Evader

by Derek Shuff

Overview

In 1941 air gunner Sergeant Jack Newton's Wellington is hit by flak on his first bombing raid over Germany. Miraculously, the skipper makes an emergency landing on a German-occupied Belgian airfield, narrowly avoiding Antwerp Cathedral. Having torched the plane, the crew give the unsuspecting Germans the slip and are hidden by the Resistance. Hoping to make it to the coast and back across the Channel, the airmen are surprised when the 23-year-old female leader of the Comete Escape Line, Andree de Jongh – codenamed Dedee – has other plans for them. Full of terrifying and humorous moments, this is the story of the epic journey of the first British airman to escape occupied Europe during the Second World War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780750951494
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	07/05/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Evader

The Epic Story of the First British Airman to be Rescued by the Comète Escape Line in World War II

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By Derek Shuff

The History Press

Copyright © 2010 Derek Shuff
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5149-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Early Days

Jack Lamport Newton was born in a hayloft on 4 February 1920, although the hayloft had long since been converted into a cosy flat, and the stables below it into a garage where chauffeur John Lamport Newton kept and looked after the guvnor's cars. They lived there for twenty-five years in a very smart part of Hampstead, in north London, through the generosity of John's employer, Mr Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, the famous baby powder company, who provided his chauffeur with the courtesy flat, and £5 a week wage.

It was in this atmosphere of gracious living, stylish and fast cars, as well as a lifestyle that must have been the envy of his school pals, that young Jack and his elder sister, Babs, spent their formative years enjoying the many benefits and privileges which came their way at 13 Lancaster Mews. Mr Johnson was a kindly man who loved expensive cars, and being well able to afford them, the 'shop' – the family's pet name for the garage – was filled with some of the choicest models around at the time. Cars such as the 90 horse power Fiat, and the superb Issota Frashini, to name just two. A stable once filled with horses was now full of high horse power cars. The irony was not lost on Jack. He became nearly as obsessed with the sleek and beautiful horseless carriages as his father, and Mr Johnson, too. Mr Johnson's cars were his pride and joy, and when he could take a couple of weeks away from his business he liked nothing more than to have chauffeur Newton drive him off to Spain where the roads were long, straight and empty. 'Come on, dear chap, put your foot down. Open up. Let's see what she can do,' he'd say encouragingly, as John put the powerful Fiat through its paces.

On one such trip, the two of them fell foul of some Spanish brigands. Up in the hills around Granada, old Mr Johnson and his chauffeur were suddenly confronted by a gang of ruffians who stood across the road waving guns, hoping to stop the car. Their intentions were pretty clear. 'Go through them, Newton. Drive on ...' ordered the old man, as though he was leading a cavalry charge. The two men put their heads down, and drove straight at the gang who had to throw themselves either side of the road to avoid being run down. Shots were fired as the car raced away, one missile hitting John Newton in the wrist. Even so, he kept control of the vehicle and continued driving until they reached safety – and a hospital.

John's favourite snack was dripping on toast. He loved it. Gus, as his wife was nicknamed, made him lightly browned toast, and John piled the dripping on so thick it fell off the sides. Then he would cut each slice into four, pop a quarter into his mouth at a time, and savour the flavour for as long as possible before swallowing. After that, he popped in the next piece, and the next until it was all consumed. Jack would watch mesmerised. He recalls:

Mum was one of six sisters who all came from Fareham, in Hampshire. Mum's father, Granddad Lamport, was a local butcher, which must have been where dad got his taste for fresh dripping. Each weekend we always had a package from our own family butcher consisting of a couple of pounds of sausages, some pieces of meat, some bacon, and some things unheard of now called chitlings. Also, there would be black pudding and dad's tub of dripping. All delivered promptly on the same day to Lancaster Mews.

We lived in Hampstead until I was about 11, then we moved to what we called the backside of Mr Johnson's house, which was on Avenue Road, St John's Wood. It was quite near to Primrose Hill and Regent's Park. Mr Johnson had a very large garden, with a sizeable plot of undeveloped land one side, and on the other was a little yellow brick house. It was on the plot of vacant land that Mr Johnson had the house built for Dad; our new home, 30-2 Townshend Road, St John's Wood. The big, detached house with two garages and huge glass awnings over both garages, cost about £3,000 in those days. I cannot imagine what it would go for today. But the great thing about living on Townshend Road, I went to Barrow Hill Road School, in St John's Wood High Street, which was barely three minutes' walk away.

By this time Dad chauffeured Mr Johnson around in a Le Mons 3.5 Bentley, as well as an Armstrong Siddeley, both kept and cared for in our double garage. The son had a Lancia, and Dad kept that up to scratch, too. When I bought my favourite little MG, Mr Johnson gave me permission to keep it in one of the garages.

Considering we lived rent free, my Dad's fiver a week take home pay allowed us to live well. We had a wonderful time. On top of that, we had a family holiday in Bournemouth once a year.

My sister and I loved those holidays. London was always interesting, but the sand and the fresh air in Bournemouth was something quite special. My sister's full name is Emalia Hilda Madge Newton, a bit of a mouthful which was why we called her 'Babs'. The Emalia was something to do with my Dad's love of Spain, and anything Spanish. I believe he'd heard the name on one of his Spanish jaunts and when my sister came along, his firstborn, she just had to be named 'Emalia'. Babs wasn't impressed. She liked to be called Babs, or Madge.

There were only the two of us. Like me, Babs is still around, but she hasn't been too well of late, having just lost her husband who was nearly 100. So, at this time of writing, she is in a nursing home in Wales. Babs is seven years older than me, so she is knocking on 90.

Life in Townshend Road was good for the chauffeur's young son, but one day he noticed a family moving into number 42, a few houses along, and suddenly thought being there showed every sign of getting still better! Jack's eye had caught sight of the new family's pretty 13-year-old daughter, Mary. That evening, before bed, he asked his mother if she knew anything about the new people. 'The husband is like your dad, he's a chauffeur,' she told him. 'That's all I know ...' Apart from the pretty daughter, Jack soon found out she had two younger brothers. Mary's father was a dour Scotsman and a member of the Royal Scots Greys. Apart from being a chauffeur, he was already a friend of Jack's dad.

Every Sunday, Mary and the two boys who were turned out in kilts, sporrans, and little buttoned black shoes, were taken to church. After a while, Jack and Mary began talking to each other. Then Jack plucked up courage and started calling at her house. He wasn't always made welcome. Sometimes he would knock, and Mary's father would tell him to 'Go away ... she's too busy.' 'Yes, I'd get shooed off,' he says. But he persevered. There was an old gas lamp-post outside, and Jack found that if he climbed to the top of it, he could see into Mary's bedroom. When his welcome wore thin at the front door, Mary opened her bedroom window, Jack shinned up the lamp-post and they chatted until Mary was called away.

Jack was getting on well with Mary, but the more it looked that way to her father, the more he showed it irritated him. Some evenings they would take Mary's dog for a walk, but when Jack called at her house to pick her up he was told precisely when Mary had to be back home. If it was nine o'clock, then her dad was on the doorstep waiting, looking at his watch as if he was counting down the seconds. It didn't make courting Mary easy for the lad. But young love conquers, and Mary had conquered Jack's heart. They became sweethearts.

I then passed one or two primary school exams and as Dad always wanted me to do something in the technical line, my parents managed to scrape enough money together to send me to the Regent Street Polytechnic. It was a sort of technical grammar school. The main school was on Regent Street and the technical side in Little Titchfield Street, alongside Broadcasting House, which was where I went each day. In four years, I did pretty well, passing most of the technical exams I sat in drawing and light engineering.

Then I applied for a job as a draughtsman at the Air Ministry. It had nothing to do with flying because the closest interest I'd shown in anything aeronautical at the time was putting together plastic model planes. Not even a plastic Wellington! Anyway, the Air Ministry didn't want me, or more to the point, they said they hadn't any places left to offer me. The only engineering job I could find was with the Post Office, so I was recruited into the Farm Street Exchange as a 'Cord Boy'; this exchange being the largest in Europe. Well, it was a start.

I went to hotels and big offices to mend switchboard cords. To wire up three-pin plugs, and clean them. I was known as the visiting cord boy. The Dorchester and The Grosvenor Hotels were both in my area. I was paid one pound four shillings and sixpence a week, which was pretty good money for a civil servant in those days.

When Germany began throwing its weight around in Europe, war fever began to get a hold of everyone, and I was no exception. I had three pals; one I'd met at work and the other two were Fleet Street journalists. We agreed we wanted to become pilots, so in 1938 we trotted along to Store Street, off Tottenham Court Road, and signed on with the RAF Volunteer Reserve. We attended training lectures on Store Street, and took part in weekend camps, which included some flying. Then I was posted to the De Havilland School of Flying, No. 13 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School, based in Maidenhead. We all trooped off there once or twice a week to familiarise ourselves with flying a couple of the aircraft they kept there – a Tiger Moth and the Hawker Hind. Both planes were painted yellow to show they were trainers.

It was there that I began to get really interested in flying. We'd go off for about half an hour, doing circuits and bumps (landing and take-offs), and a bit of cross country flying, too. I loved it, and believed I was becoming a pretty good pilot. Unfortunately, this wasn't a view shared by my instructor, especially after I returned from an afternoon training flight and came in to land just a bit too high. I had the choice of either opening up and going round again, or desperately putting the plane down firmly on the runway and hoping for the best. Unfortunately, I made the wrong choice – I went for the landing. It was more of a crash landing. One wingtip hit the ground ahead of the wheels, and bits fell off everywhere before me and my machine came to a crunching halt.

The little man from the control tower insisted I called in with my logbook before I left the airfield. When I reached the tower I could see he hadn't asked me over to sympathise. The little man took my logbook and endorsed it with the comment: 'Sergeant Newton will most likely make a very efficient pilot, but not up to the standards required by His Majesty's Air Force.' In short, there was no way they'd take me as a pilot, though my other three chums passed. It also meant I had lost the sergeant status given to trainee pilots, being instantly demoted back to the humble rank of AC2.

That left me with only one option if I wanted to be a flyer, as I did, and that was to settle for being an air gunner.

Shortly after 3 September 1939, the day war was declared on Germany, Jack had a letter from the Air Ministry addressed to Sergeant J.L. Newton. It instructed him to go to Store Street to pick up his uniform, his three tapes and little brevet hat. He felt great, and whoopee, he was still a sergeant.

I thought they had forgotten I had smashed up an aircraft, that I had been given another chance. All my friends were thinking, 'Jack must be jolly good. War has only just started and he's already a sergeant!'

But the following week an urgent telegram arrived at the Newton home in St John's Wood informing him there had been a mistake. He was told to hand in his sergeant's tapes because he was back to being an AC2, regarded as the lowest of the low.

His employer, the Post Office, thought he was crazy to want to give up his job to fly. He was a civil servant and in a reserved occupation, so he could have seen the war out as a civilian. That wasn't for Jack Newton, so the only chance he had to get back into the air was to take on a job that nobody else wanted – as a rear gunner, or a 'tailend Charlie', as they were called in those days.

His family, his friends, his girlfriend, Mary, they all suggested there might be a safer job for him to do if he really had his heart set on joining the Royal Air Force. 'I'd been bitten by the flying bug at Maidenhead, so it didn't bother me a damn that being a rear gunner was dangerous. Just as long as I was back in an aircraft.'

After some hanging around at home, waiting to be called up as a trainee air gunner, Jack was posted to the Eversfield Hotel, in Hastings, to do his initial training. It was the home of all the gunners and wireless operators. The next hotel along the road was for observers, and the palatial Marine Court was for pilots. 'So, the RAF didn't think much of us gunners, stuck in the lowly Eversfield, the worst hotel of the three!' said Jack. He did nine months' training without even catching sight of an aeroplane, other than the ones over-flying the town. Nor did he get his hands on a gun, not even those in the seaside town's amusement arcades! There were plenty of lectures, aircraft recognition tests, cross country running – presumably to keep him fit – and once a week pay parades in the underground car park. When it was wet, some of the outdoor activities took place in what was called 'Bottle Alley', a covered walkway beneath the seafront promenade that got its name because its walls were made with broken beer bottles and glasses. And when the NCOs (Noncommissioned Officers) in charge felt really bloody minded, they sent the men to run round Warrior Square ten times before collecting their pay.

Jack Newton stuck it out for nine months. Then came the plethora of inoculations for tetanus, yellow fever, smallpox, 'flu ... everything, it seemed, except swine fever!

They gave us those at the Grand Hotel, on the seafront. I had to sit on a long form, put my right arm on my hip, leaving it there until this medic had given me the three jabs in one arm, and another two in the other arm. That was OK because they gave us our jabs on a Friday so we could have a free weekend to get over them. I made my way up through Warrior Square to the railway station to get myself back to St John's Wood. On the way, I remember seeing quite a few AC2s hanging onto railings trying to catch their breath, groaning with their aches and pains from the effects of the inoculations!

Now for some real action. A posting to an operational training, No. 11 OTU Bassingbourn, in Cambridgeshire. Jack was able to familiarise himself with the Wellington 1c, the version with radial engines, and log a good number of hours in the process. Not too far away, in Gloucestershire, Frank Whittle was assembling his revolutionary jet engine at this time in 1940 and there were fears the Germans might parachute in saboteurs to wreck his work. Jack was one of those selected to undertake special guard duties on the site where the engine was being put together. Night fighters at Staverton, Jack's new posting, patrolled the skies in the area ready to confront any possible German attack. Fortunately, the Jerries stayed away.

Intense training continued on the ground and in the air as Newton went from Fairey Battles to Defiants, to Wellingtons, to understand all the complexities of the weapons that might help to save his own life, and those of his crewmates when he eventually went on operational bombing raids over Germany.

Then it was celebration time once more when the Royal Air Force gave him back his three stripes. He was a sergeant aircrew again, proudly wearing his stripes and his air gunner's winged brevet with AG embossed on it.

Aircrew were given minimum sergeant's rank, rather than LAC (Leading Aircraftsman) because if they were shot down the Germans treated the higher rank of non-commissioned officer with more respect than an LAC.

What about Mary? Was she concerned that the man who was now her fiancé (they became engaged just before she was 18) was putting his life well and truly on the line as an air gunner?

I don't think she looked at it that way. Mary was happy that I was doing what I wanted to do. In any case, with war now a part of everyone's life, we each lived one day at a time. When I saw Mary, we'd go to the cinema, take walks together, and we did a lot of cycling. I had a racing bike and Mary often came to see me speeding round the wooden race track in Paddington. Then there was my favourite MG sports car which we enjoyed taking out for a spin. Mary wrote to me every day, as she did when I was miles from her and home at Grimsby, in Lincolnshire, but there were never any recriminations in her letters at what I was doing, and the risks involved.

From gunnery school Newton was posted back to Bassingbourn around the end of 1940 and remained there training on Wellingtons. He hadn't seen any action, as yet. That happened when he flew as air gunner in Defiants, but this turned out to be primarily defensive patrolling. There was always the chance the Jerries might send over Junkers 52, loaded with paratroopers, in which case he'd have been up there in the front line. But they got cold feet!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Evader by Derek Shuff. Copyright © 2010 Derek Shuff. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Dedications,
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Introduction,
I The Early Days,
II Doing the Business,
III Dropping in on Antwerp,
IV Tangle with the Enemy,
V Train Trip Trouble,
VI 'Little Mother',
VII Mary's Love Diary,
VIII Walking with the Enemy,
IX Can I Cross the Pyrénées?,
X Bitterness of Failure,
XI Rickety Rope Bridge,
XII Safely Delivered,
XIII Smuggled into Gibraltar,
XIV Back Home!,
Conclusion,
Why it is Lucky 13 for me ...,