Untold stories from Second world war

Apr 30 2008 by David Whetstone, The Journal

Former prisoner-of-war John Nichol tells David Whetstone about those who evaded capture in an earlier conflict.

HUNDREDS, probably thousands, of books have been published about the Second World War, but John Nichol reckons he has broken new ground. You’ll remember John. He was the North East RAF man whose Tornado bomber was shot down over Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991.

He was captured, tortured and paraded on television, maintaining outwardly the appearance of a national hero, battered and bruised but with his pride seemingly intact.

Much water has passed under the bridge since then, although 17 years later we are still embroiled in Iraq and people are still dying and suffering.

Nowadays the former pupil of St Cuthbert’s Grammar School, Newcastle, is a journalist, military commentator and writer of best-selling books, both fiction and non-fiction.

The latest, Home Run, falls into the latter category, and I make the mistake of suggesting that much of this material must surely have been in the public domain for years.

John puts me right. “I’m not sure there have been many books. This is a book about evaders and not escapers and that’s the big difference.

“There have been a lot of books about escapers – The Great Escape and all those books about Colditz – but the people I’m talking about are a more exclusive band. They are the people who evaded capture and managed a home run.”

They were airmen, a bit like John Nichol half a century later, who were shot down, or they were soldiers who evaded the Germans after the raid on Arnhem or got left behind during the evacuation from Dunkirk.

Obviously John could sympathise with their predicament. He well remembers the moments after he was shot down over Iraq, “standing there in the desert and thinking: What the hell am I meant to do now?”

But he says: “A lot of these guys back in the 1940s, they were 18, 19, 20 and many of them hadn’t been out of their own village or town before, and certainly not out of the country.” According to John, the advice they had been given in the event of getting lost behind enemy lines amounted to little more than ‘head west until you hit the sea’.

John says the book came out of his last collaboration with journalist Tony Rennell (John gathers the research and finds the stories, Tony applies a narrative structure) which was called Tail-End Charlies.

It told of the brave bomber crews who fought the last battles of the Second World War in the air.

“I had a lot of stories about them being shot down but we left them there. This book takes up the story, explaining what happened to a lot of them when they stood up, looked around and wondered what to do next.”

He says he also had to start from scratch, finding the men who hadn’t been taken prisoner and who had somehow managed to get back.

One point of contact was the Royal Air Forces Escaping Society, which once attracted thousands of ex-servicemen to its regular reunions.

“The organisation has more or less closed down now. There are only a hundred or so of these guys left and most are well into their 80s.”

But John found his men and heard their extraordinary stories. He says some of them had written accounts of their experiences, either for their immediate families or for a regimental history, but few of these had enjoyed a wide circulation.

John reckons he read 30 or 40 such accounts, some running to as many as 50,000 words.

When John and his pilot, John Peters, were paraded on television, everyone in this country knew of their plight. With the Second World War evaders, it was much different.

Often, says John, they would be absorbed back into the military and their families with little fanfare. “One man got back after about 18 months and his wife said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

“At the end of the war people wanted to get on with their lives. They didn’t want to hear these stories because everyone had been involved in the war. They didn’t become features in newspapers. Many manuscripts lay unread in the bottom of drawers.”

Gently quizzing some of the evaders about their experiences, he would find that emotions ran deep.

“I particularly remember interviewing this one man about being shot down and, in many respects, he was this typical 85-year-old chap, saying things like, ‘We were just doing our job’.

“Talking about seeing another aircraft being shot down, he was saying, ‘It happened all the time. We didn’t think about it’. But then he suddenly burst into tears.

“He had never talked about it before and had suppressed his emotions. A lot of guys did become quite emotional.”

John interviewed evaders but also the people who helped them, risking their lives in the process.

He was particularly moved by the story of Gordon and Janine Carter.

Gordon was unusual in that he had lived in France until he was 13 and his family then moved to the United States. When war broke out, he went to Canada to join up. Subsequently he was shot down over occupied France.

Obviously his command of French helped him a great deal. But in striving to get back to England -– which he eventually did in a French fishing boat – he fell in love with the girl from the French Resistance, Janine.

Inevitably they parted, only to be reunited when hostilities ceased, embarking on a long and happy marriage.

I wonder if any film-makers have expressed an interest in John’s book, and he rightly suggests that the Carters’ story alone would make a pretty good one.

John Nichol looks back on his own ordeal with mixed feelings. He reflects: “I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on my worst enemy but if I hadn’t been shot down, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Now aged 44, John lives in Hertfordshire. But his parents still live in North Shields and he delights in visiting the region, taking his three-year-old daughter to the beach at Tynemouth and his other childhood haunts.

The paperback edition of Home Run (published by Penguin at £8.99) is in the shops now and another book, for which the research is all but done, is on the way.