A Special Duty (12 page)

He watched from a hiding place in the bushes as truck after truck came along and unloaded troops, who went off to search the woods. He no longer felt safe on the track and went back into the woods himself, where he chanced on two young men carrying shotguns and decided to show himself in the hope that they were partisans. “English RAF,” he kept repeating as he approached them, and to his great relief they were friendly and offered to get him some help. He asked if they could get him some boots and they said they would try, then they left him hidden in the woods. Two partisan officers, the Kumiegi brothers, were sent back to collect Charlie Keen, who had fallen fast asleep in some bushes. He vividly remembered waking up from a deep sleep to find two men standing over him with guns, demanding to know details of the aircraft and crew – nothing could be taken for granted in these desperate times. He showed them his identity tags and they wrote down the details and then asked where his parachute was buried so that they could retrieve it. Charlie could not remember and so the men walked him back, in the direction that he had just come from, to a lightly forested area where they were challenged by Kaminski, who recognized the Kumiegi brothers, but not the stranger – “Hands up!” He said, and Charlie raised his hands. “He’s English”, said one of the brothers, but Kaminski was still worried that they were Germans in disguise and insisted that they search him thoroughly. Once satisfied, he led Charlie to the dugout where Tom greeted him with a surprised smile of recognition, followed by a sharp rebuke for trampling on his injured legs. The two men were delighted and relieved to be back together and, as they sat talking, Tom turned to Kaminski and said: “If we return to England, you can come with me and stay at my house – you will have everything you need and it will be good for you”. Kaminski thanked him, but explained that his sister had been taken to Germany for forced labour and his brother had been taken by the Gestapo in 1940, so he couldn’t leave his parents on their own.

Bronislaw Kaminski, who witnessed the Halifax crash and assisted with the rescue

(Photo courtesy of Pawel Cholewa)

That night, the first attempt was made to get the two men across the river. Battalion Liaison Officer Irena Wolcz
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, who was also the commander’s wife, had spent the day making plans for the operation with partisans on the other side of the Krzeszow Bridge. At nightfall, she and her father visited the two men in the bunker, and, with touching kindness, took as a gift an English-style cake made especially for them. Tom spontaneously took the silk map handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to her, saying: “You have been very kind and I would like to give you this.”
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Later that night Kida, Smola, Kusy and Kaminski collected the airmen from the bunker and took them downstream of the Krzeszow Bridge, where villagers from the other side of the river were to meet them with a boat to ferry them across. It poured with rain and they were soaked to the skin as they waited for the boat, but it didn’t come. Then they heard shots and German voices coming from the road and abandoned the attempt. The partisans decided that the airmen were too wet and cold to spend the night in the bunker, with night time temperatures still dropping close to freezing, and so Feliks and Catherine Sitarz allowed them to sleep in their barn. A second attempt was made the following night, but with no signals received from the north bank, they returned once again to the bunker.

While Tom and Charlie had been trying to cross the San, it had been another eventful night in Tarnogora. The villagers were already complicit in the rescue and concealment of Storey and Keen, when news came in that two more airmen (Stradling and Hughes) had turned up very close to the crash site and were hiding in the home of Sebastian Lyko and his wife. The men had landed separately and found each other by chance in the woods. In fact they joked later that it was a miracle they hadn’t shot each other in the surprise encounter. Patrick had parachuted down next to a railway line and, despite landing heavily and hitting his head, he managed to push his chute into a drain and make for cover in a wood, where a couple of hours later he came across Jim who had landed on the other side of the railway line. They spent that day and night in the woods, sharing the contents of Jim’s escape box and as dawn broke on the 25th, with reconnaissance aircraft overhead, they kept on the move under cover of the trees. Three hundred German soldiers from the garrison at Rudnik were now scouring the district with dogs, and a Fieseler Storch
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spotter plane quartered the ground at tree-top height to try and flush them out. Fifty hostages were taken from a nearby village and the Gestapo threatened to send them to a concentration camp unless the villagers told them where the airmen were hiding. A German officer, who spotted four peasants dressed in khaki tilling the fields, thought he had found the missing airmen and immediately had them surrounded and taken for questioning. Back at his headquarters he gave them food and drink before discovering that they couldn’t speak English, only Ukrainian, and was so disappointed to discover that they were not the airmen that he gave them a good beating before letting them go.
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Stradling and Hughes walked all through the night of the 25
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, and the next day saw some labourers working in the fields and decided to wait until dark and then approach them to ask for help. At nightfall they knocked on the door of farmer Sebastian Lyko, who took them in and gave them food while his wife kept lookout for the German patrols that were passing the house every thirty minutes. The isolated farmhouse was very close to the guarded crash site and so, after they had eaten, Lyko hid the two men in his loft while his wife went to get help from Jakub Kak in the village. Jakub had been discussing the events of the day with Walenty Kida, and on hearing that two more airmen had been found, asked his son Michal to accompany Mrs Lyko back to the house and help to smuggle Stradling and Hughes into the forest. Michal was unfamiliar with the location of the bunker, so the group spent the night in the open, but at first light he went to Sitarz’s forest lodge and found Smola who led them to it. Storey and Keen arrived back around midday after a second attempt to cross the San, and the four men greeted each other with surprise, laughter and relief.
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Feliks Sitarz sent news to partisan headquarters that he now had four of the airmen at the bunker, but that lack of a common language was making communication difficult and Germans were already in that part of the forest looking for them.
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The partisans brought a damaged machine gun salvaged from the aircraft to the dugout in the hope that gunners Jim and Patrick would be able to get it working for them, but although they cleaned all the mud off and did their best with it, the barrel was bent and it was difficult to put the bullets inside the chamber. They eventually got it to fire a single shot, but only with the aid of a shoe!

Walter, Eddie and Hap did not make it to the dugout to be reunited with their comrades. Walter landed alone in a clump of trees and heard the noise of the plane as it crashed, praying that his friends had got out. He crawled towards an embankment, but heard a train coming and, realizing he was next to a railway line, he hid in a ditch as a goods train rattled past. He began to walk in a south-westerly direction, thinking that it would take him towards the Carpathian Mountains, but with no light to guide him, he stumbled into ditches, struggled through boggy ground, walked into barbed wire, and even heard whistles being blown, which made him think he had been discovered. He stayed on the move all night, despite the blisters from his floppy, leather flying boots, and the next morning found himself in open ground. To try and look less conspicuous, he smeared dirt over his sergeant’s stripes and tucked his trousers into his flying boots. A spotter plane flew low over his head but ignored him, and by now he was beginning to encounter people and ask for help. He was treated kindly but with caution by everyone he met, but finally found shelter with a local woman. She bathed his bleeding feet, and kept him hidden until a local partisan officer arrived to take his details. It was here that he was visited by Private James Bloom of the East Kent Regiment, who had been captured by Germans at St. Valery in 1940 and sent to a Prisoner of War Camp in eastern Germany. He had escaped and moved east through Czechoslovakia into Poland, eventually swimming across the river San into Russian territory, where he was caught and imprisoned again – this time by the Russians. He now operated with local partisans under the name of Antoni Sawicki and he told Walter that he had no intention of ending up in Russian hands again. He said that as the Russians got close, he would walk through Czechoslovakia and make contact with the partisans in Yugoslavia. Walter, having just landed in enemy territory, could not have found this conversation reassuring, and his ordeal took a more frightening turn when some young men came and threatened to take him to the Germans and not to the partisans. Forty-eight hours later he was taken on a long journey by pony and cart through the forest to a safe house in the village of Rakszawa, and from there on to the home of Mr and Mrs Dec, in Smolarzyna village, where he found kindness and refuge. James ‘Jimmy’ Bloom, who had been in Poland for four years and spoke the language fluently, stayed in touch with him when he could, but operated with the local AK
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unit, which was constantly on the move.
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Eddie and Hap were not so lucky and swiftly ended up in enemy hands. Hap landed in a muddy field, having lost one of his suede flying boots in the jump, and made his way to the nearest patch of woodland where he remained until dawn. At first light he realized he was on a track that was probably in use, so he hid further back in the bushes and watched as workers made their way along the trail to work in the fields. Later in the day he came out of hiding and showed himself to a workman who was making his way home, but was quickly told to get back under cover and wait, which he did. The man returned later with food and drink and told Hap to stay in hiding until nightfall, but Hap was worried that his proximity to the village would put them in danger, and when he heard barking dogs from the direction where his parachute was buried, he decided to move further into the woods. His freedom came to an abrupt end when he arrived at a high fence and, to the shock and surprise of both parties, he found that he was looking into the face of a German soldier on the other side of the wire. “The first German I had ever seen,” he said later. He had accidentally stumbled upon the one place the partisans had feared, the old chemical plant at Sarzyna, which was now a major German munitions depot. From here he was marched along the wire at gunpoint to the guardhouse and then bundled into a car and taken away for questioning.

Eddie landed in a shallow pond and spent the night walking east, noticing as he went, a signpost that read Tarnogora – he could not have been far from the crash site. At daybreak he came to a wide stretch of water and was trying to work out a way of getting across when a local farmer arrived holding a plank of wood. Eddie took the opportunity to use the plank bridge himself and to strike up a conversation in the hope of getting some help. It seemed like a stroke of luck that the farmer had spent some time in America, spoke a little English, and seemed friendly, so Eddie went back to the farmhouse with him, was given some soup, and slept in the barn while the farmer went off to arrange his rescue. The farmer returned with the news that he had found a man who could help, but they would need to be careful on the way to his house because German patrols were everywhere. Eddie was grateful, and willingly followed him to a large manor house, Kopki Dwor, where he waited, as instructed, behind a shed for the man who was going to help him. The farmer walked away without a backward glance and shortly after, a group of armed soldiers appeared and took Eddie into custody. Kopki Dwor, once the home of Count Tarnowski, was the main German HQ for the area, and Eddie, had been turned in by a Volksdeutsche farmer.
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He was taken off to a jail cell where he was stripped, searched, and left alone. The next morning he found that Hap was in the next cell, and they were taken together by train to the interrogation Centre Dulag Luft, in Frankfurt, Germany. They were treated well on the journey by their guards who kept them hidden for fear of reprisals, and even bought them a lager at the Berlin railway station where they changed trains. Once at their destination they went into solitary cells to await their interrogation.
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