Last words passed on 77 years later
A pilgrimage in search of rusted metal from a plane flown by an uncle he had never met. By Marty Sharpe.
The last words ever spoken by a Kiwi pilot were uttered on a Faroe Island mountainside after he was dragged from a burning plane. For the past 77 years the keeper of those words was Danial Nordberg.
He was 18 when he pulled Jack Haeusler from the wreck of his Armstrong Whitworth Whitley on November 9, 1942.
He’s 94 now, and has never had reason to believe those words could be conveyed to the pilot’s family.
Not until that pilot’s nephew showed up on the doorstep of his nursing home out of the blue in June this year.
There, in the small nursing home on the tiny archipelago in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway, Bruce Haeusler heard those words.
The words were not profound, but they resonated with Bruce.
It was a pilgrimage to one of the remotest inhabited places on Earth in search of rusted metal from a plane flown by an uncle he had never met.
And Bruce wouldn’t change a thing. The Whakatane man and his siblings were brought up with tales of their uncle ‘‘Jack’’, whose photograph took pride of place on their grandparents’ mantelpiece.
Flying Officer Harold (Jack) Haeusler was just 24 when his plane took off from its base to search for a plane that went missing in the North Atlantic. A combination of fog and radio silence meant his crew could not establish their exact location, which led to the aircraft crashing into a mountainside on the southernmost of the Faroe Islands, Suduroy.
Just one of the six-strong crew, the tail-gunner, survived his injuries. He crawled from the plane and made his way downhill, where he met a group of shepherds who helped him to the village of Tvoroyri.
Nordberg and a few friends went to the burning aircraft, where they found Haeusler badly injured but still alive. They carried him by stretcher to the little village hospital, but he died the following day.
The five crew members were buried on the island of Vagar a few days later.
Jack was one of three brothers raised in Ruatoki and educated in Opotiki. He joined the RNZAF, gaining his wings in 1940, and was engaged to be married when he sailed for Europe later that year. He was stationed in Iceland and Scotland with Coastal Command, largely on submarine patrol.
Despite never meeting him, Bruce and his siblings were raised to always remember their uncle. Bruce’s sisters Lynn Glen and Kerry Jones visited Jack’s grave in 2008.
In June this year Bruce flew to Britain for a family wedding, so decided to make the trip himself.
Before going he made contact with a man on the islands, Erlendur Simonsen, who – like many of the island’s inhabitants – was well versed in the story of the crash.
As it happened, Simonsen’s mother lived in a nursing home with Danial Nordberg. Now 94, Nordberg was a teenager when he helped pull Jack from the aircraft.
‘‘Erlendur said let’s go and see him, so we did. We spent an hour or so listening to Danial tell us about everything that happened, with Erlendur interpreting. The injuries to Jack, what he said, and the trip down the mountain on a makeshift stretcher to the village where he died the next morning,’’ Bruce said.
‘‘Danial said Jack was very badly injured. His first words were ‘‘doctor’’ and ‘‘hospital’’. When Danial and his friends made the stretcher, it was too short. To make it longer, Danial took his sweater off and made it into a kind of pillow. While he did that Jack looked at him and said ‘‘good man, good man’’. That was something my father and grandfather used to always say, ‘good man’. It rang true,’’ he said.
‘‘I was able to thank Danial for what did for our family all those years ago,’’ Bruce said. ‘‘I told Erlendur I would be keen to go to the crash site. So we caught a two-hour ferry to the island of Suduroy.
‘‘There we met a contact of Erlendur’s, Claus Olsen, who was in search and rescue and had been up to the crash site before. We climbed up to the site, about 450 metres above sea level, and saw some of the remaining plane wreckage, including parts of the undercarriage, propeller, radiator and part of the fuselage.
‘‘Mostly aluminium which does not rust but also molten aluminium from the fire. There was a fog, not unlike the conditions Jack would have been flying in, and I was thinking ‘this is exactly what it would have been like’.
‘‘Claus and I then also worked out the probable flight path of the plane over the water and then turning up the valley as they tried to gain height in heavy fog. It was very sobering to realise that another 10-15m and they would have cleared the mountain-top. Like talking with Danial, it was a very moving experience,’’ Bruce said.
‘‘It was all quite amazing, a very surreal experience. I still can’t quite believe it actually all happened.’’
It turned out Erlundur knew a man who had a spark plug from the aircraft.
‘‘So we went and saw this guy. It turned out that for years people on the island had used this spark plug to start various bits of machinery. He gave it to me. So I brought home the spark plug.’’
While on the islands Bruce visited Jack’s headstone.
He is the only Kiwi among the 14 servicemen buried at the small Midvaag Military Cemetery.
‘‘Most Kiwi servicemen were killed in battle, or go missing, and you never hear anything further. We were lucky to know so much about what happened to Jack,’’ Bruce said.
‘‘I’d go back if the opportunity ever presented itself.’’