by John Nichol
They arrived at their destination near Bamberg in the early afternoon and found a campsite. Derek was all for putting up the tent and getting some rest after the punishing drive, and starting their enquiries the next morning, but Fred hadn’t come this far to carry on waiting. He had been doing that for more than a quarter of a century. ‘We’re only six miles from where Chris came down,’ he said. On the way to Bamberg he had spotted a range of hills; he knew they marked his brother’s crash site. ‘I reckon we’d better go and have a look this afternoon, before it gets dark.’
Derek was too tired to argue, and he could tell from the determined glint in Fred’s eye that there would be no point in doing so. They climbed back into the van.
As they drew nearer, Fred could see that the hills were heavily wooded. He pointed to a large clearing at their centre. He had seen enough crash sites during the war to know the widespread devastation that took place when a Lancaster went down. ‘That could be where Chris crashed.’
The road petered out well before the hills began.
‘I reckon we should take a risk, Derek.’ Fred started to drive across a vast field that still separated them from their goal. They parked at the foot of the hills and started to walk. The path, although steep, was easy to climb, but when they finally reached the clearing Fred felt his heart sink into his boots. ‘This is natural, Derek,’ he said. ‘No aeroplane crashed here.’
As they walked wearily back down, Fred wondered what to do next. He knew they would probably have to wait until tomorrow, whatever they decided. But where to start? Neither he nor Derek spoke a word of German. They couldn’t just criss-cross the countryside looking for Lancaster-shaped clearings in the hills. For a second he felt flat and disillusioned, but then he remembered the look on his father’s face, and the reason he had come here. ‘You mark my words, Derek,’ he said, as they got back into the vehicle. ‘We’ll find someone who can speak English and help us find Chris before we go.’
They started to drive back across the field. It was a big one: 50 or 60 acres, by Fred’s estimation. In the distance he spotted two figures, a man and a woman, and he wondered what they were doing in the middle of a field. Then he smiled to himself as he realised they might well be wondering much the same thing about the two wild-eyed occupants of a small van careering towards them across the turf. The couple were out mushrooming, and as they drew closer Fred wound down his window. ‘Can you speak English?’ he asked.
The man looked up. ‘I can. A little –’
His wife interrupted him. Fred didn’t like the look on her face. ‘My father and mother were killed by a Lancaster that crashed on their house,’ she said in English.
That’s a great start, Fred thought.
‘What do you want to know?’ the woman asked.
Fred explained, glancing at her nervously out of the corner of his eye. He told them he had travelled to Germany to find the grave of his brother, who had been shot down during the Nuremberg raid and crashed somewhere in the hills that surrounded them.
There was a pause. Then the man spoke again. ‘My brother-in-law is the Bürgermeister of the village nearby.’ He started to scribble some directions and a note in German for them to pass on. Then he shook his head and scrunched up the scrap of paper in his hand. Fred’s heart began to sink, but his fears proved unfounded. The man beckoned to him. ‘We will take you there now. Follow us.’
They drove straight to the Bürgermeister’s home, where the brother-in-law acted as interpreter. It emerged that he too had fought in the war, had been captured by the English and held at a PoW camp near Ripon, only a few miles from where Chris had been stationed. He took Fred and Derek to meet a man who had been on fire-watch in Bamberg the night of the Nuremberg raid; he had seen Chris’s aircraft go down, close enough to his family’s home to fear for their safety.
‘If you come here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he told them, ‘I will take you to the crash site.’
Fred barely slept a wink that night. The next morning he and Derek arrived early at the fire-watcher’s house. They were ushered on to the back of his tractor and set off across the fields. The tractor wound its way slowly uphill. The slope became steeper and steeper and the trip seemed to take forever, but eventually they reached the place where Chris had crashed more than 27 years earlier.
As Fred had assumed, the site had been devastated by the flaming aircraft, and had not yet recovered. Debris from the Halifax was still strewn across the ground. He quartered the area, filling a plastic bag with fragments of the bomber as he went, trying to work out the flight path it had taken, and where his brother’s body might have been found.
He took a series of photographs, then stood quietly for a moment, listening to the wind in the trees. As they made their way back down, Fred glanced back with a faint flicker of amusement. Chris had been based at Skipton-on-Swale; every time he had taken off, he flew over Sutton Bank. ‘He left one big hill and crashed on another.’
Fred and Derek’s next stop was the local cemetery, where they were guided to a peaceful, well-tended corner in the shadow of five fir trees. This was where Chris had been given a Christian burial. Fred was told that several local farmers had risked the anger of their Nazi overlords by taking time off their work to attend the ceremony. They felt it more important to observe common decency and give this young man the funeral he deserved, even though he had been sent to attack their country. The locals also found him a picture of the horse-drawn hearse that had brought Chris’s coffin to the graveyard. He took snaps of the man who found the plane on the hill, of the village nearby, of every conceivable piece of the jigsaw that told the story of his brother’s death and burial.
But the journey did not end there. Chris’s body had been disinterred in 1948 and moved to the Durnbach War Cemetery near Munich, 200 miles away. The next morning he and Derek were on the road again. As they pulled up in the cemetery car park, Fred could see the rows and rows of white graves belonging to more than 3,000 British airmen.
After 10 minutes of methodical searching they located his grave. ‘Pilot Officer C. W. Panton’ it read. ‘Flight Engineer. Royal Air Force. 31 March 1944’.
Fred put his hand on the cold stone before he knelt down. ‘I knew then I was within six feet of my brother.’ The memories flooded back, of the war years, of their rabbiting expeditions, of hearing the muffled voices of Chris and their dad in the front room, of watching the shadows of the departing and returning bombers on his bedroom wall. The tears started to flow.
When it was time to leave, Fred walked backwards to the car park so he could keep his eye on his brother’s final resting place. ‘I thought I might never see it again.’
Then, after 10 emotional days in Germany, it was time to return home and share what he had found.
His father was delighted. Fred had the photos enlarged and framed, and hung them on the wall. The one of Chris’s grave took pride of place, above the mantelpiece, in front of the armchair where he so often sat. The old man stared at it for hours on end.
Three weeks later he died in his sleep.
‘He knew,’ Fred says. ‘That’s why he wanted me to go. I’m convinced of it. He wanted to see the place where his son was buried before his time ran out.’
Epilogue
The Sir Arthur Harris statue in London © UIG via Getty Images
Fred Panton’s trip to Bamberg rekindled his determination to find out as much as he could about his brother’s war years. He made contact with a friend, Canadian bomb aimer Wendell Burns, now a fellow farmer with 5,000 acres in Wynyard, east of Saskatchewan. The pair exchanged letters and Fred felt the itch in his feet once more. Chris’s crew had included some Canadians, and he had been deeply touched by Jack McLauchlan’s letter to his father. Perhaps he could track him down, and maybe the wireless operator, Harry Cooper, too?
In the spring of 1974 Fred flew to Canada; it was the first time he had been on an aeroplane. First he visited Wendell and spent some time helping him to
till his land and sow it with barley and wheat. That job done, his attention turned to the real reason for his visit.
Harry Cooper lived in Vancouver, 1,300 miles from Wynyard on the Canadian Pacific Railway. But he had come this far; there was no way he was now going to be put off by a few days on a train. It rattled across the vast prairies of Saskatchewan, through the Rocky Mountains, past the glaciers and lakes of the Banff National Park and on to the Pacific coast.
Fred arrived exhausted in Canada’s third biggest city. But there was no time to rest; he was on a mission. He needed to find Harry Cooper. There was only one problem: he had no idea where he lived – and in a city of almost two million people that might prove to be a challenge.
He turned to the phone book. To his delight, there were dozens of Coopers rather than hundreds, and not as many H. Coopers as he feared. He worked his way down the list and made a handful of unsuccessful calls. Then a woman answered. Fred made his apologies for the intrusion.
‘Does Harry Cooper live there?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Can I ask whether he served in Bomber Command?’
The woman paused. ‘Yes, he did …’
‘Was he based at Skipton-on-Swale with 466 Squadron?’
‘I think so.’
Fred couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Is he around?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Can you pass on a message for me, please?’
Mrs Cooper said she would.
‘Could you tell him that Fred, Chris Panton’s brother, was passing through town and would like to meet with him?’ He gave the number of his hotel and expressed his thanks before hanging up.
Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Harry. He had been watering his lawn.
‘Can I come and see you?’ Fred asked.
There was a sigh. ‘I can spare you five minutes,’ he said.
Blimey, Fred thought. It’s taken four years to find him, and I’ve travelled 6,000 miles to get here. All for five minutes … But it was better than nothing.
Later that afternoon, his mouth dry, he knocked on the door of a house in the outskirts of Vancouver. Harry answered, and Fred immediately sensed the tension in the air. They swapped uneasy small talk. Harry seemed edgy and Fred was unsure why.
‘Why are you here?’ Harry eventually asked.
Fred explained that he was trying to find out as much as he could about Chris. He told him how he had travelled to Germany to capture a photograph of Chris’s grave for his father, and how it had reignited his passionate interest in his brother’s wartime experiences. He told Harry that while he was at home on leave his brother had never discussed the war, and that after Chris’s death his father had forbidden all talk of it. There was a gaping hole which Fred was desperate to fill.
As Fred spoke, he saw the Canadian’s demeanour soften. His earlier guardedness seemed to fall away. ‘I thought you were looking to blame someone,’ Harry said slowly. ‘What do you want to know?’
Fred got more than his five minutes. Harry asked him to stay the night, and told him story after story, until well into the small hours.
Fred’s return flight to England was due to depart from Toronto, 2,700 miles and almost the width of the continent away from Harry Cooper’s house. He looked at the map. Jack McLauchlan, the rear gunner on Chris’s Halifax, lived in Winnipeg, 1,400 miles from Vancouver. That’s about halfway, he thought.
Two days later, tired and dishevelled, he got off the train at Winnipeg and checked into the railway hotel. Again, there was no time to waste. He had a phone book to work through. There were even fewer McLauchlans than Coopers, and soon he was speaking to Jack’s wife. She was picking her husband up later, she said. He was working at the local telephone exchange.
‘I can come and pick you up too,’ she suggested. ‘Then we can go and get him.’ She asked where he was staying. When he told her, she immediately insisted he stay with them instead. Only a few hours after he had checked in, he checked out.
He and Mrs McLauchlan sat in the car until Jack’s shift finished at midnight. Fred asked whether she had told him he was there. No, she said, they hadn’t spoken. She picked him up after every shift. He started to wonder if this had been a good idea. What would Jack’s reaction be?
The door opened on the stroke of midnight. Out walked a dapper gentleman in his fifties. The two of them got out of the car. The man got nearer, a quizzical look on his face.
‘Now then, Jack, do you know this fellow?’ his wife said.
Jack’s eyes narrowed. Crumbs, Fred thought, he probably thinks I’m an old boyfriend. He might thump me … Jack continued to stare at him. Fred glanced awkwardly between them, wondering if he should say something.
‘You wouldn’t be a Panton, would you?’
Fred smiled. ‘I’m his younger brother.’
A broad grin lit up Jack’s face. He clapped Fred on the back. ‘I knew it. You have the same twinkle in your eye.’
Fred’s Canadian adventures inspired an even greater interest in his brother’s life in the RAF. In 1972 he had come across a Lancaster at a public auction, and although he did not buy it then, he had followed its movements closely ever since, and nursed a dream of starting a private collection of Second World War aircraft. Eleven years later he finally achieved his ambition, snapping it up – for far more than the £100 he could have paid for the Halifax in 1949 – in a private sale. NX611, more affectionately known as Just Jane, was built by Austin Motors in 1945, and saw service in the Far East prior to Japan’s surrender. She had then become the property of the French government, and travelled halfway across the world before winding up in Lincolnshire.
Around the same time, Fred and his brother Harold bought part of the airfield which had once been RAF East Kirkby, where as young boys they had watched the Lancasters rumble into the sky. Rather than keeping Just Jane to themselves, they decided to renovate the airfield, restore the bomber to its former glory and open a museum to the public, honouring their brother and the thousands of young men who, night after night, put their lives at risk in the skies above Europe.
They opened the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre in 1988. Just Jane is still its centrepiece, now surrounded by a host of other Second World War aircraft and memorabilia, alongside the base’s original control tower. She is regularly taxied along the runway, the roar of her Merlins filling the air. Now the brothers have launched a campaign to get her airborne once more.
The museum was built at a time when the men of Bomber Command had no memorial of their own – and indeed were relegated to the margins of history – but now the public, alongside surviving veterans and their relatives, flock there to pay tribute to their fallen heroes. Every year it hosts a reunion for Chris’s squadron and the others that were based at the airfield. Every year the number of familiar faces dwindles, claimed by the passing of the years. But the memory of what they achieved, and the sacrifice they made, never fades.
‘We’re very proud of our brother and what he did, and what all those other young men did. It’s terrible how for many years Bomber Command was forgotten; though we never forgot, and that’s why we set up the museum – not just for us, but for everyone else. Those of us who didn’t have to fight have had it easy. Sometimes it’s good to stop and think, and be thankful.’
Postscript
The Nuremberg Raid haunts the memories and dreams of the dwindling group of men who survived it, and are still alive to speak of it. The horror of that hour of the long leg is seared into their souls. Never before had those airmen seen their brothers in arms die in such numbers. As Rusty Waughman says, ‘We didn’t usually see dead bodies; people just disappeared.’ That fateful night they watched hundreds die, in graphic detail.
Ninety-five bombers were lost that night; approximately 545 airmen killed or missing.82 The Air Staff Operational Summary of 1 April 1944, compiled from the logs of the squadrons across the country, stands as the official record of the events of 30–3
1 March. It states that 934 aircraft took part in the raid: 795 targeting Nuremberg and 139 sent on diversionary raids or other tasks. Under the subheading ‘Results’ it recounts the bare facts of the operation in the driest of bureaucratic language:
‘608 aircraft, comprising 454 Lancasters, 146 Halifaxes and eight Mosquitos attacked, dropping about 2,148 tons of bombs (967 tons of H.E. and 1,181 tons of incendiaries). Among the H.E. bombs dropped were 6 × 8,000 lb and 322 × 4,000 lb, Flares were also dropped.
‘The Pathfinders were over the target from 0059 hours to 0125 hours, with the Main Force attacking between 0103 and 0133 hours.
‘The route to the target was comparatively free from cloud but over the target 6/10ths to 10/10ths cloud in layers up to about 16,000 feet was encountered. Some reports state that the attack opened slightly late and with only marker bombs occasionally visible through the thinner cloud, most crews bombed on the sky marker flares which are reported as being somewhat scattered with the concentration improving in the later stages of the attack.
‘The weather conditions made assessment of the results difficult but the attack generally appears to have been widely scattered with no extensive area of fire, although a number of fires were seen in the target area and at least three large explosions are reported.
‘Slight to moderate flak was experienced over the target, with a few ineffective searchlights. Opposition from enemy fighters was strong especially on the route in, and in the target area, and appeared to be particularly severe to the South of the RUHR and in the FRANKFURT area. One Me 110, one Me 109 and one Ju 88 are claimed as destroyed, one Me 110 as probably destroyed and three Ju 88 as damaged.’83
