He walked through dew-soaked meadows and along a canal bank, carrying on until it started to get light, when he hid in a small wood. However, his feet were soaked, and, sitting on the wet grass, he began to feel very cold. ‘Not wishing to get pneumonia,’ he began walking again, but as he approached a metalled road, the sound of galloping hoofs terrified him and he dived behind the nearest hedgerow, imagining ‘a couple of dozen mounted Jerries looking for me’. When he risked peering out, he saw that the ‘hoof-beats’ were actually the noise made by some Dutch children’s wooden clogs as they ran along the road to school. As he waited for them to pass, he glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. ‘Twelve hours before, I had been strumming the piano in the Mess.’22
Before setting out along the road, he took off his brevet and his other RAF markings, trying to make his battledress look as civilian as possible. Hobday knew that his name and those of his comrades decorated after the Dams raid had been published in the English newspapers, and as a result they had all been put on a Nazi blacklist. He knew that if he was taken prisoner, he was unlikely to remain alive for long.
He had not walked far when he saw two farmworkers cycling towards him. He bent down, pretending to tie his laces, but they stopped. Not speaking Dutch, he couldn’t understand them, but after a few moments of gut-gnawing indecision, he decided to risk telling them who we was. He said ‘RAF’ several times without any sign of recognition from them, and then began flapping his arms about to mimic flying. They now seemed to understand and, having looked carefully up and down the road, gave him half their food, ‘black bread with some queer stuff in it which I could not stomach’. He gave them a couple of cigarettes in return from the packs he always carried on ops, in case of just such an eventuality.
Heartened by their friendliness and realising the impossibility of crossing Europe alone and unaided, Hobday decided to seek more help from civilians where he could, hoping they would put him in touch with the Dutch Resistance. After a few more hours of walking he tried to hitch a ride in a little cart, but the driver shook his head, indicating by sign language that the Germans would slit his throat if they caught him. However, he gave Hobday some more black bread before driving off.
A little further down the road, he saw the same cart driver in urgent conversation with a woman, who then passed Hobday on her bicycle a couple of times, studying him carefully without speaking. Once more he was left fearing betrayal to the Nazis, but he kept walking and was then overtaken by some young men, who spoke to him in ‘slow schoolboy English’. They gave him some apples and a tall man then brought him a civilian suit. It would have ‘fitted a man five inches taller than myself,’ Hobday said, but he changed into it and the Dutchmen took his RAF uniform away. They also insisted on shaving off his moustache, saying it made him look ‘too English’.
Hobday was then told to make his way alone to a railway station 10 miles away, as it was too dangerous for them to accompany him. By the time he arrived, he was close to exhaustion. He hadn’t slept for thirty hours and had walked for another twelve with almost no rest. The tall man was waiting for him and gave him a train ticket to a town 100 kilometres away with a list of the times of the trains he had to catch. He also gave him a note in Dutch that said: ‘This man is deaf and dumb. Please help him.’
The journey tested Hobday’s nerves to breaking point. He first almost blundered into a carriage reserved for Wehrmacht troops and then, when he found an empty carriage, a ‘German Luftwaffe man and his girl’ got in and sat next to him. Luckily they were more interested in each other than the strange man sharing the compartment, and with the aid of his ‘deaf and dumb’ note, Hobday made it safely to his destination, where a young member of the Dutch Resistance met him. Having questioned Hobday searchingly to make sure he was not a German spy, he led him out of town to a place where eight members of the Resistance were in hiding, living in a crude hut deep in the heart of dense woodland. They had been carrying out minor acts of sabotage and raiding German stores, assembling ‘quite a collection’ of firearms, explosives, uniforms, blank visas and identity cards.
Twenty-four hours later, Hobday was reunited with Fred Sutherland, who had also managed to make contact with the Resistance. Fred had walked a few miles from the Lancaster’s crash site when, realising that ‘walking all the way to the south of Europe was never going to work’, he hid behind a barn and then jumped out as a girl about his own age was cycling towards him. ‘She nearly jumped out of her skin!’ he says. ‘She couldn’t speak any English so I tried to communicate with sign language that the Germans would cut my throat if they caught me.’ She took him to a boy who could speak a few words of English, and he contacted the Resistance. ‘After the war, I was told that this girl had actually been dating a German soldier!’ Sutherland says. ‘So I guess I was lucky because she didn’t tell anyone.’
Fred Sutherland
Sutherland and Hobday were comfortable enough living in the hut, sleeping on stolen German blankets and straw beds. Their food was largely potatoes, although one day a Dutchman caught some tiny eels in a nearby canal. The Resistance had begun making arrangements for the two RAF men to be returned to England via France and Spain, but the long chain of helpers was vulnerable to infiltration or arrest by the Nazis, and it proved a lengthy and fear-ridden process. Twice they were almost discovered, once when German troops began holding infantry manoeuvres in the woods, and the other when they escaped a Gestapo raid on the hut by the skin of their teeth.
After three weeks, frantic to contact his wife, who he knew would believe that he had been killed, Hobday had to be prevented from setting off for Spain on his own, but a week later arrangements were finally in place. The night before their departure, their hosts staged a farewell party for them, fuelled by a bottle of gin and some beer. The next day they set off, first travelling to Rotterdam, escorted by a woman dressed as a nurse.
They then travelled to Paris by train, armed with new fake identity papers showing that they were labourers for the Todt Organisation working on an aerodrome near Marseille. (As the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Fritz Todt ran the entire German construction industry. His Organisation Todt built the West Wall that guarded the coast of German-occupied Europe, as well as roads and other large-scale engineering projects in occupied Europe.) They went via Brussels and had ‘some shaky moments’ at the two frontiers, surviving a close examination of their fake identity papers at a German checkpoint. When the German officer held them up to the light for a better look, Sutherland’s hands were shaking so much that he had to ball his fists and brace his elbows against his side to hide them. ‘My heart was pounding and I was really scared,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be nonchalant when you are facing your enemy.’ However, with the help of their Dutch escorts, who, at considerable risk to their own lives, kept up a stream of distracting conversation with the German frontier guards, the fake papers passed scrutiny.
‘I can’t begin to describe the courage of the people who helped us in Holland and France,’ Sutherland says. ‘They took us into their homes, fed us and cared for us at tremendous risk to themselves and their families. The Germans had infiltrated the Underground and people did not know who they could trust, and yet still they helped us, even knowing that, while we would likely be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they and their families would be shot.’
They remained in Paris for nearly a fortnight, staying in the tiny flat of an elderly French lady, at huge risk to herself, and eventually they were taken to a clearing house for escaping aircrew and PoWs. There they were given yet more new papers and then set off in small groups for the journey to the Pyrenees.
When they arrived at Pau, they got themselves French-style berets and then took a small train through ‘the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen’ to Sainte-Marie and were driven on from there in a car powered by gas made from charcoal. At the foot of the Pyrenees they lodged overnight in a barn where other escapers were already waiting and began the climb of the mountains the next day. Apart from their guide and his dog, there were ten escapers: three Americans, three Frenchmen, a Dutchman, an Australian, the Canadian Sutherland and Hobday, the only Briton.
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