Two days after the Wuppertal raid we received a visit from one of the senior officers in 5 Group and were briefed on Bomber Command’s strategy for the next few months. Our raids were to intensify: more aircraft would be despatched on every mission, more and better bombs would be dropped, accuracy would be improved by electronic aids, a number of innovative defensive measures were to be introduced. New and recently revised maps of Germany were handed out and we were shown aerial photographs of industrial and residential complexes. We would become an irresistible force that would bomb the German people into surrender.
That night we set off in the company of some two hundred and fifty other RAF bombers to Stuttgart, a place notorious among the crews for being difficult to find and bomb accurately. When we arrived, the area was shrouded in thick cloud and ground mist, but we saw the fires that had been started by the first waves of aircraft, so we bombed those. Hundreds of explosions flared beneath us, brightening the clouds with shots of brilliant light. The areas of flame began to spread, their glow suffused. We dropped our bombs, continued to the end of the targeting track and turned for home.
As I banked the plane, a huge blast from somewhere shattered our starboard wing. The Lancaster immediately went into a dive, turning and spinning, flames soaring back from the main fuel tank in the broken wing. I hunched down in terror, crashing my hand involuntarily against the joystick in front of me. My head bashed against the canopy at my side. I shouted an order down the intercom to bail out, but there was no response from anyone.
I struggled out of my seat, crawling towards the hatch in the fuselage floor behind the cockpit, climbing up against the pressure of the diving spin. The noise inside the aircraft was tremendous. I became obsessed with time, thinking that there could be only a few more seconds to go before we hit the ground. Where the navigator’s table had been was a gaping hole in the side of the fuselage, with white flames roaring against the metal struts. The rest of the fuselage, the dark, narrow tunnel that was always so cramped, was filled with smoke glowing orange from the light of tires further along.
I could see none of the other crewmen. I kicked the floor hatch open, thrust my legs through and after a struggle I was able to push myself out. The plane fell past me as a hot torch of blazing fuel. I was plunging through the night, the wind in my face and battering against my ears. I found the ripcord, snatched at it and a moment later felt a violent jerk against my spine as the chute opened above me.
My instinctive need to escape quickly from the crashing plane was borne out, because now that I was in the air I could see that I had not much further to fall before reaching the ground. I had already passed through the layer of cloud. I could see the burning city beneath me, still suffering many explosions and bursts of fire. I instinctively shrank away from it, not wanting to land in the worst of the inferno. After a few seconds it became clear that the wind was carrying me away from the biggest fires. I drifted down into a plume of smoke, suddenly blinded and choking for breath. Something hot and yellow was swelling and moving beneath me. I was terrified of falling into a blaze. Then I drifted out of the climbing smoke, breathed clean air and looked around to get my bearings again, but almost at once I hit the ground, rolling across a paved surface of some kind, my leg an agony of pain. The parachute dragged me along until I was able to release it. I lay still, unable to move, paralysed by pain. I could smell the smoke, and the fires were a huge orange radiance behind the buildings away to my right, silhouetting them. For a while there were explosions in the near distance, but I could not tell if they were bombs going off or anti-aircraft guns firing.
As the raid ended those noises faded quickly away. In their place I heard sirens, engines, signal whistles blowing, people shouting, others weeping.
I lay wounded, somewhere in the heart of the glowing city, as the remaining bombers flew for home.
I was soon discovered, arrested and taken into captivity at gunpoint. My leg was giving me hell and my blood had made a mess of my uniform, but the damage to me was mainly superficial. I had cuts to my hands, face and chest, bruises on my arms and back. As I landed awkwardly in the parachute I inflamed the old injuries to my left leg and at the same time twisted the other ankle.
After a few days in a German military hospital I was transferred by way of a slow, two-day train journey to a prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag-Luft VIII, situated in the heart of a pine forest somewhere in central Germany. (I eventually found out that it was about twelve miles to the west of the town of Wittenberge.) It was in that camp that I was destined to spend the remainder of the war, from the beginning of November 1942 until the camp was liberated by the US army in April 1945.
Looking back to that now fairly distant period of my youth, I realize that my captivity lasted just over two and a quarter years, not after all such a huge chunk of my life. That’s not how it felt at the time, of course. I was young, physically fit - once my injuries healed - and desperate to escape somehow from the drab wooden huts and barbed wire of the camp, make my way back to Britain and resume the fight.
Many of the men with whom I was in captivity had been in the camp for a long time before I arrived. Some of them had already attempted to escape and a few of them had made repeated attempts. One or two of them got away for good, or so we believed. In some sections of the camp the talk was constantly of escape. I sympathized, but I was never a candidate for being included in one of the attempts. At first it was because of my difficulty with walking, but later, when most of the damage healed, I realized I had adjusted to captivity and no longer wanted to run the risk of being a fugitive in Germany. I decided to stay put, sitting out the war.
Hunger was the worst enemy in the camp, with boredom running it a close second. On the whole we were not treated badly by the Luftwaffe guards and although there were long periods when food rations were sparse, we survived. I lost a great deal of weight, which I regained within a few weeks of returning to England in 1945. My ability to speak German was undoubtedly a valuable asset to many in the camp: I was often called upon to act as an interpreter or translator, I tutored the men who were preparing for their escapes and during the last twelve months of captivity I ran regular language lessons. It was all a way of passing the time.
Soon after I arrived in 1942 I wrote the permitted single-page letter home through the Red Cross. I wrote to my parents, telling them the news that they would most want to hear, that I was alive, safe and well. At the end I asked them to pass on my best wishes to Birgit and to tell her that I’d like her to write to me.
More than two years had passed since Joe’s death. For much of that time I had barely thought about Birgit: she was a sore spot in my life that I shrank away from. All the signs were that she felt much the same about me. Our guilt feelings obviously ran deep. While I was still in England, from time to time I asked my parents how she was but they always looked embarrassed, said that she had closed herself off and wanted no further contact. I never knew how to press for more information, so I never did. But already, in the first week of imprisonment, I found that one of the problems of idleness was constantly thinking back over your life, reminding yourself where you had gone wrong.
Frightened by the experience of being shot down a second time, hurting because of my new injuries, lonely in the prison camp, I soon began thinking back to my love affair with Birgit and wondering what the real reasons were that ended it. It seemed to me that nothing had actually gone wrong between the two of us, that what drove us apart was the awful accident of Joe’s death and our resulting guilt. In the special circumstances of isolation in a prison camp, when I became the focus of my own interests, it seemed to me that perhaps it was time to try to patch up the friendship with Birgit. Of course there was no chance of seeing her or speaking to her until after the end of the war, but I thought it might be possible for us to write letters to each other. Somewhere there was a residue of hope.