-engine Mosquito fighter-bombers acting as pathfinders. In Rotterdam, the Ridders had been waiting for some time by mid-afternoon; just as several members of the family were giving up, there was a faint humming in the distance that grew into a mighty throb. It was aircraft, but they were flying very low, as Henry had predicted. And then, to their utter astonishment, a Lancaster bomber flew low past their balcony, seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. As it passed, the bomber waggled its wings, seeming to wave at the Ridder family.
A picture of that airplane would lodge in the memory of young Wim Ridder for the rest of his days. Its markings, with the letters XY on one side of the RAF roundel, and S on the other side of it, would be permanently imprinted in his mind. Wim burst into tears of joy. And then the sky in front of the family was filled with low-flying bombers, all turning toward the avenue called the Pieter de Hoochweg, which contained buildings housing German headquarters in the port city.
“Come on!” yelled Henry, heading for the stairs, with Wim close on his heels.
The two boys led the family in a rush downstairs and into the street to follow the course of the stream of bombers. As the family ran to the Pieter de Hoochweg, many more Rotterdam residents came out into the streets to join the crowds. Wim Ridder looked at the buildings lining the elegant avenue and saw German clerks and secretaries leaning out windows and actually waving to the aircraft as they passed overhead. Did they think they were German airplanes, or were they welcoming the Allied bombers? In contrast, Wim saw that, outside a university building on Pieter de Hoochweg (today part of the Hogeschool University of Applied Sciences), the two German sentries on duty at the gate dashed to don their gasmasks, thinking it must be an air raid.
As Wim returned his eyes to the sky, the wave of bombers flew on toward the Maas River and the Waalhaven Airport on the south side of the river. And as he watched, bomb bay doors opened and food packages fell like confetti toward the airport. Absolutely elated, and convinced that the war was at an end, the Ridder family returned to their home. Only then did Wim Ridder notice that in his excitement he had run out into the street wearing just socks on his feet.8
The aircraft that Wim Ridder had seen right outside his family’s balcony, the Lancaster with the markings XY-S, was a bomber from the RAF’s 186 Squadron code-named S for Sugar. It was piloted by Alexander “Alex” Howell, another twenty-one-year-old Aussie, from Geelong in the Australian state of Victoria. Four days earlier, Howell and his 186 Squadron crew had flown their last bombing mission, dropping a blockbuster bomb on Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest retreat at Berchtesgaden high in the mountains of Bavaria.
That night raid by a number of British, Canadian and Australian bomber squadrons followed on the heels of a daylight raid by the US 8th Air Force on the same target. It wasn’t that the mission’s planners expected Hitler to be in Berchtesgaden. The bombers had been sent to pulverize the fuehrer’s favorite retreat as a symbolic gesture. The aircrews participating in these two raids had no idea that Hermann Goering, number two in the Nazi hierarchy and chief of the Luftwaffe, had been sheltering in a tunnel through the mountains below them as their bombs rained down, with his entire Luftwaffe High Command staff—they had evacuated to Berchtesgaden from Potsdam to escape Allied bombing. Goering had become a prisoner of the SS, who arrested him on the orders of Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann. Goering’s crime had been the suggestion that, with Hitler trapped in Berlin, the Reichsmarshall might initiate peace negotiations with the Allied powers.9
Now Alex Howell and his 186 Squadron colleagues were in unfamiliar territory in more ways than one. For the past three years, they had been flying night raids. All of a sudden, not only was their bomb bay full of nothing more lethal than cigarettes and chocolate, they were expected to fly in daylight, and at just 400 feet. And with the fear that the Germans might fire at them. Grimly, Howell had taken his Lancaster down to cross the Dutch coast at the prescribed height, leaving behind the rough North Sea. First passing over coastal batteries with silent guns pointing their way, he’d followed the rest of the squadron inland. Guided by the voice of his navigator Denis Down in his ears, Howell had sent their Lancaster flitting over the Dutch countryside toward Rotterdam and their assigned drop zone at Waalhaven Airport.
Flying low over the city center, the bombers of 186 Squadron banked to commence their run to the airport on the south side of the Maas River. It was at this point that the Ridder family had seen them pass and had run into the street to follow their progress. Ahead of the bombers, Alex Howell could see to one side a hospital with a huge red cross painted on its roof. As with the hospital at Wassenaar, the red cross was designed to identify it in the hope of preventing Allied air attacks. There were Dutch nurses on the hospital roof, waving like crazy people at the bombers, using towels and anything else they could lay their hands on.
Then, in the open, there appeared another massive cross, white this time, laid by Luftwaffe personnel using bed sheets. Earlier, four fast Mosquito fighter-bombers had been supposed to drop flares to identify the drop zone, but by the time Howell’s bomber arrived, the white cross was the sole marker of the bombers’ target. Howell and his crew could see hundreds of civilians surrounding the drop zone—mainly old men and women and children. Just like the nurses at the hospital, these people had heard or been told about the same broadcast that young Henry Ridder had listened to, a broadcast that had named the drop locations. And this had brought the people thronging to the site to collect the goodies, rushing like ants to spilled honey.
As the bombers ahead of S for Sugar opened their bomb bays and rained down bags of food, many of those people excitedly ran out to grab them, ignoring the aircraft that still had to let go their consignments. Alex Howell’s bomb bay doors opened, and out spewed his load, right on target. Howell’s radio operator Peter Weston felt sure that they must have hit some of the people down there with the contents of their drop. In fact, a small number of people would be injured during the food drops in just this manner, hit by falling containers. S for Sugar turned for home, and, two hours and forty minutes after takeoff, Alex Howell landed his ship back at base in England, where he and his crew celebrated the completion of the most unusual mission they had ever flown.
Following the corridors set down by the Germans, all the aircraft on the mass run of April 29 made their food drops on the six specified targets—with German flak guns pointing at them and SD secret policemen checking their loads once they hit terra firma. The Lancasters dropped 526 tons of food to the Dutch on this first anxious day of the mission, delivering more than the Luftwaffe had managed to send in a day to Stalingrad at the height of its 1942–43 airlift. And the USAAF had yet to join the operation.
At SHAEF, when news of this success was received, there were smiles all around. Ike and Beetle knew that if the Germans would hold to the cease-fire, the airlift stood a good chance of saving the Dutch. On the ground, under the eyes of German troops and black-uniformed Dutch police, tens of thousands of civilians converged on the drop zones. Yet, to the amazement of many who expected that, after the deprivations suffered during the Hunger Winter, all public discipline would break down following these food drops, with people greedily taking away all they could carry and fighting among themselves, the Dutch acted with enormous restraint and civility, gathering and piling up the supplies for organized distribution. At the same time, the Germans made no attempt to keep any of the food for themselves.
At Schiphol Airport alone, 4,000 Dutch men, women and children formed into collection teams that carefully collected, stacked and catalogued the food before it was distributed far and wide by Dutch civil officials. The only means of mass transport that remained to the Dutch took the form of the barges that plied the many canals of western Holland, and these were loaded up. In the end, the people of the major cities of Holland were delivered their share of the April 29 bounty by volunteers on bicycles and on foot.
What most Dutch to this day do not know is that Prince Bernhard was behind this organized collection and distribution of the food dropped by the Allied bombers. The creator of the detailed air-drop plan, Air Commodore Andrew Geddes, was aware of this. From the outset he had been concerned that it was not enough just to drop the food over Holland. For the operation to be a success, that food had to be gotten to those who needed it, especially the young and the elderly who were confined to their beds or their homes. Prince Bernhard, Geddes was to say, made that possible.10
Geddes also knew from SHAEF intelligence that there were a number of competing Dutch Resistance groups on the ground, with no central control of Resistance activities. Fortunately for the operation, and for the Dutch, nearly all the Resistance groups respected and bowed to the will of Queen Wilhelmina, who had arrived back in Holland from England on April 26. She had set foot on home soil again with the same single suitcase with which she had departed in 1940. Flying back with her daughter Princess Juliana and three staff members, the queen had chosen a deserted castle, Anneville, near Breda, as her temporary home until she could return to The Hague and the sovereign’s palace following the liberation of the Dutch capital.
The majority of Resistance leaders also respected the queen’s choice of Prince Bernhard as head of the Dutch military. Geddes had contacted Prince Bernhard, who by this time had his headquarters at Spelderholt, near Apeldoorn in the liberated sector of southeastern Holland. Geddes was full of praise for the enthusiasm and sense of urgency that Bernhard had brought to the table when advocating Allied food deliveries to the Dutch months before, when everyone else had been skeptical, even suspicious. Geddes filled the prince in on the air-drop plan and sought his help in organizing the efficient distribution of food once it hit the ground. Bernhard had told Geddes to leave the problem for him to sort out in occupied Holland, using his many contacts there. Which he did.
“Great credit is due His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,” said Geddes forty years later, “who was the ‘linch-pin’ of the very complex organization involved in getting the foodstuffs from the airfields to the actual distribution points in occupied territory.”11
To show how efficient the system organized by the prince proved to be, on May 1, two days after the first food drops of April 29, the family of Peter Buttenaar, the boy spooked in the field by pilots Upcott and Collett on the morning of the trial flight, would receive its ration of food after the distribution of the first drop at Wassenaar. In the same orderly way, food reached families in cities and towns throughout western Holland in the first days of May.
It was only after the pair of trial-run bombers piloted by Upcott and Collett had landed back at Ludford Manga in Lincolnshire that the two aircrews came to comprehend what an important and risky role they had played in launching one of the greatest airlift operations of the war. Back on the ground, Collett, accompanied by a curious Upcott, went to check the propeller on the Australian’s starboard outer engine, the one that had clipped the water. Standing beneath the engine, they could see that the ends of the prop blades had been bent back by their brief contact with the waves on the low-flying inbound run across the North Sea. “All three blade tips were bent backward so perfectly they retained a semblance of balance,” Upcott was to observe.12 Without that balance, Collett’s Lancaster may have ended up in the sea.
A day later, Bob Upcott received an interesting piece of information about his own aircraft from his ground crew. As they’d been giving Bad Penny the usual once-over following its mercy mission, the maintenance men had found a new bullet hole in the fuselage, on the right side of the aircraft, near the tail. Bad Penny’s ground crew worked out that the hole had been created by a 9 mm bullet, the kind fired by German pistols.13 Apparently, a German officer had fired his pistol at the bomber as it flew low overhead on April 29. Upcott had to wonder how many other Germans would likewise lose their cool, disobey orders, and fire at the waves of Allied aircraft that were due to take part in the operation in the coming days. For, as Upcott was aware, the Germans had yet to sign a single document agreeing to authorize the flights and to hold their fire.
That same Sunday, young Canadian captain Farley Mowat was in Amsterdam together with his adventurous superior, Major Ken Cottam. Cottam seemed unconcerned that the truce he had supposedly agreed to with General Blaskowitz had not yet come into effect; Cottam was thinking about his next adventures. While in Amsterdam over the previous two days, Cottam and Mowat had witnessed skirmishes between increasingly bold Dutch Resistance members and Dutch Nazis—briefly joining one such skirmish in the Dam Square. They had heard of collaborators being executed by the Resistance and had seen Dutch women being paraded through the streets with heads shaved and daubed with paint, accused of sharing the beds of German soldiers of the occupying forces.14
But Amsterdam was still a city under German military occupation, and Mowat would note that there were a surprising number of civilians in the streets this Sunday, all in a celebratory mood. He didn’t have a chance to find out why. In fact, the food drops from the air that day had convinced many Amsterdam residents that the end of the war was as imminent as the next morning and created a false sense of security among many in the population. But the German military, the SS, the SD and the local Nazis still controlled the city, and high hopes for liberation overnight would be dashed.
The truce between Allied troops and German troops in Holland that Ken Cottam would take credit for came into effect this Sunday. The negotiations at Achterveld had finally cemented this truce in place, with Arthur Seyss-Inquart instructing General Blaskowitz to observe it to permit the food-relief operations to go forward. The irrepressible Major Ken Cottam, meanwhile, was spoiling for a new exploit—he wanted to be the first Allied officer to enter Rotterdam, Holland’s premier port city. That afternoon, he, Mowat and Mowat’s orderly, Doc MacDonald, were on the move again, trying to depart from Amsterdam to drive to Rotterdam.15
Inside the city of Amsterdam, the sight of these three Allied soldiers in a jeep brought excited crowds of civilians thronging into the trio’s path. Some thought that the sight of a Canadian army jeep in their city meant that liberation day had come. But one jeepload of Canadians did not a liberation make. Puzzled Dutch made way for the lone jeep. Once out of the city and driving on the highway beside Schiphol Airport, the location for Amsterdam’s now daily food drops, Cottam had to push through formations of disciplined and heavily armed German troops who were stationed there to watch the drops—their superiors continued to fear that the Allies would make a paratroop landing under cover of the food drops. As wary German troops blocked the jeep’s way, Cottam again gave a confident tongue-lashing in German to anyone who dared defy him. The way opened up, and Cottam was able to drive them out into the countryside and head south for Rotterdam.
That night of April 29–30, en route to Rotterdam, Cottam, Mowat and MacDonald would stay in a former German officers’ club, drink it dry and trash it—with Cottam driving their jeep in through a front window. Fortified by drink, MacDonald, a slight, normally quiet fellow, surprised Mowat by spraying bullets from his Thompson submachine gun all over the building’s ornate plaster ceiling.
Mowat was by this time a grudging participant in Cottam’s games; he had grown weary of the manic major’s adventures and of the war. Nonetheless, he had no choice but to obey orders and go wherever Cottam dictated. Mowat was to confess that he had in fact become frightened of Cottam, who was increasingly looking less like a genius and more like a madman. Mowat was now praying for the war to end as soon as possible so that he would survive Cottam’s antics. He only hoped that their sojourn behind German lines had not screwed up any genuinely important official initiatives.16 As it happened, one of those initiatives was still to play itself out at Achterveld.