Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
You never thought you’d be baled out. We never did any training on parachute. We just jumped and hoped for the best. We never considered that, and I don’t think Bomber Command ever considered it. They thought, you know, the plane would go down and that would be the end of you. As I was, I fell from a fair way because we baled out fairly high and I thought, looking down I thought I was going to land in a lake, so I thought ‘Gee whizz. How am, I going to swim to the edge?’ I was daydreaming. I could hear the planes going back and your heart sank a bit because naturally, hearing them going and then ‘bang’ I hit the ground and there was snow, all snow, and I hit the snow and fortunately I was relaxed so I didn’t get hurt so I was lucky really. So then I tried to bury the parachute but it was too hard, the ground, so I had to just push it in a hole and leave it there and then I could see the lights of a car picking up some of the other crew, I guessed, so I made haste to get away. I escaped for three days. The third day I got picked up. Then I was taken to Berlin because they don’t know what you are at that stage. You could be a spy, or you could be anything. They took me to Berlin and interrogated me there and from Berlin, after they were satisfied, they sent me down south to Frankfurt on Main where the Dulag Luft [was]. That was a special interrogation centre and I was there with the navigator, I didn’t know he was there, of course, for 21 days, where they put you through the mill. First of all the Red Cross officer comes and wants to know all the particulars and you just give him the bare essentials and then you get a nice chap come and try and ask which squadron you were on and all the particulars. Then you get a fierce one who threatens you and all sorts of things and this goes on for 21 days and about, towards the end they came in to me and took me out in the middle of the night and lined me up against a brick wall like these two Indonesians and they had four men with rifles and I thought ‘This is it. Nobody will know I’m here’ and, of course, you’re almost crying by that stage, you’re so downhearted. But anyway, I stood there, I didn’t say anything and after a while they took me back to the cell. I was about twenty then.
