On the night of the 15th/16th February, 1944, a four-engined aircraft approached the village of Marihn from the direction of Berlin at about 11 pm. The aircraft was hit by fire from night fighters and exploded in the air. Police from Penzlin, the neighbouring town, were responsible for the burial of the crew, which took place on 17th February, 1944. This, the official word on Col’s death, though brief was also wrong. I began to suspect a mistake as soon as I started gathering information from elsewhere. The first path of inquiry took me to the man I initially thought might have shot down ‘W’ William, Paul Zorner, who was in the air that night in a Messerschmitt ME110. Refreshed after two weeks’ leave during the full-moon period when the RAF flew no major attacks, Zorner took off through dense ground fog from his airbase at Lüneburg, just south of Hamburg, then climbed through thick cloud to 6500 metres and headed north, hoping to intercept the bomber stream. He skirted the Hamburg flak defences and flew into deteriorating weather over Schleswig-Holstein, bordering Denmark. As he tracked back east towards Kiel the weather improved and he quickened his approach when he saw the trail of a bomber going down in flames.
Just after 8p.m. Zorner’s Bordfunker, Heinz Wilke, picked up squiggles on his radar, indicating an aircraft 300 metres above them. The 15 Squadron Lancaster, ‘LS-O’, had taken off from Mildenhall about 20 minutes after Col’s had cleared the runway at Oakington, further west. In the pilot’s seat was a 23-year-old from Alexandra in Central Otago, Flight Lieutenant Willis Mark Harris. Zorner drifted up and fired from behind and slightly below into the Lancaster’s starboard wing, then he immediately had to jink off to starboard to avoid the answering fire of the bomber’s rear gunner. But the Lancaster’s wing was already well aflame, so Zorner hung off to the side of the bomber and waited for its death throes. The stricken bomber began to descend in a wide spiral, which became steeper the lower it fell. Then, at exactly 8.22p.m., it simply tipped into a vertical dive and struck the Baltic, north of the city of Stralsund. Harris’s body washed ashore at Hiddensee three months later, the only crew member recovered. He is buried in the Berlin War Cemetery at Heerstrasse, his grave not far from Col’s.
In a book on his experiences published in 2007, Zorner reflects on what it felt like to destroy an enemy bomber, and usually all on board.
It is impossible to describe the feelings that come over you in the face of the death struggle of such an aircraft. As an airman you shudder at the prospect of what your weapons have wrought just seconds before, and you hope your opponents emerge alive. As someone fighting for the safety of defenceless people, you observe the tragedy unfolding in the night sky with utterly cold satisfaction. As a soldier you have an almost scientific, mechanical view of the scene, since you’re a tradesman qualified in the destruction of the enemy’s attacking capacity. You want to see what effect you have had and would like to remain in the vicinity as long as it takes to be able to report the ‘kill’.[1]Some 40 minutes after Harris’s Lancaster plunged into the Baltic, Wilke picked up a new ‘squiggle’ and Zorner intercepted another Lancaster before it could release its bomb load on Berlin, shooting it down in a fashion almost identical to the first and again ducking away from answering fire. This Lancaster crashed at Neuruppin, north of Berlin, at 9.11p.m. and as I matched up the details I wondered whether this could be my great-uncle’s plane. It is an eerie feeling thinking you may come face to face, more than six decades later, with the killer of a family member – even one working to the impersonal imperatives of combat. I knew from my research that Zorner had shot down 59 bombers, killing around 400 RAF airmen. The need to find out if one of these might have been my great-uncle mingled with a deep apprehension that Paul Zorner might be Col’s killer. Of course, curiosity had the upper hand.
I visited Neuruppin and Marihn, both north of Berlin and about 70 kilometres apart, a distance that a Lancaster would take about 10 minutes to cover flying at top speed. I wondered, therefore, whether there could have been a mix-up between two separate incidents of broken, black shapes falling to earth on a moonless night. After all, the report mentioned night fighters, plural, and I knew they usually hunted alone. I also wondered whether the time of Zorner’s second shooting down that night, 9.11p.m., and that reported to my great-grandmother of nearly two hours later, could have become confused in the four years between his death and the letter conveying that brief crash report. I later received a copy of another report, from the exhumation team sent to Penzlin in 1947. This more extensive report was the first to mention a crash time: 9p.m., according to local reports. For some reason this was changed in subsequent references to 11p.m., which I thought unlikely, since this was some two hours after the Lancaster would have reached Berlin.
I had tucked away in my mind from earlier research the unusual name of Zorner, one of 23 pilots who shared in the 35 ‘kills’ officially attributed to particular Luftwaffe night fighters that night, so when I learned that a Paul Zorner had just published a book recounting his experiences, I wondered whether I had stumbled on a welcome coincidence. I phoned and emailed the book’s publisher, asking for Zorner’s contact details, and was told the former pilot now lived in a managed-care home for the elderly. The publisher gave me Zorner’s number, which I phoned. I was struck by the strong, authoritative voice, not unfriendly but without any obvious warmth either – possibly a little wary. I outlined the background to my search. Then I sent him a letter, asking whether he might be the pilot who had shot down Col Jones’s plane. I enclosed a detailed map showing the respective locations of the crash sites. A few days later a copy of Zorner’s book arrived from the publisher and I quickly established that the plane he had shot down over Neuruppin was not Col’s, since Zorner himself had identified it as another aircraft.
I later visited Zorner in Homburg-Saar, in Germany’s south-west, and found him surprisingly congenial, relieved to take off his tie when I arrived not wearing one. During a three-hour conversation, he explained the simple logic that drove him during the war: ‘When we experienced what your namesake, Harris – supported by the Americans – carried out with his bombing of German cities, that really made me angry. I said once to my Bordfunker that the only way we could fulfil our duty to our homeland was to drive the losses of the Royal Air Force so high that they would just say: “The successes don’t justify the losses; we’ll call a stop to it.”’ Of the night Col died, Zorner remembered only the shooting down of the two Lancasters, as described above. These kills contributed to his tally of 33 bombers in just five months that winter, and of 59 by the end of the war. (Map 3)
Map 3: The last night—where events unfolded
My attempts to find out more about the events of 15 February 1944 took me several times to Marihn and Penzlin, the two towns mentioned in the 1947 crash reports. Not until my third visit did I glean what I was looking for. One morning 64 years after Col died, my children and I drove north from Berlin along a straight road lined with mature trees. The scrawny pine forests and sandy soil around Berlin soon give way to the richer agricultural land of Brandenburg. As we progressed north the sun filtered weakly through a thickening February fog, which had closed in by the time we drove through Fürstenberg, about 90 minutes north of Berlin, to obscure the turn-off to the former women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where many of the inmates had been used for medical experiments.
I wanted to see what Penzlin looked like in mid-February, the time Col and his crew met their end there. The conditions certainly lent an atmosphere of reflection, if not foreboding. I had arranged an 11.30a.m. meeting with the Lutheran pastor of the Marienkirche, the old brick church on the crown of the town. Over the phone I had explained briefly the background to my visit. To my surprise we were met at the church entrance by not only the pastor, Hartmuth Reincke, but also an older man. Kurt Köhn was dressed plainly and wore large plastic-framed glasses. Born in 1930, he had lived in Penzlin all his 77 years and in that time had seen the Nazis, the Russians and the nation of East Germany come and go.
The r
eason for his unexpected presence became clear at the outset: Köhn was a 13-year-old schoolboy when, on 16 February 1944, he heard the news that was spreading rapidly through this quiet rural town. A British bomber had exploded over the outskirts of the town during the night, injuring old farmer Karl Boldt, badly damaging his farmhouse and disintegrating in countless pieces over his fields. When Köhn got back on the train from his classes in the nearby town of Neubrandenburg at lunchtime, he jumped straight onto his bike and joined the steady trail of townsfolk on the 6-kilometre road to the Boldt farmstead.
He found a scene of devastation beyond his imagination. For Köhn and most other natives of Penzlin, this was the first, shocking visitation of a war that, even by early 1944, had taken its sons away but had left the town itself untouched. A bomb crater some 7 metres wide and 4 metres deep had been torn in the yard just south of the farmhouse, which had collapsed inwards with the blast. The explosion had evidently triggered a larger one on board the Lancaster, which accounted for the hail of debris and body parts strewn over 500 metres. A crowd, already large and still growing, was now busying itself gathering up pieces of the aircraft, as much for souvenirs as to help the police. Köhn came across no body parts himself, nor could he remember seeing engines, wheels, or any of the larger pieces usually found in the wreckage of a large bomber, but he and his friends quickly gathered up bits of clear perspex from the cockpit canopy and gun turrets, because this material burned like fireworks.
Köhn and Reincke drove with us to the farm, where we were met by Ingeburg Barz, Karl Boldt’s granddaughter, who had lived there all her life. On the night of the explosion Frau Barz had been away at Neubrandenburg, half an hour’s drive east, celebrating her sixth birthday. Sixty-four years later, as we stood where the crater had been – 20 metres from her house – she recounted what her grandfather had told her. Boldt had arrived injured in the larger town nearby, Penzlin, late the previous night, to report what had happened and to seek help. He told police and friends that at the time of the explosion he had just returned from collecting his wife in a horse-drawn cart from the railway station in Marihn, the small village closest to his farm. Boldt had resumed the running of the farm while his son was away serving in the German army, the Wehrmacht. A French forced labourer assigned to help him on the farm was unharnessing the horse in the yard in front of the stables when they heard a heavy bomber under attack and approaching from the direction of Berlin to the south. The aircraft sounded damaged and was flying very low, apparently in an attempt to shake off the attacking night fighter.
They watched in horror as the bomber, heading straight for them, jettisoned a large bomb – the one that left the crater. A split second later the explosion appeared to tear the Lancaster apart in mid-air. It seems probable, from the wide dispersal and minute fragmentation of the debris, that the upblast detonated what was left in the bomb bay. The force of the explosion blew the Frenchman through the gap between the stables and the farmhouse. He landed on his head in a paddock 50 metres away, stunned but otherwise uninjured. Boldt was still gripping the handle of the farmhouse front door when the blast tore it open with such force it broke his arm. His wife, standing next to him, was unscathed. And there was another compensating mercy that night: young Ingeburg’s absence meant she was not asleep in her bedroom, which bore the brunt of the explosion. The blast collapsed the entire side of the house and also wrecked the stables and barn, killing several animals.
The size of the explosion was a clear sign the Lancaster had not been destroyed purely by enemy gunfire, but by an explosion of bombs still on board, possibly a full load. This did not match up with the New Zealand Air Department’s reported crash time of 11p.m., which would have been about two hours after ‘W’ William would have reached Berlin, because by then Col’s Lancaster would already have dropped its target-marking flares, incendiaries and any high-explosive blast bombs it had taken off with and it would never have remained in the vicinity for another two hours. With a near-empty bomb bay, a low-flying bomber would have created a point of impact on crashing, even if it exploded before hitting the ground. Clarifying the timing was therefore important to establishing what actually happened.
Ingeburg Barz confirmed my doubts, saying her grandfather told her the explosion occurred two hours earlier, just after 9p.m. Further evidence came when I received Col’s personnel file from the New Zealand Defence Force archives. The documents, which the family had not seen, included several relating to the RAF investigation into the crash and the recovery of the human remains. The earliest of these, dated 25 September 1947, cites German records giving the explosion time as 9p.m. – two hours earlier than our family had been told.[2] This would have been about three hours after the Lancaster left Oakington and would be consistent with an arrival time over Berlin to light up the target about 15 minutes ahead of the main bomber stream. If so, Col’s Lancaster could easily have been picked up as a lonely signal by the radar, a night fighter directed onto it, and been chased north. It seems likely either that the Lancaster had been mortally damaged by this stage or that the pilot was hugging the ground so its defenceless belly would not be exposed and so that the mid-upper and rear gunners could maximise their fire, with the fighter more visible against the sky.
I later found out that ‘W’ William had first jettisoned another bomb a kilometre to the south of the farm, near the small town of Mollensdorf. This suggested to me that Col, as bomb aimer, had not yet had time to drop his explosive cargo and was frantically trying to do so, either in the knowledge a crash-landing was imminent or to enable the Lancaster to gain speed and height to make good its escape. Instead, it seems the upblast of the second bomb detonated what was still in the bomb bay. This would have produced an explosion big enough to atomise the bomber in mid-air and, even at that low altitude, to strew its fragments over half a kilometre without leaving a single, main point of impact.
The Lancaster had somehow blown itself up, pursued but not shot down by a night fighter. Whether a fighter crew claimed a ‘kill’ is not known, but both Col’s Lancaster and the one flown by his 7 Squadron colleague and fellow Aucklander, John Hegman, were among only eight of the 43 aircraft Bomber Command lost on this raid for which no Luftwaffe pilot was given the credit. The result was the same, but I felt a sense of triumph the Lancaster had not been shot out of the sky by the enemy but had fought to the last. More powerful than that feeling, however, was a sense of closure. Our family now knew in all probability what had really happened. I felt I had at least been able to pay the crew that tribute – and at the place where they had risked all and lost.
The men would not have suffered. Col, and no doubt all the crew, knew the risk of dropping bombs so far below their safety height – he had commented on this in his diary at least twice. The bombs would have been switched to safety but these often exploded anyway, just as primed bombs sometimes did not go off. It seems that in the desperation of trying to evade a heavily armed, faster and more agile pursuer, Col and the skipper must have decided the risk was worth it. The body of the skipper, Flight Lieutenant Roy Barnes DFC, came to rest in what was left of the Boldt farm stables and was able to be identified by a shattered fragment of his dog-tag. Two other bodies were recognisable as human forms but not identifiable, and were buried in separate coffins alongside Barnes at nearby Marihn cemetery.
In many similar cases of RAF crew buried in the Soviet occupation zone, the Russian authorities would not allow the British to recover the remains, but the families of Col’s crew were more fortunate. The RAF’s Missing Research and Enquiry Unit (MREU) exhumed the bodies in 1947 for reburial in Berlin. Its investigation report records that there was also a fourth coffin, which ‘contained one small, confused, heap of unidentifiable remains’. That left three crew unaccounted for, and the investigating officer suggested they might have either tried to bale out and died away from the crash scene or were discovered later and buried elsewhere.[3] That seems unlikely, particularly in the light of something Frau Barz told
me: a few years after the war – she could not remember exactly when – a friend’s dog started pulling an airman’s glove from under the rubble of the farmhouse. When the dog’s owner looked more closely she found it was on the hand of an intact skeleton. By then the war had brought much suffering to that part of Germany and this was not the only body making its way to the surface. I wondered what became of this skeleton. For years afterwards, once a small barracks built by the army on the site of the destroyed farmhouse had itself been removed, Frau Barz’s farmer husband turned up pieces of human bone while tilling his vegetable garden near the crater. The grave of Flight Lieutenant Barnes, DFC, has its own plot in the Berlin War Cemetery at Heerstrasse. Alongside it are six headstones laid closely side by side – the collective grave for Col and his five other fellow crew members.
Metal fragments from the aircraft – mainly bullets – occasionally worked their way to the surface of the surrounding fields. Herr Barz gave me one such fragment: a piece of aluminium body panelling, part of Col’s plane, a tangible link to the past that I shall treasure. The tiki given to Col by Princess Te Puea may lie out there still. It may even be found one day. I described this to Frau and Herr Barz and explained its significance, just in case it might one day be returned to the Tainui tribe.
A week before his death, Col wrote a last letter to his mother. Though he typed it on Oakington Airbase Officers’ Mess letterhead paper, he was careful not to mention he was going back on operations.
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 18