大象传媒

How an enemy pilot unwittingly helped my babies in WW2

Account By Kitty Wrigley nee McDonald.

In 1940 the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies over the Eastern Arm of Dover Harbour. During a particular dogfight an enemy plane was shot down and the pilot parachuted into the English Channel. Men of D company of the Green Howard鈥檚 pulled the airman from the sea and brought him as a prisoner to my father Company Sergeant Major James McDonald,(who had been seconded to the Green Howards from his own regiment the Liverpool(Irish) Kings.) As the German was slightly wounded and soaking wet the men guarding him tried to treat his wounds and put him in dry blankets. The young pilot, according to my dad was a 鈥淏loody Swine鈥� who did not take kindly to any help from the men. As they cut the straps from his lifejacket the man snatched it and flung it at my dad. That part of the story ends here apart from the fact that my father kept the lifejacket and brought it home.
In 1942 I married and had my first chid Kathleen who was stillborn in 1943. My next two daughters, Pauline and Catherine were born in 1944 and 1946 .They like my first were born with Spina Bifida, a painful curvature of the spine. In those days there was little medical help or advice for such a condition and my husband John and I just had to take the girls home and get on with it. One of the most distressing aspects of Spina Bifida is that the babies could not rest, lay or sleep with any comfort .Day and night we tried to ease their pain by packing pillows around them as they lay, until my dad remembered the German lifejacket that he had brought back from Dover some years before.
When partially blown up the vest or as we called it the 鈥淢ae West鈥� was a great help in easing the babies pain and discomfort in their cots .We even managed to make the pram comfier for them to go outside. My father was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal by the King for his actions in a later conflict at Dover (See: Battle of Britain: Dads D.C.M. at Buckingham Palace) but for my children鈥檚 sake his greatest achievement, as far as I was concerned was that he brought home a German lifejacket from that horrible battle and eased their short lives before they both died in 1947 and 1948. I still have the orange 鈥淢ae West鈥� it is stamped with an inverted triangle bearing the words WETZELL GUNNMI VI-40. It is ironic that a pilot sent by the Nazi regime to terrorize, attack and kill British people unwittingly helped a young Liverpool family and eased the lives of two sick babies in WW2.

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