Twenty Days in the Reich (2 page)
A
s I strolled slowly along the lane with my captors, I could not help being struck by the extreme beauty of this tiny German hamlet. I was also impressed with the friendly attitude of the inhabitants. I was to learn, but not until several days later, how fortunate I was not to have alighted somewhere that had recently suffered the effects of Allied bombing. In such towns, the reception was liable to be very different.
A priest came up to me, smiling amicably, and explained in quite good English that he was a Roman Catholic; he was not in the least disappointed when I told him that I was not. Little boys and girls grinned at me with obvious sympathy for my situation. Altogether, I got the impression that I could not have been more welcome had I come down in France, Belgium or some other friendly land!
We soon reached the building, which might have been a farm or a public house. I could not be sure which, as at that stage of my acquaintance with the Fatherland, I had developed no sense of
distinction between their various odd-looking structures. I sank thankfully into a chair that was offered to me. I suppose I must have looked a trifle pale and careworn, for I could feel that a reaction had begun to set in. At any rate, a woman brought me a glass of pale pink liquid that might have been anything from disinfectant to methylated spirits, but which I charitably assumed was meant to be wine. When she followed this with a glass of fresh milk (the first and last I ever saw in Germany) my wilted body began rapidly to revive.
I suppose half an hour passed whilst I sat there, listening to the unintelligible jabber. The only interlude that affected me was when a particularly uncouth-looking rustic appeared, brandishing a revolver. His manner and excited speech indicated that something had happened that had somewhat soured his outlook towards all
fliegers
. I confess to a certain amount of apprehension, but in a few moments the woman appeared, and after she had persuaded the belligerent man to withdraw, peace was soon restored.
The next incident was the entrance of a tall, fair youth dressed in the uniform of the
Volkssturm
or Home Guard, followed by no less welcome a person than Arthur, the engineer. The latter made straight towards me and shook me solemnly by the hand. At the time, this action struck me as being perfectly ridiculous, but could only of course, have been intended to express his natural
relief that I was safe, and that we were at least temporarily assured of each other’s company We were both longing for a chance to exchange views, but the fair lad, who also spoke good English, insisted that we sat on chairs at opposite ends of the room.
To pass the time as much as anything, I asked the Home Guard if I might go to the lavatory. He took me upstairs and apologised quite graciously for the actions of the man with the revolver. He later appeared with a sandwich of black bread and some kind of tinned meat, which he bade me eat in the lavatory lest anybody in authority should see and disapprove. The food tasted pretty foul, but it was the first I had eaten since the traditional pre-operation breakfast at 9 a.m. that morning and, therefore, did not go down too badly.
When I went downstairs again, the fair youth indicated that it was time to go. After a further superficial search, which forced us to yield our escape maps and emergency rations, we set off in an easterly direction. The lad wheeled a bicycle and acted as our guard, and the rear of the company was brought up by the inevitable bunch of excited youngsters.
Arthur and I again made an attempt at talking to each other, but we were quickly, although politely, repressed, and then our guard started to ask a few questions. They all seemed innocent enough and devoid of any purpose except to satisfy his curiosity, and he was not in the least
annoyed when we told him we were not allowed to answer. The query as to the number of our comrades who might be wandering around the neighbourhood was one to which we should very much have liked the answer ourselves, because we were naturally anxious to know if all the boys were safe.
The youth then told us that an aircraft had crashed 8 miles away, and we assumed at the time that we preserved security by showing no concern at this information. It was what we expected, anyway, but as events transpired, the statement had every appearance of a deliberate falsehood. Perhaps our guard was not quite so green as we believed.
Once again, as we marched slowly up the little valley, we were impressed by the beauty and peacefulness of our surroundings. The scene was almost typically English, with the rising land in front of us falling away to a low mountain top, new-born lambs gambolling happily in the fields immediately off the roadside, and the many varieties of trees just bursting into bud. Dusk was falling rapidly and the thought that struck me most was how unreal it all seemed – how can this be war with my pals and I in a comparatively grim situation? Any minute now I am bound to wake up and find myself back in my old bed in the Nissen hut at base!
After walking for about half an hour we came to the somewhat larger village of Schmallenberg,
and were led into what definitely appeared to be a farmhouse. We were put into a room that from its slightly official appearance might have been somebody’s headquarters. Men, women and children kept coming in and out, talking loudly and of course, to us, quite unintelligibly; the telephone rang frequently and everything seemed to point to the fact that frantic endeavours were being made to cope with a situation as unique as it was unexpected in this backwater of the Reich.
In a little while our fair-haired guard bade us a polite good evening and took his departure. As nobody seemed to have a great deal of concern for us any more, Arthur and I were at last able to talk to each other. I told him my story, and learnt from him that he thought he must have been second out of the aircraft. He had landed flat on his back with a bump that had knocked every breath out of his body. Although he had quickly struggled to his feet and made for the nearest cover, he had been badly short of wind, and had been caught by a civilian with a revolver before he had gone 200 yards. Of the others, like me, he knew nothing at all.
By about 8 p.m. the crowd had subsided somewhat, until finally only two men were left, who, it transpired, were to take turns at guarding us for the night. There was a wood-burning fire at one end of the room and we were invited to sit by it, which we did, grateful for every consideration these people cared to show us. It was not long
before a further outburst of chatter on the other side of the door, terminated with the entrance of Jack, our Australian rear-gunner, carrying his own chute and harness and looking as bright and cheerful as ever. He drew a chair to the fire, and as there seemed no further objection to our conversing among ourselves, we listened with great eagerness to his side of the story.
Jack, like myself, had come down practically in the middle of a village, and had been captured immediately. He had, however, been taken before some fairly high officers of the German Army, and had been subjected to some considerable interrogation. He was rather given to the opinion that he had seen five other parachutes in the air, but he was not sure of this. In any case, it did not help a lot in deciding whether all seven had got out, because Jack, departing all on his own from the rear turret, would have no idea as to the order of his exit. The only man who could be certain that six besides himself had baled out would be the skipper, whose duty would be to remain until all had gone, and unfortunately he was not here to tell the tale.
As the evening wore on, it looked as though three was going to be our maximum muster, and so it proved to be. I started to wonder how long we should be fated to be companions in misfortune. Arthur, or Sergeant Biles, to give him his full title, was about 21 years old, unmarried, and with a war that had been going on since he
was 15, he had seen little of life to interest him except in his Royal Air Force service. As a consequence, he and I (at 33) had little in common, except that we were both non-smokers and practically non-drinkers, and had not been given to going out much together back at dear old base.
Pilot Officer Jack Acheson, on the other hand, was as bright and breezy a person as one could wish to meet anywhere. His one vice, in my opinion, was a tendency to exaggerate and to be erratic in his opinions. Thus, one minute he would be on one side of the fence, and the next moment would be arguing hotly in favour of the other party! He was about 23, and married with his wife and small daughter, whom he had never seen, back in Australia. For all his faults, he was jolly good company, although as in Arthur’s case he and I had not knocked around a great deal together.
I must have fallen asleep whilst thus musing, for I awoke to hear a considerable altercation going on in German. For the second time I was treated to an example of the uncertainty of the German temper. Jack was smoking his pipe, which, he assured us, had actually been lit for him by one of our two guards. The other guard, after storming and shouting at him for fully half a minute, finally stepped forward snatched the pipe from Jack’s mouth and smashed it in two on the table. As Jack said, you have to be careful with these brutes, but why didn’t the fellow say he didn’t want him to smoke!
We didn’t fancy this fellow at all, and felt quite relieved when the other one took over. With a whispered indication not to tell anybody, he also brought us all a slice of bread and treacle. Jack and Arthur did not seem much inclined to eat their portions, despite my warnings that we did not know when we might get any more. I was quite grieved to see some of the ‘meal’ going on the fire (though that was better than leaving it lying around). Indeed, it did turn out to be better fare than we were to get for some considerable time.
There was a crude sofa by the side of the table and whilst we had not liked to get on this uninvited, our guard who was an old man, with a rather kindly face, indicated that we might use it. Jack and I sat down and tried to get some sleep with our heads rested on the table. Arthur, stretching his massive bulk onto all three chairs placed in a row, was soon snoring loudly. I only dozed fitfully, and during one of my wakeful periods I noticed that the old guard was fast asleep; I was tempted to wake the others and suggest that we make a bolt for it. I have little doubt that we could have got out of the house, but as I viewed it we were all tired, hungry and dispirited. We had neither maps nor rations, and, above all, the length of start we should get was problematical, being dependent on how long the old man would sleep after we had gone. I told the others about it in the morning, and they agreed
with me. However, we wondered, as we did many times afterwards, whether most of the folk who had charge of us would have been jolly glad to learn that we had disappeared – and no questions asked!
Dawn came at last, much earlier, or so it seemed to us, than it did in England. Perhaps that was because we had not been getting up very early of late, and so had not kept abreast of the rapid lengthening of the days. The guard drew the curtains and opened the window wide, an action which, once again, seemed to be very deliberate. He went out of the room, and we could see out into the street, which was on the same level and practically deserted. It was awfully tempting, but we did not want to get a bullet in the back at that stage of the war, and so with difficulty we kept our seats.
The same impressions returned when I went upstairs to the toilet. The previous night someone had come with us and stood outside, but this morning we seemed to be allowed to wander up at will, and I personally spent quite a long time surveying the immediate landscape. The lavatory window was quite easy to get through, with a reasonable drop of some 12 feet on to soft ground, and about half a mile away over a mist-soaked valley was an inviting-looking wood. I think that if it had not meant letting the other lads down, I should have dropped out of that window there and then. But once again it was a matter for pure
conjecture as to how far I should have got before my absence was discovered.
I rejoined my comrades in due course, and we were treated to a slice of black bread and margarine with a cup of black coffee for our breakfast. We began to think that we were going to see a mighty lot of this black bread during our stay in the Reich, a line of reasoning that was to prove accurate! Soon afterwards our guard, the kind-faced one, brought in a large accumulation of tangled up parachutes, harnesses and ‘Mae Wests’ and ordered us to sort them out. I cannot remember how many of each were there, but despite the pile I doubt if the full equipment of all three of us was covered. Then he wheeled in an outsize bicycle, with immense balloon tyres (we hadn’t realised it until then, but all the German bicycles seemed to have colossal tyres, nearly as big as our motorcycle tyres, and it struck us that they must have been very comfortable to ride, but hard to push). Following his gesticulated orders, we loaded all the stuff on top of the machine, tied it on with a few odd bits of string, and trundled the contrivance out of the house and along the road to a destination that we learnt was Fredeberg, 6 kilometres away.
A kilometre is roughly five-eighths of a mile, and as the mathematician of the party I was soon able to manipulate the conversion without any special mental effort. This journey looked like being about 4 miles, which we considered to be
plenty far enough on the breakfast we had eaten, and with our burden as it was. After walking a few minutes, we stopped at a wayside farm and a further issue of parachutes etc. was dumped on us. Here, I noticed with a little thrill that Ron’s harness was among the gear. Nobody else spotted it because the stuff we had was so jumbled up that we had lost all interest in it, but I had happened to don Ron’s harness only the day before by mistake. I had at once discarded it because it was too big for me, but I had noticed the number 250 stamped on the side. There was no doubt in my mind that this was his harness, but the problem for which we had no solution was ‘where was Ron?’.
Somehow or other we got this lot on as well, and then took it in turns to rest while one of us held the stuff in place and another one steered the bicycle. We told one or two fair young damsels whom we passed along the road that the parachute silk, which was beginning to trail in the dust, would make them some very nice underwear, but as they didn’t understand our remarks, neither they nor our guard suspected that we might be being a trifle indelicate!