Churchill's Great Escapes

Seven Incredible Escapes Made by WWII Heroes

Damien Lewis

• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780806542119
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

From Damien Lewis, bestselling author and award-winning historian and war reporter, comes the thrillingly told stories of seven dramatic and epic WWII escapes executed by members of one of the world's legendary military fighting forces: the British Special Air Service. No food. No water. Out of ammo. Hunted and on the run. The dreaded certainty of discovery looming between recapture and safe haven. What would you do? Give up? For the seven heroes of Churchill's Great Escapes the answer was simple: keep moving against all odds. These are the extraordinary stories of the bravery and endurance of the men of SAS, legendary pioneers of escape and evasion who, through the darkest of days and nights of World War II, endeavored and succeeded in slipping through the clutches of the enemy. Based on in-the-moment personal diaries and notebooks, mission reports, debriefings and letters, Damien Lewis recounts the most terrifying and adrenaline-fueled days and nights in the lives of men for whom survival was the only option. We follow every desperate step, facing unknowable threats and death around every corner, and share in the breathtaking endurance that brought them freedom against the most formidable of threats: the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine.

Great Escape Seven

ACROSS ENEMY LINES

While Hitler ordered his commanders to hold the frontlines in France at all costs, Allied forces pushed resolutely onwards from the Normandy beachheads, and the SAS continued to wreak havoc behind the lines. At the same time, the RAF – its ranks swelled with airman brought in from across the Commonwealth – waged a mighty bombing campaign, as did the USAAF. Day and night the skies were darkened by the massed silhouettes of warplanes hitting enemy targets across what remained of occupied France, or flying over Germany itself on raids designed to batter the Third Reich into submission. One of those many thousands of brave Allied bomber crew was twenty-seven-year-old Canadian flying officer Ronald Lewis ‘Lew’ Fiddick.

On the night of 28 July 1944, Fiddick lay on his belly in the forward nose blister of Lancaster L-7576, bound for Germany. All around him the dark skies were thick with similar-looking Avro Lancasters, the iconic British heavy bomber designed for long-range night raids. The massed ranks of warplanes thundered onwards towards the German frontier, which was soon visible to Fiddick in the eerie glow of a low, bright moon. Their target for tonight was the German city of Stuttgart, situated in the south-west of the country, sixty miles or so on the far side of the border.

A total of 1,142 bombers had left RAF bases across Britain that night, to hit targets the length and breadth of Germany. Their aim was to cause maximum damage to Nazi Germany’s infrastructure, thereby preventing the enemy from rushing reinforcements into France and providing Allied land forces the best possible chance of wresting the whole nation from Nazi control. The crew of Lancaster L-7576 were tasked to drop their deadly cargo over Stuttgart’s main rail hub.

It had been a late decision to include L-7576, a first-generation Lancaster nicknamed ‘K for King’, on tonight’s mission. K for King had completed ninety-eight sorties and was the oldest aircraft on the squadron’s airbase. As the veteran Lancaster – the ‘King’ of 622 Squadron – tonight would be her ninety-ninth combat flight, a gargantuan achievement considering that such aircraft were typically either decommissioned or lost long before that. Fiddick recalled that ‘the wing commander wanted to fly the one hundredth trip’, keen for the prestige this ‘retirement flight’ would bring the squadron, for it was sure to feature on the newsreels. The choice had been made to include the venerable warplane on tonight’s raid only because a brand-new Lancaster meant for Fiddick and crew had suffered engine trouble and been grounded.

Fiddick and his six fellow crew members had taken off from RAF Mildenhall at 2200 hours, joining 496 other aircraft at their rallying point over the south of England. From an early age Fiddick had been fascinated by aeroplanes, remembering of his youth that whenever he saw aircraft in the sky, ‘I did have a desire to fly.’ Yet as the son of a Canadian farmer from the small village of Cedar, on Vancouver Island, and with ‘no money to do very much’, his hopes of becoming a pilot were limited. That changed with the outbreak of war, when the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) began calling up young men to train as aircrew. Fiddick undertook his flight training in Canada, and soon after qualifying had crossed the Atlantic to the UK. There he underwent a course in ‘bomb-aiming’ so that he would have the versatility to switch between roles – pilot and bomb-aimer – depending on wherever he could be of most of use. To be ‘doing something useful’ was Fiddick’s primary motivation in the war.

On that 28 July flight he was acting as the bomb-aimer, having the responsibility of ensuring the aircraft’s munitions hit their intended target. That was no small task given all the challenges of such a mission, not least of which was the air turbulence caused by so many planes in the sky all heading for the same destination. As the bomb-aimer, he was responsible for spotting the ‘primary visual markers’ of ‘mixed red and green’ signal flares, laid out by the pathfinder aircraft which were flying ahead of the main fleet of bombers. Once spotted, he would communicate their positions to his two fellow RCAF officers, seated above him in the cockpit – twenty-year-old pilot Harold Sherman Peabody and twenty-two-year-old navigator James Harrington Doe.

They were all so young, but none gave much thought to that at the time: there was a war to be fought, after all. Fiddick, Peabody and Doe possessed strong bonds of friendship forged in the fires of combat. They had been flying together and billeted in the same hut since February that year, and were based at RAF 622 Squadron’s Mildenhall, Suffolk, aerodrome. Doe’s diary from the time confirmed how intense the combat sorties had been, but Fiddick also recalled that between missions, they would spend time together in the Suffolk pubs: ‘no heavy drinking – just friendly pub-crawling.’

Together with Peabody and Doe in the Lancaster’s cockpit were RAF flight engineer George J. Wishart and radio operator Sergeant Arthur Payton. Flight Sergeant Richard Proulx – another Canadian – manned the aircraft’s mid-upper gun-turret, boasting formidable Browning 7.62mm machine guns, while Sergeant Percy Buckley – a Brit, and at eighteen, the youngest of the crew – manned the rear turret, defending the Lancaster from an assault from that direction.

Doe had navigated them due south over the English Channel, until they crossed the coast at Le Havre, whereupon they turned south-eastwards, plotting a course towards Stuttgart. As they neared the town of Orléans and the River Loire in north-central France, they had come under attack from the first enemy warplanes. ‘Fighters were active in the moonlight,’ the official RAF report noted, and before long the formation came under sustained fire.

A twin-engine Junkers Ju 88 dual-purpose fighter-bomber sent a burst of deadly tracer fire slicing into the lead Lancaster’s tail section, chunks of shattered debris spiralling backwards in the damaged aircraft’s slipstream. The defiant Lancaster’s crew managed to hit back at the Ju 88, bursts of machine-gun fire sending it plummeting out of the sky, after which the heavy bomber, though severely damaged, was able to turn for home.

Despite the ever-present danger, Fiddick kept his mind clear and his eyes fixed on the terrain to his front. ‘You couldn’t afford to be scared up there – you just had to be alert,’ he recalled. Before long, they were passing over the dense forests, dark peaks and tight, winding valleys of the Vosges Mountains, which delineated the long-contested border between France and Germany. Soon they would be starting their approach to Stuttgart, if all went well. But at 0130 hours on 29 July, K for King herself became the target.

‘Enemy aircraft – corkscrew starboard!’ Buckley, the rear gunner, yelled as he spotted a German plane in pursuit.

It was another Junkers Ju 88, part of Nachtjagdgeschwader-6 – a Luftwaffe night-fighter squadron based near Stuttgart. Peabody immediately banked to forty-five degrees, putting the Lancaster into a right-hand, diving corkscrew turn, the standard manoeuvre taught to Lancaster pilots in order to evade night fighters. ‘This meant you threw the airplane over on its side and lost a lot of height immediately to avoid being hit by bullets from the fighter plane and then you pull out and come back up,’ Fiddick recalled.

Theoretically, the speed the Lancaster gained in the dive would propel it out of the line of enemy fire. At first it seemed to work, L-7576 seeming to shake-off the pursuing aircraft. But the German fighter pilots had grown familiar with the Lancaster’s standard evasive manoeuvre, knowing that at the bottom of the dive the British bomber would have to sacrifice speed in order to gain height and rejoin the other aircraft. At the very point when L-7576’s airspeed had dropped and she was almost motionless in the air, the waiting German pilot pounced, squeezing off a long burst of tracer fire, which tore into the rear end of the bomber’s fuselage. Fiddick felt the aircraft shudder, as repeated bursts ripped through the plane.

‘We did a corkscrew and came back up, and almost immediately as we levelled off we were hit,’ Fiddick remarked. ‘I still remember the bullets hitting the airplane – just a steady stream.’

The German gunner had found his mark, the bullets shooting away ‘all the tail controls, so there was no control of the airplane anymore’, Fiddick recalled. Fearing that those towards the rear must have been killed – seemingly confirmed, when no answer came from the rear and upper gunners, Buckley and Proulx – Peabody fought to keep the stricken warplane in the air. But as further bursts tore into them, the surviving crew realised they had no choice – they would have to bail out.

Extricating himself from the cramped forward turret, Fiddick was joined in the nose section by Flight Lieutenant Wishart, who had clambered down from above. They needed to jump before Peabody lost control of the aircraft, or they would lose any chance of getting out at all. Wishart lifted the release handle of the escape hatch, which tumbled away into the night. A freezing wind tore through the gaping aperture at their feet, as Wishart pushed himself through the opening and was gone, whisked away into the howling darkness.

Fiddick moved into position to follow, yet he just couldn’t bring himself to jump. Loyalty and friendship trumped his desire to save himself. Turning away from the hatch, he crawled up into the cockpit, to join his friend above. That way, he figured he could at least help Peabody free himself from the notoriously tight pilot’s seat when he activated the auto-pilot, which meant they might both stand a change of getting out alive. Fiddick clambered into the seat beside Peabody, trying to help as he fought to keep the dying warplane airborne.

‘I held the airplane steady as long as I could,’ Fiddick remarked of this desperate moment, as the stricken Lancaster juddered and shook horribly. But eventually the damage proved too much. There was a massive jolt to the aircraft, as he and Peabody lost all control. From his seat, he was ‘more or less thrown into the nose compartment and out through the escape hatch’, Fiddick recalled.

He had had zero time to strap himself in, and he’d been catapulted out of the cockpit, the arc of his fall taking him through the escape hatch that Wishart had left hanging open. ‘The next thing I knew I was falling through the air,’ Fiddick recalled.

Recovering his senses, he triggered his ’chute, which snapped into shape above him, capturing the air with a crack like a ship’s mainsail. He gazed around. Though the night was brightly lit by the moon, he could see no sign of the other crew members, Peabody included. He figured they must have been ‘scattered to the four winds’.

As he drifted towards earth Fiddick reckoned he was coming down in the far north-east of occupied France, in what looked like the Vosges Mountains. France and Germany had been battling over this rugged terrain for centuries, and populations of neighbouring valleys tended to be staunchly loyal to one side or the other. Those of the western slopes generally harboured French loyalties, those of the eastern valleys had German sympathies. If he made it safely to the ground, Fiddick might either be welcomed by friendly Maquis – French resistance fighters – or handed over to the enemy by villagers loyal to the Fatherland.

As luck would have it, he came down into an isolated glade of saplings, which bowed under his weight. ‘I landed in a forest about 8 miles SE of Cirey-Sur-Vezouse [sic],’ Fiddick’s escape report noted, Cirey-sur-Vezouze being a village in the central Vosges region. ‘I remember breaking branches off trees as I fell, but I went right to the ground.’

Fiddick’s survival instincts kicked in right away as he set to work concealing his presence, for there was a good chance that he had been spotted bailing out. ‘I buried my parachute and my vest,’ he explained. That vital task done, he simply sat on his buried parachute for the remainder of the night hours, stunned by the rapid series of events that had deposited him alone and unarmed in the depths of remote and hostile territory. As he well knew, the nearest Allied positions were several hundred miles away across occupied France.

‘It was the next day when I decided I’d better do something about getting myself out of this mess,’ Fiddick recalled, ‘so I got up and I started to walk.’ It was only as he began to move that he became aware that one of his knees had been injured and that he had lost his boots. He figured they had either been ripped off as he had tumbled out of the aircraft, or torn away with the shock of his parachute opening.

Getting on the move as best he could with no footwear, and hampered by his injury, Fiddick found his bearings using his escape compass. He set a course back along the same direction as the Lancaster had flown in on and began his barefoot march. The journey through the thick forests felt never-ending, especially as he tripped and stumbled painfully. But Fiddick had been a woodsman back in his native Canada, and he knew how to drink from the streams that cascaded through the terrain, to keep himself going. While the human body can do without food for days, it cannot last for long without water.

Finally, he limped into the outskirts of a village. Of course, he had no way of knowing exactly where he was or whether the inhabitants were loyal to the French or the German cause. Should he simply declare his presence and risk capture? Or stay hidden and try to formulate a plan?

In his escape report, Fiddick described how he ‘lay up outside the village for two days’, keeping to a copse of trees in the middle of a field, from where he had a clear view of the comings and goings. He was keeping a close eye, trying to work out which houses any German troops might be paying attention to and those ‘which they didn’t bother with’. That way, he hoped to work out the best of the villagers ‘with which to make contact’.

At mid-afternoon on his second day in hiding, Fiddick’s hand was forced, when ‘a young chap about 10 years old brought a couple of cows into the field’. The youth, spotting the mystery watcher in his battered uniform, promptly turned tail and fled. Fiddick knew it was only a matter of time before the child told someone what he had seen, so he approached a nearby farmstead and slipped into the loft of a barn, crawling deep into the hay.

‘Now all I had to hope for was that [the farmer] didn’t hit me with the pitch fork,’ Fiddick remarked. With that thought in the back of his mind he fell into an exhausted sleep.

He awoke the next day to the sound of life all around him. Dragging his fatigued body across the hay bales, he managed to position himself where he could observe the comings and goings. But though he was well hidden, Fiddick was becoming increasingly weak from hunger and thirst. He wondered whether he should simply knock at the nearest house and seek assistance.

Eventually, his hand was forced. The villagers had roused the Maquis as soon as the mystery man in uniform had been spotted. A patrol led by one Raymond Freismuth tracked Fiddick to his hayloft hideout. Freismuth made it clear to the wounded and exhausted Canadian how close he had come to falling into the clutches of the enemy. Clearly visible from the hideout, one of the nearby buildings was actually a Gestapo outpost, for they were doing all they could to counter Maquis activity in the region. Had Fiddick approached that place, the game would have been well and truly up.

Freismuth took the fugitive to the nearby farmhouse, which turned out to be occupied by a man called Leonard Barassi. Italian by birth, Barassi had moved to France and taken French citizenship, and he was a stalwart of the resistance. Barassi took Fiddick in, hid him and fed him – which was fortunate, for the downed Canadian airman was famished. As luck would have it, there was a strong Resistance spirit throughout the village, which Fiddick learned was called Cirey-sur-Vezouze.

Fiddick would stay with Barassi for several days, as the locals checked out his bona fides. They fetched a village priest, Father Rohr, who was clearly there to determine whether Fiddick was the genuine article or not. Father Rohr had spent thirty years living in Fraser Valley, a point on mainland Canada lying just across the sea from Fiddick’s home, on Vancouver Island. This strange coincidence proved a streak of good fortune for Fiddick, for the priest was able to probe the airman’s story with the kind of questions only a man familiar with the area would be able to answer.

With his identity thus verified, Fiddick was relieved of his RCAF uniform and given some civilian clothes. Thus attired, he stood more chance of being able to pass as a local, while being shepherded between cellars, attics and other places of hiding. But changing out of uniform was a decidedly risky move, Fiddick recalled, for ‘it would have been unhealthy for me had I been picked up.’ Any Allied serviceman caught in civilian clothes behind the lines would be seen as a spy or saboteur. But likewise, this was the only way to stand any chance of evading capture.

Fiddick marvelled at the courage and spirit of the villagers of Cirey-sur-Vezouze. He knew all too well the risks they took in concealing him, his presence there being a veritable time bomb. An official SAS report from the time described how, if ...