Читать книгу Amazing Airmen - Ian Darling - Страница 17
ОглавлениеSergeant Wilf Renner was ready to press the knob on the bomb-release cord of Halifax bomber JD463. Renner, a twenty-two-year-old bomb-aimer, knew he was just minutes away from Frankfurt, a city in central Germany.
Renner’s crew, which flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 419 Squadron, left their base at Middleton St. George, in northern England, late on the evening of October 4, 1943. The crew’s target was Frankfurt’s railway yards.
The sky near Frankfurt was filled with Allied bombers. The pilots, however, could not see the other aircraft well. To avoid detection by German night fighters and anti-aircraft crews, the bombers did not have their lights on.
Wilf Renner in 1943.
Lying on a board in the nose of his bomber, Renner suddenly noticed another aircraft too close to JD463. “There’s a plane below,” he shouted over the intercom. Sergeant Arthur Fare, the pilot, immediately pulled JD463 up, avoiding a collision. Fare continued flying to Frankfurt at about 20,000 feet (6,000 metres).
A few minutes went by. The aircraft flew over the city. Renner pressed the knob. “Bombs away,” he said. The plane released incendiary, as well as regular, bombs. “Bomb doors closed.”
JD463 bounced up as soon as it dropped its heavy load. Fare maintained a steady course for a minute while a camera automatically took photos that would show where the bombs had landed.
He had started to turn the bomber around for the trip home when searchlights caught it. Ground fire hit an engine on the port side. Fare took the plane down as quickly as possible, to get away from the lights. The speed of the descent pinned Renner to the board on which he had been lying. “We’re losing control,” Fare said on the intercom. “Be prepared to bail out.”
Fare managed to stabilize the aircraft for a few minutes. It flew in a more normal manner, except much slower. The crew got ready to bail out — Renner put on his parachute.
A German night fighter approached JD463 and fired, hitting the bomber. Renner was blown out of the aircraft. He didn’t know how he got out of the bomber because he was unconscious, but he may have gone through an escape hatch that the crew had opened.
Renner regained consciousness while falling through the air. He pulled the ripcord to open his parachute seconds before he landed. He had descended into a wooded area of Belgium, near the village of Laneffe, about sixty-five kilometres south of Brussels.
Renner had several fractured ribs, as well as cuts to his hands, arms, and head. He had also lost his flying boots. They had come off his feet either when the night fighter hit JD463, or when he was coming down to Earth.
He heard dogs barking, so he knew he wasn’t deep in the woods. People who could help might not be far away. Renner wrapped himself in his parachute to try to stay warm during the cool night.
When dawn came he stood up and started walking. He found a path in the woods and decided to follow it. Before long, two woodsmen with saws on their shoulders walked toward him.
The men noticed Renner’s uniform. “Royal Air Force comrade,” one said, trying to let the young airman know he had landed in friendly territory. The two men were Walloons, French-speaking residents of Belgium.
“Doctor,” said one of the men, using a word in English that he knew. He wanted Renner to understand that they realized he needed a doctor to treat his wounds. The men also used the French word “pantoufles,” which means slippers. They realized Renner needed something on his feet before he could walk any significant distance.
One of the woodsmen was Camille Van Laethem. “Restez ici avec lui,” Van Laethem said to Renner, who had learned some French at St. Jerome’s High School in Kitchener, near his home in Preston, Ontario. “Je cherche un docteur.” Renner understood that he should stay with the other woodsman while Van Laethem went for a doctor.
The woodsman who remained offered Renner some of his lunch. Renner wasn’t hungry, but he did accept the warm milk the woodsman gave him.
Van Laethem returned a few hours later with Dr. Robert Fanuel. He also brought a pair of “pantoufles” and coveralls that Renner could wear over his uniform.
Dr. Fanuel examined Renner, applied some bandages and explained in French that he would come back in the evening with a person who spoke English. Renner’s knowledge of French was sufficient to enable him to understand the doctor’s plan.
The two woodsmen remained with him as they waited for the doctor to return. As the sun went down on a pleasant fall day, Dr. Fanuel reappeared with a Roman Catholic priest. Speaking in English the priest told Renner, who was also a Roman Catholic, that they wanted to take him to a home in the area. The doctor would treat him there.
Renner got into the doctor’s car and went to a two-storey house in the centre of Laneffe. It was the home of another priest, Father Léon Laboulle. Renner didn’t have to ask the priest for a rosary. His mother, Louise Renner, had given him a set of rosary beads that he carried on all his flights, including the flight that brought him to Belgium.
Renner felt blessed. He had escaped from the aircraft, had landed safely, and had met people who were trying to help him, even if he could not communicate well with them. He was, in fact, more blessed than he realized because the priest supported the Belgian Resistance that was fighting the Germans.
Father Laboulle was already looking after two Russians who had been German prisoners working at a coal mine at Charleroi, a city near Laneffe. They had escaped from the mine. The Russians had a room downstairs. Renner had a room upstairs.
Dr. Fanuel came to see Renner several times a week. He recovered well. Father Laboulle was intrigued to have a Canadian with him. He invited some of his friends to meet Renner because they had not previously met a Canadian.
Lying in bed one day after he had been at the priest’s home for about two weeks, Renner was startled when he looked up to see a man in a police uniform. He thought the Gestapo had found him. He was mistaken. The man was not a Gestapo agent but a colonel in the Brussels police force.
A friend of the Resistance, the colonel spoke English and assured Renner he could trust Father Laboulle. He also presented Renner with a few cigars.
While at Father Laboulle’s home, a member of the Resistance took Renner’s photo to create false identification papers for him. The papers said he was Willy Leon Ravel, who was “un cordonnier” — a shoemaker. Having arrived in Belgium without his shoes, Renner appreciated the irony of his occupation. The priest also arranged for Renner to obtain civilian clothes to replace his air force uniform.
One day, Father Laboulle decided to take his Canadian guest on a motorcycle to a store in downtown Charleroi, to buy him a pair of shoes. On the way, the priest stopped his motorcycle and fired a pistol. He wanted to make sure it worked. Although startled, Renner realized he was riding with a brave, bold priest.
When they arrived in Charleroi, the two men walked up a staircase at the back of a shoe store. The stairs led to an apartment occupied by the owner of the store. They couldn’t risk entering the store itself in case someone who didn’t support the Allies saw them.
The owner came up the interior staircase. Before he could find a pair of shoes for Renner, he noticed some unwanted customers in his store. “Les Boches,” he whispered, using a pejorative word to describe Germans.
Renner looked down the staircase into the store. He could see several men in uniforms. He was not mistaken this time. German soldiers were right below him.
Renner quietly backed away from the staircase in the shoe store. The Germans had not seen him. He didn’t know why they were in the store. They might have been looking for him and other Allied airmen, or they might simply have been looking for shoes.
Regardless of what they wanted, they made him nervous. Renner remembered that Father Laboulle had a pistol and wondered if he would have to use it.
The soldiers only stayed in the store for about five minutes, then they left.
The store owner took Renner’s shoe size, went down to his store and returned with a set of shoes that fit him. Having helped the Allied airman, the owner offered Renner and Father Laboulle a drink. The two men enjoyed a glass of wine before going back to the priest’s home.
Back in Preston, Renner’s parents, John and Louise, received a telegram a few days after JD463 failed to return to Middleton St. George. It said their son was missing in action. Six months later they were informed that he was presumed dead. Despite this devastating news, Louise Renner presumed he was alive, a presumption based on her faith.
Renner’s parents were not the only people deeply affected by the information about their son, who was an apprentice machinist before the war. It was also dreadful news for Renner’s fiancée, Elizabeth Pulbrook. He had become engaged to her before he left Canada.
In early November, a few days after Renner acquired his shoes, Dr. Fanuel came to Father Laboulle’s home to convey an urgent message. The doctor had come with a member of a Franciscan order, Brother Materne, to tell Renner and the two Russians that they should leave immediately. The Gestapo were searching the area.
Maria Dardenne.
They all left the house within minutes. Renner departed on Brother Materne’s bicycle. The ride was not very comfortable because Brother Materne was also on the bike. The priest pedalled while Renner sat on the seat. Renner did not know where he was going. He just had his rosary beads and his faith that this stranger would take him to an appropriate location.
Brother Materne took Renner a few kilometres away from Laneffe, to the home of Dr. Fanuel’s aunt.
The doctor had made the right decision when he urged Renner to get out of the house. Within hours, the Gestapo came to Father Laboulle’s home and took the priest away for questioning. They held him for a week before releasing him.
Dr. Fanuel’s decision to put Renner in his aunt’s home was not so wise. She was too nervous to look after an Allied airman. The doctor decided that Renner should go to another home. After he stayed with the aunt for two nights, he again sat on the seat of a bicycle while Brother Materne pedalled.
Renner went about fifteen kilometres, to the home of Maria Dardenne in the hamlet of Fairoul. Maria, who was forty, had a particular reason to support the Belgian Resistance. She hated Germans because her older brother, Raymond, was critically wounded by German soldiers who invaded Belgium during the First World War. Gangrene had developed in his legs and Maria, who was a teenager at the time, took care of him until he died.
Even though twenty-five years had passed since the end of the First World War, she still had a vivid memory of her brother and the way he died. “Les Boches,” she said contemptuously when talking about the country that her brother fought.
This memory motivated Maria to look after Allied flyers during the Second World War, when German troops again invaded her country. Renner was not the first flyer she sheltered. She had previously taken in Flight Sergeant Douglas Knight of the Royal Air Force. The Germans eventually caught Knight, who became a prisoner of war. They shot the member of the Resistance who was escorting him at the time.
The Belgian Resistance had offered Maria money to compensate her for looking after the Allied evaders who stayed with her, but she wouldn’t accept any compensation. She didn’t want to be paid for helping flyers who risked their lives to fight Nazi Germany.
Maria lived in a large stone house that had two storeys and an attic. Renner stayed in a room on the second floor. Maria’s eighty-four-year-old father, Joseph Dardenne, lived in another room on the same floor. She did not tell her father about Renner because she thought they would all be safer if few people knew about him.
Maria’s father stayed in his room most of the time, coming out to go across the street with her to eat meals at the farm operated by her brother, Joseph Dardenne Jr.
Joseph Jr. knew Renner was hiding in Maria’s house, and he also knew what happened to the person who was escorting the previous Allied evader Maria had sheltered. “Prenez garde. Prenez garde,” he said to his sister as he urged her to be careful. He was concerned not only for his sister, but also for himself, his father, his wife, and his infant son, who was born the week Renner arrived.
Most of the time, Renner remained in his room. He would go out to use the washroom, and when the father left the house. Even in his room he had to be careful. The room faced the street and he did not want anyone in the hamlet to see him through the window.
If Renner did have to hide quickly, he could go to another bedroom that had a trap door to the attic. For added security, Maria and Joseph Jr. had strung an electrical wire between their homes. Anyone in the farmhouse could use the line to activate a buzzer in Maria’s kitchen if a suspicious person approached.
Maria was concerned about security even when she did the laundry. After she washed Renner’s clothes, she would hang them inside hers on a clothesline so neighbours would not see them. She also used her coat to cover the food she brought from the farmhouse to his room every evening after she finished working on her brother’s farm.
During his first few months at Maria’s home, Renner studied French. Maria helped him, and gave him a dictionary and newspapers. The French he learned at St. Jerome’s High School quickly came back to him.
He also helped Maria to learn English. She found the language to be exasperating and asked him to explain why certain grammar rules existed. Renner, not an English scholar, did his best.
Renner spent a lot of time on his own. Elisabeth Neuville, the sister of a local Resistance leader, brought him two English books. The first was the complete works of William Shakespeare; the second was a copy of Reader’s Digest from 1926. His favourite Shakespearean play was Hamlet. Renner’s confinement enabled him to understand Hamlet’s isolation and introspection.
To get some fresh air, Renner would go to the courtyard at the back of the house, but he could do that only when no one was around.
He and Maria occasionally left the house after dark. Sometimes they went to her brother’s house, where Joseph Jr. told Renner about the progress of the war. They also went to see two other Allied airmen in Fairoul who were evading the Germans, Sergeant Charles Warren, an American, and Sergeant Alan Lucas, an Englishman. They stayed with the village priest.
In February 1944, another evader arrived at Maria’s home and stayed in a room on the second floor. He was Sergeant Norm Michie, a Canadian from Toronto who had been shot down over the Netherlands.
With two evaders on the second floor, Maria’s father realized strangers were in his home. Maria told him they were members of the Belgian Resistance who were staying overnight. Even though the father had seen them, Renner and Michie tried to stay away from him.
Some days the house was even more crowded. Brother Materne stayed there if he was travelling on behalf of the Resistance and needed a place to sleep.
Despite the stress of working with the Resistance, or perhaps because of it, Maria maintained a sense of humour. Once, when Désiré Croin, the head of the local movement, visited her house she offered him a cigarette she had rolled. It contained not only tobacco, but also the end of a match. Croin, who had a moustache, smoked the cigarette contentedly until the match flared and singed his moustache.
Renner and Michie talked to members of the Resistance when they came to Maria’s house. In particular, they could easily talk to Elisabeth Neuville. She spoke English well because she had studied in England before the war. Her brother, Walter Neuville, was the second in command of the local movement.
These conversations prompted the two evaders to think of joining the Resistance. They felt restless, and they wanted to help the war effort. They also thought the Resistance might eventually help them get back to England.
By mid-April, the winter had receded, and the Resistance in the area, known as Secret Army Zone 1C60, could concentrate on putting men in the woods. Croin, the head of the zone, and Neuville accepted the offer of the two airmen to join their Resistance group.
For Renner and Michie, leaving Maria was emotionally difficult. She had risked her life for them.
The two men walked for several hours to a camp that the Resistance had set up in a wooded area near the town of Walcourt. On his first night in the camp, Renner felt apprehensive. He had left the relative security of Maria’s house and he did not know what would happen next.
The camp was composed of two huts. One became the home of seven men: Charles Warren and Alan Lucas, who were the two other evaders in Laneffe; Pat Healey, a Canadian evader from Montreal; two Russians; and Renner and Michie. Two Yugoslavians lived in the other hut.
Renner’s hut provided rudimentary accommodation. About five metres by five metres, it was made of tree branches, parachute silk, and straw.
The men at the camp had a specific job to perform. They were responsible for retrieving supplies that the Royal Air Force occasionally dropped by parachute.
The group was always prepared, in case the Germans raided the camp. They wore their clothes at all times. They were also armed with Sten submachine guns. The Russians and Yugoslavians carried the guns. Those men were particularly tough.
A member of the Resistance came to the camp each day. In addition to bringing items needed for daily living, the visitors would tell the men when to expect an aircraft. The Resistance received information about the flights through shortwave broadcasts on the British Broadcasting Corp. Neuville had the radio to receive these messages.
The code was the French phrase “la carpe est muette,” which means “the carp is silent.” Those words designated a particular field near the camp as the drop zone.
The BBC broadcast the code on May 10, 1944. Renner was excited. This was what he had been waiting for. He and his colleagues went to the field in the evening and waited for the plane. The group had four big spotlights. When they heard the engines of a plane, the men shone the lights on the area where they wanted the pilot to drop the supplies.
Each drop included about ten or twelve canisters, and weighed about nine tons. The canisters, containing items such as guns, ammunition, and cigarettes, came down without any complications. The men went to them, removed the parachutes, sorted the contents, and hid the supplies in the woods for the night. The next day a member of the Resistance came to the camp in a truck to collect them.
The supplies were well protected. Belgian police, quietly working with the Resistance, travelled with the load, just in case problems arose on the way.
The Royal Air Force dropped supplies near the camp on two other nights during the spring and summer. Because the men in the camp could go several weeks without having to retrieve canisters and sort the supplies, they had a lot of free time. During this time the English-speaking men talked with the Russians and the Yugoslavians in broken French, which was their only common language. They spoke about their home countries, their families, and the war.
The three Canadians — Renner, Michie, and Healey — commiserated with each other. Even though winter was over, the camp was cold, and they wondered when they would get back to Canada.
One day the men in the camp collected some money they had accumulated and asked a member of the local Resistance to buy a few bottles of gin. That night, the camp had a party atmosphere.
On June 6, the camp had a different kind of celebration. On this day, Neuville and his sister came to say that the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches. It was D-Day, the day the men in the camp had been waiting for. From then on, they wondered when Allied troops would arrive in Belgium.
A Belgian army officer came to the camp with a member of the Resistance in early September, to tell them that the American Third Army had liberated the area. For Wilf Renner, the war was over.
Renner and Michie went back to Fairoul, and stayed with Maria for a few days. They quickly saw how the Germans had lost their power. Brother Materne brought a seventeen-year-old German soldier he had captured to the house. He put the soldier on a bed and chained him to a metal railing. The next day he took the prisoner away.
Maria finally introduced Renner and Michie to her father, the person they had tried to avoid meeting.
While at Maria’s home, Renner and Michie received British uniforms and were taken to an American base at Brussels. At the base, the Americans interrogated Renner to determine if he really was an Allied evader and not a German spy. He then flew to London, where the British interrogated him again. Finally, he was released to the RCAF.
The air force informed Renner’s parents that their son was alive and well. Even though Louise Renner had not heard anything about her son for almost a year, she always believed he was alive.
Renner came home on the Queen Mary, which docked in New York. He arrived back in Preston on October 31, 1944. Less than a month later, on November 25, he married Elizabeth.
He remained in the RCAF and stayed at several bases. He was prepared to participate in the war against Japan, but the air force discharged him in May 1945, the month the war against Germany ended.
JD463 crashed near the village of Thy-le-Château. All of Renner’s crewmates died. The bodies of three were found in the wreckage of the plane. The other three, blown out of the aircraft, were found on the ground.
The members of the crew are buried in the Gosselies Communal Cemetery, near Charleroi: Sergeant Arthur Fare, the pilot; Sergeant Cyril Winterbottom, the flight engineer; Sergeant George Chapman, the navigator; Sergeant William Boyce, the wireless operator; Sergeant George Beach, the mid-upper gunner; and Sergeant Robert Paddison, the rear gunner.
Paddison was from the Collingwood area in Ontario. He, like Renner, was a member of the RCAF. The other members of the crew served with the RAF.
In their book, The Bomber Command War Diaries, Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt say 406 aircraft participated in the raid on Frankfurt. The raid caused severe damage to the eastern part of the city and the docks on the River Main. The two writers also say a bomb landed on an orphanage, killing ninety children, fourteen nuns, and other staff members.
After the war, Renner resumed his pre-war career as a machinist. With two partners he set up Galt Wood Tool and Machine Co., in 1956. He sold the company in 1976, stayed on as an adviser, and fully retired in 1986. He served his community by accepting several board positions, including chair of the Waterloo County Catholic School Board.
In 1961, Renner returned to Belgium to see Maria in peace time. He saw her three other times. She died in 1977 at the age of seventy-four.
Renner wanted to do something in Fairoul to honour Maria. After consulting her family, he donated a new altar to the village church in her memory.
On a trip to Belgium in 1992, he went to the woods where he had camped with the Resistance. “Thank goodness it’s only once in a lifetime,” he said to himself as he looked around. He also visited the graves of his crewmates.
The pilot of the night fighter that shot JD463 down was Major Wilhelm Herget. He was the commander of Nachtjagdgeschwader 4, a group of Luftwaffe night fighters based at Florennes, Belgium.
Herget went to Belgium after the war to identify himself as the pilot who shot down the bomber at Thy-le-Château. He spoke to a historian, Jean Léotard. He also said that at the end of the war an American tank shot his plane down and he became a prisoner of war.
Wilf Renner still lives in Preston, which is now part of the City of Cambridge, and he still has the rosary he carried with him throughout the war. He will be ninety in 2010.
Wilf Renner in 2008.
Renner’s respect for Maria Dardenne remains as strong today as ever. He has a large picture of her in the living room of his home. Renner requires only a few words to describe the woman who protected him: “Maria was the bravest woman I ever met.”
