John Evans
Halifax bomber pilot whose plane was hit over Belgium and who spent more than 100 days evading capture, helped by the resistance
October 13 2017, 12:01am,
The Times

The Royal Air Force bomber pilot John Evans, front centre, with his crew
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As John Evans struggled to get out of his burning Halifax bomber he realised with horror that his parachute was not on his back — and was about to fall out of the aircraft without him. The parachute pack had become dislodged from the hook on which it was kept while Flight Sergeant Evans was at the controls. It was now lying right at the edge of the open front escape hatch. Evans, who was only a little over 5ft 7in, scrambled towards it, clipped it to his parachute harness and jumped through the escape hatch.
As he tumbled into the darkness he watched the blazing aircraft dive into the ground. Only moments earlier he and his crew had been attacked by a Messerschmitt 110. A few minutes before that they had delivered their bomb load on the railway marshalling yards at Hasselt. It was May 12, 1944, Evans was on his 12th mission, and the land below him was Belgium, occupied by the Nazis for four years.
Spinning through the night air, Evans’s parachute opened with such a jerk that one of his flying boots was wrenched off. He saw a wood rushing up to meet him, crashed through the tops of a cluster of fir trees, and landed gently on the ground. The parachute had tangled in branches and acted as a brake on his fall.
Sitting in the darkness, Evans thought of his parents at home in Wales, who would soon get a message to say that he was missing, and then of his friends on the squadron who would be at Betty’s Bar in York later, drinking beer and wondering about the friends who had not returned from the last mission.
As daylight dawned Evans approached a farm labourer on the road. He explained in schoolboy French that he was an English airman. When the man replied in Flemish, Evans shrugged, said, “Bonjour,” and headed off. The man then pointed towards the direction Evans was walking and shouted: “Boches!” It was a word that they both understood, and Evans hurried in the other direction. Eventually he took a risk and knocked on the door of a farmhouse. He got lucky. The couple would help him, despite the risks to themselves and their seven children. They fed him and contacted a member of the resistance. Soon afterwards Evans’s bomb aimer, Flying Officer Bill “Robbie” Robertson, who had been found in the woods, was brought into the farmhouse.
They had fallen into the hands of people linked to the Comet evasion line and to the armed resistance, the Armée Blanche. He and Robertson were given bicycles and taken by a group of men to Zonhoven, where they met Baron de Villenfagne, a local resistance leader, and René Jaspers, his dedicated helper. Jaspers took them to an underground hideout dug into a steep bank deep in the wood. They were soon joined by three other members of Evans’s crew.
The resistance allowed the airmen to stay in one place for only a few days. At one time they were housed by an elderly widow, Louise Delchef, who hated the Nazis and wanted to prove it to Evans. She took him into the attic and showed him a stash of machineguns and revolvers, which she kept under the tiles on her roof. One day, the old woman said, she would use them against the Boches.
The man pointed and shouted: ‘Boches!’ a word they both understood
After D-Day the airmen were transferred to the village of Beffe in the Ardennes, where they stayed with a young married couple. One morning the Germans launched a massive search for four members of the Armée Blanche, and Evans and the other airmen were forced to flee out of the back window of the house. Behind them a gun battle broke out in which three of the resistance were killed and a German officer seriously wounded. The fourth resistance man remained hidden in a cellar.
With the Allies now moving through northern France, the resistance created a camp for about 30 evaders near Bohan sur Semois, a small town on the French border. On the road the airmen could hear the rumble of German vehicles as their armies retreated. Food was scarce so sometimes they had to cut chunks of meat from horses killed by strafing aircraft.
When the American army entered Bohan, Evans swam the River Semois and introduced himself to a young soldier. He finally returned to Britain on September 9, four months after he had left. His parents in Goodwick, Pembrokeshire, had feared he was dead.
Born into a seafaring family in 1919, John Evans was the fourth of five children. He had an older brother, Cyril, two older sisters, Mair and Enid, and a younger brother, Doug.
After his return to Britain, Evans was posted to Transport Command and tasked with delivering Wellington aircraft to north Africa. On his first leave after his escape he met a young woman named Jeanne Thomas and they married in February 1946, five weeks after he had been demobbed.
He worked for many years for HM Customs and Excise, first at Fishguard Harbour and then from 1959 in Liverpool. He and Jeanne lived on the Wirral until her death in 1998, when Evans moved to Calverton, Nottinghamshire, to be near his daughter, Judith.
Summers were often spent tracking down the people who had helped to save his life, travelling with Jeanne, his brother Doug and Doug’s wife, Dorothy. They discovered from Jaspers that parts of Evans’s wrecked plane had been turned into saucepans and cooking pots by enterprising locals. Jaspers had survived incarceration in Neuengamme concentration camp, but others who had helped Evans had been killed.
Evans’s family, including Judith, a retired social research consultant, and Richard, an engineer, are still in contact with the families of some of those who helped him.
A peace-loving and humble man who enjoyed painting watercolours and played the piano by ear, Evans was acutely aware of, and a little haunted by, the controversy that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s bombing campaign attracted after the war, but he felt that “it could not properly be judged in hindsight through civilian eyes”.
John Evans, RAF pilot, was born on June 30, 1919. He died of congestive heart failure on August 4, 2017, aged 98