Extraordinary war story in softcover
I Would Not Step Back, by Hilary Pedersen and associated writers, published by Mention the War Ltd. Reviewed by Alister Browne.
The war-time saga of Hawke’s Bay man Phil Lamason, I Would Not
Step Back has now been published in an accessible softcover edition following on from last year’s handsome collector’s production.
Some of the story of Lamason’s incarceration in Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 first came out in a newspaper interview in 1945, but here, for the first time, the whole story is told.
Of course, the most harrowing detail is in the camp, where 168 Allied airmen were illegally kept until ‘‘sprung’’ by, among other people, German Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering when he heard about their plight and had them transferred to a regular POW camp.
For Buchenwald was one of those places where you worked or died, and they died in almost unimaginable ways because that’s what the death camps were for.
Yet they continued with their horrific trade until the end, when either Allied forces turned up at the gate or Germany surrendered.
Small wonder bitter debate still rumbles over why, when their existence and what occurred in them was known, so little was done to save those in them until it was all too late for so many.
Lamason became a part of the horror after he was shot down in his Lancaster bomber over Germanoccupied France just before D-day.
Flying in Bomber Command was a job that was the third most dangerous in World War II after service in a German U-boat and Soviet tank.
So, from Lamason’s biography the reader gets an unvarnished account of a concentration camp, and before that, flying in a Lancaster, then attempting to evade the enemy on the ground before being betrayed because the Germans had penetrated the escape line he thought was helping him escape. It is an extraordinary tale of resilience, luck, defiance and personal courage – the title sums that up – that the extremes of war seem to bring to the surface in people.
As the authors note, those who survive go on to live lives so differently – some are crippled by the experience and are never the same again, others carry on almost, but not quite, as if nothing much had happened.
Lamason, it appears, was one of the latter, enabling him and others to share his story with post-war generations. Not that the memories didn’t remain though – it’s just that they didn’t define the man, not this one anyway.
Lamason became a part of the horror after he was shot down in his Lancaster bomber over German-occupied France just before D-day.