They had started climbing the mountains at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening and did not reach the Spanish side until the Saturday morning. Having already passed through the Netherlands and right across France, in constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, they had then dragged themselves right over the Pyrenees. Their epic escape was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever done’, Sutherland says. Completely spent, they rested for the remainder of that morning and swallowed some food and wine, though it ‘came up as fast as it went down’.
In the afternoon they walked down to the nearest village, Orbaizeta. By then Hobday was so stiff he could hardly walk, and his companions were little better. Although Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist regime, it was professedly neutral in the war, but there was a tense atmosphere as they encountered the Spanish carabineros for the first time. However, they treated the escapers well enough, and they remained in the ‘dirty little village’ until the Monday, though Hobday had to sell his watch to pay for food for Sutherland and himself. The shop where they ate was ‘a general store, very much like the Wild West saloons of the old cowboy films, complete with liquor, shepherds, singing and a bit of good-natured scrapping. On the Sunday they all came in with their week’s money and proceeded to get rid of it on booze.’ The place was filthy and there were pigs and chickens wandering everywhere, indoors and out.
The escapees were then taken to Pamplona, where they were met by the Red Cross, who escorted them to Madrid, a journey that took a further fortnight. There staff at the British Embassy gave them a train ticket to Gibraltar, where, to their enormous relief, they were at last back on British soil. Hobday’s first action was to cable his wife to tell her he was alive. They were flown home a few days later, on 6 December 1943, almost three months after they had been shot down.
If Hobday needed any reminder of how fortunate they had been to come through that marathon journey unscathed, the fate of a Dutchman he had befriended provided it. He attempted to cross the Pyrenees a week after Hobday but was caught in a snowstorm and got lost. Suffering from frostbite, he was captured by a German frontier guard and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.23
Fred Sutherland, speaking from his home in Canada seventy years on, perhaps encapsulates the emotions of all those wartime evaders:
The whole experience was quite unreal, just like living in a movie. It was all very nerve-racking and I didn’t rate my chances of making it home, but it was worth a try. The Dutch people were risking their own lives to help me. Without them I would have been captured or dead and I can never thank them enough for that. And when I was on the ground – seeing the Nazis close up – that’s when I realised we had to win this war; regardless of the cost.
* * *
For the families of the dead, the ramifications of the disastrous Dortmund–Ems raid went on for months as they struggled to come to terms with their loss, and to understand how their loved ones had perished. David Maltby’s father, Ettrick, received a letter from the mother of Maltby’s navigator, Vivian Nicholson, desperate to find out how her own son had died. She was heartbreakingly eloquent in her expression of her grief.
‘I scarcely know how to write this letter,’ Elizabeth Nicholson wrote.
We would like to know the true facts of what they did that night and would be gratefully thankful for any news you could give us. We have a photo of your gallant son and our boy together. It is indeed a terrible wound for us to see them so young, happy and beautiful. Our boy was conscientious, very guarded about his duties. Please, if your son told you anything [about our son], we would indeed be grateful if you could let us know. I know you will understand my yearning for news, and I have the worry of our second son aged 19 on the submarine HMS Seanymph. The world owes so much to these gallant young men. We can only wait patiently till we can understand why they are taken from our homes, where their places can never be filled.24
Many of the young men taking to the skies that night had left ‘last letters’ to be delivered to their loved ones if they were killed. Maltby’s wireless operator, Antony Stone, was no exception. His mother received her son’s final letter shortly after his death. ‘I will have ended happily,’ he wrote, ‘so have no fears of how I ended as I have the finest crowd of fellows with me, and if Skipper goes I will be glad to go with him.’25
Many more letters, to parents of the bereaved, and from those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, would be delivered before the war was over.
Bomber Command’s Main Force had continued to pound Germany during the autumn and early winter of 1943, including a raid on Kassel on 22/23 October that caused a week-long firestorm in the town and killed 10,000 people, and the launch of the ‘Battle of Berlin’, a six-month bombing campaign against the German capital, beginning on 18/19 November. Over the course of the campaign some 9,000 sorties would be flown and almost 30,000 tons of bombs dropped. Bomber Harris’s claim that though ‘it will cost us between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war’1 proved optimistic; the aircraft losses were over twice as heavy and the bombing campaign did not destroy the city, nor the morale of its population, nor the Nazis’ willingness to continue the war. In contrast, the heavy losses sustained by Main Force during this period undoubtedly had an effect on morale.
Following George Holden’s death at Dortmund–Ems, Mick Martin had been put in temporary charge of 617 Squadron, but because he had jumped two ranks from Flight Lieutenant direct to Wing Commander, some felt his face still did not fit, and on 10 November 1943 he was replaced by a new commander, a tall, dark-haired and gaunt-faced figure: Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. Still only twenty-six, Cheshire was one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots and its youngest Group Captain, who had taken a drop in rank in order to command 617.
Cheshire made a dramatic entrance to his new squadron. Gunner Chan Chandler was in his room at the Petwood Hotel when there was a shot directly outside his window. ‘I looked out and saw this chap with a revolver in his hand, called him a bloody lunatic and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. He replied that he thought the place needed waking up! It turned out he was the new CO and my first words to him were to call him a bloody lunatic! However, we got on famously after that.’2
Leonard Cheshire
At his first squadron meeting Cheshire told his men that ‘If you get into trouble when you’re off duty, I will do what I can to help you. If you get into trouble on duty, I’ll make life a hell of a lot worse for you.’
‘So we all knew where we stood from the start,’ Johnny Johnson says. Far more approachable and friendly than Guy Gibson, Cheshire was soon highly thought of by all. ‘He developed the techniques for marking, for instance,’ Johnson says, ‘so the efficiency of the squadron was improved. That was always his objective: to get things absolutely right.’
Larry Curtis found Cheshire ‘very quiet, very relaxed, but at the same time, you did what you were told; he just approached it in a different way.’3 Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hamilton witnessed this new approach when he joined the squadron. His crew had achieved an impressive bombing