The memoirs of Sqn Ldr Rupert Parkhouse, recorded in 1995 – Part 16. The first post in this series is #9775 on page 489 of this thread.
ABOUT August 8 we were taken by German truck to the prison at Drancy, the place that became infamous later, but at that time it consisted of several tower blocks where the lifts were working and we lived in fairly civilised conditions.
A week or so later a couple of French officers told me they had discovered an underground passage for the heating system and invited me to join them in an escape. So in my naïve way I went back to my companions and asked to borrow a French uniform. They were extremely worried because it would mean them wearing my RAF uniform and being implicated in the escape. They told me I did not speak proper French and would be a drag on the others, and they didn't think I ought to go.
Rather shamefacedly I told my friends what I had been told, and I have regretted it ever since. They escaped next day and when it was discovered we were asked to sign parole not to escape, which I could not do and so I was consigned to the other ranks quarters which were half-completed concrete shells. We lay on bare boards and I got lice and very bad diarrhoea until I got some medicine.
I tried vainly to think of a means of escape but it wouldn't come. I met a sergeant air gunner and we endlessly discussed escape without success; looking back I think this was the result of the emotional experiences we had been through, post-operational stress they call it now. But that's not totally convincing because several gallant chaps escaped from France.
On September 10 I was reunited with the French officers and we were taken by train to Germany. At the Belgian stations the people would come and give us fruit and things. Once again nobody thought about jumping the train for the plan just wouldn't come. Eventually we arrived at a place called Liebnitz in Silesia and were marched to a prison camp called Oflag VIIF which was the old Saxon cadet school which was surrounded with barbed wire.
We actually lived the kind of life that the cadets would have lived; we had quite smart parades in the morning, the German commandant was a typical Prussian who came out wearing a picklehauber and a sword, we were counted and then we could walk around the perimeter. At night we would sleep treble bunked in the school with an enormous coal stove in the centre, and my French friends had great amusement from telling me bawdy stories in French and getting them to repeat them in my bad French accent.
Such was the efficiency of the German railways and the Red Cross that a whole consignment of musical instruments arrived at the camp after the first month. There were many talented players among the thousand French officers and we would sit down to lunch, a pretty sparse bowl of soup and bread, and listen to the orchestra playing. On the walls around us were the honours boards with names picked out in gold of the cadets who had fallen in the Franco-Austrian war of 1866, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and of course an enormous list from the First World War.
NEXT POST: Rupert is reunited with RAF officers in the Dulag Luft camp, among them Roger Bushell the famous escaper.
May I wish a Merry Christmas and Peaceful New Year to all our fellow Pruners, particularly to Danny in his crewroom seat of honour, and most of all to all British Service personnel and their families, wherever they may be.