A NARROW ESCAPE

 Paragraph 29.

Various phases in my autobiography.

Period: One day in October 1944.

So to be honest: spaceflight is not the only important and sometimes overwhelming  in my life and so I have to grant attention to other and far-reaching experiences.
I am still here, but sometimes this was not always too easy for there was the WW-2 and in that period  I had to survive, literally. figurativelly and physically. After the Battle of Arnhem we had to leave  that lovely place and find ways to survive in suburbian and rural environments, but always trying to remain as close as possible to Arnhem and the frontline, approximately 20 Kilometers away.  I was a tall boy and wore a kind of overall. This overall I took with me during our escape from Arnhem. The overall was green and on the back stood  the letters AKU, the factory where I had taken it, so it was far from unobtrusive. I was adventurous, hated our ennemies, the Germans, and was always trying to find ways to harm them.  Meanwhile I  learned myself a doctrine to escape when necessary. For instance the attitude after an eventual arrest was to run away as soon as possible, so never await the moment that certain doors would be closed  behind me. A few times I used this doctrine, but in the story hereby I had success and this possibly saved my life.

It was a nice day and so the flying conditions were excellent. We lived in the village Rheden north of the river IJssel where a cable-ferry sailed between  the north- and southbank of that river. In the morning we, that is to say my brother, a friend and I, boarded the ferry to go to the other side of the river  to try to get some apples and meanwhile to have a look in a 4-engined bomber, Liberator or Lancaster, which had been  crashed a few days earlier. When we with our ferry were in the middle of the river almost above us somewhat to the West there was a short battle between a Spitfire (possible one of the the latest versions with clipped wings) and a Focke Wulf 190. The Spitfire fired a short salvo and hit the Focke Wulf. The German pilot baled out of his plane right above us. He descended  hanging on his parachute and splashed down in the fast streaming water of the river.  This was only a few meters from the place where I stood so I saw him while he was dragged away by his parachute and before he disappeared under water I heard him screaming  Hilfe, Hilfe,  (Help, help). This all took place in a few seconds and meanwhile there was a severe panic among the people on board. Nobody was interested in the fate of the pilot. The skipper of the ferry had only one intension: to return as soon as possible to the northbank, where we came from. The Focke Wulf had  crashed in an orchard on the southbank and was on fire. The Spitfire flew away in the south-western direction, waving with his wings. In my opinion the pilot of the Spitfire had seen that his ill-fated colleague safely had left his plane and waved to him and certainly not to us.

Already before the ferry was fully moored people ran away, some of them jumped into the water. A policeman was so afraid that he tried to climb a steep wall. 3 persons did not panic: we. We calmly left the ferry, but I was stopped by 2 SS-men with a motor bicycle.  They told me that I as a Dutch boy could swim and did not do anything to save the German and they said they would kill me. so that moment I alerted my doctrine.  Meanwhile the guard of the ferry, a German marine soldier, who we knew and -though difficult these days- considered him as a friend. I know that my brother sometimes enjoyed his accordeon music.
He asked the SS-men what they wanted to do and when he heard their plans he said: That is only possible with the consent  of Herr Hauptmann (the Captain), who was responsible for all what befell in his area. The SS-men asked where they could find him and the guard said that Herr Hauptmann was on the place of the crashed fighter. So the SS-men, still pointing their machine gun at me, ordered me to board the ferry and with them I arrived near the spot where the FW was still burning and we met Herr Hauptmann, a  sympathetically  looking German, perhaps a man from Baveria, was standing  there and listened to the report of the SS-men. For me time to practise my escape doctrine: I looked for the way into which I had to run, but meanwhile I stepped so that I had Herr Hauptmann between the SS-men  and me.

Suddenly a formation of 7 Spitfires passed overhead and Herr Hauptmann looked to that magnificent scene and  stammered: Schpittfeuer. When he said this the amber cigaretpipe fell out of his mouth. I immediately picked it up and handed this over to Herr Hauptmann saying Bitte Herr Hauptmann (please Herr Hauptmann) he said: Danke vielmals (Thanks very much.)

From that moment on I was on the run,  like an Italian infantrist in North Africa.
I heard some shots, but Herr Hauptmann blocked the field of fire of the SS-men and I could run, jumped over barbed wires, through and across  ditches and escaped.

And here I have to admit that there is a blind spot in my memories: I don't know how I ultimately returned home. My brother told me that I crossed the river later that day  with the ferry, but really I do not know.  
I vaguely remember that in the evening  I got a kind of nervous breakdown.

For a long period after this event it did not do anything to my conscience or character-building. When in my mind  recollections of this event showed up  I pressed  these away for  I considered it as a kind of justice that one of our ennemies was ruled out and no longer able to fight against our allies.

But life went on. The event took place when I was 16 years old and so gradually I grow out of my youth and got wiser. This culminated in the desire to get to know more about the German pilot and eventually contact his family. All my attempts in that direction failed: it happened too long ago and the records did not give the right information. In some archives I found that indeed a Focke Wulf 190 was shot down over the river IJssel and that the pilot drowned, but it was not possible to trace the exact date. 

Hereby an extract of the reports of the Community Angerlo in which region the Focke Wulf  190 fell down.

QUOTE

 GEMEENTE ANGERLO (Municipality Angerlo)

3.  Een Amerikaanse bommenwerper. (an American bomber)

7.  Een Duitse jager; de piloot kwam met zijn parachute in the  IJssel terecht en verdronk.
(A German fighter; the pilot, with his prachute, fell down in the river IJssel and drowned)

UNQUOTE

The fact that this fighter was the Focke Wulf I derived from another archive.
For me it took a long time before I felt a kind of  'sorry' for that pilot.  This happened for instance when I myself during my training as a pilot  took off with my Tiger Moth, which was a special sensation, I realized that the German pilot during his training must have had the same experience. The fact that a person has to train  to serve a criminal regime  is of all times.   

 
REFUSES TO EXECUTE INHUMAN ORDERS.
In the next 2 episodes of my life I refused to execute orders. In the first example I refused to execute an order which in my opinion was inhuman.  This had no consequencies for me.
First example:
Date:  27th of December 1949.
A very important day in the history of Indonesia and the Netherlands: Indonesia got her indepence. With our Dakota (C-47) we had made the last transportflight under Dutch jurisdiction from Surabaya via Ambon and Biak to Hollandia (now Jayapura) in Dutch Nieuw Guinea (now Irian Barat). That day we had to return as soon as possible to the territory of the Dutch East Indies before the transfer of souvereignty officially had taken place. Our next destination was Ambon were we  had to  arrive in time to attend the transfer ceremony.
We met an enormous problem: there was no fuel on the aerodrome Sentani (Hollandia) and so we had to use a  more than 4 years old American dump to tank. As much as possible we riddled the high-octane petrol. The engines of our good old Dakota started withoud any prolems so we trusted the quality of the old 2nd war petrol. During the long flight over the north coast and jungle of Nieuw Guinea we dropped a lot of pamphlets in which an announcement of the fact that Nieuw Guinea no longer was ruled by  Batavia (Djakarta) in Indonesia, but as of this day dirctly by the Netherlands in the Hague.
Not far from Ambon, north of the Island Ceram, one of our engines started to grumble and also showed some irregularites. When the second engine started to do the same I sent an SOS report to Ambon and asked the operator over there to switch on a radio beacon. Meanwhile we prepared ourselves for an eventual emergency landing at sea.  But we made it and landed without problems.
In the crewroom a lot of Ambonesians listened to a shortwave station in the Netherlands were the ceremonies could be followed and everybody hoped that the speech of our Queen Juliana would give some comfort. The Ambonesians always had been very loyal to the Netherlands, they had defended our colony from the Japanese troops and from the Indonesian freedom fighters.
After that speech a Dutch civil servant asked my commander to order one of his crew to lower the Dutch flag and to hoist the Indonesian flag, because his Ambonesian subordinates had refused to do this. And so I got the order to do that. I refused for I did not want to enter history as the Dutch sailor who lowered the Dutch flag in Ambon. I also considered such an act as a deep affront to the loyal Ambonesians.
My commander did not order another crew member to do it and he assured the civil servant that he would report me when we had returned to Surabaya. He did not do so, possibly he appreciated my attitude. Back in Surabaya we, that is to say the whole crew, kept silence about this.
Many years later when I met my commander during a reunion he confirmed this all and he said that he had appreciated my silence.
So this refusal did not have further consequenses for me.

Period: February 1950.
Ther second refusal  took place 2 months after Indonesia got its independence and we executed orders of the government of the Republic of Indonesia. We were stationed in the sea near the Natuna islands north east of Borneo (now Kalimantan) and we had to stop copra  smugglers. They used little ships, named  sampans. As soon as we discovered such a ship we ordered them to stop and meanwhile  we attracted one of our patrol boats with an  entering group to search the ship.   During such a reconnaissance flight we spotted a sampan and ordered the ship to stop. But they refused and continued their trip. I had to fire some rounds in front of their bow with the .50 machinegun, so this must have been pretty impressive,  but it had no effect.
I got the order to aim my machinegun at the people on the deck and to shoot. Those people were young boys in short trousers with naked upper parts of their body  and they did not carry guns. I passed through a process of consideration: shooting and certainly killing those boys would put an indelible impress on my conscience.  During this process a by-thought  emerged: of what avail an eventual cargo of copra, and the orders of the Indosian government.
So I decided not to shoot , I left my position behind the .50. One of my colleagues replaced me: a good guy and I was sure that he also did not want to shoot. He had a face like Barbarossa: a long red beard. We flew some low passes, even lower than the gangboard of the sampan, and in that way the colleague with the enormous beard was good visible for the boys on board. And then there was the miracle: the sampam stopped and so the patrol vessel was able to finish the operation. Later on we got a report from that vessel: they did not find any copra, but they had to leave  the sampan in a hurry for some of the young boys were possibly infected  by cerebro-spinal meningitis.
I expected problems for in fact I had refused to execute that order to fire, a military offence of the  highest  degree. I defended myself by the appeal that I had to execute an inhuman order and was not punished. But in our navy we have the confidential registration of your behaviour and inhuman order or not  the event was written down and had a harmful effect on my naval carreer.  

 

Focke Wulf 190 (shot down in air battle)	German fighter pilot
Spitfire with clipped wings which shot down the Focke Wulf	Air battle, splash down pilot and escape route Chris
Mooring place ferry at north bank river IJssel (To refusals execute orders)	Chris in Catalina with .50 machine-gun.
Our Dakota on Sentani (Hollandia) with Cycloop mountains.	Our Dakota W-6  on Sentani airport
Pamphlet of Dutch government about transfer  souvereignty	Our flightplan for flight Hollandia-Ambon
Colleague with Barbarossa beard.	Strategic situation during air battle