tested Hobday’s nerves to breaking point. He first almost blundered into a carriage reserved for Wehrmacht troops and then, when he found an empty carriage, a ‘German Luftwaffe man and his girl’ got in and sat next to him. Luckily they were more interested in each other than the strange man sharing the compartment, and with the aid of his ‘deaf and dumb’ note, Hobday made it safely to his destination, where a young member of the Dutch Resistance met him. Having questioned Hobday searchingly to make sure he was not a German spy, he led him out of town to a place where eight members of the Resistance were in hiding, living in a crude hut deep in the heart of dense woodland. They had been carrying out minor acts of sabotage and raiding German stores, assembling ‘quite a collection’ of firearms, explosives, uniforms, blank visas and identity cards.
Twenty-four hours later, Hobday was reunited with Fred Sutherland, who had also managed to make contact with the Resistance. Fred had walked a few miles from the Lancaster’s crash site when, realising that ‘walking all the way to the south of Europe was never going to work’, he hid behind a barn and then jumped out as a girl about his own age was cycling towards him. ‘She nearly jumped out of her skin!’ he says. ‘She couldn’t speak any English so I tried to communicate with sign language that the Germans would cut my throat if they caught me.’ She took him to a boy who could speak a few words of English, and he contacted the Resistance. ‘After the war, I was told that this girl had actually been dating a German soldier!’ Sutherland says. ‘So I guess I was lucky because she didn’t tell anyone.’
Fred Sutherland
Sutherland and Hobday were comfortable enough living in the hut, sleeping on stolen German blankets and straw beds. Their food was largely potatoes, although one day a Dutchman caught some tiny eels in a nearby canal. The Resistance had begun making arrangements for the two RAF men to be returned to England via France and Spain, but the long chain of helpers was vulnerable to infiltration or arrest by the Nazis, and it proved a lengthy and fear-ridden process. Twice they were almost discovered, once when German troops began holding infantry manoeuvres in the woods, and the other when they escaped a Gestapo raid on the hut by the skin of their teeth.
After three weeks, frantic to contact his wife, who he knew would believe that he had been killed, Hobday had to be prevented from setting off for Spain on his own, but a week later arrangements were finally in place. The night before their departure, their hosts staged a farewell party for them, fuelled by a bottle of gin and some beer. The next day they set off, first travelling to Rotterdam, escorted by a woman dressed as a nurse.
They then travelled to Paris by train, armed with new fake identity papers showing that they were labourers for the Todt Organisation working on an aerodrome near Marseille. (As the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Fritz Todt ran the entire German construction industry. His Organisation Todt built the West Wall that guarded the coast of German-occupied Europe, as well as roads and other large-scale engineering projects in occupied Europe.) They went via Brussels and had ‘some shaky moments’ at the two frontiers, surviving a close examination of their fake identity papers at a German checkpoint. When the German officer held them up to the light for a better look, Sutherland’s hands were shaking so much that he had to ball his fists and brace his elbows against his side to hide them. ‘My heart was pounding and I was really scared,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be nonchalant when you are facing your enemy.’ However, with the help of their Dutch escorts, who, at considerable risk to their own lives, kept up a stream of distracting conversation with the German frontier guards, the fake papers passed scrutiny.
‘I can’t begin to describe the courage of the people who helped us in Holland and France,’ Sutherland says. ‘They took us into their homes, fed us and cared for us at tremendous risk to themselves and their families. The Germans had infiltrated the Underground and people did not know who they could trust, and yet still they helped us, even knowing that, while we would likely be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they and their families would be shot.’
They remained in Paris for nearly a fortnight, staying in the tiny flat of an elderly French lady, at huge risk to herself, and eventually they were taken to a clearing house for escaping aircrew and PoWs. There they were given yet more new papers and then set off in small groups for the journey to the Pyrenees.
When they arrived at Pau, they got themselves French-style berets and then took a small train through ‘the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen’ to Sainte-Marie and were driven on from there in a car powered by gas made from charcoal. At the foot of the Pyrenees they lodged overnight in a barn where other escapers were already waiting and began the climb of the mountains the next day. Apart from their guide and his dog, there were ten escapers: three Americans, three Frenchmen, a Dutchman, an Australian, the Canadian Sutherland and Hobday, the only Briton.
Following weeks in hiding, on a very poor diet and with little chance of exercise, Hobday was very unfit. Even worse, after climbing for six hours over the rocky paths, his shoes fell apart. Fortunately the guide had a spare pair, though they were too small and ‘hurt like hell’. They climbed all night, a perilous ascent with no light to guide them, following narrow, twisting paths with the mountainside rising sheer above them on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Only the thought of the fate that awaited them if they were found by the Nazis spurred them on. They had little rest and even less food, and suffered a frustrating and frightening delay when a shepherd, recruited by the guide to show them a short cut to the Spanish side of the mountains, became completely lost and left them in driving rain 7,000 feet up on the mountainside, while he tried to discover where they were.
They had started climbing the mountains at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening and did not reach the Spanish side until the Saturday morning. Having already passed through the Netherlands and right across France, in constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, they had then dragged themselves right over the Pyrenees. Their epic escape was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever done’, Sutherland says. Completely spent, they rested for the remainder of that morning and swallowed some food and wine, though it ‘came up as fast as it went down’.
In the afternoon they walked down to the nearest village, Orbaizeta. By then Hobday was so stiff he could hardly walk, and his companions were little better. Although Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist regime, it was professedly neutral in the war, but there was a tense atmosphere as they encountered the Spanish carabineros for the first time. However, they treated the escapers well enough, and they remained in the ‘dirty little village’ until the Monday, though Hobday had to sell his watch to pay for food for Sutherland and himself. The shop where they ate was ‘a general store, very much like the Wild West saloons of the old cowboy films, complete with liquor, shepherds, singing and a bit of good-natured scrapping. On the Sunday they all came in with their week’s money and proceeded to get rid of it on booze.’ The place was filthy and there were pigs and chickens wandering everywhere, indoors and out.
The escapees were then taken to Pamplona, where they were met by the Red Cross, who escorted them to Madrid, a journey that took a further fortnight. There staff at the British Embassy gave them a train ticket to Gibraltar, where, to their enormous relief, they were at last back on British soil. Hobday’s first action was to cable his wife to tell her he was alive. They were flown home a few days later, on 6 December 1943, almost three months after they had been shot down.
If Hobday needed any reminder of how fortunate they had been to come through that marathon journey unscathed, the fate of a Dutchman he had befriended provided it. He attempted to cross the Pyrenees a week after Hobday but was caught in a snowstorm and got lost. Suffering from frostbite, he was captured by a German frontier guard and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.23
Fred Sutherland, speaking from his home in Canada seventy years on, perhaps encapsulates the emotions of all those wartime evaders:
