Anthony Casey: JOURNALISM: On The Run In Hitler's Germany On The Run In Hitler's Germany On the night of August 9, 1943, the crew of a stricken Lancaster bomber on a mission over Germany was faced with a dangerous decision. The plane was too badly damaged to fly properly, but if the crew was to bail out the timing would have to be perfect or their abandoned craft would smash into a village and kill civilians. Bert Cole was the bomb aimer on the Lancaster, part of 49 Squadron. This week the 82-year-old, and only surviving crew member, explained what happened that night over Kaiserslautern. "We'd had engine failure," he said. "We were half way through France when it happened, and had to make the decision whether to turn back. But we had a 70 mph tailwind, so that would have lost us 140 mph ground speed. "So we carried, flying the cookie [a 4,000lb bomb] to the target. The flak had a go at us and in the end we were left with three engines. We simply couldn't keep her straight and level, she just wouldn't fly. "When we got down to 4,000 feet the skipper said we'd have to bail out. He said we were going to have to get as low as we could because he didn't want the aircraft to crash and smash the village up and kill people. "We eventually bailed out at about 2,000 feet and the aircraft went into the wood." Bert landed in a tree, suspended by his parachute. He said: "I thought that if I pressed the automatic release to make the harness come off, I'd fall 40 feet and break my legs, but I had no choice. So I pressed it." Grinning, he held his hands just over foot apart. "I fell this far!" The parachute jump earned Bert membership of the Caterpillar Club, a loose affiliation of RAF men who had to bail out of their aircraft. He still has the membership card in his collection of memorabilia. With just his escape rations of food, a water bottle, and a map, Bert remained at large in rural Germany for three days. He was captured because he had forgotten that the locl schoolchildren were only in class for half of each day. Bert said: "The idea was that you worked towards France, laying up in the daytime and moving at night. You had to try to get in touch with the Underground [the French Resistance]. On the third day I made a big mistake and got caught by the local school children. I hurried into the woods and lay under the bushes, but they had already seen me and I could soon hear the German dogs. Then everything went quiet, and I looked up and this big German soldier was looking down at me. It was like a film - he actually said 'for you, the war is over'." As a prisoner of war, Bert spent his time in three different prisons - Stalag Luft 1, Stalag Luft 6 and Stalag Luft 4. And he escaped three times. "You couldn't just make up your mind to escape. You had to join an escape committee, XYZ. You had to put your name down on the escape list and help did the tunnel. It was a bit of a nightmare if you were claustrophobic as I was, because the tunnels were just big enough to crawl along. We used to take empty milk tins to make a pump for the air." Each time he escaped, Bert was recaptured and put in the cooler - solitary confinement - as punishment. He admitted that he never expected to get very far, as the prisons were all in the middle of nowhere. However, escape offered a break from the routine of prison life and, he added, a chance to annoy his captors. He wasn't finally free until after a 600-mile forced march, when the German forces, heavily depleted, took their prisoners as far from the advancing Allied forces as possible in a last bid to prevent their liberation. By then, the Germans were so close to defeat, said Bert, that many of the guards were old men. When peace broke out, Bert moved to Anglesey in North Wales to work on Air Traffic Control. His wife, two children and five grandchildren are all proud of his exploits in the RAF. Years later, a teacher from Kaiserslautern got in touch with Bert. Karl-Gerd Morgenthaler works at the school that Bert's crew narrowly avoiding crashing into in 1943. And Herr Morganthaler's father? He commanded the anti-aircraft guns that fired on Bert's Lancaster that night more than 60 years ago.
