Sgt. John Wilton Walsh
Royal Air Force 77 Squadron
from:Wansted, London
My Dad, John Wilton Walsh was a Sergeant Flight Engineer on Halifax B2s out of Elvington and Pocklington, Yorkshire. On his second trip out to bomb he was shot down by a combination of a radar controlled ground to air type 88 ak-ak gun and a FW190. The original card showing the pick up by the Radar controlled gun to the eventual crash of the plane he was in is still available in the war museum.
With the pilot killed in his seat, my father wound the elevator trim tabs up and down to try and create a shooting position for the upper gun turret operator to get a shot at the FW190 that was sitting just below their tail pumping fire into the tail of the Halifax B2 they were in. Once it was realised that the whole aircraft was to be lost to fire, the wireless operator, navigator, mid upper gunner and my father decided to bail out.
On arriving at ground level my father, knowing he was over Belgium, made contact with a local resident using his schoolboy French and they decided to hide him. My father was looked after by this Belgian family for three months until the Nazi's were making it too hot for them to hold him any longer. My father dressed in civvies was taken to a Brussels prison as a spy and interrogated by the SS for three months. A record card of his subsequent treatment exists in the prison records. These records are available via the War Museum and the Philatelist Society UK. He was then en-trained and sent to Dulag Luft IV, he escaped twice and was caught twice before being sent to Stalag Luft 111 where he became a tunneller.
Having spent some time with his game keeper uncle as a boy and teenager, he was adept at trapping rats and birds to add to his normal daily ration, also due to his years as a border at school, from the age of 7 to 17, he tells me that the regime in the prisons he was in was more lax than his school days in Earls Colne Grammar School! Dad spent two and half years in the POW camps and had two Christmas's there. I have his Christmas day menu's in his POW log book.
After the enormous march from Stalag Luft 111 in Poland to Germany, where he was liberated and taken home to hospital. He told me of the number of days they marched and I have his map drawn in pencil in his POW log book. He told me about the fact that they had taken the Schmeisser Machine Guns from their guards, only to unload them and give them back to the guards as they entered any new village or town. The German Guards then terrorised the locals into giving their captors food and water, once that had been done the German guards were fed and the march continued with the RAF personnel now in charge of the loaded machine guns.
Dad's trip home was in a USAF Liberator, an ironical name for a plane! After his release from hospital he was sent home, on arrival his mother did not recognise him. He weighed 6 stone 8 when he got home, he was 5' 11" tall and weighed 10 st 4 when he enlisted. He was well looked after by his mother, a local school head cook. His aunt, the deputy Matron of the well known Middlesex Hospital, and his other aunt, an elocution and English teacher, all of whom lived together in the house my father now returned.
Dad was demobbed some weeks later and little later signed up for further service as a VRT Officer and he finished his service in 1979 having been part of RAF VC10 tanker project. Subsequently he worked on engineering and calibrating the simulators for the Jaguar and then the Tornado. My father left the service as a Squadron Leader having been a Wing Staff Officer for the ATC for many years.
An account his last two flights over Germany and his escape from his Halifax bomber, can be found in the book, The Bomber Boys. Until his death in the year 2000 my dad was an active member of the Kriegies Club and other wartime organisations including a lengthy time with the RAF Association organising and working within many charities supporting ex-service personnel.
