Bren, Robin – Pilot’s Memoirs

Interviewer:  Could you give us a thumbnail sketch of your training and your lead up to being a prisoner of war?

Yeah, I’ll try. At the outbreak of war I was training at the College of Aeronautical Engineering, Sydney Street, London. They also had a place over there at the Brooklands Aerodrome. I was just about finished my time at the College when war broke out; had war not broken out I would’ve probably gone on to civil aviation and got my ground engineer’s licences, but with the outbreak of war, that put paid to that. So there wasn’t much one could do, so I kicked my heels for a little while, and decided the only thing to do was join the Air Force; I had part qualifications. So we did a quick trip to the local recruiting station down at Bromford – this is in Essex. From there they said, “Oh well, go home and we’ll call you when we want you.”

[In] about a fortnight I was called to Uxbridge which was another one of the recruiting stations. There they tested you, did a medical, checked you for a trade and then sent you home again. I got sent home because I think they got the wrong … something happened anyway; anyway, I went home again. And then they called me back again, and they said, “Ooh, Bromford must’ve made a mistake.” And I said, “Well that’s what they said about you.” ‘Cause I wanted to be an engine fitter and they had me down as an instrument repairer. I didn’t want to do instrument repairs. Anyway, I got my way, [be]came a fitter to the engines.

But from Uxbridge we got posted to North Coates, to three feet of snow. We were supposed to be elsewhere, back in … nothing was done there. Then we finally got posted back to Halton, which was a pre-war camp; very, very good, excellent conditions. And there we started training as engine fitters and framing fitters and so on and so forth.From there we suddenly got posted up to Hednesford on Cannock Chase; it was all dusty roads and wooden huts, and the standard of training on the whole course went down from AC1 down to minus AC2. [-AC2] It was really a lousy camp.

Anyway, at the end of the course we were all grouped up to be posted overseas; [the] people I was supposed to go overseas with – [I] had absolutely nothing in common with them at all; I couldn’t stand the sight of them and I don’t think they liked me very much. Fortunately, for some reason I failed the course, so I didn’t go overseas after all, and I finally got posted to Hemswell in Lincolnshire to service the ambulance – I was an Aircraftsman Second Class then – as a mechanic. And I worked there for ‘bout nine months I think it was, and they sent me on a conversion course from mechanic to fitter. I had six weeks at Hednesford again, then back fortunately to my old squadron, 144 at Hemswell, which was very good.

Finally we went from Hemswell to North Luffenham, smallest [?] in England, in Rutland, and I was there for another nine months. It was very good – servicing Hampdens [??]. And then I decided it was about time I did something else and I applied for [a] posting to a Flight Engineers course. Finally that came through and I went for an interview to Cardington, where they had some airships before the war. We went down to Cardington, three or four of us, had an interview there, and we were sent back after that to North Luffenham; found all the squadron had scarpered. They’d gone off to Scotland to do torpedo bombing for Coastal Command, and we were left there not knowing quite what was going to happen because a Polish squadron had taken over. Their food was much better than ours. [Chuckles]

And finally we got sent to Syerston just outside Nottingham with 61 Squadron, and that was a conversion flight from Manchesters to Lancasters. And I serviced Manchesters for about three or four months there … dreadful things … and a little bit on Lancasters; not much. And then finally the posting came through to go to [the] Flight Engineers course down at St Athans in South Wales. We did six weeks down there; we were expected to do the course, night guard duties, and concentrate on the course. Well you can imagine what happened – the instructors on the course were all asleep during the day, so what the hell? Anyway, we finally passed out from there and I got posted with another bloke to East Moor, to 158 Squadron. And we’d been crewed up with a crew – I went with another crew and pilot; it’s all in my little book over there. We got crewed up; we did a few night cross-countrys, and …

What aircraft was this?

This is on Halifax, the early Halifax. I went back to East Moor, flying Halifaxes. What disappointed me was the fact that when I got to East Moor I found that the Halifaxes there had Merlin engines. The original Halifax came out with radial engines and the one[s] we were shown at St Athans had radial engines, and so when I got up there I found virtually all my experience on the Air Force had been on radials. So I was lost … well, we were lost. Anyway, that’s beside the point; but we did a few cross-country trips, and we were given one plane which we were told was the newest plane on the squadron. But I wouldn’t be sure about that, ‘cause when you got in you had to pump the old hydraulic oil up for an engine before you could start up. And all the newer ones that we flew in after that, we didn’t have to bother with it.

We did one trip with the pilot – a night flying test I think it was – and we took off and we were half way down the runway and the pilot said, “Look at the air speed.” The air speed was going down; should’ve been going up. We were too far to stop, so we had to carry on. So we took off and we flew [a]round … sort of remembering that this thing was all upside down … we flew round for a bit and then we asked for permission to land, and they gave us that, and they gave us a red light on top of that. So we went round again, and finally decided we’d land on our own. We landed on our own, got down onto the runway and we ran off the runway at one end, and all we broke was a little strut in the tail. The pilot became a flight sergeant after that; there was a lot of faith in him as a pilot. And we did two or three more trips – one to Paris to paper it with leaflets, and then we went to Dusseldorf; that seemed to be all right. And then we went to Bremen, and on the way back from Bremen the pilot said, “Look at the engine temperature!” And it was gradually going up and up and up, and the revs were going up and up. So we cut the petrol off and we did what we could; tried to feather the prop [propellor] – nothing seemed to happen, and the old thing was going away there, waving away. And we were just going round in decreasing circles like this, all the time. So there was nothing much we could do, so we thought we’d better bail out. So we bailed out; we were over Holland. I think we must’ve been about fourteen or fifteen thousand feet up … seemed to be plenty of time, anyway, and finally we got rid of the rest of the crew ‘cept the pilot and myself – thought that might help, but it didn’t. [Chuckle] So he said, “You’d better go”, but every time he took a foot off the controls the plane went into a power dive. So I left him to it, and – he must’ve got out, but anyhow, I didn’t know at the time. And I was floating over it when she crashed and blew up. I have got a photograph of the house near where it crashed.

A little later on I got picked up; I landed in a ditch in Holland in water. Some Dutch people came along and picked me up. They took me to what they said was a pumping station, which has since been converted to a house that people live in. They took me along there, and then eventually people gathered. I didn’t understand French or German very much [but] I sort of gathered that if I had been able to speak French or German I might not’ve been a POW. [Prisoner of war] They couldn’t risk it; my knowledge was nil. Anyhow, we finally got picked up by the Dutch Police … have a photograph of them too. They took us to the Police station, searched me – I had about three knives on me, for various reasons, you know. And then finally the Germans turned up, [an] officer in a car, and who was sitting in the back seat but my pilot, so we were sitting in the back together. What [was] the confusion to the Germans was the fact that two planes had come down that night; [there] was another one that came down a few kilometres from where we were – it was a Lancaster, and that crashed but unfortunately it blew up – they had a full bomb load on. They were off course … I’ve got the full story of that at home.

We drove around for a bit looking for the other members of the crew, and finished up in the end at Leeuwarden which was a German Air Force base. We were treated quite well there with the Luftwaffe; we [were] fed in the Officers’ Mess and generally looked after quite well. And then finally we got taken off to Amsterdam across the Zuiderzee – it’s not called Zuiderzee now, it’s something else – and we were taken across there to Amsterdam. We spent about four or five days in a civilian prison there in seprate cells, but we could talk to each other through the bars [chuckle] … it was quite good. Oh, I mean any outside … if you wanted to go to the toilet you’d get the guard and he’d take you down the stairs [and] outside into the yard where the toilets were, but you couldn’t do anything much there.

And finally they gathered us all together, put us on a train and took us to Dulag Luft, which was the main place they took all the Air Force for interrogation. I don’t really remember much about that, but I seem to remember marching from the railway station to camp, and there were lots of civilians around, all looking at us. And there was one little boy, he was … ooh, be about this high I suppose … he was the Hitler Youth exercise, and he was screaming his head off. Couldn’t understand a word he said, but we [could] get the general idea. [Chuckle] But he was a kid; only been about fourteen or fifteen, if that.

Anyhow, we got to the camp – [as] I say, I don’t remember much about the camp at all except it seemed very comfortable for what it was. And then after they got a full camp we were shifted onto a train; a full train of … don’t know how many there were in the camp actually, but we were fortunate [to be] in carriages, not in cattle trucks at that time. This was in 1942, so we were quite well off as far as that went. But we had about six to a compartment and we went up the Rhine Valley, but you couldn’t see much ‘cause all the blinds were drawn down. It was all a bit cramped there, but you imagine a full train of airmen and whatever else, plus masses of guards armed to the hilt – tommy guns, rifles, hand grenades – the whole blooming lot, you know. And – what they thought we could do I don’t know – but you can imagine after five or six days on the train what the toilets were like.

Finally we finished up at Lamsdorf, and we had a very dusty, hot march in September from the railway station to the actual camp. There we were taken and given a medical by German doctors, finger printed, given a metal tag with our POW number – mine was 27003 – and then we were put into the Air Force compound which was in the middle of the camp, the reasons being that we had various people who tried to break out. One of them I believe was Douglas Bader, who gave them hell and tried to break out [of] there minus his legs. So they shifted him and they put us into an inside compound. And if you can imagine going into a long wooden hut, low, standing on a porch looking down it; about a hundred and twenty blokes there in various states of dress and undress, some with beards, some without, the smoke, and washing hanging on lines above the ceiling, and wooden bunks on one side and tables and forms on the other. It was pretty ghastly; you’d wonder, ‘How the hell am I going to put up with this?’ But you got used to it after a bit.

But we had about five or six weeks, I think it was, before an order came through that we were to be tied up. So we were tied up with string; [it was] something that the Army did to the German prisoners … or the Canadians, I think, did to the German prisoners they picked up at Dieppe or somewhere … they tied them up apparently. So they thought, ‘Right, well we’ll try that on the British prisoners of war, and the Canadians, tie them up with string.’ So we were tied up with string like this, from seven in the morning ‘til six o’clock at night. And they were undone at half past ten to about half past eleven so that they soup could come out from the kitchen, and then they tied us up again. If you think of the number of guards and people we kept occupied doing that, because they not only had their rifles and tommy guns and hand grenades and everything else with them, they had about eight or nine to each hut; what the hell they thought we could do I don’t know, when we were tied up like this. Anyway, they finally got fed up with the string, and they finished up with chains, about this much apart, and they had little padlocks on them with all different keys. So you can imagine in the morning when they came in to chain you up, they had to go through all they keys to get the things locked, [voices in background] and then at night when they came back to undo you they had to find all the keys for the different padlocks. [It was] wonderful – kept them going for ages. Then they got tired of that …

How long would this go on for?

This’d go on for about … nine months all together. They finished up with handcuffs, which you know, they’d clip-on handcuffs. You could use those, and that was fine because you could undo those if you had a nail or a nail file, you could use them. But if you got caught without them on that was a problem. But we went with the handcuffs – they weren’t so bad ‘cause you could do something with them. But finally they gave up the whole exercise.

And when were you released?

From the chains?

Yes.

It must’ve been about nine months after we got … October I think we were tied up, and about nine months after that I think it was. We had that time, so you can imagine what you were like, not much strength there at all. But we had some very good PT [physical training] people there, and they helped us out and did exercises and things, got us more or less back to …

You really had a bad time?

Well I don’t know, it’s a bit … a lot of it depends on the camp, and the people you were with and the way it ran. We were pretty lucky where we were. They did get a bit tight one time; the cooking was done on tin stoves made out of Red Cross tins, and one day we had an inspection by the German officers. They used to come round and they saw this tin stove there which was smoking away quite nicely, so he put his boot into it and smashed the whole thing up, you see. A few weeks later another officer came through and there was another little fire, purposely lit for them. [Chuckle] And that was smoking away quite merrily too, and the officer put his boot into it, but it’d been lined with brick. And we never had any more trouble. [Laughter]

So when were you finally released?

Well that was in January ‘45. That was when we were given two hours’ notice in January 1945 to be ready to march.

And where did you march to?

[Chuckle] Well we left Lamsdorf … twelve o’clock they had us outside the camp, lined up. They gave us twenty pounds [20lb] in weight plus your own gear, so you can imagine what happened; you had to sort out everything that you couldn’t think you could carry ‘cause there was three feet of snow on the ground at that time. You couldn’t carry that much, not after two or three years in there, so we had to dump what we could. And we took tea and coffee and chocolate as good trading pieces for the civilians. And we finally left the camp about six o’clock at night, in the dark with the snow around, and we marched; don’t know where. The idea was to get us away from the Russians, so we marched for ten days, stopping mostly during the day and marching at night. We finished up at Gorlitz, which was another prison camp; I can’t give you the number out of my head but I have got the number. And we were there for a few days – it was pretty drastic there, there was no room for anybody there, so they said, “Well, just sleep where you can get a bed.” And two of us got in with a whole bunch of New Zealanders and they really couldn’t’ve done enough for us … absolutely amazing. They dug up breadboards from somewhere to boil a copper to give us a hot shower and everything else, and they really looked after us, and it was great.

And then we thought we would stay there for a bit, and they finally shifted us again, across country, just following along with the … they had mostly the Volkssturmmann, the people’s Home Guard type of thing, looking after us then. And we [?] – oh, two of us jumped the column; we got fed up with it so we left the column when we thought it was a good idea. And we stayed one night with [on] a farm where they slept us in their loft, and then we went on the next day on our own, just wandering round, you know. Unfortunately we made a big mistake – we found a farm ,and instead of giving it a miss we went in and it was still held by the Germans with a French working party. We should’ve know because of the mess outside the camp – all the Red Cross tins [chuckle] … left, you know, from prisoners that passed through. Anyhow, we stayed with them for a few days, and then they gave us one German soldier to take us cross country to another camp. So we marched across this open country; and I didn’t hear it crash, but there was a hell of a roar above, and it must’ve been a Fortress that was coming down and crashed, because we picked up one of the crew from there. And we tried our best to get him to give us some chocolate or whatever he may have, but he wouldn’t have a word to do with it. When we got him finally into the camp; I don’t know what happened there, to him.

But we were lucky there – there was a German officer came into the hut and said to the guard, “What’re these people doing here?” He said, “Oh, I picked up the American on the way.” He said, “Well you should’ve shot them.” He said, “I couldn’t – I had these two with me”, then pointed to my friend and myself. He said, “Oh, well take them outside, I’ll do it myself.” But he hesitated, and another officer came out and said, “What d’you think you’re doing? They’re [?] and registered prisoners, you can’t touch them.” So we got away with it.

And then we finally went into the camp for a bit … finally got into the main camp, but it was the worst camp I’ve ever been in. It was the only time I’ve ever got lice. It was terrible.

[Ends]