Emotional journey retracing family’s history
Jack Hatfield was 27 when he died. His brother Tracy died in 2005 at the age of 85. Both had been born and raised in Tusket.
After his plane was hit over Cologne on that late-spring night in 1942 – during the “thousand-plane” raid on the German city – Tracy Hatfield parachuted into a large wheat field. Eventually, he found a haystack, where he went to sleep. He later awoke and saw a farmer pointing a gun at him. The younger Hatfield says his father told him he was glad to be captured, knowing his injuries – including a fractured neck – would be treated and he would be given food.
He spent two months in the hospital, the doctor telling him he was very lucky to have survived. The pilot who shot his plane down went to visit him, but Hatfield refused to see him. The younger Hatfield says his father told him he always regretted that decision, having come to realize the German airman was only doing his job that night when Hatfield’s plane was shot down.
“’He was just doing what I would have done,’” the younger Hatfield said, recalling his father’s sentiment.
Hatfield was interrogated for 13 straight days by a German officer, and, despite uncertainty about what might happen to him, he only offered the basic information a prisoner of war was required to give. In an interview with Don Pothier, who wrote a book about the history of Tusket, Hatfield recalled that at the end of the last day of interrogation, the German officer shook his hand and told him he was a fine soldier.
Hatfield also spoke to Pothier about the first prisoner-of-war camp where he stayed, Stalag Luft 3, saying it was huge. “It seemed like as far as you could see there were prisoners,” Hatfield told Pothier. “It was difficult to believe there could be enough soldiers left out there to fight the war.”
The younger Hatfield recalls his father telling him they were treated fairly well in the camp. The food could have been better and more plentiful, he said, but the prisoners ate as well as their German guards and, thanks to Red Cross parcels, sometimes better. Hatfield spent almost a year in this camp (the focus of the 1963 movie The Great Escape). Where this camp was located is now part of Poland. Hatfield was then moved to another camp in what is now Lithuania.
Hatfield had worked for the Royal Bank prior to the war and, once he returned home, he had a chance to return to the bank, but he chose not to. Instead, with his brothers Garth and Paul, he started a wholesale business in tobacco and confectionery called Gateway Jobbers.
Referring to his trip overseas earlier this fall, the younger Hatfield said it was something he had thought of doing for a number of years.
“I was over in England in 2008 and I visited the airbases over there where my father flew out of and where Jack flew out of,” he said. “I had worked it out by 2009, 2010, where I was going to go and how I was going to get there, but it just seemed like a very daunting task at the time, so I kept putting it off, but I knew some time I would go, and I thought, well, if I don’t go now, I’m never going to go.”
Hatfield was reflecting on his trip just a few days after the season of remembrance had begun and the local poppy campaign was underway. In recent years, since the death of his father, he said his Remembrance Day routine has changed.
“I don’t go to the ceremonies,” he said. “I used to with Dad, but what I do (now) is I go to Dad’s grave in Tusket. I go there about a quarter to 11 and I stay until about 10 after 11. Just by myself ... just think about everything.”