The Last Escaper: The Untold First-Hand Story of the Legendary World War II Bomber Pilot, "Cooler King" and Arch Escape Artist
368
The Last Escaper: The Untold First-Hand Story of the Legendary World War II Bomber Pilot, "Cooler King" and Arch Escape Artist
368eBook
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Overview
The product of a lifetime’s reflection, The Last Escaper is Peter Tunstall’s unforgettable memoir of his days in the British Royal Air Force and as one of the most celebrated British POWs of World War II. Tunstall was an infamous tormentor of his German captors. Dubbed the “cooler king” on account of his long spells in solitary, he once dropped a water “bomb” directly in the lap of a high-ranking German officer. He also devised an ingenious method for smuggling coded messages back to London. But above all he was a highly skilled pilot, loyal friend, and trusted colleague. Without false pride or bitterness, Tunstall recounts the hijinks of training to be a pilot, terrifying bombing raids, and elaborate escape attempts at once hilarious and deadly serious—all part of a poignant and human war story superbly told by a natural raconteur. The Last Escaper is a captivating final testament by the “last man standing” from the Greatest Generation.
“Right up there with Stalag 17 and The Great Escape.” —New York Post
“The historical account of behind-the-scenes drama makes this a valuable addition to the period literature.” —Publishers Weekly
“The stark reality of war is ever present in his detailed accounting of life as a prisoner of war. We are taken through the highs and lows of not only each failed attempt but the psychological effects of imprisonment on himself, others in the camps and ultimately how it changed each person involved.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468311556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 21,311 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mission impossible
I'm not psychic, so I can't say that I knew on that summer evening, as the aircraft lifted above the boundary fence and began a climbing turn toward Germany, that none of us would be coming back. But I wouldn't have bet against it.
August 1940 was not a good time to be a bomber pilot. France had fallen. It looked very much as though Great Britain was next. Most of the British Army had been pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk, but they had had to leave nearly all their weapons and equipment behind. The losses would take years to replace and we simply didn't have that long. The Germans were massing on the Channel coast to follow up their conquest of France with a quick invasion of Britain. If they got across, it was hard to see what could stop them. Our troops had little more than small arms with which to defend themselves, and not much more than haystacks to shelter behind. Every morning and afternoon immense swarms of German bombers roamed across the southeast of England, seeking out airfields, factories and ports, clearing a way for the ground forces that were to follow. RAF fighters were desperately fending them off, but God alone knew for how long that could go on.
In all this darkness there was only one faint gleam of hope. The British bomber force still remained, the only weapon that could directly affect Germany's war-making capacity. We knew that Germany had few natural resources of her own. In particular she was highly dependent on imported oil. She must already have used up most of her existing stocks in the campaign against France and the Low Countries. If bombing could destroy Germany's remaining oil plants, her entire intricate war machine might grind to a halt. That, of course, couldn't win the war for us. No doubt she would respond by building new refineries in places we couldn't easily hit. But it would buy us precious time, at least until the autumn gales set in and made a sea-borne invasion an impossibility until the following spring.
Such, at any rate, was the theory. In reality my comrades and I were being handed a Mission Impossible. We had begun the war believing that we would be able to fly into Germany in daylight, and that formations of bombers would be able to defend themselves against fighter attacks. Our first few raids disabused us of that notion. Loss rates approached fifty percent, with the survivors being so badly mauled that they had little or no chance of hitting their targets. So we turned to night attacks. The darkness gave us some prospect of living long enough to be able to reach our objectives. But it also increased the difficulty of the task exponentially. For one thing, none of us knew very much about flying after dark. When I began my operational career, I had precisely two hours and ten minutes' worth of experience as a pilot in command of a bomber at night.
Nor was that all. A bomber aircraft faces three challenges: navigation, target identification, and bomb aiming. With the miserably inadequate technology available at the time, all three largely defeated us. Unable to see the ground in the dark and lacking any radio-navigational aids, we found our way by what was officially known as dead reckoning (more honestly described as "by guess and by God"), that is, flying a compass course for a specified time and hoping that we would somehow wind up in the same province as our intended destination. The best of us navigated in much the same manner as Columbus had done when sailing to America in 1492 — by using a mariner's sextant to sight the moon or stars and measuring their altitude above the horizon. A skilled navigator using these methods could tell you, to within a radius of around twenty miles, where you had been fifteen minutes ago. That assumes, of course, that high clouds didn't make it impossible to see the sky clearly. But this wouldn't have been of any help to my crew. None of us had had any training in astral navigation.
Even if one did find the target area, identifying a black building against a black landscape was usually impossible. Often, the only time we knew we were in the vicinity of something valuable to the enemy was when his anti-aircraft guns started shooting at us. Our bomb-sighting equipment was also primitive, producing errors of hundreds of yards even in skilled hands. And the bombs themselves were too small, carried too weak a charge of explosive, and in a shockingly high proportion of cases failed to go off.
Lastly, there were innumerable problems with our new aircraft, the Handley Page Hampden. This was a twin-engine bomber with a crew of four. It was about the same size as one of the smaller commuter turboprops used today for short hops between regional airports and the big hubs. But in 1940 it represented the last word in British bomber technology. Although it was quite a robust aircraft and pleasant to fly, many of the technical issues had not been worked out when we started using it in operations against Germany. The mechanics, no less than the aircrews, were learning on the job, and breakdowns were frequent. Hardly a single flight took place without some critical component — engines, compasses, radios — giving up the ghost. But in a world war, it's not possible to spend months or years in testing and development, especially when the war is going as badly as ours was. So we were simply thrown in at the deep end and left to figure out a way to cope with all these challenges by ourselves. Those who didn't manage, never came back. It was as simple and as brutal as that.
These sombre reflections were much in my mind when, on the afternoon of 26 August, we were called to the briefing room to be told the details of that night's mission. Our target was the Leuna synthetic oil plant at Merseburg near Leipzig. It was a hell of a long way away from our base at Hemswell in Lincolnshire, much further than any of us had ever been before. The round trip would take at least eight hours if the weather stayed kind, and longer if it didn't. The target was difficult to see, and, as we knew from an unsuccessful attack by another squadron ten days earlier, heavily defended.
As was usual in 1940, we were briefed to choose our own individual routes to the target. The idea of a concentrated bomber stream which sought to overwhelm the defences, allowing most of the aircraft to slip through while the Germans were preoccupied with just one or two of the leaders, had not yet been conceived. We bumbled along singly, getting everything that could be tossed up by the enemy all to ourselves, like driven pheasants coming stupidly out of cover — only one at a time.
This formidable assignment was received with the usual apparent nonchalance, but left a distinctly heavy feeling in the stomach. It was especially discouraging as the Met forecast was the usual story of fronts and cloud systems along the way with "perhaps" some clearance in the target area. The last item of guesswork, no doubt intended to help morale, was quite unconvincing, and we knew only too well how unreliable the forecast winds could be.
After briefing, we went for a quick meal to the mess. When our flight commander, Charles Kydd, who had personal service transport, shouted, "Who's for flights?" there was an undignified rush to scramble aboard his little Hillman van rather than walk the quarter of a mile down to the hangars. There in the locker rooms, dimly lit with windows already blacked out for the night as an air raid precaution, we put on thick woollen sweaters under our uniform tunics. Mine was a white one, which Ann had knitted for me with RAF colours in the V-neck. Then, over our tunics, we pulled on the harsh Sidcot flying suits, which in August would be warm enough without the detachable lining. Finally, we tied on our Mae West life jackets and began to feel like Michelin Men, cumbersome with clothing and equipment. Next came a last quick check of gear: topographical maps, code books, target maps, briefing instructions, and in my breast pocket, the usual six snapshots of Ann and — sentimental little boy that I was — the receipt from the Imperial Hotel, Llandudno, for the dinner dance on our last evening together.
Leaving the dim locker room in the hangar, with parachutes slung over our shoulders and leather helmets in our hands, it was odd to hit daylight again, like coming out of a cinema matinée. A watery sun was setting, giving a pink underglow to the ragged broken clouds scudding across the sky. The tarmac apron outside the hangar glinted with puddles from a recent downpour, and the tyres of the canvas-topped lorries sang in the wet as they sped towards us and stopped.
We clambered aboard the high three-tonners bound for the aircraft dispersal points, handing up to each other parachutes, navigation bags, ration packs and thermos flasks. It was going to be a long haul to Leipzig and back and a lonely night. As our lorry started to roll, somebody called from the hangar: "Good luck, chaps, see you in the 'Snake Pit' for a pint tomorrow night." Somebody always did it and I rather wished they wouldn't. Everyone knew the casualty rate well enough. The odds were against finishing a first tour of thirty sorties, and the jovialities always seemed a bit like tempting fate. This was by far the most trying part of any bomber sortie and I much preferred to be airborne.
We dropped out of the lorry at our own Hampden, which we had flight-tested that afternoon and found serviceable except for a minor instrument snag. Now the ground crew had her fully re-fuelled and our middle-aged corporal in charge of the ground crew assured me that everything was on top line, instruments all okay, bombed up and ready to go. I made a quick routine inspection round the aircraft, took a look into the open bomb bay to check that all safety pins had been removed from the bombs, and it was time to climb aboard. I noticed that one of my crew always gave the ground a ritual pat before he climbed into his battle station.
Parachute and helmet on and up the ladder to waddle across the wing with the pilot-type parachute bumping at the back of my thighs. One step up into the cockpit and I sank down into the metal seat with the 'chute and its sorbo-rubber pad forming the only cushion. Our corporal handed the safety harness over my shoulders and I buckled the straps to the ones coming up from the floor. Plug in the intercom for speaking to the rest of the crew; plug in oxygen and a nod to the corporal who gave me two pats on the shoulder (better than words) before disappearing down the ladder and removing it. I hoped nobody ever saw me trace the letters A N N for luck on the windscreen with my right forefinger.
Having run through the long list of routine checks, I shouted out, "Starting Port" and pressed the button to turn that engine while the lad underneath was priming fuel into the cylinders. With ignition switches on, the big three-bladed prop turned twice slowly, then jerked and, with a shuddering belch of blue smoke and a flash of flame from the exhaust, the eighteen-cylinder Bristol engine started. Now that we were committed, the tensions always eased. Starboard engine started, bomb doors closed, time now to wriggle a bit more comfortably down on that sorbo pad and tighten the shoulder straps.
Clear of dispersal, we were on our way and taxiing towards the caravan where "Paraffin Pete", a junior aircrew officer, was in charge of the flare path laid out on the all-grass airfield. It was still bright enough, however, for us to be able to take off without illumination. Pete flashed us a green with his Aldis signalling lamp. Once in line with the avenue of unlit paraffin gooseneck flares, like a row of old black watering-cans with a fat wick sticking out of each spout, I completed the take-off checks and pushed the two throttles all the way forward.
With an almighty bellow, the Hampden heaved herself forward over the grass and began to accelerate. On she bounded towards that far hedge, which had already been breached by a Hampden or two in the past. Then a gentle backward pressure on the control column, followed by a bit more, and we unstuck from Mother Earth. At about 100 feet from the ground I brought in the wing flaps and began a climbing turn onto our first course and we were bound for Leipzig, nearly four hours and, by the route we were taking, somewhat more than 600 miles away.
Looking down through broken cloud in the failing light we could see Englishmen carrying on their normal lives, going home for a peaceful evening or on the way to the village pub. My Irish rear-gunner, Sergeant Joyce, said: "Wouldn't mind changing places with them, sir, would you?" I thought it was a somewhat demoralising remark and I made some daft reply about how lucky we were to be able to travel so widely at government expense.
Soon after we crossed the English coast, the sea horizon merged with the sky as darkness fell and the cloud began to thicken. We were flying into the night and towards dirty weather. When I asked the navigator, Sergeant Murdock, what he could see below, I got the familiar answer, "Nothing, sir. It's black as a witch's tit down there."
It is a pity we caught no glimpse of the enemy coast, for had we seen it, probably before the expected time, we might have become aware that the winds we had been given for navigation purposes were inaccurate in speed and direction. In retrospect, it's clear that we were being blown faster and deeper into enemy territory than we expected and somewhat off track to the north.
We probed around for sight of a landmark but finally abandoned hope and climbed to a more comfortable height between cloud layers, trusting that we would later find the promised clearance in the weather that would enable us to make another effort at fixing our position visually. On the matter of finding the target I had come to a personal resolve. Too many of our previous missions had been failures — no more than the squadron average, perhaps, but failures nonetheless. Tonight we were going to extend ourselves to the utter limit or, as we used to say at the time, "shit or bust!" As we forged on across Europe, the enemy would occasionally engage, their searchlight beams reaching up through low cloud, the heavy flak bokbokking away, and sometimes getting a bit too close when we neglected to weave around and confuse their sound detectors.
Eventually, by our time calculations we should have been nearing the target area. It was now necessary to descend through the cloud and try, once again, to establish our position visually once we had broken out into the clear. Ordinarily, no pilot would ever dream of doing this. If the cloud extends all the way down to ground level, as it often does, the first you'll know of it is when you find yourself being quizzed by St Peter at the pearly gates. But these are risks that must be taken in wartime. If we were to find our target, there was simply no alternative.
More than seventy years later, my blood still runs cold at the memory of this descent. We sank into the blackness through the dense layer of cloud, throttles back, fretting about the higher ground we knew lay to the south of Leipzig, and trying to contrive that we erred in our navigation only in a northerly direction, if at all. As the altimeter unwound, my crew had their eyes straining for first sight of the ground while I concentrated on the instruments to keep the Hampden on an even keel.
The mind races quickly in these situations. The altimeter was showing 1,500 feet above sea level, but that was based on what the air pressure had been when we took off from Hemswell. Now, hours later, we might already be at ground level. 1,200 feet. Most hills that height are too low even to have names. 1,000 feet. This was getting ridiculous. We were going to fly into the ground and be killed instantly, without even having seen it. 900 feet. Two voices called over the intercom simultaneously:
"There's the ground!"
"I can see the deck!"
For the first time, I lifted my eyes from the instruments and, sure enough, there were a few scattered lights below. The Germans appeared to be a bit careless about blackout regulations this far to the east and perhaps overconfident about an air attack on account of the foul weather. We scudded along the base of the cloud with the altimeter reading a perilously low 800 to 900 feet, twisting and turning in an effort to find the target and still petrified about invisible hills, factory chimneys or radio antennae. Our chances of identifying the refinery were hopeless and I knew it, but we continued to try.
Down below the natives were obviously hostile, opening up on us with some light flak. As the tracer flitted up, we reckoned there must be something worth defending, and we managed to discern the reflected glint of some railway lines. These led into an array of buildings that looked like enormous sheds or workshops, so we turned back and bombed them.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Escaper"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Peter Tunstall.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents,
Copyright,
Foreword by Major-General Corran Purdon,
Introduction,
1. Mission impossible,
2. "Do you really fly?",
3. Never say die,
4. Bomber pilot,
5. Temporarily unsure of our position,
6. "Kommen sie mit!",
7. From Barth to Spangenberg and Thorn,
8. "What's the plan?",
9. The only remedy, escape,
10. Colditz,
11. "O what a beautiful morning ...",
Afterword,
Index,
About the Author,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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