by John Nichol
A Wing and a Prayer shuddered and seemed to come to a halt in mid-air. At first Rusty was too stunned to do anything. Then the awful thought occurred to him that this was it – they had flown several raids over Berlin and its massed ranks of defences and survived the horrors of Nuremberg, only to have their lives ended by a collision with a plane from their own bloody side.
He tried to regain control but there was nothing he could do. They were riding piggy-back on their fellow bomber. It seemed as if the two lumbering beasts were ‘intertwined … in one final grotesque embrace of death’. Then the unknown Lancaster separated itself from Rusty’s, and fell away at a 45-degree angle into the clouds.
Amazingly, the damage to A Wing and a Prayer – the name had never seemed so appropriate as it did right at that moment – was not as bad as they feared. It was a miracle that the thousands of pounds of high explosives in the bomb bay had survived the impact. The plane was responding, albeit sluggishly, but in an astonishing act of courage Rusty chose to go on and bomb the target rather than limp back to England.
On the return flight to Ludford Magna they discovered that one of the undercarriage wheels was badly damaged. Rusty considered his options. He decided to press on and land back at base, but he knew there were no guarantees they would make it safely. He felt he owed it to his crew to lay it on the line for them.
‘This could be a bit dicey. If any of you want to bale out …’
They decided to stick with their pilot and put their faith in his skill. As they came into land, he told them to assume their crash positions. Everyone braced themselves. Rusty held the heavy bomber on one wheel, before he reduced their speed and allowed the damaged starboard wheel to touch down. As it did, the aircraft began to career dangerously off course, but Rusty was up to the challenge. He managed to maintain control.
The plane started to veer towards the control tower. A WAAF on the Air Traffic Control staff fell over in fright as she saw the vast machine loom out of the darkness and hurtle towards them. With all the strength he could muster, Rusty managed to bring the bomber to a stop a matter of yards from the tower.
Slowly, breathing sighs of relief, the crew clambered from their battered aircraft. ‘Best landing yet, Skipper,’ Taffy said nonchalantly.
A little more than three weeks after Nuremberg, on a raid to Düsseldorf, Chick Chandler’s Lancaster was shot up by flak and fighter fire. Two of his crew members had been fatally injured, two others wounded. Chick’s parachute pack was shot off his back but he was otherwise unharmed. The aircraft was damaged by fire, the bomb bays door wouldn’t close and the landing gear wouldn’t open. He and others only survived because of the extreme skill and bravery of their pilot, Oliver Brooks, who, with Chick at his side, managed to bring the stricken aircraft in to land at Woodbridge. ‘A wizard effort,’ Chick said, ‘by the best pilot the RAF has seen.’
The Lancaster ‘slid along on its belly. In a shower of sparks, dirt, dust, and debris and with the metal screeching on the concrete, the bomb doors buckled and collapsed under the weight of the aircraft and the propellers twisting as they struck the ground.’
Once his tour was over – and there were few more relieved crew members than Chick when he returned from his last flight in one piece – he was transferred to a training unit for what promised to be a six-month period away from the front line.
Unfortunately a ‘personal dispute’ with an officer led to him being given the worst jobs, including having to escort men detained by the RAF for misbehaviour to disciplinary centres. On his return from one such task, he was told that he had been ‘volunteered’ for another tour of operations.
Chick was understandably reluctant to return; he still had three months of the normal rest period left. He was posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit, where he met his new crew. But he told the Squadron Leader he would only carry out training flights, not ops, until his rest period had expired. He was dismissed immediately and replaced by a new engineer. While he waited for the bus in dispersal, the crew he was supposed to have joined took off. They crashed on landing. Everyone but the rear gunner was killed.
His refusal was to have severe consequences. Despite having survived some of the heaviest and costliest raids of the war, and completed a full tour, he was branded as having a Lack of Moral Fibre – the dreaded LMF. In a letter written many years later, Chick touched upon his experiences: ‘I saw psychiatrists, medical officers, Group Captains, boards officers, Wing Commanders in charge of flying, etc, etc. At one time when being interviewed by a particularly aggressive Wing Commander I was threatened with facing a firing squad. I am not suggesting that this was the official policy and I really thought my man was bluffing, no doubt infuriated by my insistence that I [get] my full rest period. A threat that I did take seriously was the fact I could get demoted, transferred to the Army, and sent to a particularly unpleasant theatre of war.’
Chick endured 10 weeks of hell. ‘It was worse than ops,’ he said. Eventually he was allowed a hearing to state his case. He was given a job on the ground, but the hated LMF stamp still scarred his logbook: ‘Withdrawn from aircrew duties.’
Remarkably, he remained in the RAF until 1978 as an air traffic controller, but still smarts from the way he was treated once his tour was over. ‘I was shot up by flak, fighters, had my parachute harness shot off, crash landed, pinned by searchlights for 20 minutes and branded LMF. I had a hectic time in Bomber Command, but a charmed life. I was lucky and I can’t have too much luck left to rely on. But the Air Force treated me very shabbily over the LMF issue.’
On 18 April 1944, on the way back from bombing a railway station at Tergnier, in northern France, Andy Wiseman’s aircraft was ripped apart by cannon fire from a fighter they never saw. The pilot, sitting right next to Andy, was killed, as were the rear gunner and flight engineer. The navigator baled out. Andy quickly followed, carrying the lucky doll given to him by Jean. The navigator managed to make his way back to England, but Andy was captured and ended the war in the infamous Stalag Luft III prison camp in Sagan, Lower Silesia.
Another of its inmates was Dick Starkey. His broken, frostbitten ankle had slowly healed, thanks to treatment in two different military hospitals. At the time of his arrival, security at the camp had never been more severe. A week before the Nuremberg raid, more than 200 Allied servicemen had tried to escape from it, and 76 had succeeded. Fifty of the 73 who were recaptured were executed.
All further escape plans had been abandoned. Not that Dick would have been chosen to go, given his disability. As 1945 dawned, there seemed to be another good reason not to risk going under the wire: word had spread that the Russian army was making significant advances towards them; Dick and his fellow PoWs would soon be liberated.
In January 1945, however, in a temperature of minus 20 degrees centigrade and a gusting blizzard, Dick, Andy Wiseman and thousands of fellow PoWs were marched from Stalag Luft III across the Silesian plain. They walked for 16 hours a day, dragging what few possessions they had behind them on sledges. At the rear of the column when they took shelter at a farm, Dick was one of the last inside the barns, which the prisoners shared with cows, sheep and horses.
They continued in this fashion for four days, and the effort began to take its toll on Dick’s battered body. His neck was still so stiff that he couldn’t raise his head above eye level, and though he was able to walk his ankle was not up to trudging for hours on end through heavy snow and ice. It became so swollen that he dared not take off his boots in case he wouldn’t be able to get them back on.
Dick refused to give up. Rumours passed up and down the column that those suffering from frostbite, injury or exhaustion to the point of being unable to carry on were being shot. The periodic echo of rifle fire seemed to confirm it. Dick summoned up the last of his dwindling reserves of energy and determination, and soldiered on. Finally, after seven days of marching, they reached a train station and were transported to Luckenwald, where he became one of the 28,000 inmates praying for th
e war to end.
Thomas Maxwell, the 18-year-old rear gunner who had been shot down over Stuttgart and learned of the Nuremberg raid on an old wireless in a French farmhouse attic, continued to make his way back to safety with the help of the Comète line, a Resistance network which helped British airmen evade capture by offering shelter, clothes, false papers and transport, and guided them through occupied France into neutral Spain. They could then get home via a flight from British-owned Gibraltar.
His journey took two and a half months, but at the end of May 1944 Thomas arrived back in England to be debriefed by MI9. Before making his way back to Mildenhall to rejoin his squadron, he went to collect his possessions, which had been bagged up and shipped out to the Central Repository at RAF Uxbridge by the Committee of Adjustment, the branch of the RAF tasked with clearing away the personal possessions of missing aircrew, after his plane went down in March. One of his principal concerns was the eleven bars of chocolate he had been squirrelling away before he was shot down. But what he saw on his arrival immediately destroyed his appetite.
‘The place smelled of death. All the personal effects of aircrew missing or killed in action were there, as well as huge piles of uniform, which were heaped on trestle tables. These were being sorted out with great care before being sent on to loved ones and next of kin. I imagined what it must have been like for the people who worked there, young WAAFs mainly, whose job it was to sort through these objects. I saw so many things: cigarettes, golf clubs, squash racquets, beer-soaked ten shilling notes, old theatre tickets, half-completed letters to girlfriends, chocolate and sweet ration coupons, a tin box containing pennies which a father had saved for his child. That was only a few of the items. Imagine the sort of trivia one might leave if you were all of a sudden taken out of existence and then multiply it by hundreds.
‘The WAAF had the job of going through and sorting all the personal letters and, with the help of a squadron officer, would decide which would be sent on and which destroyed. This was only done when it was confirmed that someone was killed in action, or they had been missing in action for a certain amount of time. I can’t imagine how they coped with reading all those words.
‘I got the impression that it was a rare event for someone to turn up and collect their stuff like I had done. I was introduced to them and everyone stopped what they were doing and applauded! It seemed to bring a little bit of brightness to what must have been a terribly onerous task. I got my cardboard box. My chocolate ration had gone, “Returned to Catering Officer”, but I was given a new ration book allowance in lieu.’
Thomas reached for his logbook. The last entry was written in red ink: ‘LL828 March 15 Stuttgart: Failed to Return.’ He was mortified. They had only been an hour and 20 minutes from landing in England when he had baled out. They had racked up six hours and 10 minutes of night-flying time before transmitting their first and last signal to base, none of which he had been credited with. There was no way he was going to be cheated out of that time; he entered the hours in the book himself.
‘The next entry on a new page was three months later, by myself, and said simply in red ink: “Balls”.’ Thomas also added the details of his most recent flight, which had brought him back from Gibraltar to Whitchurch at 9.10 that morning.
Possessions in hand, Thomas returned to Mildenhall, the first of his squadron to have been shot down and return to operational duty. He went on to complete a further 26 operations.
Don Brinkhurst, the only airman from the Nuremberg raid to evade capture on the ground, was taken in by the Belgian Resistance near Liège. He was met at the safe house by a civilian carrying a revolver who led him into a back room where his mother-in-law was frying mushrooms.
‘What is she frying?’ he asked Don in English.
‘Mushrooms.’
The man put away his revolver. ‘If you had stopped or hesitated, I would have shot you as a German impostor.’
His credentials established, Don was even given a party to celebrate his 21st birthday three weeks later, though he had to flee when someone betrayed him to the Germans. He crossed into Switzerland, after being helped over a heavily guarded bridge by a Résistante who posed as his girlfriend, and then back into newly liberated France, where he encountered some Allied troops. From there, he made his way back to the UK and joined up with his old squadron.
On 2 January 1945 he took off in a Lancaster on the first of another 20 operations. The target was Nuremberg.
CHAPTER 20
Scars and Ghosts
For those whose loved ones were missing, the infamous radio broadcasts of William Joyce, more commonly known as Lord Haw-Haw, became required listening. In between snatches of jazz music and tedious passages of Nazi propaganda, Joyce read out the names of prisoners-of-war and often passed personal messages from them to their families over the airwaves. George Prince’s family was listening to one such broadcast when his name was mentioned. He was alive! The joyous news was passed on to his friend, Jocelyn. She was ecstatic, but still surprised he had been captured. ‘We thought that they were all invincible.’
Jocelyn started to write to George in Dulag Luft. Her letters were, she says, merely a mundane account of all the things she had been doing; friends she had seen, gatherings she had been to. Inconsequential, but she hoped they would be of some comfort to him. She also tried sending him cigarettes via the Red Cross. She only received one letter from him in return, but she kept on writing regardless.
Jocelyn had no idea that George treasured each letter she sent. It was a reminder of home, evidence that life was continuing as it had always done in New Malden and that, beyond the brutality and barbed wire of his prison camp, a normal world still existed.
A few days before VE Day in 1945, there was a knock at the door of her parents’ place and, without any prior warning, there he was on the threshold. They went straight to the cinema. It soon became clear that something had shifted in their relationship. Her correspondence had intensified their feelings for each other. They married in 1949. ‘It’s curious, I suppose,’ Jocelyn says. ‘I only started writing to him because he got shot down. I wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been? Things might have turned out very differently.’
Jocelyn was not the only object of George’s affection waiting for him. His father travelled to Skellingthorpe, where George had been stationed, and drove his beloved MG down the A1 from Lincolnshire to Surrey. ‘That car started the war with me and ended the war with me,’ George says.
In the middle of April 1945, Dick Starkey’s German captors evacuated Luckenwald, where he had been held since the New Year, and fought a running battle with the advancing Russian forces in a nearby forest. Eventually, to the joy of the inmates, the Russians rolled in: they were free.
Or so they believed.
The Russians refused to allow them to leave the camp until the Americans arrived and an exchange was agreed. There was an agonising wait as they were forced to stay inside the camp until the deal was done – whilst listening to the BBC announce that thousands of other PoWs had been released and were on their way back to England.
As time dragged on, their wariness about their new Russian overseers grew. One afternoon a group of elderly German conscripts, who had somehow survived the fighting in the forest, walked towards the camp with their hands held high. The Russian PoWs at the gate, now given the responsibility of guarding the place, shot them down in cold blood. ‘We realised the Russians would show no mercy after the atrocities committed by the Germans in their country.’
Some became so impatient they decided to make a run for it, though that meant trying to force their way through Russian lines. Dick chose to stay, even if the frustration grew each day. The Russians started to ease the restrictions, allowing the PoWs to go for a walk within a one-mile perimeter of the camp. With an Australian pilot, Dick chose to walk into the forest, where the Germans had been hiding before the Russians had cleared them out.
They found a clearing and the
remains of a field kitchen. German helmets were still scattered across the ground. Dick picked one up.
‘Ah! What have we here?’ a voice asked in English.
They turned. Two German soldiers and a young woman, possibly a nurse, were standing there. One of the men was holding a Luger. It was pointed at them.
‘Do you know who we are?’ he asked. He unbuttoned his tunic. He was wearing a black shirt emblazoned with a yellow skull and crossbones – the insignia of the SS.
The SS officer asked if they had anything to eat. Dick told them the Russians ran the camp very strictly and gave them little food. A thin smile played on the SS man’s lips. ‘Probably Britain and America will now fight the Bolsheviks,’ he said.
Dick felt the kind of despair he had not experienced since his first few hours on German soil. There was no way that these men would let them return to camp and risk them telling the Russians that there were still German soldiers hiding in the forest. The safest option would be to shoot them.
Dick had survived being blown out of a burning plane, the impact of hitting the ground after falling 15,000 feet, more than a year as a PoW and an arduous week-long march through the Silesian winter. Now the war was all but over, he was about to be killed for taking a misguided stroll through the woods.
‘Go back to your camp and get us food,’ the SS man said.
Dick was stunned. Were they really letting them go? But he was not going to stay and argue. They turned and started to walk, expecting to be shot in the back at any moment. ‘Those 25 steps back to the trees were the longest of my life. We dared not start running.’
As soon as they reached the trees they started to sprint, forgetting for a few panic-stricken seconds about his injured ankle.
At the end of May their agony came to an end. Dick was one of the last British PoWs to be repatriated; he landed at RAF Bicester a very relieved and happy man. He stayed in the RAF and was posted to RAF Dishforth in 1946 to familiarise himself with the new Avro York aircraft, used to bring troops back from the Far East.
