Please Take Care of Bethany

by PC Brian Wilkinson



  COPYRIGHT EXISTS

  ©Brittunculi 2016

  Print, Audio and eBook License Notes

  This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This publication may not be resold or given away to other people without the express consent of the publisher. If you would like to share this publication with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased or supplied for your use only, you should return it to the publisher and purchase your own copy.

  (Reproduced as first and self- published in 2005 by Brian Wilkinson).

  New 2015 edition cover features three RAF Avro-Lancasters in flight, 1956.

  CONTENTS

 

  PLEASE TAKE CARE of BETHANY

  Please Take Care of Bethany

  Doreen

  The Bombing of Sofia

  The Final Mission

  Have You Ever Had That Feeling?

  But Why Three?

  All Good Things Must Come to an End

  About the author

  “Please Take Care of Bethany”

  I am PC 5427 Wilkinson, Police Constable Brian J.B. Wilkinson of the Drover Estate in Liverpool. My middle name is Josef-Benjamin. I was born on Merseyside during March of 1945, a small back-to-back terrace house. What today, if it still existed, well I guess you would term it a slum. That smoky, charcoal-black stained stone from the pollution of the chimneys and factories likened to the lungs of a heavy smoker. All the way over there, down the small dank cobbled street away from the house, the toilet block. The toilet block that all twelve houses on our street shared, a most unpleasant walk during the cold Liverpool winters.

  In the house opposite us, there lived a beautiful young girl called Doreen, her eyes always alight with joy and happiness. We would play marbles in the street, always such fun as the bumpy old cobbles would never allow the marbles to roll in any predictable straight line.

  Doreen and I were the best of friends. We would sit hand in hand on the wall at the end of the street, watching the old trolleybus go by and the old horses, the nags that dragged the coal cart, struggling to stay on their feet given the excess weight of their load. This was a Britain recovering from the war and we “made do”. We were happy to be free and that’s what they would say to us as kids, the grown-ups on the same street. Mr Parker, the old storekeeper down the next road, would always say to me every time without fail as I went in to buy Mum some bread, “Freedom Brian, freedom. That is what your dad gave his life for. Be very proud of him son.”

  I missed my dad so very much, as I grew up without him. He went to war and he never returned. We knew nothing of whatever really happened to him until one day long after the war had ended. The day when my mother was just stood there washing the dishes at the old Belfast sink and staring out into the yard, the day that she suddenly dropped the plate that she had in her hand. Smash! I remember the noise and Mum freezing motionless there on the spot. Then that outbreak of emotion as she fell to the floor and started crying, sobbing to herself quite uncontrollably.

  I had never met my dad. He had gone to war and I was born at home. But Dad was everywhere. He was in every conversation that we, the family, had. He was never forgotten. I never understood his sacrifice fully until this particular day, the day that the plate smashed to the ground.

  The knock at the door. The man I didn’t know who was escorted in by one of our neighbours, a lovely lady and a dear friend to my mother, the same lady who helped my mother back to her feet. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she said to Mum and I was sent out to play. I was eleven I think at this time. The year was 1956.

  “Who is he?” I remember asking my Doreen, our hands as always clasped together and both of us sat up there on our favourite wall-top seat. “My dad says he’s from the government,” replied Doreen, giggling excitedly.

  From that point in time and over the next coming few years, and as I became an independent teenager, I started to understand the magnitude and the significance of the sacrifice that Dad had made for his country; the personal sacrifice that he had made for us all, the reason that Dad had given his own life away. Just as Mr Parker, the old shop keeper would always say to me, “He died for freedom Brian, he died for freedom!”

  You see that man, the man who came to the door that day in 1956, and the man who had upset my mum so very much, this same man from the government, well he had been to our house just the once before. This government man was the man who had come to our house just two weeks before I was born to tell my mum that Dad had been shot down and killed in action. My father, RAF rear gunner ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Brian Wilkinson was dead.

  You understand now why Mum had been so very upset that day, don’t you? Why she had frozen at the window, frozen at the sight of this very same man returning to the house again for a second time. He, removing that same black bowler hat again as he entered through the gate of our small stone-flagged front yard for this second visit. Bernadette, my mum’s dearest and closest life-long friend standing there at Mum’s side throughout. ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Wilkinson, my father, well his body had never been recovered until this day in 1956 and now eleven years after the end of the war with Nazi Germany my dad was coming home to us again.

  I want this to be a happy story and I want there to be a happy end but there is not one. Dad’s B17 Bomber had flown low on its final returning flight and had struck head-on into the cliffs at Dover. Those beautiful White Cliffs of Dover, this first visual sight of home had probably been the very last thing that he had seen before he died. Then here we are, eleven years later, his body had been finally recovered, found to be still strapped there into his seat and entombed within the shell of the bomber, this old American B17 warplane.

  Excavations had started for the building of a new terminal for shipping at Dover port, as post-war Europe had started to blossom again and economic trade with the wider world was much needed. Structural engineers and drillers had unearthed what was the crumbled wreckage of this old warplane sunken deep into the mud below the cliff-face, and the Royal Air-Force had now identified it as the Thompson. This was my dad’s plane. The man from the government, the man in the black bowler hat that I clearly remember from being such a young child, had come to the house that day to make the arrangements, the arrangements with my mother Evelina for the return of my father’s body back to Liverpool.

  It seemed like the whole city turned out for the funeral of my dad, RAF rear gunner ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Brian Wilkinson on this particular Sunday of April 1956, a sense that Liverpool in its entirety had come to a complete standstill. I know now as an adult that this isn’t true but that’s the feeling I had got as a child of just eleven and in seeing so many thousands of people there, all stood silently and respectfully as the procession drove through the city. The burial was a private family matter. Mum had wanted this and she said to me that day, as Dad was lowered into the ground below, “I will tell you about your dad when you are old enough to understand son, but for now let’s just leave him to sleep in peace.”

  Then the day came, the day of my eighteenth birthday and I let go of Doreen’s hand to take the hand of my mother, the hand of the wonderful Evelina Wilkinson, the hand of this oh so proud war widow. I knew then that she had finally found the strength to tell me. I had never asked previously about the letter Dad had left her. I heard the family talk of it often but I never troubled Mum as I knew this was something so dear and special to her. I knew that she would tell me in her own time and in her own way when she was ready to do so.

  Today, the day I became eighteen, a man now and a man so very much in love with Doreen, Mum gave me that letter to read, a letter a
ddressed to her, the last thing Dad had ever written down on paper and a letter found with him inside the plane. A letter sealed inside an airtight mission bag and so perfectly preserved, a letter that had somehow and almost by miracle survived all of its years below the cold strong tidal waves of the English Channel and as if it had only been written yesterday. A letter that he had penned for my mother and had then stuffed safely hidden deep down inside his flight jacket. A letter to my mum that was held close beside his heart as he breathed his last. It was this very same love letter that that government man, the man in the black bowler hat had returned to her, Evelina, on that day of 1956.

  It read:

  My Dearest Evelina,

  I have so longed to come home to you, my dear precious Evelina. Our bombing raids over Bulgaria have ended and I no longer fly from Italy. We have for the last three months been involved in a special mission, a secret mission of which I am forbidden to speak of but I am frightened as we all are now. I write you this letter in the hope that you will understand why I volunteered to do this and should I not return home this time, to know of my love for you: my deep, endless, undying love for you, the undying love that keeps me sane during these, the darkest of hours. You are always in my heart.

  As I sat to the rear of my flying tin can, us up there so very high up in the sky, I watched our bombs fall down below onto Sofia, this once so beautiful and ancient city that had now found itself thrown into the war against us. I saw the sky light up with the blast of the bombs we dropped and I wondered who we were killing. There were no Germans down there really. These were just people like you and me. Imagine my love, what I see in my mind, women just like you with their children queuing for the bus and then blown up, in an instant, blown into thousands of pieces of human dust by what we had just delivered to them. I am so tired and sick of this war. I am so tired of the loss of my friends. Half of us never return home. How much grief can this great nation of ours bear? They will never build a monument to remember me. Us lot, the bomber crews who kill women and children.

  Do you remember Willy? Young Willy Garth from over on Sander’s Fields? He killed himself last week. He was terrified and couldn’t board the metal bird as ordered. I wish you could see what we see, all those planes that take off and we wait to count them back in, safely home and back at base, but they don’t return anymore. We sit here strapped in with nowhere to run, nowhere to go other than downward, just sitting here waiting for our turn to be the next missing crew too, simply fall from the sky. Willy was thrown, rough-handed back into his seat by a Squadron Leader, ordered to do his duty at all cost. It was a cost to him. He jumped from the plane in flight during take-off. I think he knew he would die soon anyway and just couldn’t face the fear of waiting for it to happen anymore.

  We’ve now been given a new crate to work with, an American B17 Bomber. She’s a big old heavy bird and the American pilot says, “It’s like trying to steer a brick.” We’ve had to strip it completely down. She’s an amazing old bird, very strong but very heavy. She lacks the range capability we need and we have fitted new drop tanks. We’ve called her the Thompson. We all named her after the guy we had down there on the ground below.

  We’ve been in constant training for weeks. We’re good now, well, I think as good as we can get given what we have to work with. I always worry about having an American pilot though, a bit too gung-ho for my liking but he’s a great laugh, don’t get me wrong. He’s a Texan and as loud as you can imagine any Texan to be. Oh, we have a French Bombardier too, Pierre, a perfect English speaker and hand-picked just like the pilot and me. We’re the best in the air apparently. The lads mock us with phony salutes, funny really.

  Pierre is also navigating for us. We are a jolly mix and try to have a good laugh, even if sometimes we don’t quite understand each other’s sense of humour. That’s about it, just us three, a crew reduced by seven in this stripped down metal brick that we can hardly believe can still fly, especially given everything we have had to take off her. We have a new nick-name; they call us back at base, the Magnificent Three. I guess it’s got a kind of good ring to it. The Magnificent three, imagine that?

  I wanted so much to be home with you, holding your hand when Bethany was born but I volunteered to do this. I was given the choice not to do this if I so wanted, but I want to be honest with you about that fact, I have to do this for myself. Think of what they have done to your family back home and try to understand me and my motivation. Please try to understand, and remember this, I am ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Wilkinson the best rear gunner in the sky and with me on board, well what can possibly go wrong?

  I have this last mission only my love and then I shall be home with you, at home for the birth of our child. They have promised me this. They have promised me at least two months down leave and I can’t wait to see you. I love you with all my heart,

  Yours eternally, all my love, Brian xxxxx

  And then, there, at the bottom of the letter and scribbled hurriedly across it, as if an afterthought, below Dad’s signature it said;

  “Fuel out, dropping fast, too low to bail, please take care of Bethany for me.”

  That’s how my dad had died. He had died a war hero alongside his new crew, just the three of them alone together. My mum had known nothing of this letter or his final mission until eleven years later, and not until after the body of my dad had been recovered from beneath the sea at Dover.

  The man from the government would never go on to say what the full facts of this ill-fated final secret mission were, but he did say this to Mum at the time, she recalled;

  “The Thompson, a B17 Flying Fortress with a hand-picked specialist crew of three, had left an airbase in occupied British territories on February 26th 1945 at 22.30 hours. The mission was to deliver a massive, single precision payload bomb of huge devastating capacity against a research facility beyond German held lines. Major Frank Thompson, a British officer beyond these enemy-held lines had reported, before all communication with him had been lost on the 23rd May 1944, the development of a new chemical warfare facility. ‘The crew of the Thompson B17 Heavy Bomber had completed this mission with great accuracy and with great effect. They had died on their return journey having changed the course of the war. The crew were to divert and return the bomber to the UK after the payload had been delivered,” he said.

  The reason for this diversion was never stated. Mum explained to me that she’d asked this man what drop tanks were, as written in dad’s final letter. He replied by telling her, “They are extra fuel supply tanks attached to the outside of the aircraft. They are used to increase the flying range and can be released and jettisoned by the crew when empty. The heavy bomber had been stripped down to reduce its weight load and to allow for the extra weight of the bomb and the additional fuel needed. I am so sorry but I cannot tell you more.”

  Mum was so very proud of Dad and what he had done. You see my mum was of Polish origin and her grandparents, my great-grandparents, had been executed by the Nazis during the war in a reprisal attack against partisan resistance in their home village. She had survived only because her mother and father had arrived to live in Britain in 1913 and before the outbreak of the first war, World War I. She would simply smile at me and say, “Be very proud of your dad, I understand why he volunteered for this. I am very honoured to have met him and so very proud that he did so.” Mum never remarried.

  I have for so many years had these stories, these childhood war time fantasies, in my head about what Dad was actually doing during his final flight and I suppose that, well in the absence of the full true facts, I like these stories. Maybe they were attacked by German fighters and my dad, ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Wilkinson shot them all out of the sky before they realised they were hit themselves and now leaking fuel? Maybe they received heavy flak over France and struggled at the controls in a desperate last-ditch attempt to reach home and clear the cliffs ahead of them?

  Or maybe they just didn’t have enough fuel to start with, a tragic wa
r-time miscalculation and fatal error. What-ever the true story, my dad is a war hero and that’s all that matters to me. I’m named directly after my dad, Mum told me. “We were certain you were going to be born a girl at the time, that’s why we chose the name Bethany together, but the name Brian is so much more special now, don’t you think so son?”

  My study notes conclude that at the outbreak of World War II, Bulgaria, at the time a kingdom under the governance of Prime Minister Bogdan Filov had always declared a position of (Bulgarian) military neutrality in the hope of avoiding direct conflicts and to regain lands lost during the previous Balkan Wars and the First World War, the Great War, to these original pre-Balkan War boundaries. She also sought to reclaim the areas neighbouring her sovereign borders and those lands with high populations of former Bulgarian patriots.

  Hopes to resolve these older territorial claims were aided when Southern Dobruja, a part of Romania since 1913, was repatriated to the Kingdom of Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova in 1940. Bulgaria also maintained its non-aggression pact with its immediate southern neighbour, Turkey.

  Due to Bulgaria’s strategic geographical position however, such bloodless neutrality would prove impossible to maintain. In 1941 Bulgaria officially joined the Axis Powers. German forces had amassed on her border demanding the right to pass through her sovereign lands in preparation for Germany’s planned invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Bulgaria signed the Tripartite Pact, firmly cementing her position as an Axis power on the 1st March 1941. The Soviet Union had by this point in time also signed up to a non-aggression pact with Germany and little opposition to Bulgaria’s new war-time position was noted.

  Bulgaria, despite this new allegiance at this point, continued its course of military passivity. Germany, Italy and Hungary had now successfully invaded Yugoslavia and Greece with Yugoslavia officially surrendering to the Axis powers on the 17th April and Greece shortly afterward on the 30th April.

  On the 20th April, just ten days before Greece’s capitulation, Bulgarian forces, seizing their opportunity, had entered Yugoslavia and Greece following closely behind this Axis invasion. The military objective was to take back the lands of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia. Bulgaria now occupied the area between the Struma River and the city of Alexandroupoli and her Aegean Sea gains also included the islands of Thasos and Samothrace. Her occupation also included much of modern day Macedonia and Eastern Serbia. Although Bulgarian forces never directly entered into combat with British forces, they did reinforce former German held lines within these new gained territories.

  Despite popular myth, Bulgaria was involved in the deportation of the Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Following significant protest to Germany, principally by the Bulgarian government, Dimitar Peshev MP, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and some members of the Royal Family, it is historically recognised that Bulgarian territorial Jews were saved from deportation. However, Bulgaria was fully complicit with the Nazis in the deportation of the Jewish communities beyond her sovereign border, such as the Jewish population of Greek Macedonia and Vardar Macedonia. Had the Axis powers won the war, without doubt the same fate would have then befallen all Bulgarian Jews.

  June 22nd 1941 saw the invasion of the Soviet Union by German forces, an invasion that Bulgaria did not take part in. No official declarations of war between the Soviets and the Bulgarians had been formalised however but despite this, a number of direct Bulgarian naval skirmishes against the Soviet Black Sea Fleet did take place. Back home Bulgarian opposition, anti-fascist and partisan resistance, and other Soviet Allied Communist groups conducted numerous sabotage attacks against Bulgarian armed forces. Resistance to Bulgaria’s new war-time stance led to a developed and popularist united resistance movement. This ultimately led to guerrilla warfare turning Bulgarian against fellow Bulgarian. This united resistance movement, officially formed in August 1942 was called the Fatherland Front. Partisan detachments were particularly active in the mountainous regions of western and southern Bulgaria.

  The Bulgarian government declared war on both the United Kingdom and the United States on the 13th December 1941. Allied bombing raids, in which many Bulgarian cities and towns were bombed in strategic co-ordinated operations, began in retaliation.

  The balance of power in 1943 between the Allies and the Axis powers was now changing and Germany had suffered serious and major defeats on the battlefields of its occupied territories, especially those on her Eastern Front. In August 1943 the Bulgarian King ‘Tsar Boris III died suddenly during a visit to Berlin, a visit in which he was to renegotiate his country’s Axis position with Hitler. He was succeeded to the throne by his 6-year-old son and direct heir Simeon II. Bulgaria was now to be governed by a German puppet administration headed by the new Prime Minister, Dobri Bozhilov. Diplomatic relationships with the Soviets were, however, still maintained by Bulgaria, this despite its ongoing membership of the Axis power.

  Following Germany’s defeat on Soviet occupied territory, and in particular the areas of Iaşi and Chişinău, Romania broke away from the Axis during the summer of 1944 and declared war on Germany. The Soviet forces were now given consent to cross her borders and thus the ability to later militarily invade Bulgaria. Within Bulgaria, the resistance movement of The Fatherland Front had by now ceased and a new anti-fascist government was formed on the 2nd September. Following the declaration of war made against her by The Soviet Union three days later, and subsequently as a result, on the 5th September, Bulgaria officially joined the Soviet Forces (8th of September) in the war against Nazi Germany.

  Frank Thompson was born in Darjeeling, West Bengal in British India. He was born on the 17th August 1920 to a missionary family, and was the elder brother to E.P Thompson, the later famed English historian, socialist and peace campaigner. Frank Thompson was educated at both Winchester College and New College in Oxford. It was here at Oxford, whilst studying at the university that he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, influenced greatly by his dear friend, Iris Murdoch.

  Despite Thompson’s affiliation to the Communist Party, he did not agree with the party’s neutral position dictated to its membership following the Molotov Ribbentrop Communist Pact, and he signed up voluntarily for service in the British Army. He saw active service at home in England, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Sicily, Serbia and finally in Bulgaria. Here, he became a crucial part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). His role as a British officer and representative of the British War Office, and of Winston Churchill, was one of a liaison officer between the British Army and the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans, many of whom were members of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The Bulgarian partisans played a key role in helping Britain win the war, notably the numerous and most successful sabotage missions of Bulgarian and German artillery supply lines.

  Thompson, along with three other British Commandos, was parachuted into hostile territory on January the 25th, 1944. His role was to establish a direct military and complimentary link between British fighters and their Bulgarian counterparts, the Bulgarian resistance divisions led by Slavcho Transki. Thompson and the commandos landed in the district of Dobro Pole in Macedonia. The single radio which they were carrying and one that was essentially needed to maintain contact with connections in Cairo, Egypt and also in Bari, Italy, soon broke, and this just shortly after arrival.

  Thompson and the other three commandos took part in the brutally violent and the significantly outnumbered clashes between the fascist sympathetic Bulgarian Gendarmerie and the anti-fascist units of the Second Sofian Brigade of The National Liberation of Partisans. He was captured on the 23rd May 1944 in the village of Batuliya in Bulgaria after being wounded by Bulgarian Gendarmerie forces. He was executed by firing squad in the nearby village of Litakovo. He was only 24 years of age.

  Following the post-war establishment of the new communist government of Bulgaria, the villages that had witnessed these violent military clashes were renamed. These villages being Livage, Lipata- Tsarevi, Stragi, Malak-
Babul, Babul and Zavoya were all merged into one district and are to this day and remain so, simply called Thompson in honour of the British officer. Mayor William Frank Thompson and his fellow commandos are just a handful of so many more of today’s forgotten heroes of World War II.

  His brother, E. P. Thompson wrote two books about him, the first with his mother ‘There Is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson’ and the second ‘Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944’. This latter work was published in 1996.

  Of my dad’s plane, the so-called Thompson, it was developed in the 1930s for the United States Army. The Boeing B-17 heavy bomber was fitted with four engines. Boeing, in commercial competition against both Douglas and Martin aircraft, won the contract to build an initial batch of 200 B-17 aircraft. The B-17 outperformed all the rival contract entries at the time. Regrettably, following the crash of its first prototype, Boeing soon lost this contract with the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), but the US Army remained impressed with the overall design and capability of the aircraft and placed an order for a further thirteen aircraft. During many years of evolution the B-17 undertook numerous changes and advances in basic design and was finally introduced into military service in 1938.

  The so-called Flying Fortress was primarily used during World War II for daylight precision and strategic bombing campaigns against German industrial and military targets. The B-17 was based at many RAF stations in southern England and was used as far away as North Africa. The B-17 was also used in Foggia, Italy, where it complemented RAF Bomber Command’s night-time bombing raids. This was to secure air superiority in preparation for Operation Overlord, known to us today as the D-Day landings. Code named Operation Pointblank, its purpose was to secure air superiority over the cities, factories and battlefields of Western Europe. Its involvement, though to a much lesser degree, continued during the War of the Pacific where it was used for raids against Japanese shipping and airfields.

  From the very beginning of its service, the USAAC made great use of the B-17 as a strategic weapon, given its powerful, high and long-distance flying range capabilities - a craft that proved time and time again that it would be able to return home despite extensive and heavy battle damage scars. Within a very short period of service time, the stories about the B-17 Flying Fortress had soon taken on almost mythical proportions. War time stories and photographs of these heavily damaged (though still flight capable) aircraft, soon gave it an iconic status among the servicemen who flew them. An emotional testament that made this clear, is found within my father’s final letter.

  The B-17 dropped more bombs on Axis occupied enemy territory and Axis power homelands than any other aircraft throughout the war. Of the 1.5 million metric tons of bombs dropped on Germany and its occupied territories by US built aircraft, 640,000 tons of this sum were dropped directly from B-17s. The standard crew membership of the B-17 was typically ten persons: a pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier/nose gunner, flight engineer/top turret gunner, radio operator, two waist gunners, ball turret gunner and a tail gunner. My father, Brian ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Wilkinson had flown her with a crew of just three.