I traced my great-grandfather’s journey 80 years after his WWII escape | UK | News

Three weeks before Italy’s Allied invasion, a Califax bombing plane goes down a track and lifts a very secret shelf airport in Bedfordshire to a dark sky. Seven young air man on board. Mission, Pimento operation, code -named Pimento, includes parachuting to the members of the French Alps to the members of the resistance.

The Allies took Sicily and a full -scale invasion of Italy will be paid within three weeks. The French guerrillas need heavy explosives in Califax to sabotage the German counter -attack, which is expected to follow. Failure can extend the war. The gigantic four -engine bombardment aircraft flying in low and moonlight comes to the drop area near Annecy in Southeast France around 3 o’clock, but cannot detect the torch lights of the crew reception party. The captain circles the low valley in a dangerous way. The snowy mountains crossed on both sides of the aircraft and the church towers. No light.

As the captain thinks to cancel the task, the plane trembles violently and closes the outer starboard engine. Through intercom, he orders the flight engineer to open his loads before he tells him to change fuel tanks. However, after a few minutes, the inner starboard engine runs and dies, locks the califax permanent, downwards. How little altitude of the plane began to decrease.

The pilot orders the crew’s stations to collapse, but the buildings are already running towards the califax, and their tiles shine in the moonlight. When the engines roar in protest and the burning gas smell fill the cockpit, it wraps its mind for a solution. Halifax’s starboard wing clips a house, wash the upper half and set fire. The trunk hit another building and kills six of the seven aviators instantly. The gasoline in the fuel tanks captures fire and explodes, burns wildly.

Five civilians trapped in their homes disappear in the fire, including Serge’s mother, Erminia, three and Olivier, one. An eyewitness then remembers in an interview in the 1980s, “I remember it as if it were yesterday.” “Going out of the house and seeing the terrible fire, turmoil plane stuck from the house, the coarse bodies of the aviators on the ground.

11 lives disappeared in seconds. Fleet leader Frank Griffiths, only one man emerges from the fiery wreck. Later, he defined him as the nearest “brush with Reaper’s Scythe .. But that’s why I write this today. I am his great grandson. Frank, who is still connected to the seat of the cockpit, rose to some phone wires that broke his fall along the night sky and probably saved his life.

He bleed heavy with a broken shoulder and wrist, staggered from the fire before he went out. He won his consciousness again, set out again, but soon vomited, spitting blood and broken tooth pieces.

A 14 -year -old boy, René, approached a bike. “Thousand on my bike, I will take you to safety,” he said. He folded Frank on the handlebars and pushed him to his mother Angéline’s house. When he saw Frank, he screamed, but quickly began to apply first aid. The rest of his family gathered around Frank, robbing him, burning his British clothes, and when they heard the gunfire outside, he would correct him in local French. They packed Frank in their chimneys in their panties. But that was a wrong alarm – the ignition was only the Italian soldiers trying to clean the “survivors” from a nearby wood.

“I had a wife and a child I hoped to see one day in England,” Frank remembered Frank. “I trusted this to the people in the room, and for some reason, women began to cry.” Members of the local resistance arrived and took Frank to a restaurant-Cum-Brothel called Ma Baraque.

Frank was taken to a bedroom on the upper floor where he went to bed for three days. On the third day, the Italian troops (the occupying force in this region of France) entered the bar to drink. Frank was lying still upstairs, listening to the Chit-Chat by dragging the flooring boards. Frank moved to another safe house in Les Goths’ small hamlet. The host, a mother named Mimi Pallud, agreed to host him, looking for the pilot of every German and Italian in the region. He told his neighbors that Frank was a distant relative who escaped from the local Lunatic refuge.

After a week healed, the resistance took out his plans to miss Frank to the security of Switzerland. A few miles away from the border, Frank, a beautiful 22 -year -old woman named Colette attended. Hand in hand, they wandered from straw to the border fence and acted like a lover to relieve suspicion. Frank, on a night of Mehisit, was worse than passing through his feet, Frank Frank remembered Frank.

As the darkness fell, the couple came to a farmhouse owned by the First World War veteran Léon Mérandon, who despised the Germans. When the darkness fell, the border loosen a part of the fence to mix the pair. The plan worked and Frank ran himself to Switzerland in an area. “Colette whispered ‘libre!” Frank remembered, “But I couldn’t answer. I just took his hand and squeezed it.”

My great grandfather is safe, but only temporarily. He stayed in Switzerland until their injuries healed. Then, a choice was made: Stay in Switzerland for the rest of the war or re -enter France (occupied by the Germans since the accident) and try to return to England.

“I have passed through a traumatic essence period, Frank said Frank. “Now I was quite in the form and when I showed my faces, they didn’t look very new. If I wanted to, I could be an internship with other aircraft crews in Switzerland, but there was another reason for going back to England and continuing the war. But there was another reason that exceeded the call of duty, and this was the most powerful power in the UK.

About 79 years after Frank’s catastrophic arrival to France, I reached the place where it fell. It was the starting point of my journey. Although he was a newly graduated 22 -year -old, I didn’t go to Ibiza, but I went to France to escape my great grandfather’s Nazis almost 80 years ago.

A stone monument in the form of the Califax tail commemorates the events of 15 August 1943. The names of the killed civilians were written on the stone and the crew of Frank, surprisingly, he had only 23 years of age.

In the local cemetery, I visited the graves of 22 -year -old back -fiber Frank Pollard from Bury and John Congdon, a 26 -year -old navigator from Tiverton (the other four aviators were transferred to a Commonwealth War grave in the 1970s). The tombstones faced the magnificent Plateau des Glières. The great holidays that I enjoyed in the Alps made me think that these young men almost never visited there for any pleasure – but he was buried there.

It wasn’t my only reason to physically withdraw Frank’s footprints and make a journey. In the accident area, I met Marie-Annick and Samuel, the eldest daughter and grandfather of the female Angéline Fontaine, who first looked at Frank and hid her. He was the first in a series of extraordinary meetings with the grandchildren of those who risked their lives to save him and take him back to England.

Samuel, a mechanic in the overalls who came out of work to meet me in the afternoon, crushed my hand to jammed a hand -like hand before buying the first of a few beers. Despite his language barrier, they barely took their eyes in a three -hour conversation.

Later, I met Josette, the daughter of Mimi Pallud, the woman who told her neighbors that Frank escaped from the local shelter. Now 80 was a baby when Frank visited in 1943.

He entered Josette’s apartment and clapped his hands with a breath of tears in his eyes. Josette told me that Frank kept him in his arms in 1943 and thought his own baby in my grandmother Tessa.

I met the Mérandon family on the Swiss border at the farm house where he took refuge before Frank and Colette made his last struggle in Switzerland. They told me that in the rest of his life, Léon claimed to help a rack pilot. This is from a man who fought in the trenches before helping Jewish school children escape their scores to Switzerland.

After healing in Switzerland, Frank was directed to the south before completing a brutal march on the Pyrenes at night under the Nazis’s noses. Franco’s fascist police arrested and imprisoned him and spent a miserable week in a dirty prison.

Fortunately, his release from prison was guaranteed and after 108 days, Frank reached Gibraltar. The plane hit the lightning on the road and collided in England, but this time no one was injured. Frank died in 1996 four years before I was born. It was painful that I never met my grandfather, but it was a miracle that he actually reached 83.

• Pimento Operation: Adam Hart (Hodder & Stoghton, £ 22) by my great grandfather’s big escape