A Special Duty

by Jennifer Elkin

  Finally he was granted home leave, and he returned to the Unicorn Hotel Ludlow for a reunion with Rita. It was just ten months since he had flown off to join his Squadron in North Africa, and yet it was a lifetime. Although back in body, his mind churned with thoughts of his lost crew members and the partisans who he had left in such a perilous situation. To the parents of Walter Davis he wrote:

  “I was the pilot and captain of the aircraft from which your son Walter was reported missing. I am unable to give you any information regarding him except that he left the aircraft and reached the ground safely. If you have received any information about him, would you please let me know? I was fortunate enough to escape. Unfortunately we were widely separated and I was unable to get in touch with Walter. Immediately upon my escape I asked permission to be dropped in his vicinity to assist him, but this was refused.”

  He travelled north to the family home in Carlisle, 5 Belah Road, Stanwix, where his entire family had gathered to welcome him home, posing for a photograph in the garden. After this brief reunion he was ordered back to London for a meeting with Poland’s Prime Minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczk, at the Polish Embassy in London. His days were filled with administrative tasks and letter writing, but every night in dreams he struggled to keep his aircraft in flight, fought off enemies, and waded through swamps to find his crew. He thrashed about in the grip of nightmares, and in the morning peace of mind was fleeting. He wanted to go back into Poland and find Walter Davis, the first member of his crew and great friend, but instead he was told to report to Morecambe on the 2nd September for re-kitting, and to await posting. The seaside town of Morecambe, with its narrow streets of boarding houses, theatres, and famous sunset over the bay, would one day be significant to Tom, but in October 1944, it was just a holding camp, and a step in his progression back to operational flying. When his posting came through however, it was not to an operational squadron, but to 32 Maintenance Unit, RAF St. Athan where, because of his flying experience, he was given the job of Unit Test Pilot.

  The Storey family at 5 Belah Road, Stanwix, Carlisle

  Walter, still in Poland, had listened to the sounds of the Russian Army getting closer during the early summer of 1944, and thought his troubles would soon be at an end. In fact they got much worse and, as the front came closer, he found himself in no-man’s land, and took to sheltering in an underground potato store as the shells flew overhead. He watched German Stukas dive-bombing a nearby village, and then at the end of July began to see the first Russian soldiers. An officer took over his room in the Dec’s house, and although he was given a document by the AK Home Army, certifying his nationality, the Russians didn’t recognise the AK as a legal organisation, making his papers worthless. One by one, AK officers in the area were rounded up and shot, including the farmer who had carried him to Smolarzyna in a cart. The structure that had saved and nurtured him was crumbling into pieces, and Walter, who had hoped for help from the Russians, found himself hiding from them in fear for his life. In September, Polish militia, who had collaborated with the Russians, came to arrest the Dec’s son, and also asked for Walter Davis. At this point, Private Jimmy Bloom arrived back on the scene with two bicycles, declaring that it was too dangerous to stay in the village, and the two men cycled to the town of Lancut, where, once again, they were taken in and sheltered for several weeks by two Polish families in the town. Every knock on the door meant scuttling to a hiding place, but this time they were hiding from the Russians.

  In the New Year of 1945, Walter and Jimmy moved to a room in the house of Mr Szust, in Lancut, and Walter was able to attend church from time-to-time and on one occasion, even to play the church organ. He remembered being very moved by a requiem mass for the victims of the Warsaw massacre, at which the entire congregation wept loudly. They moved to the larger town of Rzeszow when they heard that American servicemen were awaiting evacuation from there, but they arrived too late for the aircraft, which had just taken off. Rzeszow was full of prisoners of war who had recently been freed from German camps by the Russians, and it was here that they met up with two members of Walter’s Squadron, Alan Jolly and Robert Peterson, survivors of the McCall crew, who had been shot down in August flying supplies to the Home Army near Krakow. Three of their crew had been killed and the other four had baled out and were on the run. Davis, Jolly and Peterson stayed together from this point on, and in order to avoid divulging the nature of their missions, they made up the story that they had been bombing in Upper Silesia, and stuck to it whenever questioned. Bloom was in the greatest danger because of his time fighting with the AK, and the Russians were actively looking for him under his Polish identity, Antoni Sawicki. He was taken in for questioning, and only released when Walter and a group of ex POWs spoke up for him and said he was one of them. At this point, Bloom, who had no wish to fall into Russian hands again, took off, returning to the Polish partisans in Lancut, with the parting words to his friends: “We will all end up in Siberia”.xv

  The Russians knew the names of Allied servicemen they were likely to find because staff at the British Mission in Moscow had compiled a list of army and RAF personnel known to be in Poland, either as evaders or prisoners of war, and a copy of this was given to General Slavin so that his troops could identify and give news of them to the British Mission. On that list were the names of missing members of the McCall and Storey crews, and Private Bloom of the East Kent Regiment,xvi but with no Allied organisation to assist them, they were issued with Russian uniforms and moved on in a dislocated muddle, by cattle truck or on foot, with little food and no means of cooking any they had. Their progress took them firstly to Jaslo, then on to Nowy Sacz and Przemysl, from where Walter remembered walking across the frozen River San to Lvov. From Lvov, they caught a train to Kiev and then to Odessa, where finally they embarked on the old cruise liner, the Duchess of Bedford. Walter had seen terrible suffering on his journey; he had been cold and desperately hungry, but finally he was back in British hands, and exchanged his Russian uniform for RAF khaki. It was the 14th March 1945, and he and his companions, Alan Jolly and Robert Peterson, were on their way home.

  By this time, the Russians had given British Mission personnel permission to visit Lublin to try and locate Allied evaders and POWs, but this came too late to help Walter and his fellow travellers, who had already made the journey to Odessa in abject conditions. As it transpired the British Mission was also unable to assist remaining Allied personnel because of resolute stonewalling by the Russians. Burrows felt that permission to visit Lublin was only granted to give the impression that they were honouring agreements. They were effectively denied access to the ex-POWs who were being held at collecting points by the Russians. Relations had not improved, and Burrows wrote cynically of this episode:

  “Meantime it looks as if the Russians have been despatching to Odessa all the ex-POWs they can find, hoping to get Poland cleared before their non-observance of the agreement leads to a showdown in Moscow.”xvii

  The men sailed to Malta in the Duchess of Bedford, and then transferred to the troop ship RMS Orion in Valetta Harbour. This took them to Gibraltar, where they joined a convoy escorted by destroyers for the final leg of the voyage through dangerous U-boat patrolled waters. When the commodore aboard the Orion heard that three airmen on board had been with the Polish underground, he sent for them and, after listening to their story, broke the strict ‘no alcohol’ regulation, and gave them a beer.

  Eddie Elkington-Smith arrived back on home soil two months later in a Lancaster Bomber of 106 Squadron, having become separated from Hap during their long march to freedom. With the approach of the Russians in July 1944, Stalag Luft VI was evacuated, and Eddie and Hap were taken on foot and by cattle train to Thorn, in Poland, and then on to Stammlager 357 at Fallingbostel, in West Germany. At this camp, seventeen thousand prisoners of war, most of them British, were crammed into huts designed to hold a third of that number, and food shortages were acute. The Germans, despite being in retreat, w
ere determined to prevent the liberation of their prisoners, and nine months later this camp too was evacuated, and 12,000 British POWs, including the camp leader ‘Dixie Deans’, were marched away to the north east in columns of 2,000. Eddie and Hap became separated during the long trek, with Hap’s group arriving at the village of Gresse, east of the Elbe, after ten days of forced marching. Here, Hap witnessed the death of a young RAF sergeant, Kenneth Mortimer, who was shot and killed, along with about thirty other prisoners, when their lines were mistaken for a German troop column and strafed by British Typhoons. There was no camp at the end of this march, and they were finally liberated by British troops near Lubeck on the 2nd May, 1945. Eddie made his own way to an aerodrome in Rheine, from where he was flown home.xviii

  Within days of the return of Eddie and Hap, Tom and Rita’s first child, daughter Patricia, was born, and the following month he was awarded a ‘Mention in Despatches’ for his actions following the loss of his aircraft. The lost crew were all back on home soil, but the Squadron had suffered terrible losses attempting to take supplies into Warsaw during the August uprising, and many of his friends were dead. Tom’s thoughts constantly returned to the Squadron and to his partisan companions in Poland, with whom he had no contact since leaving them prior to STURMWIND. He tried to find some of them with the help of the Polish Red Cross, but this proved difficult as the partisans operated under codenames, but they did manage to put him in touch with his friend and interpreter Alojzego Pajaka (Ali), who had survived the battle, but was captured by the Germans and had spent time in a concentration camp. Tom wrote to Ali and tried to explain that although his Squadron had done their best, and many of his friends had been killed delivering supplies to Warsaw, the obstacles were just too great. “Whatever you think of politicians, positive or negative, remember one thing Ali, those English boys gave their lives to help their friends.”xix He spoke fondly of the songs that George and the partisans had taught him, saying that he had not forgotten one of them, and he asked Ali to tell all his comrades that he would love to hear from them and receive photographs.

  It would be twelve years before news of George would reach his friends in England, but in May 1945 as the last members of the Storey crew were making their way home, he was fighting with the Polish Second Army as it progressed from Berlin to Dresden, and then Prague. After separating from the crew at Kiev Aerodrome, George had succeeded in getting General Strokacz’ approval to return to the Polish forests with a team of people equipped by the Soviets, to work under Kunicki’s command, but in a cruel twist of fate, STURMWIND fighting broke out before he was able to return. He waited daily for news of the battle, but it soon became clear that Kunicki was not in a position to receive air drops, and Strokacz cancelled the planned mission. George was instead drafted into the Russian airborne division, and two weeks later parachuted into the Carpathian Mountains from a Dakota flown by the Pavlov crew. He was wounded in battle but his injuries were light, and he was passed over the front to the Polish Second Army. Wounded again, this time seriously, George’s war was also over, but his trials were not.

  Notes

  1 Head of Directorate for Soviet liaison with Allies, General Staff.

  2 Naval Attaché at the Moscow Mission.

  3 MI5, MI3, IS9(W) and IS9(X).

  CHAPTER 9

  HOME

  Peace returned to Europe in May 1945, just two days after my sister Pat was born, and it was a time of change for war-weary people. Churchill’s Conservative Government was very quickly swept out of power in a landslide election victory for Labour, whose pledge of full employment for returning servicemen and a ‘cradle-to-grave’ health service struck a chord after the hardship of war. Thousands of servicemen would never return; their fate and whereabouts unknown, but Walter Davis, the last missing member of the Storey crew, made it home to his parents’ house in time for VE day and, by way of celebration, hung a notice outside next to the Union Jack that read Niech żyje Polska (Long Live Poland). His friend, Private Jimmy Bloom eventually reported to the British Embassy in Warsaw and worked there as in interpreter for five weeks before being repatriated in October 1945. In 1947 he received the British Empire Medal for gallant and distinguished services in the field.i Tom continued to fly with the RAF for another year, before a failed eye test grounded him and he was moved to a desk job. His old crew would attest to the fact that his eyesight had always been pretty bad, joking that his landings were better at night than in the day, but in peacetime, it was no longer expedient to overlook such imperfection. Life in the RAF without flying was unthinkable, so Tom resigned his commission, returning to Ludlow where he took over the running of the Unicorn Hotel with Rita. There followed a series of unsettled and restless years, with job opportunities ill-matched to his skills or potential. He yearned for a better life and, having done his pilot training in Canada and mixed with many Canadians who flew with the Squadron, decided that he and Rita should emigrate. Charlie Keen had already left for Canada and was flying with the Transatlantic Ferry Unit, and Patrick Stradling would also take his family to Canada and then to Rhodesia in the 1950s. Tom’s plan was well advanced when Rita became ill, spending many weeks in hospital and, having given up the tenancy of The Unicorn, he was forced to look for whatever job he could get, and that job was an assistant in an ironmonger’s shop.

  His next job was as a food inspector, which suited him better because he could keep on the move, but his mind always returned to Poland, and the friends he had left behind. Any news of Poland in the national newspapers caught his eye, and he read that Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had returned to Poland in 1945 as a Deputy Prime Minister, had fled back to England, having been unable to protect his country from Communist domination. He had met Mikolajczyk in 1944, and his plight prompted Tom to write him a letter, sympathising with his situation and saying: “I am happy that you have sought refuge in this country, as I did with your people”. Mikolajczyk very quickly moved on to America, where he settled, but he remembered Tom, and took the time to reply and wish him well before leaving. And then, in April 1947, just a few months before I was born, the body of Peter Crosland was found on a wooded hillside in the Cabar district of Yugoslavia, where it had lain since November, 1943. The woodsmen who found him buried his remains on the hillside, retaining the identity tags, which enabled one of the RAF search parties (MRES1) to locate his body during a sweep of Yugoslavia, and re-inter his body in the Belgrade War Cemetery. Tom read about it in a national newspaper and wrote to the RAF to confirm that the story was true, later travelling to London to identify some of Peter’s personal effects.

  The family continued to grow with the birth of my younger sister Susan in 1949, and by this time we were living in an ‘Airey House’2 on the outskirts of Ludlow, which was a good place for a young family, and we loved it. The football pitch was at the bottom of our road, Clee View, and every Saturday we walked down to watch from the touchline as Dad, always taller than anyone around him, streaked down the pitch flicking the ball between his feet, and weaving through the opposition. At around this time we acquired an old Austin car, in which we would travel to Carlisle to visit our Cumbrian family. Wrapped in blankets, we would be loaded into the car at bedtime so that we could sleep, but somehow we always managed to be awake for the thrill of Shap Fell. It was a long haul to the top of this barren section of the A6, and in the dark it seemed to us bleakest and most frightening place we could imagine. My memory always had us driving through fog, sleet, or lashing rain. The lights of oncoming cars would be blinding, and yet Dad never flinched or appeared worried; these were the conditions that were familiar for him and he seemed completely at ease. I remember once on a particularly bad night asking him how he could see where he was going. He said: “I keep my eyes lowered on the left edge of the road, and I never look at the lights”. We loved his reassuring presence because he made the frightening feel normal, and we would arrive in Carlisle, having overcome the perils of Shap, feeling like adventurers ourselves.

&nb
sp; It was the move to Lancaster in the north west of England that really changed everything, and yet it was a very positive move to a beautiful part of the country. Dad had got a job as a travelling salesman for Jewsbury and Brown, soft drinks merchant, and not only did the job come with a house and a car, but the move, close to the sea at Morecambe, was hopefully going to help Susan, who suffered from chronic asthma and had spent long months in a sanatorium before the move. This was an ideal job for Dad, who loved being behind the wheel of a car, and had an easy-going, genial manner that enabled him to develop a rapport with the managers of the busy theatres and piers in the seaside town of Morecambe, which formed his ‘patch’. For him, it was a bit like being back in the RAF mess, propping up the bar at the Winter Gardens, the Alhambra, the Gaumont, and the Central Pier, and for us there was the thrill of him arriving home with our autograph books signed by the stars of the day; Jerry Colunna, Alma Cogan, and most thrilling of all, Tommy Steele. On one occasion, when Susan was confined to bed with a severe asthma attack, Dad brought Harold Graham, the organist from the Central Pier and well-known local celebrity to visit and cheer her up, and on another occasion he got us complimentary tickets for ‘Dancing Waters’ at the Gaumont. Coloured jets of water, dancing to the 1812 overture, would be a laughable entertainment now, but we were thrilled by the spectacle, especially when the manager treated us to a box of chocolates in the interval. The fifties were great years for the seaside towns, and although they began well for us, it wasn’t long before clouds began to gather. Coming home from school, more often than not, Dad would be sitting by the fire and not at work. I say he was there, but actually he had begun to retreat to his ‘other place’, and we became quite used to it. The anniversary of the ill-fated flight in April was always a difficult time for him and seemed to intensify his emotional turmoil. Then, in September 1957, he was unsettled by an advertisement that had been placed in The Times: