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Last Weiss 12/18/2019 7:43:44 AM
In the days leading up to Christmas I shall be copying the first few pages of my books in the blog. Just to give you a taste. Starting with my first, 'Last Weiss' from 2015 THE LAST WEISS
APRIL 1944. GERMANY.
CHAPTER 1
Seeing a Lancaster explode wasn't a pretty sight. Unnerving, in fact. Most of the guys who didn't make it did the decent thing and went quietly. In the darkness of the night. First we knew was some empty beds, soon to be replenished with fresh cannon-fodder.
Occasionally there might be a hint of how and why. We'd spot a feathered engine, the lame duck falling behind, to be picked off by the ever-attentive 109s. Or hear a garbled voice on the RT telling of flak damage. Then silence.
But those of us who'd done a few ops - and I'd done twenty five - had witnessed at least one big bang. A tracer in the fuel tank? A lucky hit on the bomb load? Who knows? But seeing seven of your mates blown to bits in one ghastly moment shook even the best of us. Some idiot at Air Ministry had once decreed we fly close formation, but this had stopped when the blokes who copped it also took out their wingman.
I had these nightmares from time to time, but usually dismissed them with daylight. Except today I realised I wasn't in my own bed. Not in a bed at all. But in open country. A Lanc was damned cold at twenty thousand feet, so I was glad to be still wearing my flying suit with plenty of layers underneath. All this insulation had come in handy for what had apparently been a night in a German ditch.
Stretching limbs and rubbing eyes, I tried to work out what the hell had happened. We'd been aiming for Schweinfurt. To have another go at those ball-bearings the Yanks had hit a few night before. That had been a bit of a disaster. Ours as well, it seemed.
We had definitely been outward bound, bombs still on board. Exactly where things had gone wrong, I had no idea: after all, I spent my life aloft stranded well away from the rest of them. Tail gunner was often reckoned to be the suicide position, but on this occasion it might have saved my life.
Because there was no hint of other RAF life around. Bill, the skipper from Brisbane? Joe the canny Scots navigator? Herb in the upper turret....? What the hell had happened!
Surely it hadn't been a night fighter? I'd seen nothing and couldn't bear the thought I'd somehow let the side down. 110s now had upward pointing guns and could sneak in from below for a belly shot. I couldn't depress my guns enough to hit them, but at least I could normally see them and could have shouted a warning. But there'd been nothing. I could swear it.
Such agonising was pointless. Couldn't sit there all day re-living the past. Because I was in a spot of bother. I vaguely remembered the tail turret falling away. Falling into space. Parachute opening. And landing with a heavy thud somewhere in the Third Reich.
I'd managed to disentangle myself from the chute and half-bury it under some leaves. Then nothing. A bit of concussion perhaps? Whatever the cause, I'd been in the land of nod for.... I looked at my watch.... something like ten hours. It was now broad daylight and I needed a plan.
Some gentle probing suggested no broken bones. I got up, walked around, checked out the Mark One Human Body. Seemed OK. My long sleep had probably been a blessing, because I felt fit and with-it. Also very hungry. I broke into my emergency rations, a small bar of chocolate and some boiled sweets; like gold-dust in ration-ravaged Britain.
Man can survive for days without food, so my most urgent task was finding out where I was. Back at base we'd all had escape and evasion lectures. What to do if you found yourself in the sort of situation I was now in. Top of the list was that the first few hours were vital. It was easier to escape before you were caught - if that doesn't sound Irish.
Looking around, I saw that my alfresco bedroom had been a small hollow on the edge of a copse. On the other side was a meadow, sloping down towards a brook, burbling away happily with snow-melt. No lying snow around here, but the temperature was barely above freezing. My flying suit had kept me snug during the night, but I couldn't walk around the Reich dressed like that. The climate would soon become a factor.
I surveyed the possibilities. Which told me I'd been lucky to come down in one of the few open spaces; beyond that, in every direction, only hills and trees. Mostly evergreens. No sign of human habitation. This could be planet earth before the arrival of homo sapiens. Except for a track, that led out of the meadow to....? Time to find out.
It was all very well for the escape-and-evasion guys to talk blithely about not getting caught in the first place, but this was far from easy. For the past four years we'd been systematically trying to kill my new hosts. Not the best way of making friends. I had no local money, so no prospect of feeding myself, beyond foraging and thievery. And no proper identification papers, so vital in a police state. A lot on the debit side.
The credit side was painfully light, but could have been worse. My faithful old Lanc had obviously spread itself over a large rural area, miles from the usual targets. If I'd landed near Berlin, Hamburg or anywhere in the Ruhr, my chances would have been close to zero. Here - wherever here was - they might be less used to rounding up stray airmen.
Luckily, I spoke German. Not like a native, but well enough to get what I wanted and hold a decent conversation. The escape-and-evasion fellows had told us that most of the young men in the Third Reich were now labourers, brought in from occupied countries to do the work previously done by Germans. Who were now mostly abroad, dying for the Fatherland. So foreigners would would be common.
There was a final string to my bow - how useful it might be, I'd no idea. I was Norwegian. The powers-that-be often tried to crew aircraft by nationality. A few months earlier, our famous wordsmith, Nordahl Grieg, had died over Berlin trying to record one of their trips. But national crews were not always possible, so you could get a real United Nations up there. We had an Aussie, a Scot, some English and myself.
The first step was to make a better job of hiding the incriminating evidence. Without a spade, the best I could come up with was a stone to scrape a small pit. Into this went the chute and flying suit. Also my uniform. Prancing around Germany in battledress blue, with an Air Gunner brevet on my left breast was not a good idea.
This still didn't leave me anywhere near naked. I've mentioned the many layers needed to cope with the intense cold at altitude, but there was another factor. Chances of surviving a tour of ops was roughly fifty-fifty, so most of us took the optimistic view and planned for a life after being shot down. I was now wearing the clothes I'd had on when leaving Oslo. Nothing, I hoped, to connect me with England. With one exception: I kept my military tag as proof service status should I be caught. Didn't want to give the Gestapo an excuse for shooting me as a spy.
Buriel party complete, I took stock. I was wearing a good warm sweater, ditto trousers. The flying boots stood out rather too much, but were stout and good for walking: anyway, going barefoot was not an option. Although food could wait, I was not going to die of thirst. I tanked up with water from the brook, hoping it was upstream from any sheep droppings.
I pondered the idea of scouting around for any evidence of Bill and my mates, but soon realised this was pointless. All the signs were that they were goners. I'd only survived by the lucky chance of being far enough away from the blast.
So off I went down the track. With absolutely no plan. Must still have been shell-shocked, because I felt almost euphoric. Or was it fatalistic? My most probable destination was a POW camp, but what the hell! It was now four months into 1944. The war couldn't last forever. And miraculously, I was still alive.
