My dad, one of ‘ The Few’
whatsoever, there was a thundering, almighty graunch. The plane was careering through tall trees and into a potato field. With no idea of their position, my father was horribly surprised by the deafening “rending crunch on impact with Mother Earth” in the fleeting moments before he passed out. Complete blackness followed as he lost consciousness.
wee small hours of the morning in the nearby village of Glabbeek, the commotion startled some of the local Belgians. They jumped out of bed.
Regaining consciousness, my father tried to exit the wreckage. If he was injured, he didn’t know it. He managed to open the turret door manually.
Dropping a large distance to the ground, and a lot further than he’d anticipated, he felt a shattering pain in his leg, so intense, he passed out again. Shattered bones protruded through the flesh below his knee.
Astonishingly, Ted Lambert’s front turret had been knocked off the aircraft on impact and had rolled around and around eventually coming to rest. Ted, who miraculously emerged with scarcely a scratch, dashed over to check on the others.
The rest of the aeroplane was in two pieces, each ending up about 50 feet apart. Pieces of wreckage were strewn chaotically among broken branches and scattered leaves.
My father drifted in and out of consciousness. Ted and the two pilots, who were also largely unharmed, dragged the injured crewmen away from the aircraft, over to the edge of a clearing. It was pitch black and they could hardly see a thing. The pilot explained that tall trees had broken their fall. Without trees to cushion their impact, it is unlikely any of them would have survived the crash.
( Perhaps this was the genesis of my father’s deep- seated love of trees.)
Sergeant Boutle was in the worst shape. He had a fractured skull. Sergeant “Jock” Lawson had an injury to his face. The pilots went back to the aircraft and, as they had been trained to do, set fire to it by exploding the oxygen bottles. Nearby, villagers spotted the fire and rushed out to help. The crewmen heard them coming but didn’t recognise the language they were speaking, although they sounded friendly enough.
The airmen asked the villagers where they were and learned that they had arrived, unannounced, in the middle of Belgium.
Their rescuers helped them back to the village, carrying the injured men on stretchers. It was a fiveminute walk to the home of Franz and Bertha Willems- Harry on Kersbeekstraat in Glabbeek — Zuurbemde, and they ushered the airmen inside, along with neighbour Mr de Becker and mayor Victor Mertens. Bertha cut Boutle’s parachute off him as he lay on a stretcher, to ease his laboured breathing. Local doctor Dr Homans gave my father some medication for the pain emanating from his left leg. Everyone was most concerned about Donald who, apart from being helped to sit up to vomit, lay motionless on a mattress with his eyes closed.
His face was swollen and covered in blood. Mr de Becker could see that the other airmen were young and handsome, but couldn’t tell if Donald was a man of 25 or 55. He was in such a bad way that it didn’t look as if he was going to survive.
None of the locals spoke English but the airmen managed to make themselves understood when they asked if there was a priest nearby.
Pastor Van Maegdenbergh arrived with holy oil and administered last rites. Angela Walker grew up thinking of her dad as a quiet and humble man, at his happiest sitting at home with his head buried in a newspaper.
She had heard the softly- spoken upholsterer from Auckland occasionally discuss his part in World War II. But he downplayed his experiences as a New Zealand airman — including being taken prisoner by the Germans and staging an audacious escape.
Angela’s father Ian died in 2009 at age 89 but it wasn’t until three years later she began going through his old diaries — and the former Kiwi Olympic gymnast was amazed at what they contained.
“In a box was a blue diary from 1940 in which he diligently wrote every day, and red one he started in 1941,” she says.
“When I saw what was inside them I was gobsmacked.
“It was like suddenly being part of an amazing movie. Dad had given me snippets of his life as an airman down the years but never the full story.”
Walker was just 20 when he was an air gunner and radar operator with 600 Squadron in England.
Initially tasked with defending Britain under the control of RAF Fighter Command, he was part of a night fighter squadron operating from Manston, Kent, and was heralded as one of “The Few”.
As morning approached, Franz and Bertha gave the men some breakfast. My father felt ever so grateful for the kind way they willingly shared what little they had and hungrily devoured his food.
Mr de Becker was amazed at my father’s appetite despite his badly fractured leg. Word of the airmen’s presence soon spread and most of the village filed in to see their “RAF heroes”.
With three of the crew badly injured, the villagers had no option but to notify their German occupiers to arrange for an ambulance to take them to the nearest hospital.
With a compound fracture of the leg, my father was about to officially become a prisoner of war. But he was alive. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. Not just because he had survived the crash, but also because the horror of night raids to Germany was finally over.
After the Battle of Britain, he transferred to RAF Bomber Command and retrained on Wellington bombers, before joining 115 Squadron and flying scores of missions over Germany.
Three of the aircraft Walker flew in crash- landed; one inauspiciously, in a field in Nazi- occupied Belgium. There, he was captured, hospitalised and taken prisoner.
But the Kiwi was not one for languishing in POW camps and hospitals.
Hatching a daring plan to escape from prison with other inmates, he scaled the barbed wire fence and enjoyed a brief moment of liberty before being recaptured.
Good fortune followed him throughout the war and he was eventually placed on a list of injured men who were exchanged for German prisoners.
This little- known, historymaking exchange took place in Barcelona in October 1943.
Having left England abruptly in the dead of night, he realised that, ironically, crashing into a field in Belgium had just preserved his life, releasing him from further perilous bombing raids.
Now however, instead of being in a plane that dropped the bombs, he was on the very ground that would be subjected to heavy bombardment for the next few years. But he didn’t concern himself with that right now.
He just felt a strange sense of relief. Having already survived something akin to Russian roulette, he certainly had good reason to be relieved.
The work he had been doing was so hazardous that, throughout 1941, more RAF aircrew were lost over Germany than Thousands of Allied and Axis prisoners were safely returned to their homelands, in the midst of war.
Angela, 50, lives on Auckland’s North Shore with her husband and son.
Like her father, she became a top athlete. She represented New Zealand at the Olympic and Commonwealth Games where she won Gold and Bronze medals in gymnastics.
Ian — who had two surviving daughters and two grandkids — was a talented cyclist who narrowly missed out on being selected for the Empire Games.
“When I read Dad’s diaries it was very emotional because I realised he could easily have been killed and I would never have existed,” she says.
“After the war he lived a fairly subdued life compared to his time as an airman.
“Just over four years ago I started chipping away at turning his diaries into a book. It was allconsuming and almost all of my spare time was dedicated to putting it together.”
Angela says she did not expect the book would ever be published and initially wrote it for his family and his grandchildren.
“I’m thrilled Dad’s story is out there,” she says.
“He may have been a very humble and quiet man but as I later discovered, he was also very deep.”
‘ It was like suddenly being part of an amazing movie. Dad had given me snippets of his life as an airman down the years but never the full story.’
German civilians killed on the ground.
I’ll always remember how palpable Dad’s relief still seemed when he told us about surviving his plane crash in Belgium.
He hadn’t known how he could have endured the horror of night raids indefinitely, yet carrying on had seemed his only option.
I always marvelled at this man who, despite being bound for a prisoner of war camp with shattered bones to boot, seemed to have been profoundly grateful to have arrived on a foreign field, alive. From
by Angela Walker. Distributed by South Pacific Books and available in bookshops nationwide. RRP: $ 60