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• Continued from chapter one

The six crew members who managed to bale out successfully came down in a forested area in the north eastern sector of the French département called l’Yonne, 100km south-east of Paris. As they drifted gently to earth it was just before one in the morning and a three-quarters moon lit their descent.

Despite jumping from a comparatively low height, the six crew members who had survived baling out were scattered about the forest, isolated from each other in separate areas.

As already mentioned, Geoff O’Brien and Eric Ashford would become POWs. The other four crew members remained at liberty. Bill Watson would head south by rail and eventually, with the aid of the French resistance, make his way back to the UK on 8th August 1944. Bob Haynes would head in a south-easterly direction, eventually ending up with a local resistance group called the St Mards maquis. Several other evaders from the Mailly raid, together with an Australian and a number of American airmen shot down on other raids, congregated in the same maquis before getting back to the UK after liberation of the surrounding area in August of the same year. Garth Harrison would also eventually find his way into the same maquis group, but he was also destined to be briefly reunited with Jack.

But, for the time being, Jack was on his own and would spend almost another four months in France before being repatriated. It was an enforced stay that would test his courage and his resilience to the utmost……

He really had very little appreciation of what conditions were like on the ground in France. The French government had surrendered to Germany almost four years earlier in June 1940 and resistance groups had, initially, been rather slow to organise in any coherent fashion.

For the northern part of France where Jack’s plane had crashed, had been under Nazi occupation ever since defeat, and collaboration at all levels of both political and civil life was rife. One of the political factions swiftest to organise some kind of resistance against the occupying forces and their French collaborators were the communists. Their civil arm, the National Front, had given rise to a military arm, the FTP (Francs, Tireurs et Partisans) who waged guerrilla warfare against the occupiers, who labelled the FTP groups as ‘terrorists’ and urged ‘loyal’ French citizens to unmask them. Hiding an allied airman, or participating in any other form of ‘resistance’ was therefore a very dangerous thing to do.

But by the time of the Mailly raid, hundreds of disaffected people were joining the ranks of the resistance. Ironically, it was the collaborative policies of the French government, who had introduced obligatory work service in Germany to serve the manpower requirements of the Nazi war machine, that had driven many young men forced to live clandestinely away from their families to avoid the work draft into the open arms of the French resistance groups.

Although Jack didn’t know it at the time, he had baled out into an area where organised resistance groups were thin on the ground. The first true maquis groups had been constituted in late 1943 and were really only becoming more numerous in this springtime of 1944.

Falling from his burning Lancaster in the early hours of Thursday 4th May, Jack’s thoughts were on the thorny problem of his immediate survival as, horrified, he realised that he was falling rapidly to earth, attached to his parachute by only one harness strap. In later life, he would reflect on the fact that, had he not landed in the uppermost branches of a tall oak tree which broke his fall, he may well have been killed on descent.

His first tentative attempts to disentangle himself and his parachute from the branches failed dismally. Trapped where he’d fallen and totally exasperated at his inability to start out on what he hoped would be his return trip to the UK, he decided to spend a long, sleepless night in the oak tree where he’d landed.

He was anxious to get moving as soon as possible so, as soon as the pale light of dawn gave him enough light to see by, he unclipped himself from his harness and started tentatively climbing down through the branches. No sooner had he started making a little progress downwards, than he slipped, crashing through the branches but finally coming to rest just above the point where the massive trunk fell precipitously away beneath the leaf canopy. Pausing to catch his breath and give thanks for yet another lucky escape, Jack lowered himself from the branches and allowed himself to fall the last fifteen feet or so to the ground.

From his overnight vantage point in the tree, he’d worked out exactly what direction to take to get to where he thought his crashed Lancaster would be. He had every intention of getting to it as soon as possible to confirm that it was indeed his.

But as he got near to the edge of the forest, he could see not only the still smouldering wreck of a bomber, but a small crowd of villagers, up and about early to see what had crashed in the field.

Quickly he darted back into the forest. He was on his way back to the tree where his parachute was still in the branches, with a vague idea of assessing how easy it would be to free it, when he bumped into a lone woodman. His real name was Joachim Pereira, a Portuguese by birth who had married a French girl, Thérèse, and adopted the name Jacques.

Jack decided to take the risk and ask the stranger for help. Using a mixture of schoolboy French and gestures, he explained that he’d baled out of his stricken plane and led the woodman back into the forest to show him where his parachute was still marking out where he’d landed.

It was hopeless. Jacques gestured that the parachute was far too high to be recovered, and led the airman to a rough cabin in the wood. He made him understand that he was to stay there, hidden until nightfall when he would come back for him.

He was as good as his word. Returning at nightfall, he led Jack through the forest and back to his small house in the nearby village of La Charmée.

• Continued in chapter three

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jack Marsden's daughter Janet and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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