They put the wireless on to the BBC, and there were reports of a big battle over the Channel, with many Hun machines shot down, so we hoped it was all true and made up for us a bit.
This was Eagle Day, and in a way it more than made up for 82 Squadron. The weather, of course, had been the same for the Luftwaffe and their massive fleet of bombers and fighter escorts, intent on destroying RAF fighter bases, had been recalled because of the heavy cloud over Britain and the North Sea. The message reached the escorts and most of the bombers but not all. Some heavy damage was done to several RAF airfields, although they were not the intended fighter bases, but the bombers with no fighter protection suffered great losses to RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Further attacks were launched and fighting went on for the whole day, so the BBC news heard by John Bristow could only have had early reports from the morning’s episode of the Battle of Britain. The final totals given by the Air Ministry were 69 Luftwaffe aircraft down for 13 RAF fighters; later consolidated figures indicated 47 against 13.
Danish hospitality was warm and welcoming but it could not last. Everybody was well aware of the punishment likely for those who sheltered enemies of Germany, and everybody seemed to include all the children of the village who came to look at the English heroes. John Bristow remembered the awful threat: ‘Mrs Jørgensen was quite rightly frightened that the Germans were out looking for us and might turn up at any time. If they found us having coffee and cakes, they’d take the whole family away and very probably shoot them.’
As stated earlier, Germany would respect the freedom and independence of the peoples of Denmark and Norway, and hoped very much that such respect would not be prejudiced by anything as silly as resistance, passive or active. Which is to say, we’ll shoot you. Bristow: ‘So, they decided to get in touch with the aerodrome and the Germans came for us. We hadn’t really had a chance of anything else. Maybe if we’d melted away with Mr Nielsen we might have made it.’
Maybe, John, but the only hope would have been a boat to Sweden. Later in the war, when the Danish resistance was more organised, such a thing might have been possible, but not in 1940 and only a few months after the Occupation. Bristow continues the story:
They kept us at the aerodrome overnight, then put us on a Junkers 52 [a pre-war three-engined passenger and freight liner] for Hamburg. The other passenger was a German general. We were interrogated in Hamburg. The questions included date of birth and I told the officer, August 14th. ‘But that’s today,’ he said. ‘How wonderful,’ and he sent his secretary out to get a bottle of schnapps, and we had a birthday drink, wishing each other good health. I suppose that, at the time, the Germans thought they were going to win the war and so could afford to be magnanimous.
Bill Magrath was not having anything like such a good time. He, Don Blair and Bill Greenwood, after their journey by straw-filled cart and rowing boat, were placed in a small field hospital in Ålborg. Newland, Syms and Wardell were there too. Magrath: ‘They called it a clinic but I got no treatment at all for a whole week. I was in a bad way, and then they put me on a stretcher in the back of an army lorry and drove me to another hospital in Schleswig, which nearly finished me off.’
This was surely not typical of the way injured enemy airmen were treated by either side, and at Schleswig Bill found a more sympathetic regime, with a German army surgeon, Kapitan Doktor Marosy. Magrath:
He did what he could, which involved sorting out my arm and my leg and lying in bed with them stretched out before me in plaster. It still hurt a lot, and I couldn’t see out of my right eye. Anyway, there came a point when there was nothing more they could do with their limited resources and they sent me to a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at another hospital. He operated and did the job properly, which meant I could expect to be able to walk after a fashion and wave my arms about.
One night there was an air raid:
I don’t know if there were any shelters but I couldn’t have gone anyhow, and a bomb exploded near us and blew the window in where I was, and threw my bed across the ward. Everybody else was either Polish or French, and they thought the bombs were great, and sang God Save the King while they were pushing my bed back and arranging my limbs in proper order. Not long after that, I went back to Schleswig and discovered John Oates, who’d been the boss’s wingman in A Flight.
Oates had been at Fjerritslev hospital, where the Danish staff had treated him like royalty, but he found Schleswig rather different:
I’d been ten weeks with the Danes, then I was taken by ambulance to this muck-hole, still paralysed and so not able to help myself to do the basics. If there were any doctors there I didn’t see any, or maybe they thought I was a hopeless case. The guards certainly thought so and used often to leave me on my own for days, so I couldn’t go to the bogs or get a proper wash, not that I had a towel or soap anyway, or a comb. I was in a very dirty state, then two young Wehrmacht boys came in and asked why I was lying in my own filth, because the Germans did not treat airmen prisoners like this. They came back with a stretcher, took me up two flights of stairs and gave me a hot bath, and fed me with milk and fried potatoes.
Another move, to a hospital at Obermasfeld, did little to make life better for Oates, despite the British medical staff there. It had been set up centuries before as a hospital for the poor, but Oates simply found it a rather poor hospital as the medics decided it was too late to treat him. Oates:
One day, the Germans were going to take us walking wounded and blind out for a stroll in the countryside. This didn’t suit one British officer who ordered me to march the men properly, to show the Germans how we did things. When I refused, he tried to court-martial me. I said that might be rather difficult in a German hospital but he was welcome to try it when we got home, then we could all have a good laugh.
At another camp near Kassel, an invigorated Oates made himself bookmaker at the fortnightly dog races. So successful was he that he ended up with all the lagergeld, all the prisoners’ money, so he had to dish it out again to keep his business going.
Matters improved a little when Oates was taken to Stalag Luft 1, Barth, in the very north of Germany, and put in sick quarters:
The commandant came in one day, Major Burkhardt, and told us that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union [Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941]. I said something uncomplimentary concerning Napoleon and the 1812 Overture. Herr Major said nonsense, it would be over in six weeks, and bet me a bottle of cherry brandy against fifty English cigarettes. And, he said, if the Ivans weren’t beaten, Germany would lose the war. I wrote the bet and the date on the wall. Six weeks to the day, he marched in, clicked heels, saluted, Heil Hitlered, put the brandy on my bedside locker, turned smartly and marched out.
Magrath was here too; both he and Oates were invalids and as such a burden on the Germans. It looked clear enough that they could never fly on active service again and so were prime candidates for repatriation. Indeed, they were told they were being sent to Switzerland, but the train they were on was clearly not going that way and they were disembarked at Schildberg (German name at the time for Ostrzeszów in south-west Poland). Oates:
‘It was yet another staging post, and yet another hospital without doctors, nurses or treatment. There were hundreds of Allied wounded there, and a hundred fleas for each one. At last, the International Committee of the Red Cross formally passed Magrath and me for going home, and we were put on a train for Rouen.’
At Rouen was a POW transit camp built on the old racecourse. More than a year had passed since Ålborg and the two men were still in an awful state physically. Bill Magrath’s mental state deteriorated too, when he heard that the verdict on his and Oates’s repatriation had been reversed. ‘I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to a POW camp in Germany so I crewed up with a pilot from 83 Squadron and we decided to escape, which looked as if it might be a lot easier in France than it would be from Stalag Luft whatever. We liberated a set of wire cutters from a French electrician and went fo
r it.’
Bill Magrath’s companion was Sergeant Oliver Barton James, who had been pilot of a Hampden bomber on a dawn mission to lay mines in the Bay of Biscay. Shot down at Morlaix, which is about 50 miles east of Brest in Finistère, James had serious injuries while two crew were killed and one got away. During James’s hospital treatment, the German doctors decided he had to have his left arm amputated, so that made him an unlikely companion for one who had only recently learned to walk again. It was night-time, 21 November 1941. The camp was divided into three areas – officer prisoners, other ranks prisoners, and German staff. Magrath:
There were two other RAF fellows with us, both able-bodied, and we soon cut through the barbed wire that separated us non-officer prisoners from the German guards’ quarters. We half expected to bump into some but they were all in their huts. We could hear them talking and laughing while we walked straight out of the gate. Once we were clear, we split into our pairs, and I limped off with my one-armed friend and headed south.
They had a vague idea of getting to Paris, where they thought they might find help from the resistance, but soon realised that help was required more immediately.
After four nights of walking, our food had run out and we were exhausted, well, I was anyway. James could have gone on on his own but we were probably better together, especially as I had my schoolboy French and he couldn’t speak a word of it. We went into a village church and sat there, waiting for a miracle.
The miracle arrived in the guise of the local priest who, paying close attention to Magrath’s story, understood enough of it to guess what was wanted. There were no Germans in the village so they could walk openly to the priest’s house, the two airmen still in their uniforms, tatty and worn but dangerous nevertheless. ‘The priest’s housekeeper cooked us a meal, which was the best food we’d had for months, and boiled water for us to have baths. There was a comfortable bed too, and we slept the sleep of the just that night.’
The decision was taken that, despite the risk of being shot as spies if arrested, civilian clothes would replace RAF issue. The good Father went around to a few reliable people, collecting outfits for his refugees, and the housekeeper burned their castoffs. Now there was a problem. Many more days of walking were out of the question, so a train to Paris had to be their option, but the station at the nearest town was continously watched by German soldiers. The priest came up with an ingenious solution. Magrath:
It was brilliant, really. We hid a little way from the station while the priest, who had changed out of his clergyman gear into civvies, went in and replaced the clerk in the ticket office. We then trotted up, French workmen by all appearances, and without having to say anything were handed two third-class singles to Paris. We passed over the money he’d already given us, and he handed back more in change than we’d had before. The Hun soldiers never noticed a thing. We couldn’t say our goodbyes and thank-yous of course, but I’m sure the priest knew what we were feeling.
Arriving in the French capital with no knowledge of important matters such as the hours of curfew, no idea where to go, no identity papers and no understanding of the city’s geography, Magrath and James wandered around hoping for some luck. The luck they had turned out to be mixed, starting well:
The place was crawling with Germans, which was unnerving to say the least, and we couldn’t work out what to do at all, until it began to get dark and we knew we had to sort something out quickly. Being on the streets at night would be asking for trouble. We saw a woman walking on her own in a quiet little backstreet and decided to chance it. I offered her money if she would put us up for the night, and she asked a lot of questions in rapid Parisian French, which I struggled with, but she must have realised that two crippled idiots like us could not be anything other than what we said we were. She took us home, gave us a meal and we kipped there.
Early in the morning, they set off for the usual first port of call for evaders, the local church. Their hostess had told them where the priest lived but they were too early for him. He was still in bed. So they tried the next church and the next priest, but he was the nervy type and quite petrified just by standing near two enemies of the Germans. Luckily he was equally frightened of the Germans and told the airmen only to allez-vous en as vite as they possibly could.
‘There was a Metro station handy so I went to the kiosk and bought a Paris guidebook. James thought maybe we should try another religion and so, being C of E according to our RAF ID, we searched the map for the Anglican church we knew must be there somewhere.’
There were several. The nearest one was (and still is) St George’s, rue Auguste Vacquerie, near l’Étoile, but it was closed. A notice on the door in English and French told them that services were suspended for the duration and that the building was under the jurisdiction of the American Embassy. This was only a few days before Pearl Harbor but the USA wasn’t in the war yet and so represented nothing more than friendly neutrality. They found the embassy on their map and resumed on foot, not feeling confident enough to take the Metro. Magrath: ‘We did wonder about the embassy. What arrangements might they have with the occupying power? Would they be obliged to hand us over? So when we saw a building with a Red Cross sign outside, we went in there instead.’
This was another gamble. Would there be anyone in authority in that Red Cross office who would be willing to risk compromising all their good activity just to help two British airmen get back home? In any case, neither of them looked as if they would be able to contribute much to the war effort if they did manage the journey.
The woman who met them at the door didn’t take long to understand who they were and what they wanted. Quickly she ushered them in and along to a room that was a veritable hive of activity, with volunteers packing all sorts of goodies in parcels to be sent to victims of the war. Hopes rose when the woman gave each of the men 50 francs, with a bonus of two oranges, but fell rather sharply when a senior-seeming man turned up to ask them to follow him. Magrath: ‘He took us up several flights of stairs, left us in a tiny attic room at the top of the house, and locked us in. As that key turned, we thought we’d had it. We sat on the floor and waited for the sound of jackboots.’
The more time went by, the better they began to feel. If they had been betrayed, surely the Germans would have been there in short order. So, when they did hear footsteps, and there was only one set, they looked up with moderate enthusiasm as the key turned and the door opened. What they saw was not quite what they’d expected. Magrath:
It was a monk, of all people, in the full outfit. The French Friar Tuck, except more serious. Once he found out I claimed to be Irish, he thought he had a way of checking our story. Where was my school, how many of the masters were priests? Well, none of them, because it was Portora, in Enniskillen, one of King James’s Royal Schools and firmly Protestant, but I told him we’d had a school trip to St Patrick’s grave and that Oscar Wilde was an old boy, and that seemed to satisfy him. Then our original Red Cross chap took us to his house, took us in as non-paying guests, and things began to happen.
The monk visited them several times, once with a camera and later with very authentic looking ID papers, well worn, showing them to be workers from Marseille returning home, which had the side effect of explaining to any curious Parisian Bill Magrath’s unorthodox French accent. He was a country bumpkin from down south. They had train tickets to Nevers, on the border with Vichy France, unoccupied by Germans but officially a kind of German dependency, where they had to wait for the next stage of their journey to be organised.
Meanwhile, John Bristow had resumed his career as radio engineer. In his early days as prisoner at Barth, Stalag Luft 1, security had been fairly lax and working parties had been allowed outside the camp on parole. Barth was a sizeable town with many facilities including a shop that sold radios and spare parts, and Bristow asked someone on parole if he would have a look at the shop and see what might be acquired, such as valves. Just then a rumour went around that the working parties
were to be stopped, so Bristow’s man, not really knowing what he was doing, bought two valves.
These two components happened to be fine for the job Bristow had in mind, but there was nothing else. The working parties were soon forbidden so there was no source of supply. Bristow had no transformer to cut the voltage from the mains to suit the four-volt valves, no condensers, no resisters, and nothing with which to make an earphone. The list of camp bits and pieces employed by Bristow and his mates to make all these things is quite extraordinary: wire from the barracks lighting circuitry, tin cans, the heater from a discarded electric kettle, silver paper from cigarette packets, an aluminium billy can, greaseproof paper, a toothbrush handle, pencil lead, a Bakelite shaving box. Perhaps most remarkable of all, silver paper interleaved with pages from a bible and the resulting sandwich boiled in candle wax, made a condenser. According to Bristow, bibles were the only books to hand that had sufficiently high quality paper.
Bristow’s colleague in all this was Sergeant David Young, WOp/AG with 43 Squadron flying Hampden bombers, who had been attacking aerodromes in northern France on the night of 6/7 December 1940 when he was shot down by flak, crash landed and all crew taken prisoner. Young had been a radio engineer at the BBC before the war and, according to Bristow, ‘should never have been allowed to fly because he was far too clever’.
Interesting viewpoint; air chief marshals all take note. Young’s theoretical knowledge, for example in doing the calculations that allowed them to transform German mains electricity into four volts DC, combined with Bristow’s practical abilities, produced a wireless set, with one essential component missing. It worked, tuned to the 40-metre band on short wave, but they couldn’t listen in because they had no earphone.
The Squadron That Died Twice Page 13