Lancaster on Fire |
Crashed Halifax - Rear Section |
Inside a Lancaster - Wireless Operator's Position Looking Forward Towards the Cockpit |
Bury or
conceal your parachute, dispose of any secret papers, operational maps etc. and
get away from the landing area immediately otherwise your liberty may not last
long. Enemy patrols usually motorised, will reach the area within half to three
quarters of an hour. If you’ve not been
spotted already, full searches and sweeps will begin at first light.
Few aircrews had high security documents on them
when they landed. Lower security items such Navigators maps and Wireless
operators codebooks were left in the aircraft as most crews had little time to
evacuate once the order was given. RAF and Commonwealth airmen approaching the
ground at night by parachute had three immediate priorities, land safely, bury
or hide their parachute, Mae West and helmet and get away from the landing area
immediately. It was not always that straightforward.
F/O Ross Wiens (RCAF) baled out of his Lancaster
on the night of 16/17 August 1944. As he was in a Pathfinder Squadron, the
aircraft had led the rest of the Bomber stream into the port of Stettin. Flak
damage eventually forced the crew to abandon aircraft an hour after turning for
home. Wiens made a very good landing, dropping behind some hills. He followed
his evasion training, burying his parachute, Mae west and flying helmet and
removed all flying insignia from his uniform. Hurrying away from the landing
site, whilst being thankful for landing safety he must have wondered what would
happen once it was daylight. He was in Nazi occupied Denmark.
W/O Dennis Budd (RCAF)was a rear gunner in the
same aircraft as Ross Wiens. He landed 10 kms from Tollose in Denmark and had
injured his leg. Resting in a wood for a day he roughed up his uniform, removed
the insignia and lived off some of the rations from his escape kit. He set out
north-east for Copenhagen and the first German soldiers encountered on the road
ignored him. His injuries were slowing him down and he quickly realised he
would not get far without assistance and approached a farmhouse for help. The
farmer ushered him into a barn, then locked it. The farmer was a collaborator
and tried to telephone the local authorities, but there was a crossed line and
the call somehow ended up at his neighbour’s Magnus Neilson. Neilson threatened
to report his neighbour for sheltering an evader if he tried to alert report it
to the Nazis. Budd was removed by the Danish resistance and placed in an
isolated farmhouse whilst his identity was verified before continuing his
evasion to neutral Sweden.
F/O Robert Clements (RCAF) (see last week’s
post) said in his Evasion Report ‘I was second out of the aircraft and I
landed in a field near Exel I hid my
parachute, Mae West and helmet and made straight for the shelter of some woods,
where I took out my maps and tried to ascertain my position. I thought I was in
N.E. Belgium. I started walking South West by my compass, but found out later
that it had been affected by the zip fastener on my gloves and also the fly-button compass which I had sewn
on to my shirt cuffs, so that I was actually walking due West. About midnight I
came out of some woods and saw an aircraft burning on the ground nearby. A
German patrol was coming up the road towards it, so I waited until they had
passed and then made my way as quickly as possible through the fields in the
direction they had come from.’
The burning aircraft may have been the remains
of Lancaster W4822 from which Clements and Jimmy Elliott had baled out earlier
(see last week’s post). Neither airmen say in their reports that they saw the
aircraft explode, only that Clements was told by locals two aircraft were seen
to crash that night and another blow up in the air, spinning down to earth with
the tail section landing separately to the main fuselage. Clements believed the
latter aircraft was his and that the photoflash had exploded. The navigator P/O
Norman Buggey corroborated this after the war. He was the third and last man
out and saw the Lancaster explode. As he was injured on landing and became a
POW, neither Clements nor Elliott would have been aware of this information
when they were interviewed by MI9 in London in early January 44.
With both gunners probably dead and the Wireless
Operator and Flight Engineer still mid aircraft trying to get back through
thick smoke and fire to find their parachutes after abandoning fighting the
fire, the pilot, an American, F/Lt D West stayed at the controls, holding the
aircraft for as long as possible to give any remaining crew members time to
reach the escape hatch. He died with the others in the explosion, sticking with
his crew to the last, when he could have saved himself. Time and time again official reports and
accounts from surviving aircrew show this selfless sacrifice that pilots and
crew displayed. War can make ordinary people do extraordinary things and
aircrew were no exception. In the air the close knit team depended on each
other for survival, and so it was in the ultimate adversity, working together
and following orders from the skipper.
Clements must have replayed the sequence of
events countless times as walked across country. As a Second Pilot that night
he was on board for a single mission to gain experience of Operations before he
took his own crew out for the first time.
‘I walked
until 04.00 hours when I found myself in very scrubby heath land. I could find
no suitable hiding place as the country was flat and bare, so I was forced to
keep on walking. At 07.00 hours I heard a bugle call and men shouting, so I
hastily jumped down into a slit trench covered with heather. An hour later the
Germans began their drilling about 50 yards away from where I was hiding and I
was forced to remain in hiding in the trench for the whole of that day. Luckily
I had been able to fill my water bottle previously and had with me my rations
from my aids box, which eased the situation considerably.’ Clements was able to
steal away after dark.
Navigator F/O Maurice Garlick (see last week’s
post) had decided to crawl over fields towards a wood about two miles away.
There was little use in his legs, only pain, which increased as some of the
circulation returned. He heard and saw several farm workers, but no one on
their own. He reached a small copse and managed to cut down saplings to make a
rough pair of crutches and with some parachute cord made a sort of sling for
his right foot. This enabled him to hobble and crawl to the wood. Using the the
lid from his escape kit to catch rainwater and Horlicks tablets and chocolate
he managed to keep going hobbling and crawling to the wood. It took him two
days and the pain in his legs had become severe.
The trees were not as thick as he thought and
after a night’s rest he knew there was no choice but to try and continue and
seek an isolated farmhouse. After hiding from a patrol of passing German
soldiers he hobbled and crawled for the remainder of the day and night. He had
managed to eat some potatoes and wild rhubarb and during the afternoon was
fixed his position by the spires of Troyes Cathedral which were now in sight.
He finally located an isolated farmhouse and hid
in bushes watching the occupants. An elderly farmer came out and after watching
him working for a while, Garlick decided to make an approach and hobbling up on
his crutches he explained who he was.
The family took him in, bathed his legs and gave
him a meal. He had a shave and was given a jacket, a pair of trousers and a
penknife to replace one he had lost. The family were anxious that he left as it
was too dangerous to stay overnight. Garlick left with some food and drink they
had prepared for him and the family refused any payment. (Airmen would have
carried a money wallet in their uniform containing various currencies including
French Francs.)
He hobbled through the countryside for the next
six days travelling mainly at night,
hiding in woods and out of sight during the day. By 14 May he was
becoming very weak and the burns on his legs were infected. Approaching a large
farmhouse near Bucy, he hid and observed it until the evening when he spotted a
young boy working in a nearby field.
What must have been going through Garlick’s mind
when he saw the youth? Eleven days after
being shot down he had crawled and hobbled for miles and was still free, but
what a state the airman was in. Exhausted and dirty, weak from hunger and
thirst and the pain in his infected legs, Garlick’s war was soon to change into
something totally unexpected.
Sources - National Archives Files
Shot Down and on the Run - Air Commodore Graham
Pitchfork
We Flew We Fell We Lived – Philip Lagrandeur
© Keith Morley
Again another very interesting post. Spectacular photo of the Lancaster on fire.
ReplyDeleteIt never ceases to amaze me how well researched your posts are Keith, you make these pieces come to life on the page.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading more soon.
An enjoyable and involving post as usual, Keith.To be commended.
ReplyDeleteOnce in enemy territory, having survived the impact and concealing their parachutes our airmen have been evading capture but also living off the land and using what they can from their environment. They had to become opportunists and not too fussy regarding possible food. ‘potatoes and wild rhubarb’ being an example of this. Raw but vaguely edible. According to Freddie Spencer Chapman who wrote the book ‘The Jungle is neutral’, The role of a survivalist is to ‘expect nothing and accept the dangers and bounties of the jungle as of a natural course. Hence, one's steady state of mind was of the utmost importance to ensure that the physical health of body and the will to live were reinforced on a daily basis.’ (A Bear Grylls or Ray Mears’ survival course might have been useful here along with the standard ‘escape kit’.) This ‘will to live’ obviously kept the servicemen/women going and made them work through incredible pain and adversity like Garlick here, and when this was no longer possible great acts of heroism then sporadically became the ultimate sacrifice.The Pilots who went down with their planes or Captain Edward Smith who perished with his ship ‘The Titanic’. The aircrew worked closely together and their loyalty to each other was an ‘ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ According to George Gordon Byron,
“They never fail who die in a great cause.”
However, our evaders here are the survivors and we continue to follow their progress with interest. We believe that Garlick is rather indestructible, but is he ?
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston Churchill.