Six air crew's 12 days at sea

Kyt · Nov 10, 2008

Lookout Newspaper |November 10, 2008, Vol 53, No 45 | Six air crew tough out 12 days at sea

Every detail remains etched in Wing Cdr (retired) Don Payne’s mind of his 13th mission in 1945 when his plane was shot down.

It took place two days after his twentieth birthday. It was Friday the 13th, when one life was lost, and the other six men were left to survive for 12 days in a dinghy in the frigid North Sea.

As flying officer at the time, his mission was to bomb German warships at Kiel. Burning rockets soared through the air, striking the Lancaster plane Payne was flying.

“They put a hole in the airplane fuel tanks and harmed two of the engines,” he recalls. “Then all hell broke loose.”

They were able to finish the mission, and as they headed back to their base the situation turned critical.

“We got into trouble again just south of Flensburg, Germany, when we were hit a second time. We knew we were in trouble the first time and really in trouble the second time.”

Payne says he looked at the rudder pedals, felt a rush of air and saw the ground beneath his feet through a large hole in the fuselage.

He called his navigator for a course across the North Sea in an attempt to return to their base in Sweden, but the aircraft lost power and the main engine faltered. Fuel poured from the plane.

“We became a glider. It was dark and we had never practiced ditching. I called ‘dinghy, dinghy prepare for ditching’ and the gunners came out and accumulated in the most secure part of the airplane to brace themselves for the emergency landing.”

Without any lights on the plane, leaving them in the darkness of night, Payne was forced to use the whitecaps as a visual to land.

“I felt the tail hit the water and the force of the impact ejected me from the plane. My nose came off my face, and the next thing I knew I was in the water, still in my seat, seeing the bubbles going the wrong way.”

The remaining six crewmen were still in the plane when Payne surfaced, but the plane was on its nose. The survivors scrambled into the dinghy, some badly injured.

Twenty-four year-old Bert Vardy never emerged from the sinking aircraft.

Aboard the dinghy it was chaotic. They tried to adjust to their situation and organize as best as they could, first attending to their medical conditions.

“I lost a lot of blood at first, but the bleeding stopped on its own and the next 12 hours were vague. The water was six to eight degrees, but I don’t remember feeling cold,” says Payne.

They assessed their supplies: a medical kit, a silk map, a compass, a bit of chocolate and a small blue bible. They had no SOS equipment, and knew their only chance was if someone found them.

Bobbing up and down in the dinghy, they tried to establish their location.

“You can’t navigate a round thing,” said Payne.

Uncertain of how fast they were moving, they threw shark repellent dye into the water to gage their velocity.

“We’d leave it in the water for half a minute and watch how fast the streak left us to judge direction and speed. Twice a day, we estimated our course, and the navigator tried to keep track of where we were in the North Sea.”

Then the rain and storms came.

They huddled under a parachute to keep dry, and later used it as a sea anchor to stop the wind from blowing the dinghy around.

“We bailed ourselves dry for a few days, but then found if we left six inches of water in the bottom it was warmer, so we kept wet the entire time. When it rained we would drink the water.”

The experience effected people in different ways.

Saddened by the loss of Vardy, one man tried to jump out of the dinghy. “His buddy was back in the airplane and he had a lot of trouble with that. Of course we all did,” says Payne.

They encountered moments of hope when they heard a submarine go underneath them, but it kept on going, the noise eventually silenced by the sound of the sea.

Then on the tenth day they saw land. Judging from the towers and shoreline they thought it was Denmark.

“We had circumnavigated the North Sea and were close to where we originally started,” says Payne.

The group continued floating into what would be their scariest moment.

“A wall of water, which turned out to be a tidal surge, hit the dinghy in the middle of the night.”

Two-metre waves crashed onto them, nearly capsizing the craft.

“To see a white foamy line coming towards us was an awesome sight. We didn’t make any sense of what it was until it hit us,” said Payne.

The closer they floated to land, the more exhausted and emotionally drained they became. At one stage they landed on a sandbar in eight inches of water and had to wait for the tide to go back out before they were freed. They could see they were close to the Rouge Basin, and witnessed their own Typhoon aircrafts bombing the shoreline. Instead of drifting to shore, the incoming tide took them back out to sea.

Then in the afternoon of the twelfth day, Wesser, a German Red Cross Boat from Bremen picked them up.

“Immediately we were fed, but we couldn’t keep anything down. We were so happy to be able to get out of the dinghy. At the time of the rescue, most of the six weighed a mere 95 pounds.

While their situation was no longer dire, they did have to endure capture when the Wesser crew handed them over to the German Navy.

“Once we were out of salt water we were separated.”

Marching through Hamburg with other prisoners of war, old ladies threw rocks at him. “Hamburg was one of our main targets, so I didn’t blame them.”

During his interrogation, the German interrogator let him see his file. Payne was surprised to see pictures of his mother, school pictures and other personal details. “He knew more about me than I knew about myself.”

They travelled in a coal bin on a ferry en route to a prison camp. This was unnerving because Payne knew they were targets of his own navy or air force.

He waited out the remainder of the war as a prisoner.

On the day before Victory in Europe, he was handed over to the British Army who put him and other prisoners in a hospital.

When Payne asked for his next of kin to be notified, he heard his grandmother was surprised he was alive. When the plane was shot down Payne lost his dog tag. Someone found it, wore it and died. The news that Payne was buried in Grave 12 in Lasvess, Sweden, came in the form of a telegraph to his grandmother.

Payne tried to find out the identity of the man who died wearing his tags, but was unsuccessful.

In the years that followed, Payne received an Air Force Cross and a Distinguished Flying Cross for his service in Korea. He retired in 1975.

Today, only two of the six survivors are alive: 83-year-old Payne and 84-year-old George Riley, Payne’s navigator.

Every Remembrance Day Payne has a standing order in Bancroft, ON. A wreath is placed in memory of Bert Vardy on behalf of the crew.
Click to expand...

Lancaster KB784 of 428 Squadron
Mission to Kiel 13/14th April 1945

Took off at 20.20 from Middleton-St.George to bomb the U-Boat yards. Hit by Flak both outbound and homebound. With three engines failing, the Lancaster was ditched. F/Sgt Vardy is commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial. The crew drifted for 12 days before washing ashore.

F/O Payne and F/O Riley were later decorated for their supreme courage.

F/O D M Payne RCAF DFC PoW
Sgt T F Sinclair RCAF PoW
F/O G C Riley RCAF MBE PoW
F/O V Banks RCAF Inj
WO2 E V Miller RCAF Inj
F/Sgt E R O Casey RCAF Inj
F/S A E Vardy RCAF Killed

David Layne · Nov 10, 2008

Nice report but poor research here.

He called his navigator for a course across the North Sea in an attempt to return to their base in Sweden, but the aircraft lost power and the main engine faltered. Fuel poured from the plane.

Kyt · Nov 11, 2008

I was wondering about that too David and I think maybe it is a typo for their base or Sweden

Antipodean Andy · Nov 11, 2008

...and Lancasters clearly have a main engine and three others for decoration.

Still, it does not take anything away from the incredible story of survival.

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Six air crew's 12 days at sea

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