We turned back for home, jubilant at having accounted for eight of the enemy without loss to ourselves. Taken in isolation, it was a splendid result. And even when only three of our eight claims were subsequently confirmed, the fact alone that we had returned without casualties on this historic day was achievement enough in itself. But from an overall point of view, our personal successes–whether eight or three–were again just a drop in the ocean.
Eichhoff, Beer and I were nonetheless still buoyed up when we touched down back at Senlis. It was now about 21.30hrs and dusk had fallen. A short while earlier, quite by chance, a couple of war reporters had turned up at the field with their recording van. They were trying to cobble together an up-to-the-minute report from the invasion front. Upon being informed that we were just returning from a combat mission, they rushed over to interview us, thrusting a microphone in front of our faces and demanding to know all about the fight we had been in less than half an hour earlier–you can’t get much more recent than that. When our ordeal was over, the three of us were each presented with a copy of the recording they had made. Unfortunately, my disc was lost along with a lot of my other effects after I was shot down the following morning.
That morning–7 June–began shortly after 05.30hrs when another twelve of the Gruppe’s Fw 190s, each carrying two underwing rockets, lifted off from Senlis. The objective was once again the invasion shipping off Gold beach, which might explain why Major Hohagen, who was leading today’s mission, had selected me to fly as his wingman. At yesterday’s debriefing I had been asked to describe in some detail the rudimentary procedure I had adopted for aiming and launching my rockets. As I was the only pilot to achieve a hit, perhaps he now looked upon me as the unit’s anti-shipping expert. Maybe he thought it could do no harm to have me on his wing–even though, in all honesty, I had pointed out that I was also the only pilot lucky enough to have been presented with a target almost sideways on.
We employed similar tactics to the day before, approaching Gold from the seaward side at an altitude of about 1,000 metres and with our throttles wide open. But the situation, both on the water below and in the air all around us, was far less favourable than it had been the day before. The British were on the alert and we stood absolutely no chance of manoeuvring into position for a coordinated rocket attack. We simply had to fire our missiles in the general direction of the ships standing off the beach, trusting more to luck than judgement. Needless to say, we didn’t score a single hit.
But I must admit I was surprised when our leader made no move to take us down for a strafing run with our cannon. I could only assume that today’s mission included further targets that only the Kommandeur had been briefed on, and which we wingmen, for some reason, had not been told about. So it was a case of sticking close and following his lead.
But then, some 1,500 metres almost directly ahead of me on the sea below, I spotted a large landing ship. It must have been a good 2,000 tons and appeared to be lying stationary in the water, with troops preparing to disembark into a clutch of small amphibious craft hovering alongside. On a sudden impulse–and against every rule of formation-keeping discipline that had ever been drummed into me–I pushed the stick forward, intending to give the vessel a good burst, almost in passing, as it were. I knew that when we got back to base I could expect the mother and father of all roastings for leaving my number one–the Kommandeur himself, no less–alone and unprotected for those few moments. But I would be back in my place on his wing in next to no time, I thought to myself…except that things didn’t quite turn out that way.
As I dived at the ship I opened up with everything I had. Fire from my four 20-mm cannon and two heavy machine guns raked the vessel’s deck. At first there was no return fire from my selected target, but the gun crews on all the surrounding ships seemed suddenly to wake up to the fact that one of their number was under attack from the air. Tracer came at me from all sides. I felt as if I was flying into a glowing spider’s web.
I was almost directly above the landing ship, and just about to pull up out of danger, when I felt the fuselage of my machine take several hits. Then the engine caught a packet. It immediately started to spray oil all over the windscreen and I realized that I had finally pushed my luck too far. This was it–no choices this time. I had to bale out.
But I needed to gain some height before I could safely take to my parachute. I pulled the nose of the Focke-Wulf up into a steep climb. With the engine already beginning to labour, I was losing speed rapidly and still taking hits from the ships that continued to fire at me furiously. At 600 metres I decided it was time to go. I had already completed the preparatory bale-out ritual–everything unbuckled and undone–but this time I decided to be more careful. I wasn’t going to roll out over the side of the cockpit and risk getting trapped again. I would catapult myself out cleanly.
Lifting myself from my seat, I gave the stick a hefty kick with my right foot. As expected, the machine instantly tipped forward on to its nose and I was shot quite comfortably straight out of the cockpit by the sudden force of the negative g. But then the slipstream caught me and hurled me backwards against the tailplane.
Fortunately, I hit it with my left shoulder. I say fortunately because it could so easily have been my head or right shoulder that took the blow, which would have meant ‘curtains’ on the spot or not being able to use my right hand to open my parachute. As it was, I hardly felt a thing. It was only later in hospital that I was told I had broken not only my shoulder blade, but my collar-bone, upper arm and three ribs as well.
I must have been in a state of some shock, however, for as I drifted slowly down in my parachute everything around me seemed to be cocooned in an eerie silence. The light flak now coming up at me from the ship I had just attacked, the bullets singing past my ears and tearing a few small holes in the silk canopy of my ’chute–none of it really registered. A stiff breeze was driving me towards the beach at Ver-sur-Mer. And it wasn’t until I was just a few metres off the ground that people finally stopped using me for target practice.
In those days there was about a 100-metre wide stretch of sand and sea-grass between the water’s edge and the rising land on which the village stood. And it was in the middle of this that I came gently to earth, and it was only when I touched the ground that my hearing slowly started to return and I began to feel the pain in my left shoulder.
CHAPTER 8
CAPTIVITY
The first thing to do was to get out of my parachute, which was developing a mind of its own and starting to drag me through the spiky grass. I managed this with my one good arm and then tried to conceal both it and myself in what little cover there was on the exposed beach. In my innocence–ignorance, if you like–I imagined that if only I could keep out of sight long enough, we would launch the promised counter-attack, drive the Tommys back into the water, and take the opportunity to rescue me at the same time.
But, instead of this wishful scenario, it wasn’t long before I saw through the grass two upturned soup bowls slowly approaching me–British helmets! Their wearers were advancing with extreme caution, prodding the sand ahead of them with thin sticks as they came. When they were about twenty metres away from me they raised their rifles and shouted: “Hands up!” In those days my English was non-existent, but their meaning was obvious. I still had my pride as a Luftwaffe officer, however, and didn’t want to subject myself to this indignity. So instead, and with some justification, I remained lying on the ground, my face screwed up in pain, and waved at them with my right arm.
They cottoned on at once. When they got to me they helped me to my feet; but not before first confiscating my silk parachute. Then they searched me for weapons. But in the west none of us wore side arms when flying on operations. Finally, they indicated that I was to accompany them. We were to walk in single file, with me in the middle, while they resumed their ceremonial prodding of the ground, explaining that we were in the middle of a German minefield.
“Bugger it,” I th
ought to myself, “after all that, and now you’re probably going to die a hero’s death blown up by one of our own mines.” But we got out safely and made our way to a small tent with a red cross painted on it. Here a medic gave me first aid by folding my left forearm against the upper arm and binding both tightly together with my shoulder. It made the pain much more bearable.
I must say those lads treated me very well. They got me a warm blanket–it was still rather chilly this early in the morning–and motioned for me to sit or lie down next to the tent. They gave me a mug of hot cocoa and offered me a cigarette, which I gratefully accepted. It must have been my nerves, for up until that time I had been a strict non-smoker. (I was to remain a slave to the weed from that 7 June 1944 until finally giving up the habit in 1962.)
As I lay there sipping my cocoa and smoking, I was able to watch the vast amounts of war matériel pouring ashore over the kilometre-long stretch of beach in front of me. Marshals were herding every vehicle on to some sort of artificial track that led from the beach up to the high ground immediately next to Ver-sur-Mer–and all this was going on without the slightest sign of any countermeasures from our side. The Tommys must have pushed quite a way inland already. Only once did a mine go up between the landing craft crowding the water’s edge, but it did no damage as far as I could tell.
In the afternoon I was taken to a small patch of open ground in the centre of Ver-sur-Mer, which was being used as a collecting point for the first German prisoners. About twenty were already there. I hadn’t seen a single local inhabitant as I walked through the ruined village, which had been badly knocked about by the pre-invasion bombardment. Two armed sentries were patrolling the low stone wall that enclosed the area of grass, no more than about thirty metres square, that we now occupied. A few tents had already been put up to offer us some protection from the cold of the night ahead. From this I deduced that our captors were not yet prepared, or able, to transport us back to England.
From our ‘prison camp’ in the village I could no longer see the beach itself, but the battleships lying further out to sea were still clearly visible. After darkness had fallen they provided an awe-inspiring and fascinating spectacle. Every few minutes one or other of them would fire a salvo from its enormous 40-cm guns. For a moment a vivid orange cloud would blossom out of the blackness and from it would emerge the glowing pinpricks of the shells as they climbed slowly–or so it appeared from this distance–high into the sky on their way inland…and still no evidence whatsoever of any counterattack, either by land, sea or air.
This, together with the fact that I had been separated from my comrades, the Staffel and the Geschwader, and was no longer able to help Germany in her present hour of need, filled me with a sense of deep depression. Naturally, my thoughts turned to my family back in Rosenheim, especially my mother and sister, whose letters to me would now be returned to them stamped ‘Fallen for Greater Germany’. But fortunately it was only a few weeks before they learned from information broadcast by the British authorities that I had survived and was in captivity only slightly wounded.
The author on home leave in 1943 pictured with his grandmother…
My grandmother, strange to relate, had not needed official confirmation. She was a keen amateur astrologist. And although we often poked fun at her for her belief in the stars, she had lost no time in drawing up a chart of the constellations for 7 June, the day I had gone missing. This, she insisted, showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was very much alive. Just how right she was may be judged from the fact that both the chart and I are still in existence to this day.
Thoughts of escape also crossed my mind. It would not have been difficult. But I knew that I wouldn’t get far with my useless left arm. Instead I spent a sleepless night worrying about what the future held in store. I must have finally dozed off, for I was suddenly woken again at about 6am by the angry hammering of flak out to sea. Then I heard the roar of fighter engines, unmistakably Fw 190s, somewhere close by. Could it have been the Geschwader–perhaps even my own Staffel–attacking the shipping off Gold for the third morning in a row? But after that–nothing. For the remainder of the day the only sounds of battle were the distant rumbles of naval gunfire as the enemy’s heavy warships kept up their bombardment of our ground forces now fighting far inland.
…and the astrological chart she drew up to ‘prove’ her grandson was still alive despite being reported missing.
After night fell on this 8 June we were taken down to the beach together with groups of other prisoners and put aboard a landing craft for the trip across the Channel. When we landed in England the wounded were separated from the rest and taken by train to a military hospital in Preston, Lancashire. It was here that I was operated upon; that is, the broken bones were put back into place and an adhesive dressing was applied to my left arm and shoulder.
The treatment and medical attention that I received was excellent, although the chloroform that was the standard anaesthetic in those days meant that one came to again after the operation feeling perfectly lousy. It affected different people in different ways. While still dozy and not yet fully conscious, the grizzled old soldier in the bed next to mine kept yelling over and over again at the top of his voice, “Chérie, you absolutely stink of Calvados!”–so clearly his time in Normandy hadn’t been entirely wasted.
The one thing I couldn’t stand was the English idea of breakfast consisting of tea with milk, and porridge served with pappy white bread; especially as I had always loathed porridge, even as a boy. But all in all our captors stuck to the rules of the Geneva Convention, and there was nothing really to complain about. The day after my operation I was allowed out for a walk in the hospital grounds with a few of the other prisoners.
A wire fence divided us from the parade ground of the neighbouring barracks. Naturally curious to see how things were done ‘on the other side’ we strolled across. We were deeply impressed by the British drill sergeant–bullet-headed, chiselled chin you could sharpen a flint on–who was screaming orders at a bunch of obviously raw recruits in a voice that would have made any German kapo green with envy. Of course, he knew full well who was watching him through the wire and was probably laying it on a bit thick just for our benefit.
After about a fortnight an elderly captain, jovial and more than a little portly, came to collect me. He seemed quite friendly and so I asked him, more by gestures than in words, where we were going. He murmured something or other in reply and I caught a word that sounded like ‘sanatorium’, but I didn’t believe this for a moment. Although of German stock himself, I’m sure that His Majesty King George VI’s hospitality didn’t extend as far as convalescent leave for prisoners of war.
But I had heard somewhere that the English had a camp something along the lines of the Luftwaffe’s own reception and interrogation centre for shot-down allied flyers at Oberursel, in the Taunus hills outside Frankfurt. I could therefore make a fairly good guess as to where we were actually heading. While waiting for the train at Preston station the captain treated me to a coffee, which we drank standing at the buffet counter. The other passengers were watching me with patently mixed feelings, although none was openly hostile.
I was given to understand that our rail journey was to last about four hours and would take us somewhere to the west of London. After two hours or so the captain unpacked a couple of ham and lettuce sandwiches, one of which he gave to me. Thus fortified, he started to nod off. But he kept jerking into wakefulness again, eyeing me somewhat distrustfully each time he did so. I had made myself comfortable in a window seat and was gazing with interest at the passing landscape, while he, for obvious reasons, sat diagonally across from me next to the door leading out into the corridor.
Finally, his tiredness got the better of him. “Dammit, let’s get some sleep”, he grunted, forsaking all military and patriotic responsibilities in favour of a quick nap. I dutifully closed my eyes until he had dropped off. I had given up all thoughts of an escape attempt from the spee
ding train anyway.
He awoke as the carriage rattled over the points outside one of London’s main railway stations, and was clearly relieved to see me still sitting obediently in my corner by the window. It was another two hours before he was finally able to deliver me to the ‘convalescent home’. First I was formally and rather brusquely assigned a room, and then had to change out of my flying overalls into a set of British battledress tunic and trousers that had been dyed black and had the letters POW–for prisoner-of-war–painted across the back.
The following morning my interrogation began. It was conducted by a British colonel, who introduced himself to me as Oberst ‘King’ (although I subsequently discovered that this was not his real name). He spoke flawless German. According to the rules, all I was obliged to tell him was my rank, name and home address–plus, at most, any inconsequential personal details I might care to impart.
At first he stuck to this format, no doubt in an attempt to gain my confidence and get me to reveal things that could be of interest to him. When I mentioned to him that I played the cello, he feigned astonishment, saying that from my appearance (at that time I had a full head of dark hair and a brown suntanned face) he had me pegged more for a gypsy than a typical German–let alone an officer in the armed forces. It was then my turn to be astonished. How could a man in his position subscribe to such views? Did he really believe in that sort of racial propaganda, or was this just another of his ploys to make me start talking?
At my next interrogation, for which I was woken in the middle of the night, he came straight to the point. First of all he wanted to know which airfield I had taken off from on my last flight, to which unit I belonged, and how many operational aircraft we had. When I refused categorically to answer these questions, he tried threatening me, because for one, I was not carrying my ‘Frontflugausweis’–my front-line flying pass, which admittedly I had forgotten to put in my pocket–but was simply wearing an identity tag that could quite easily be false, and another, there were no badges of rank on my flying overalls (these latter were newly issued and I had not yet had the time to sew my Leutnant’s wing and bar insignia on the sleeves).
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