Andrew Wilson brought his 'crippled' Halifax bomber back to safety after a mid-air collision over France on 13 January 1945. The plane's condition is astonishing - among the most severely damaged aircraft to return in WW2 - as were his skill, pilotage and captaincy, and the accounts of the accident are as impactful as the subsequent lifelong camaraderie and affection between the surviving crew.
Read and edited version of my account from the York Press (Monday 4 May 2020) here or the full version below.
My grandfather could not sleep the night of Saturday 13 January 1945, after he had landed his Halifax bomber safely in Ford, Sussex.
Aged 21, Andrew Wilson had flown nearly thirty missions to targets in mainland Europe. It was never easy, but the night’s sortie to Saarbrücken on Germany’s western border with France had forced him into a state of concentration and action from which he would not come down for some time.
“We just sat up together smoking,” he once told me, in the understated fashion typical of his stories about the war.
The group of five was comprised of Wilson and the other surviving members of the seven man crew who had left the airfield in Snaith, East Riding, hours earlier, and returned in one of the most severely damaged aircraft to make it home in the campaign.
Photographs of the men in front of their plane leave you wondering how they could possibly have remained in the sky. Around ten feet of the nose have been torn from the front, and wires, pipes and fuselage hang beleaguered to one side. The navigator’s station is crushed, and the pilot’s flight deck exposed, prone to the freezing thin air that was free to maraud through the cabin.
The crew look tired and serious, two of them visibly clutching the cigarettes that continued to calm their nerves. Wilson, tall and imposing in the centre, looks almost nonchalant.
“We didn’t have much time to think,” he told me.
Reading the accounts today, I remembered his re-telling of a few moments of that sortie as I sat on the floor next to his chair as an interested grandson in the late 1980s.
The mission had been ‘uneventful and without incident’ according to Wilson’s files, until just north of Paris another plane from Elvington, Yorkshire – a French crew piloted by Edmond Jouzier – moved across their front and the two collided.
In his report, French mid-upper gunner, Robert Memin, describes how the tail of his plane shattered with a huge crash as they began ‘climbing, diving and turning’. Realising the plane was out of control, he evacuated, and parachuted into a tree in front of the mayor’s house in a tiny village near Gisors, Normandy. During his descent, he had watched as the plane exploded on the ground.
Listening to Wilson’s stories as a child, the depth of decision-making and clear-minded adherence to protocol was impossible to imagine or understand. Only reading the official reports now does their subsequent struggle for home come to life.
Immediately after the collision, the aircraft had felt like it was ‘falling around the sky’, and he watched as the other plane seemed to ‘hang in the air’ beside them for eternity. After they were under control, he soberly followed his ingrained training.
First, he checked the crew, noting simply that ‘The Navigator and Bomb aimer had gone’. His friends, Stan Whitehouse and Dave Hauber, positioned as usual in the nose of the aircraft, had fallen to their deaths. Later, Wilson would visit the Normandy memorial to the two men and three French crew who also died, and would regularly look at photographs of Stan and Dave in remembrance. The language of the report reflects the need for a cool account of events, and emphasises the human ability to block emotional trauma in moments of great need: trauma that returns in time.
Next, the crew checked their equipment and instruments. All maps and charts were gone, all major instruments including their radios were ‘useless’ – sparks were flying from severed wiring – and pieces were falling from the damaged front. They switched off all electrics to guard against the risk of fire. Wilson notes, ‘We were obviously in a bad way.’
There were four remaining parachutes between the five airmen. Expecting to crash, he told his crew to evacuate. They refused, determined to stay alongside their captain come what may.
They climbed to save fuel and to give themselves ‘a little time to think’, but at what Wilson thought was around 11,000 ft the engines began to stall. The altimeter could not be trusted, and once the engines were restarted survival was their only goal. Wilson looked to the sky, not for spiritual revelation, but rather to find constellations that would guide them home. ‘Having identified the North Star,’ he reported, ‘I flew North West until I estimated we were somewhere near Lincolnshire and started the Standard Distress Procedure.’
His estimate was a judgment based on their direction, taken from the stars, the time, taken from a wristwatch, and a best guess of their speed that can only have come from the aggressive gale coursing through the plane as his feet peered out into the empty sky.
“All I can tell you is that it was very, very cold,” he once said to me in one of those story-telling times.
The procedure required the pilot to circle until the ground crew picked them up on radar and provided homing searchlights. It worked, but as he made his approach and lowered the speed the plane swung and yawed violently. They had to go round again. This time, Wilson approached low and fast, and landed safely.
Records of the time state that ‘seldom if ever did an RAF aircraft land on an English airfield with more damage.’ Weeks later, the entire command received a memo sent on behalf of Air Chief Marshal Harris – the famous ‘Bomber’ Harris – detailing his effort.
The memo reads: ‘This Officer undoubtedly showed a very high standard of Pilotage and Captaincy in bringing his Aircraft back to a base in the United Kingdom in its crippled condition. By his coolness and sound airmanship in adverse conditions he saved the lives of the remainder of his crew.’
Later, Wilson and Memin formed a friendship, and wrote to each other regularly, exchanging photographs and stories. The letters from Memin are charming and ooze affection.
Throughout, he writes to ‘my dear Andy’, inviting him to visit the family home in Poitiers when he next visits ‘La Belle France’. Both were stationed in Yorkshire during the war, and there are several mentions of a bar (now tea rooms) where the servicemen would go to unwind. Memin once visited Elvington for a reunion, and wrote, ‘I agree with you that it was a bit difficult to get some drinks from the bar. It reminds me of Betty’s in York during the war.’ To have been a fly on the wall.
Memin playfully refers to some of the photographs Wilson had sent him. ‘I notice [your plane’s] call sign is ‘L’ for Love,’ he writes. ‘So was mine when we had our first meeting over France on 13th January 1945.’ Then he continues, ‘In my squadron, ‘L’ for Love was shot down five times until they changed the call sign [to] ‘Q’ [for] Queen.’
One section of a letter struck me more than the rest. Memin referred to a model Halifax he had seen at a memorial in Normandy to the lost crew. ‘Brachet was written on the nose,’ he wrote.
Robert Brachet had been the navigator and captain of Memin’s crew, and died after the collision in 1945. The model designers had found the name in a book about war heroes.
Enclosed was a copy of the chapter: Brachet! I hastily translated it as best I could. Brachet is described in fantastic terms, ‘a big devil, sculpted, with a coiffured slick hairstyle and straight forward look which speaks volumes. He is only 25 years old, but a true leader.’
And the author describes the captain’s decision to remain on board with the pilot in theatrical fashion, ‘Brachet, who for months had described the sacrifice of his life, knows that the time has come to be great. Le Capitaine Brachet, your name will remain a symbol of the perfect air captain of the finest character.’
Reading these lines, I wondered if these were simply the colourful flourishes of an author selling a dramatisation. Nobody could have asked for Brachet’s emotions during those final moments, though Memin’s report states, ‘Our crew leader had on this occasion a courageous behaviour.’ I wondered if an account such as this would make it into a book this side of the Channel. The understatement of the official reports, the Air Vice Marshal’s letter, and Wilson’s own descriptions of his actions feel curiously and aptly British, if there is such a thing.
Perhaps we have a different relationship with the so-called ‘area bombing’ campaign led by Harris, a policy contested and controversial even at the time that has us conflicted: saluting the sacrifice of young men and women whilst being unable to believe in the tactics employed. It took me back to a conversation I had with Wilson as a child. Precocious, I had asked about the consequences of bombing, and he told me about a mission to an airfield in Essen – probably Christmas Eve of 1944 – that went wrong. His voice, tone, and serious demeanour were arresting, and are impossible to shake.
Looking, as I can now, at his Air Force Cross, awarded for an act of ‘exemplary gallantry while flying, though not in active operations against the enemy’, I can marvel at just that: the cool airmanship and captaincy at only 21, and the leadership and courage he showed to his young crew on the night of 13 January 1945, when his logbook entry for the flight read, simply: 1945 Jan 13, Halifax III MH-Y, OPS. TO SAARBRÜCKEN. COLLIDED NR. PARIS. A./B. + NAV. KILLED. LANDED FORD.
Perhaps Memin puts it best, describing in one of his letters the photograph that Wilson had sent of the crew standing in front of the damaged plane.
‘I appreciated the photos of your crew. They look very relax[ed] indeed.
‘At this time of our life we were [a] happy and careless mess. I think our dangerous job could not be done without these qualities.’
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