It’s your von Lucky day... champagne RAF heroes who fell into right Hans!
News Reporter
CAPTURED RAF airmen share champagne and caviar with a German officer in an extraordinary Second World War photograph that has come to light.
The image, discovered by an amateur historian and digitally colourised, reveals the three sitting in a cafe in Nazi-occupied France.
The Panzer tank commander, aptly named Hans von Luck, had made a point of displaying generosity to Allied prisoners.
Flight Sergeants Edward Rodgers and Cyril Bartlam were served with drinks as well as plates of the delicacy from a large tin on the table. Their host is seen talking to a standing colleague known to be a close associate of legendary tank commander Erwin Rommel.
A second image shows Rodgers and a smiling Bartlam surrounded by Germans immediately after being captured.
The pair bailed out of their Blenheim light bomber, which left
RAF Wyton, Cambs, for a raid near the coastal town of SaintValery-en-Caux in June 1940. A third man, Sgt David Dorris, sadly went down with the plane which crashed into a field.
Von Luck, who had helped to take the town of Fecamp days before, is said to have told the RAF officers: “You are in luck, you’ll be staying with me for a while.”
French postman Laurent Viton, a keen historian, found the pictures and they were published in the military magazine Iron Cross. Editor
Andy Saunders said: “Hospitality to one’s captives was also frequently extended by the British.
“But it became less common on both sides as the war progressed and attitudes hardened. This photograph, though, is remarkable. These men – adversaries – seem relaxed, almost in celebration, and yet the war was raging at its fiercest.”
The airman were sent to PoW camps days later. Rodgers ended up
RAF airman amid Germans after their plane went down in 1940
in Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania. He was one of hundreds put on a “death march” across Poland and Germany as the Russians advanced.
When he was liberated in April 1945, he weighed just 7st. His son
Brendan said: “My father told me he’d been very lucky to have survived – but he never mentioned champagne and caviar.”
Rodgers returned to his home city of Dublin, where he managed a cinema. He married Mary in 1945 and one of their four children was called Valery after the French town. He died in 1986, aged 82.
Bartlam, of Broseley, Shrops, also survived the war and died in 1997.
Von Luck was captured south of Berlin in April 1945 and spent four years in a Soviet labour camp. He died in Hamburg in 1997, aged 86.