In the same instant, Otto saw the Mosquito slide over his plane and he made to position himself to attack the British aircraft from behind. He armed the weapons, hearing the gun covers slide back, then as he cocked his right index finger over the firing button he drew back the yoke to bring the Heinkel’s nose upward to bear on the Mosquito ahead. But it came back lifeless; the Mosquito must have shot through the cabling for the elevators. He still had the use of his rudders and the ailerons, which controlled roll, but Otto knew he had no prospect of landing, let alone of pursuing the Mosquito.
The Heinkel began to roller-coast, losing speed each time it climbed, then accelerating with each dive. Otto tried to compensate by trimming the tail elevators and throttling back each time it flew downwards, knowing that maintaining altitude was crucial to getting close to base before baling out. When the Heinkel was down to 1000 metres, Otto wrenched back the throttles and in the comparative silence of the lower engine revs he shouted to Fred to bale out. Then he thrust the throttles forward to bring the nose of the aircraft up again and levered open the safety strip for the ejector seat. Otto discarded the cockpit canopy and waited for the percussive roar of Fred’s ejector seat being fired clear of the aircraft, then he thumped his own ejector-seat rod and felt himself being propelled into the night. The slipstream immediately caught him and flipped him round. Otto unfastened the harness, then jettisoned the seat itself. He counted a few seconds before pulling the rectangular handgrip on his parachute ripcord. As he swung there, he felt the cold pressing damply on his face and he could make out snow shimmering below. Otto took the flare pistol from the right pocket of his flying trousers, loaded a cartridge and fired a magnesium flare downwards. He could see in its light Fred’s parachute floating earthwards to his left. Otto fired two more flares, to illuminate the landing zone.
He saw that he and Fred were coming down in a heavily wooded area, with only a small clearing, in which he could make out a cluster of village buildings. On one side of the village, tall pine trees rose up in a dense wall; on the other, an area of deciduous trees presented a physically less hostile prospect for landing. Otto pulled on the left stay of his parachute harness and felt himself slide towards his left. Too far – he would sail clean over the village and was now heading straight for the deciduous trees. He let the tension off the left parachute stays and felt his course correct itself. But too late: he felt a splintering of branches.
Otto found himself cradled in the top of a large oak, and seconds later the parachute canopy settled silently and gently over its broad crown like a bird net. Awkwardly he swung downwards, pawing the air with his boot for a solid footing. Once he had found a reliable foothold among the springy outer branches, he released his parachute harness, twisting the safety clasp like a jar lid, then springing it loose with a thump. Otto fumbled in the darkness for his flare pistol and shot another magnesium flare upwards, to show the lie of the land. The oak in which he was perched stood on the edge of a steep bank, above a small valley though which a narrow road ran alongside a stream. A small bridge spanned the stream, the road leading on towards the village. Fred had landed in the village, and shouted to Otto the moment the flare shot skywards. ‘Otakar! Come down to the village, but watch out for the stream!’
As he clambered down through the dim body of the oak, branch by branch, Otto winced, aware he had given his right knee a heavy whack. He could not remember this happening, but now he felt the knee swelling painfully inside his flying suit. He reached the bottom branch and surveyed the snow-covered ground below with a mixture of irritation and concern. He had no option but to try to shimmy down the tall oak’s thick trunk. Otto knew his injured knee and thick flying suit would not make things any easier, but two things might help: his thick gloves and the inflatable dinghy on his back, which could serve as a cushion to break a fall. He fired the compressed air bottle, let the dinghy inflate and then fall like an oversized doughnut to the snow.
Now he began the descent, using his acutely painful knee as a brake. Too late he registered the hindrance of his life vest bunching between him and the tree trunk. Its inflation bottle was fixed to his left thigh and he felt it dragging against the rough bark as he slid downwards. Then, with an affronted hiss, it burst into life as the friction activated the compressed air release. The chest panels of the vest flared out like a bullfrog’s jowl and bounced him out from the tree trunk. Struck by the comic stupidity of his fall from grace, Otto closed the distance to the ground in a soundless instant, the inflatable dinghy receiving him like a catcher’s mitt.
Now he scrambled down the steep bank, floundering in the deep snow. Fred met him at the bridge over the stream and led him towards a tavern. They knocked on the door, which opened to reveal a nervous publican, who told them they had come down in a small village north of Frankfurt. The whole village had taken shelter when they heard the screaming of aircraft engines and the impact of the Heinkel, thinking it was an enemy bomber that might crash into their houses. With great relief, the tavern owner phoned Otto’s and Fred’s airbase to report them safe. Then he opened the bar and treated them like kings. Otto’s knee had swelled up so much his flying dungarees had to be cut from him. But that did not dampen the celebrations that awaited him and Fred once they made it back to their mess. As Otto recalled, ‘We poured oil on the flames that night!’
But home base did not necessarily mean home safe. Otto Fries told me that despite his narrow escapes in the air, he had felt most terrified – and certain he was about to die – two months before this baling out over the small village. The experience was the one time he was caught in a bombing raid, and came relatively late in the war, in November 1944. By this stage, following the D-Day landings in Normandy in June, the Allied advance had increased the pressure on the German air defence. Otto’s squadron had been moved from Belgium to the Netherlands, then on to Münster-Handorf in Germany’s north-west. Because of the frequency of attacks on their airbase, the squadron had moved into living quarters away from that target, and were accommodated in a convent nearby.
That November morning Otto had returned from night operations relatively late, turning in at 6a.m. and sliding into sleep with some difficulty. He dreamed fitfully of making an emergency landing and standing alone on the runway under a thundercloud. He woke to the realisation the cloud was the crashing of flak guns, accompanied by the wailing of the hand-sirens being cranked by nuns running along the corridors. He tore open the blackout curtains to see about three dozen US Flying Fortress bombers approaching through the brown smoke clumps of flak explosions. Knowing the convent lay directly on the bombers’ approach path to the airbase some 3 kilometres beyond, Otto sprang into action, alerting his room mate, Paul Stieghorst, who simply snuffled and turned over.
Otto, by contrast, watched with mounting panic as the bomber formation drew nearer, then the lead aircraft dropped his smoke marker to signal the start of bombing – not with the airfield in range, but rather the convent. ‘Paul! The smoke signal has us marked. Get out!’ Otto dragged his heavy, flying dungarees over his pyjamas, stabbed his feet into slippers and grabbed his cap and gloves as he took off along the corridor and drummed down the wooden stairs for the exit. Already he could hear bombs whistling downwards close by.
Trenches that had been dug into the grass in front of the convent for shelter seemed too far away, so he sprinted for the beech forest instead and threw himself to the ground as the first crunching explosions shook themselves into him through the earth. The explosions and the droning of 140 engines combined as a sickening thunder, interspersed with the shrill splintering of glass and trees. As the sound became deafening he thought he was about to die: ‘It felt like someone was running a steel brush down my spine, from my neck to my tailbone. It was the most terrifying experience of the war for me – far worse than being shot down, because I was so helpless.’
Suddenly, total silence returned, itself an assault on the senses. A whistle sounded the all-clear – punctuated by five distant expl
osions of bombs falling beyond the convent. Otto took in the shattered woods, cloaked in acrid smoke. As he shook off the dirt, he saw the edge of the nearest bomb crater only three steps to his left. Some distance beyond that he noticed the trench shelters had been obliterated by two direct hits. Grit, fragments of masonry and splintered beech wood littered the ground between the craters and the convent in which he had been sleeping just minutes before.
The building itself stood undamaged apart from its windows, all of which had been blasted out, some of them spilling tattered blackout curtains from their frames. Still dazed, Otto skirted the crater-pocked stretch of ground to reach the building. One door had been blown away completely; the other swung precariously on a broken hinge. As Otto crunched his way up the stairs over glass splinters he saw, framed in the doorway at the top, his room-mate, Paul Stieghorst, standing barefoot and in his pyjamas. ‘Man! How did you get here – from the cellar?’ Otto asked in astonishment.
‘Hardly! I couldn’t jump into the cellar with the nuns in this get-up! This is as far as I got, and I’ve been tucked in the corner behind the door the whole time. A swinging door missed ripping my nose off by just a few centimetres! Can you get me my slippers? I can’t move here for all the glass on the floor.’
Otto carried on up the stairs, found Paul’s sports shoes, shook the glass splinters from them and threw them down the stairs.
It was just after ten in the morning. At first glance, their room looked just as they had left it, except for the crystal shower of glass everywhere. The blackout curtains were shredded. Otto and Paul raked the glass splinters from their beds, fixed blankets around the empty window frames and went back to sleep. At midday, an orderly woke them for lunch and they made their way to the canteen. As Otto spooned soup into his mouth he overheard a nun say to his commander, ‘God has held his hand over our convent!’ Paul grinned and elbowed Otto in the ribs, spilling his soup. ‘See, we’re in the wrong job – we should be nuns!’
Just four weeks later Paul Stieghorst and his Bordfunker were blasted from the sky south of Bremen by flak from their own side. Otto was sent to break the news to Paul’s father. By then, December 1944, Germany had clearly lost the war.
Part Three
RECKONING
CHAPTER 11
COPING WITH LOSS
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Epitaph on the headstone of Irish ‘war poet’ W.B. Yeats
By the end of the mounting death toll among Col’s friends was affecting him in ways he only hints at it in his letters home, but it clearly influenced his decision to return to operations. By the time he completed his first tour and left Lakenheath just before Christmas 1942, a huge swathe had been cut through 149 Squadron and others to which some of his friends had been posted. But for Col the biggest blow had yet to come: on 2 February 1943 his closest wartime friend, Barry Martin of Christchurch, died in the wreckage of a 7 Squadron Stirling shot down near Rotterdam on the way back from a raid on Cologne. On board was the first H2S radar unit captured by the Germans, a find that proved so important in the ‘stealth race’ against Bomber Command described in Chapter 6.
Many firm friendships were cut short by death, so Col’s and Barry’s had flourished against the odds. It continued after Barry completed his first tour in July 1942 then volunteered for a second tour, with 7 Squadron at Oakington, just north of Cambridge and west of the cathedral town of Ely. Col followed his dead friend’s path to Oakington in January 1944, but was himself killed a few weeks later on his first op of his second tour. With this knowledge weighing on me, I sought out Oakington in the summer of 2007. I approached through the town of Histon, along narrow corkscrew lanes with thatched cottages on the rise and old stone walls setting off the colour of hollyhocks, poppies and hydrangeas. It was obvious, as I had been told, that Oakington’s heyday as one of the RAF’s premier stations was long past. Once a base for one of the finest bomber squadrons of the war, now only a small cluster of buildings breathed any life at all, and these as a refugee settlement centre. The hedgerows pressed close to the road verge, preventing me from gaining any perspective on the former airfield itself and foiling my sense of direction.
Neatly manicured Oakington-Westwick village appears to be a recent retirement housing estate. A stencil-like iron ‘welcome’ sign at the village entrance features a Lancaster bomber soaring over a country church and an ox ploughing a field – a reminder of both its origins and its glory days. After parking on a rough verge, I walked up a metal access road until I reached two galvanised, farm-style gates sporting faded signs saying ‘Defence Property Keep Out.’ I climbed over and found myself on the scaly remains of what had once been Oakington’s perimeter track. Here the lumbering ‘heavies’ – the Stirlings and Lancasters – had taxied to the start of the runway and taken off into the night. A square hay bale lay where it had been thrown from a vehicle and a few small, self-sown oaks brushed the edge of the carriageway. The broken asphalt gave off a tremor of heat and memory. Here you were, Col, for the last time.
This had also been Barry’s last point of departure. Col first learned of his friend’s fate when he phoned Oakington in early February 1943 to invite Barry to his investiture at Buckingham Palace, only to be told he had just been reported missing in action. Col was to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross from King George VI, but now his proudest moment of the war was overshadowed by anxiety over whether he would ever see his close friend again. Barry was also awarded the DFC, gazetted only after his death. And I later discovered the two shared another honour, this one relating specifically to their time at Oakington.
I drove along a lush country lane into the village of Longstanton. St Michael’s Church sat atop a rise, ringed with old headstones and set back from a large chestnut tree that shaded both a corner gate and an ancient well. It was a timeless scene, where I was as likely to have seen the vicar riding past in a horse and trap as met the gardener on a ride-on mower. Driving through the village’s main intersection towards a soulless new housing estate clustered down the hill, I passed another old church, this one sturdier-looking and with a significance I learned of only later. All Saints’ Church contains the Roll of Honour listing those killed flying with 7 Squadron, including Col Jones and Barry Martin. I discovered this when going through the squadron’s archives at the RAF Museum in Hendon, west London, where a facsimile is held. I was sad not to have seen inside the church, but I regretted more that Col, during his brief tenure at Oakington at the coldest point of winter, never had the chance to cycle through these lanes when they were green and speckled with bright flowers as they were on the day I visited.
I had another visit to make. It took me back to Mildenhall a few months later, and to the bungalow of 92-year-old Fred Coney, the president of the association for 149 Squadron and three others that operated from that airbase during the war. Coney, a lanky figure with a lively sense of humour, eased himself into my rental car and chatted while we drove the short distance to St John’s Church at Holywell Row and the Beck Row War Cemetery beside it. Using his walking stick, Coney picked his way carefully across the lumpy grass, around the back of the stone church to a section neatly demarcated from the other headstones and containing the graves of 78 Commonwealth servicemen who died during the war. A US F-15 fighter-bomber from Lakenheath thundered overhead as we surveyed the rows of uniform white headstones. Most buried at Beck Row died while flying from Mildenhall, Lakenheath or other airbases nearby. The most famous grave is that of an Australian pilot, Rawdon Hume ‘Ron’ Middleton, who earned the Victoria Cross for a breathtaking act of self-sacrifice in November 1942. In a letter to his mother on 2 February 1943, Col wrote of these deeds, and of his regard for Middleton:
We heard the other day that one of the chaps from the squadron, Flight Sergeant Ron Middleton, has been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. You will probably have read about it in the paper. He was a great friend of mine and a fine chap. Hi
s exploit, in the official citation for his award, was ‘unsurpassed in the annals of the RAF.’ He was badly wounded over Turin, losing one eye, having his face torn open, and also being wounded in the body. They flew at 5000ft through a pass in the Alps, and when they got to the English coast he told the rest of the crew to bale out. He did not leave the machine. Perhaps he was too weak. In any case, it had no automatic pilot, so had he left the controls, it would have crashed and perhaps killed someone on English ground. So he flew out to sea and went down with it. Two of the crew baled out over the sea and were drowned. The rest were saved. The deed caused a tremendous wave of emotion right throughout this country. There are a number of ex-149 Squadron chaps here, so we sent his mother a cable, each signing it. I have written a letter which we are all going to sign and post it to her. He was a fine chap. Then in today’s paper I read that they had found his body. It was washed ashore on the south coast. It was the death of a brave man. He was an Australian, the best they send out.
I had wanted to visit Beck Row Cemetery because Col had been a pallbearer at the burial there of another 149 Squadron friend and colleague. Eric Wynn, a Canadian pilot, and his entire crew died when their Stirling caught fire and crashed shortly after take-off on 24 August 1942. They were among 8000 airmen to die in crashes over Britain, more than one in seven of all the Bomber Command aircrew killed during the war. Col described the ceremony in his diary four days later:
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 14