EPILOGUE

Some forgot the events of that night in 1943. Others could never forget and many did not live to remember. Löwenherz, Fleming and Sweet and the crews that flew with them were not the only ones to die. The Luftwaffe lost eight night fighters: three Ju88s, four Me11os and a Dornier 217 as well as three others that landed so heavily as to be written off strength. Ten Luftwaffe aircrew died and two more were hurt so badly that they never again flew in combat.

The RAF’s losses were forty-four bombers, of which thirty-one fell to German night fighters. Three hundred and one crewmen were lost: of these sixty-eight survived to become POWs. Nine of this latter group were seriously injured. Of the RAF aircraft destroyed thirty had already bombed. Five aircraft jettisoned their bombs in the sea or in open country. One bomb-load accidentally fell upon a Dutch village and caused eight deaths and three injured. Of the RAF aircraft destroyed, nine were lost toflak and one waslostwhen an RAF night fighter mis-identified it and shot it down as it crossed the English coast forty miles south of the Flight Plan.

Three bombers made fatal navigation errors. One descended through cloud and crashed into a mountain near Stavanger in Norway. Another ran out of fuel one hundred and sixty miles east of the Orkney Islands. One crashed in the South of France after being shot up. All of the crews perished.

PO Munro (John Munro’s brother), a Stirling pilot, survived the raid and completed his tour of operations. He now runs his brother’s estates, having married Sarah, his sister-in-law, and brought up the child and sent him to university where he studied Law. Tommy Carter and his crew were killed four operations after this one.

Lambert never flew again. Ruth was posted away, became pregnant, left the WAAF and stayed near her husband for the rest of the war. After the war Lambert went to work as a draughtsman in an aircraft factory. In 1954 he patented a supercharger modification and went into business manufacturing it. He is happy and moderately wealthy, although like many bomber pilots he has a history of spinal pains and disorders. They have a daughter and two sons.

Battersby, Flash Gordon and Digby were reassigned to a new pilot. They completed their tour, were posted to Training Command and then returned to do four trips of a second tour before the war ended. On the last operation they were badly shot up and Flash Gordon lost his left arm. Many Lancaster turrets were modified to have a clear-view panel. The Group Captain persuaded Air Ministry to officially name this the Sweet Panel.

Battersby married the WAAF driver that he met that night. After the war he went to London University just as his father had planned and, somewhat to his father’s surprise, chose to study English Medieval History. He has written a book on medieval fortification and is at present a visiting professor at a large American university.

Digby returned to Australia. He has the Australian agency for a British light plane manufacturer and travels round the country selling them to farmers on the assurance that if he could learn to fly them anyone could. Sometimes the customers ask him if he was in the Air Force during the war but Digby stoutly maintains that he was too young to be in the war. Now completely bald, he wears a toupee.

Jammy Giles left the RAF in 1949. He was drinking a lot by then and couldn’t get used to the fact that post-war Officers’ Mess parties had become rather more staid than he liked. His mother died and left him a little cash with which he started to buy a pub near Stratford-upon-Avon. In the first year it made money but that led Jammy into a false confidence, for really he is not a good businessman. Careless book-keeping and generosity with credit made him bankrupt in 1954. However, after working as a waiter for two years he had another go at running his own place. While at his lowest point economically and psychologically he had met and married a beautiful girl named Bessie. Together they started a lorry-driver’s café on the A1 only about thirty miles fromWarley. Jammy admits that it owes its success to Bessie, who works twice as hard as he does. She handles all the buying and hiring and firing and, as Jammy says, ‘more drivers eat here to see her than to see me’. However, sometimes Squadron people visit them to recall old times. There are dark fly-blown pictures on the wall of Jammy standing under Lancaster bombers and one of him receiving his DFC from the King. Only two years ago Peterson called in and they were laughing about the time he did a bombing run seated on the Elsan. Peterson lives in Montreal and is a vice-president of a small company that makes camping equipment.

In 1948 Cohen’s parents both died within three months of each other. Nora Ashton still lives with her mother in the house down the lane. It puzzles some people that she never married, for they guess, rightly, that she had many proposals.

The Group Captain died in 1946 in a car accident in Germany while he was still in the RAF. Willi Reinecke also got a job with the RAF in Germany after the war, although he had to falsify his age to do it. He worked in Air Traffic Control for nearly five years before retiring to live in the Ruhr. His son now works for Lufthansa, also in Air Traffic.

Fischer got another medal soon after D-Day. He was awarded the Oak-leaves after rounding up a group of stragglers including cooks and clerks and, using Panzerfäuste, repulsing an attack by British tanks outside Caen. He was killed after being cut off from his division in the fighting near Essen. He established a strongpoint with one hundred and fifty men and refused all demands to surrender. Artillery fire destroyed them. He still had the three-hundred-year-old Kuba carpet with him. It was found in the ruins by an RASC driver and ended its days as a floor covering in his lorry.

Frau Voss survived the war. Using the few works of art that her husband had—with typical foresight—stored in his son-in-law’s house, she was able to live comfortably in Portugal until she died in 1959.

Bodo Reuter also survived the war. He worked on a freight boat for a year and then met a man in Athens who gave him a job crewing a luxury yacht for a Greek millionaire. For the first time in his life he began to drink to the point where it interfered with his work. He was dismissed and went to work on various ships but it was on a Panamanian oil tanker that he continued for the longest period, working as a cook. On Christmas Day, 1952, two policemen found a derelict old man on a park bench in Le Havre. He’d sold his seaman’s papers to buy wine so they were unable to identify him. They filled in his death certificate by guesswork. Shrewdly they guessed he was German, but, as one of the flics said, he looked more like a poet than a beggar. They compromised and wrote schoolteacher.

August Bach’s SS son Peter, within nine days of writing his letter, won one of the Army’s most coveted awards, a badge for the single-handed destruction of a tank. Three days after that he was promoted and four days later—on rest behind the lines—he died of shotgun wounds inflicted by a partisan.

August Bach is now a very old man with pure white hair and wrinkled skin. He went to Brazil after the war, married a local girl and had two sons and a daughter. The first job he got was with a small company that builds power boats for fishing enthusiasts, mostly from the USA. After four years the owner gave Bach a small share of the business and a few months after that made him a full partner and retired. Bach was an old man already but by bringing his son and son-in-law into the business he has expanded its trade every year. Bach’s younger son Hans returned to Germany. Having already flown light planes in Brazil he got a job with Lufthansa and was trained as a pilot. He now has done nearly three thousand hours on jets. August Bach and his wife spend most of their days in their small cottage on the beach. In some ways it is not unlike the hut he had at Ermine and he still photographs birds and sometimes dissects them.

At Ermine itself there is virtually no trace of the radar station, although the concrete gun emplacements are still there. Dutch bird-watchers go there on Sundays in the summer but there are no herons there now. The nearby drainage workings have disturbed them.

The surviving Mausi twin served a six months’ prison sentence for shooting the dogs but did not see combat until the closing weeks of the war. He was captured by the Red Army and served eleven years in a labour camp in the extreme north. He was a sick man when he was released and was permitted to go toWest Germany where he had relatives. He is unmarried and works as a storekeeper in a plastics factory near Hamburg. He only got that job because the manager was also in the Waffen SS and felt sorry for him.

Hans Furth was taken prisoner by the British in 1945 and continued to work as a doctor in the camp and later for Allied Military Government. He ran as a candidate in the local elections but did not win. However, one of the people who worked for him on the election campaign was the Munich manager of an American public relations company. Furth was offered a job in the Chicago office. He worked for them for eight years and then left to start his own PR company in New York. Nowadays he works there only two days a week and is able to afford long holidays in Florida and a trip to Europe once a year. Originally, most of his clients were German manufacturers moving into the US market but now those are in the minority. Furth has become so American in his clothes and speech that very few of his clients guess that he is not a native. For this reason he only employs American-born staff with the exception of an English secretary, an English receptionist and an English telephone operator, ‘for the image’.

Dr Starkhof, the Abwehr man, was arrested after the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20th, 1944. He conclusively proved his innocence and so escaped the death sentence. He was, however, sent to a concentration camp and although he was still alive when the American troops reached it he died only three months afterwards.

The Burgomaster went into a mental home and died before the war ended. The young Meyers who got married with Andi Niels’ aid immigrated to Israel and now works on a fruit farm near Jerusalem. Redenbacher became an Oberst at OKL and was killed flying as a passenger in a Ju52 in January 1945. Old Krugelheim was killed when a low-flying USAAF Mustang shot up the Kroonsdijk airfield in late 1944. The airfield itself still exists, although it is only half its former area. There are only light planes flying from it today, although there is a two-motor aeroplane that for only fifteen guilders takes sightseers for a quick circuit of the IJsselmeer workings. Those same workings drained a vast area of sea and found the remains of Kokke’s Ju88 last year. Although it was intended for a museum it broke up when being moved.

Warley Fen’s runways are still in position although they cannot be seen for growing crops. If you go there today you will also find some of the other buildings. The Sick Quarters where Cohen died have become sheep pens and the remains of the Sergeants’ Mess where the gramophone was once so loud now echo to the grunt of many pigs. Only the Control Tower is in anything like its original condition, although if you ascend the iron staircase be careful. You might end up writing a book about it.