A detail underlining tragedy. But with a smile

It’s going to take me months, if not years, to finish going through my late parents’ papers. But however long the task may be, it’s alleviated by some of the findings I make. Sometimes, they’re amusing, sometimes more serious, and the best are both.

As I’ve mentioned before, my father, Leonard, served in the Royal Air Force in World War 2. One trace of this service that I recently discovered in his papers was a card prepared to help airmen escape capture if they were shot down over Nazi-occupied territory and, somehow, managed to survive.

Airmen, phrases for the escape of,

It was marked ‘Not to be Produced in Public’. Clearly, this was sensitive material. Someone had decided that it was important for the general public in Britain not to know that the German for “I am in a hurry” could be “Ich habe es eilig”.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a situation in which a British airman would have used that expression. Faced with a platoon of German soldiers, he would have explained “I’d love to stay and chat but…” and pulling out his escape card, added “ich habe es eilig”. I suspect one of his captors might have replied, “oh, don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re our guest now.”

Perhaps the top levels of the RAF thought that it would be harmful to civilian morale to know that their airmen might ever find themselves in such a situation in the first place. Presumably, they assumed that Brits were too short of imagination to guess that RAF crews faced any risk of being shot down or captured. Seeing the escape card might have created panic among them.

That strikes me as pretty farfetched. It would be like believing that a majority of British voters could be fooled by shifty politicians into swallowing the patently preposterous proposition that they might be better off outside the European Union. Can you imagine that ever happening?

I also liked the fact that the card provides translations for the expression “Will you please get me a third class ticket to…” which the RAF rendered in French as “Voulez-vous me prendre un billet de troisième classe pour… s’il vous plait”

Get out of Nazi Europe free card

You’ve got to admire the thriftiness of the air force, haven’t you? Even for an airman on the run from Nazi forces, their men were expected to travel economically. I can just picture an airmen who somehow managed to dodge the German troops across half of Europe and then smuggle himself across the Channel to England being hauled in for a grilling by an irate squadron leader in Finance.

“What’s this in your expenses claim? You travelled from Düsseldorf to Brussels in second class? You know the rules. Only third-class travel’s authorised. You’ll have to pay the balance out of your own pocket, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps the US air force was more generous. Maybe they were taught to ask for first-class tickets for officers and second-class tickets for the others.

Still, the card doesn’t only evoke amusement. After all, the mere fact that it was produced underlines the danger airmen faced. Within Bomber Command, for instance, for every 100 who served, 45 were killed, 6 were seriously wounded and 8 were captured. Only 41 out of every 100 escaped any of those fates.

Leonard was among those shot down. But that happened in September 1944, when Allied forces already controlled a great part of Western Europe. So when his plane was hit, on the way back from dropping supplies to the paratroops caught at Arnhem in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden (made all the more infamous by the film A Bridge Too Far), the pilot was able to keep it in the air until well behind the Allied lines. As a result, instead of being captured they were simply evacuated to Brussels.

There Leonard had a wonderful time. He had no need of the silly phrase card. He’d spent his childhood in the city and spoke a beautiful, fluent French. Fortunately, the RAF had had the foresight to provide airmen not just with useless lists of phrases but also with escape currency to spend if they were shot down (presumably so they could buy third-class rail tickets). Leonard enjoyed himself immensely spending his escape money in the city of his childhood, before being shipped back to England and the rest of the war.

Ah, well. Even when I try to get serious about my father’s war, I notice the story ends up light-hearted. I think that was something of a hallmark of that generation. They’d seen things that weren’t that edifying and saw no benefit in reliving the horror. Instead, they focused on the things that made them laugh, and finished conversations about the war on a smile.

Which strikes me as a good note on which to end this blog post too.