Alan Mackay RIP

Kyt · Nov 19, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5182539.ece

Alan Mackay’s flying career with the Royal Air Force was brief yet eventful. Returning from a bombing raid over Germany in February, 1941, his Wellington bomber was badly damaged by ground fire but he coaxed it over the Channel to land in a Suffolk field without injury to himself or his crew.

He was less fortunate in April that year flying a Wellington to North Africa to join the Desert Air Force. When almost there, his aircraft was again a victim to ground fire. He landed it on the beach near Benghazi in Cyrenaica (now Libya), from where Commonwealth troops had withdrawn a few days earlier in the face of Rommel’s first tentative thrust eastwards. He spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps.

Having been a trainee journalist on the People’s Journal in Aberdeen before the war, he began production of his own newspaper in Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, the camp from which the “Great Escape” was made in March 1944. Rumour and misleading news given out by the German prison staff was a cause of confusion and strain on morale, so Mackay opened on an optimistic note. His first handwritten publication, pinned on a hut wall, appeared on February 15, 1943, under the heading “313 days to Christmas”.

He adopted the title The Daily Recco partly to echo one of Scotland’s popular papers but also as it contained information in response to his reconnaissance of issues of interest to his fellow prisoners. Later the paper was banned by German prison staff; until then Mackay claimed it as “the only free press in Nazi-occupied Europe”. Incorporating news received over the camp’s secret radio, it consisted of morale-boosting bulletins on Allied progress in the war.

Mackay was transferred to Stalag Luft VI in Heydekrug on the East Prussian-Lithuanian border before the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III took place. When the German announcement that 47 of the escapers had been shot “while trying to escape” was published in Stalag Luft III and leaked to other camps, he ran the story in The Daily Recco in Heydekrug. (In fact, 50 escapers were murdered in groups of two or three by the Gestapo.)

As the Red Army swept into Lithuania in January 1945, the prisoners in Stalag Luft VI and other camps were packed into cattle wagons and moved to Stalag 579 at Fallingbostel, south of Hamburg. From there, many were marched in freezing weather towards Lübeck under guard of elderly and demoralised German soldiers. Near to exhaustion, Mackay abandoned his copies of the Recco to the care of a farmer’s wife in whose barns some of the column was housed overnight. Fortunately, she was a South African and, after the war, a cousin of Mackay’s involved in preparation for the Nuremberg war crime trials was able to trace her and recover them. They are now in the RAF Museum at Hendon.

As the prisoners’ march westwards became increasingly disorganised, Mackay and two other prisoners broke away from the column, found an abandoned German staff car and headed west until they met the advancing British 2nd Army.

He returned to journalism after demobilisation, first as a staff reporter for the Daily Record, where he was known for supporting the underdog in a column headed “Alan Adair — frank but fair”, and another supporting the interest of Glenrothes miners. Subsequently he worked on the Scottish Daily Express. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, a son and a daughter.

Alan Mackay, bomber pilot, PoW and journalist, was born on November 5, 1920. He died on October 23, 2008, aged 87
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Antipodean Andy · Nov 19, 2008

RIP to a gifted man.

Kyt · Nov 19, 2008

Amazon.co.uk: 313 Days to Christmas: A Human Record of War and Imprisonment: Alan Mackay: Books

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