Behind Enemy Lines
Eddie Worsdale’s Amazing Journey Through Occupied France
By Max Lambert
12.30am, October 25, 1942.
Streaming fire from its starboard wing, the outcome of a night fighter attack, the bomber’s pilot somehow got the plane down, crash landing in an open field near a French village northeast of Reims. The nose section of the 75 (NZ) Squadron Wellington crumpled on impact and the blaze soon engulfed the plane’s entire forward section, then began eating away at the fuselage aft.
New Zealand wireless operator Eddie Worsdale and English rear-gunner Len Newbold emerged shaken but unscathed from the smoke-filled tail area. Pilot and fellow New Zealander Howard Hugill was dead, said to have been thrown clear, and the navigator, English like Newbold, died in the burning wreck.The two survivors believed no one could have lived up front including the fifth member of the crew, New Zealand front gunner Jim Barnes, a Dunedin man. They were right about Hugill and navigator Johnny Pete but wrong about Barnes.
Worsdale didn’t hear a “bale out” order but Barnes had parachuted from the front hatch, landing in a pine forest, an ankle broken, and picked up next day by searching Germans. A POW until war’s end. (See footnote).Swift capture was normally the fate of most bomber aircrew down alive in enemy territory. But not Worsdale.
An Incredible Journey
That night he began a remarkable 18-month odyssey, a story virtually unknown today. Still three months short of his 21st birthday, he and Newbold walked upwards of 400 km southeast from the crash site to sanctuary in neutral Switzerland. Their dangerous 18-day trek ended the night of November 11, Armistice Day, when they gave themselves up to a Swiss village mayor. After twiddling his thumbs for nine months Worsdale began work as a cipher officer in the British consulate in Geneva, coding and decoding secret and sensitive messages for another nine months.
On June 5, 1944, the day before the Allied landings at Normandy, Worsdale and English naval officer Billie Stephens — one of handful of Allied escapers from the notorious Colditz Castle — slipped back into a France crawling with Germans. They rode south and west on trains past Toulouse on a danger-fraught trip before scaling a high pass in the Pyrenees into final freedom in Spain and then England. Repatriated, Worsdale was commissioned and served at an RNZAF base in the Pacific. In January 1945 he received a Mention in Dispatches.
Worsdale is still a survivor — at 94. He was born and grew up in Christchurch but Wellington has been home since 1940. He’s shortish and spruce with clear eyes and hair on his head. A bit hard of hearing. Sharp memory. Enjoys cooking — he’s a long-time widower — moves easily around his retirement-village apartment. But he’s given up driving now and uses a mobility scooter for the uphill beat to the suburban Karori TAB for a Saturday bet: “I give it a miss when it’s wet,” he says.
Worsdale has more than a passing interest in racing — his jumper Guess Who won Riccarton’s 1979 Grand National Steeplechase and the 1980 Great Northern Steeplechase at Ellerslie and 10 other races. He talks happily about all that and the plastics manufacturing business he started in 1948. But what really sets him apart are his wartime exploits. War turned Worsdale, poorly educated in the Depression years, from an immature, unsophisticated youngster into a man as it did thousands of others.
Worsdale, then a furniture shop worker and would-be interior decorator, enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force on May 11, 1941, four months after his 19th birthday, and five weeks later was bound for Canada with 68 others on the graceful Awatea for training as wireless operators/airgunners. Twenty-four of them never came home.
Graduated from wireless school in Winnipeg, and a bombing and gunnery course, the now Sergeant Worsdale crossed the Atlantic to England in February 1942. More training before he was sent in June to an Operational Training Unit at Bassingbourn near Cambridge to become one of a crew of five on a two-engine Wellington. During the “crewing up” process he met Hugill and the others with whom he’d fly. It took a little time for Hugill to sort out his final team but he wrote in his 27 June diary entry, “Crew complete today. Drank to our future.”
Early Days
Hugill, a year older than Worsdale, helped his father grow apples on the family orchard at Huapai, northwest of Auckland, before enlisting in the RNZAF in July 1941. He got his wings after flying at Whenuapai and Ohakea and sailed direct for England in January 1942. For three months the Hugill crew trained intensively at Bassingbourn, getting ready for operations (ops). Finished at OTU, the crew’s posting took them to 75 Squadron at Mildenhall, Suffolk, an elaborate pre-war field.
The crew arrived on September 8, a bad time for 75. Between 3 and 10 September no fewer than eight of its Wellingtons went down attacking Germany. Of the 40 men aboard, 35 died, 20 of them New Zealanders. Just one all-New Zealand crew survived to become POWs. In October another five aircraft gone, Worsdale, Barnes and Newbold the only survivors of 25 aircrew. “It was luck, sheer luck,” Worsdale says. Luck stayed with him.
Worsdale and Newbold, a Northampton boot maker, made their ops debut the night of September 15–16, flying with another crew to lay mines off the North Sea Frisian Islands. Three nights later Hugill flew as second pilot with an experienced crew, mining again. On the night of September 30-October 1 the Hugill crew flew their first op together, dropping mines off Terschelling, a Dutch Frisian island. That was followed by attacks on Krefeld and Aachen in northwest Germany, and on Genoa, Italy, a long flight of 9 hours 15 minutes on October 23–24.
Behind Enemy Lines
Then their final op, Milan, carrying incendiaries, the very next night. Bomber crews considered Italian targets a softer option than Germany, flak and fighters often absent. Many airmen though found the flights interminable and exhausting, and their aircraft had to clear the menacing Alps summits. Wellingtons had a high enough ceiling to get over but that October night something was not right with Z1652’s performance. “We just couldn’t make enough height; it was too risky to try crossing the Alps. We turned back,” Worsdale remembers.
Heading home, cruising comfortably about 10,000 feet, they had neared Reims soon after midnight when they were attacked. The German night fighter made just one pass, hitting them without warning. Worsdale: “Canon shells tore a big hole in the starboard wing between the engine nacelle and fuselage and hit us in other places. The hydraulic lines burst and sprayed me with oil. I smelled burning and bits began falling off. Before Howard saw the flames from his seat way forward he told us he’d go down and hedge hop home. Then he said he was having difficulty with the controls.”
“I screamed at the forward crew to jettison the incendiaries; they did. I was terrified of crashing with those things sitting below us. Being burned was my greatest fear. I could see Johnny Pete standing up alongside Howard as we went down, flames all around them.”
Worsdale took his crash position on the rest bed in the body of the aircraft, bracing for impact. In an impossible situation, Hugill somehow found open land in an area thick with forest and put the Wellington down in a masterly wheels-up crash landing. “How he did it I don’t know,” Worsdale says. They hit ground not far from the tiny rural village of Ville-sur-Retourne, population then about 150. Hugill and Pete are buried in the village cemetery, the only two Allied war victims, graves still tended by the locals.
With some difficulty Worsdale and Newbold got out of the rear of the plane without a scratch as the gasoline tanks exploded, fuelling an enormous blaze. Certain the others were dead, they backed away from the tail, turned round and stumbled off into the dark. “I was thinking of the telegram my Mum would get about me — ‘missing on air operations’.” Walking as far as possible before dawn, they hid among trees and slept uneasily in the autumn cold.
Next morning their plight was obvious. Instead of warm beds at Mildenhall they were on their own, odds stacked against them.
“We were in a foreign country, didn’t speak a word of French. No food apart from malted milk tablets, a bit of chocolate and toffees in our escape kits. We did have a small silk map, and tiny compasses. All the Germans in the area would be looking for us because the bodies in the aircraft wouldn’t match crew numbers. But I was determined to make a go for Switzerland and Len agreed.”
He knew enough to head southeast to the nearest Swiss frontier point and for the first day or two used the compasses. Then they discovered local post-office published maps and encountered a chauffeur who gave them Michelin maps showing in great detail the route to the Swiss border.
The Long Road to Safety
The two men learned to avoid most large villages and towns from where German garrison troops patrolled the nearby countryside. They also spent a good deal of time watching likely villages and dwellings before seeking food and help. “The houses and farms we picked never turned us away, and from sympathetic and courageous French at grave risk if discovered helping us, we learned if Germans were present in the next few villages.” However, they never connected with the Resistance; the Maquis was not yet active in subjugated northeast France. But often they were wet, cold and hungry as the autumn weather worsened.
The first week they travelled at night but bolder the second, walked by day and hid at night. By now they were beginning to look less like airmen — unwashed, grubby, stubble on their faces. They’d shed their distinctive flying boots — exchanged for French work boots that didn’t quite fit and which quickly began troubling their feet — but still wore their white polo sweaters, soon turning grey, and their RAF battle dress minus the insignia they’d ripped off.
Worsdale’s conversation about those days in France is peppered, not surprisingly, with the word “luck”. “Sure, we had some black moments and continuing reaction from the crash and the loss of crew mates, and we knew that one false move, one mistake could do for us. Once when we were very low we spotted a farmhouse. The people there took us in, dried us out, gave us a great feed. That made us feel better psychologically. We were extraordinarily lucky.”
Only twice did they have real scares. Once in a village house they met a group of young men who began talking about Germany. “We didn’t like the look of them and I said to Len, ‘Let’s get out here’. But that was the only time we felt we might be betrayed. It was day’s end, we’d walked a long way and felt buggered but we kept on hiking.” The worst day, walking a dusty country road, a large black car stopped a little ahead of them. Two burly armed uniformed men climbed from the vehicle. SS officers. “They’d stopped for a pee. We breathed deeply and continued on. They glared at us as we came abreast but said nothing. They returned to their car and drove away. Luck again. They should have got us.”
The two men figured they’d covered about 400 km by the time they reached the village of Damvant, just inside Switzerland, after 18 days on the march. Reims-Damvant in a straight line is 350 km, on highways it takes about four hours. Worsdale and Newbold averaged 20 odd km a day but as tantalising freedom beckoned they quickened stride and the last day posted an astonishing 45 km.
“We picked the time and place to try to cross the frontier. Farmers gave us information about the area and we sussed it out and crossed at dusk. A bit of fog came up and hid us fairly well but we didn’t know what to expect in the way of guards. Luckily there were none and we found a line of concrete posts marking the border — and could see the lights of Damvant a kilometre away. :
“Those lights sparked the greatest feeling of relief I’ve ever had, the sheer relief of knowing we’d made it and were no longer being hunted,” Worsdale recalls.
Safe at last, Worsdale and Newbold found the mayor’s home and gave themselves up. “He was pleased to see us, then as he had to, called the local police.” At the nearest prison they were given a big glass of kirsch, a good feed and decent beds in the same cell. They were among the first Allied airmen to evade the Germans and cross into Switzerland — a novelty.
Next morning they were taken by train to Berne and collected by a British legation car. A shower and new clothes at the legation then dinner hosted by the air attache. And yes, the “missing” telegram to his parents was followed in mid-December by the best of news that their son had “arrived in a neutral country”.
Freedom at Last- with Special Duties
Worsdale and Newbold were moved from Berne to a pension in Vevey, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva where the New Zealander stayed for nine months. He learned a smattering of French, cycled around the area, played bridge, travelled widely and listened to Geneva Symphony concerts in Geneva’s English Gardens on summer nights — a pleasant lifestyle. Still he was delighted when asked to work in the Geneva consulate, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) staff there headed by station chief Colonel Count “Freddie” Vanden Heuvel, described in one account as a “cosmopolitan figure of Italian origin brought up in England”.
POW escapers and evaders were “free” in Switzerland but still needed permission to travel in this neutral country though it was given freely. They were still under British military command and when required to work for the British could be seconded for special duties. Which was exactly how the now Flight Sergeant Worsdale was corralled in late summer 1943.
Worsdale’s air force morse wasn’t fast enough to take high-speed messages but he found his niche as a cipher officer coding and decoding both-ways secret traffic.
He became privy to a host of wartime intelligence but higher authority handled for “Hauvel’s-eyes-only” messages.
He met numerous figures in the intelligence world and other escapers and evaders but strangely enough not Billie Stephens. Men who’d been on the run didn’t talk about their experiences. It was years after the war before Worsdale learned that Stephens, a Lieutenant Commander, had got out of the forbidding Colditz Castle, the POW destination for ‘bad boys’ and escapers, in eastern Germany near Leipzig. The Germans captured Stephens after destroying his motor launch during the famous British raid on the dry dock at St Nazaire on France’s Atlantic coast in March 1942. Ordered to Colditz after trying to escape from a POW camp he even jumped from the train taking him there but was soon recaptured.
On the night of 14–15 October 1942 Stephens and three other Commonwealth prisoners, British army officers Pat Reid and Ronnie Littledale, and Canadian pilot Hank Wardle, staged a daring escape from Colditz. The four split into pairs to have a better chance of evading capture. Travelling independently, each pair used trains to get near Switzerland and then walked the final distance to the frontier. Stephens and Littledale took five days to reach safety, a day more than the others. All four eventually got back to Britain but Littledale, who rejoined his unit, was killed fighting in France in September 1944. Stephens died aged 85 in 1997.
Among those Worsdale did meet were New Zealand Brigadiers James Hargest and Reg Miles who’d reached Switzerland following their escape from Campo 12 in Italy. The two high rankers separately made it across the Pyrenees to Spain, where Miles committed suicide, before Worsdale got to Spain. The first he knew the pair had left Switzerland was when Geneva was told in a message that Miles was dead.
Normandy and a Place in History
Worsdale’s turn to leave Switzerland came without warning just before the Normandy landings. He was simply told he was going. He’s still surprised that he was ordered out.
“I didn’t know the precise date of the Invasion but I carried a lot of information in my head that the Germans would have liked to have so it was a risky venture. I’d been told earlier that London had advised Geneva that I was not to leave until the chances of getting to Spain were more than favourable.”
The Gestapo, active in Switzerland, must have known the New Zealander worked for the British in Geneva, and clearly he would have been a valuable catch.
Whatever, the decision was made. Most Swiss intelligence officers and police had British sympathies and quietly co-operated in getting Allied servicemen across the frontier. At 10.30 on the morning of June 5, 1944 Worsdale was introduced to Stephens in Geneva. A Swiss military vehicle took them to a deserted spot on the border where Swiss and French officers signalled each other all was well. The two men shook hands with the Swiss and slipped under the wire at 1.30 pm. Worsdale’s second adventure had begun.
They walked to a French village cafe in spitting distance of their departure spot to meet a young Corsican woman called Paulette who accompanied them on a bus to Annecy, an hour away. Another guide they knew as Philippe took them all the way to Toulouse from Annecy, changing trains at Valence, Avignon and Tarascon. At one stage their train was halted by an air raid that destroyed track ahead. They scrabbled to get aboard the back of a truck to complete the leg they were on.
Exhausted from tension and lack of sleep, Worsdale fell deeply asleep standing in a crowded rocking express to Toulouse and twice found himself on the floor. They endured long fraught waits for the right trains at crowded stations, napped in a church, rubbed shoulders with German troops, remembered not to speak English, were ignored by fellow travellers in the European fashion and snatched what food they could.
Philippe bought all the tickets and shepherded them. They kept their distance while maintaining sight of him. Knackered and frazzled, they reached Toulouse late morning on June 7, then ran for a tram, Philippe explaining this would shake off anyone who might be following them. No one did, and after they got off were taken to the back door of a dress shop right opposite Gestapo headquarters.
The flat above was the home of the remarkable elderly woman M’lle Marie-Louise Dissard, code name “Francoise”, awarded the George Medal by Britain postwar. Despite the Gestapo’s 1943 breakup of the famed Pat O’Leary escape line which spirited hundreds of aircrew and soldiers to safety, she was never rumbled by the Germans. A heavy smoker who wielded a large silver holder and owner of an enormous tortoise-shell cat called Mifouf, she continued the line until France’s liberation.
Francoise walked the two men to a “safe house” in Toulouse. Worsdale: “At one stage a young woman cycled up to her and warned that two strange figures, Gestapo perhaps, were following her. We were the Gestapo.” At the safe house next day they met French-Canadian Andre Duchesnay, navigator of a Halifax that had crashed in Holland on April 23. With some help he’d made his way by train to Toulouse. Resistance members and Stephens, a fluent French speaker, grilled him intensely to establish he was no Gestapo plant.
The German Seige
That day a concerned Francoise told them she’d heard the Germans would declare a state of siege in Toulouse on the 9th because of the immense Maquis activity following the Normandy landings, so they left that evening, riding a train southwest about 100 km to Montrejeau. Their new guide, a French air force corporal, also an Andre, then walked them 7 km south to his home in the village of Loures-Barousse, arriving at 1am on the 9th. They stayed there until the evening two days later when Andre took them, on foot again, to Izaourt, another small village, 10km further south, where they remained two more days, hiding in another supporter’s house. The Pyrenees now loomed ahead but now everything fell to pieces — no guide, no papers for the frontier area, nothing. The guide or passeur (“frontier runner”) paid to escort them over the border had not materialised.
Worsdale remembers: “And then we were told that the Germans were coming to the village to take able-bodied Frenchmen for labour. We must leave. Someone said they’d lead us out into the country and some other mumbo jumbo and there was a village where’d get help. It didn’t exist. We were basically thrown to the wolves.”
A woman took the three men as far as she dared, pointed out the route to take, before leaving them. The servicemen were on their own.
The trio trudged on across the countryside, finally hunkering down on a hillside to assess their predicament. Now a split in the ranks. Worsdale: “The other two had doubts. They said they’d go back to Izaourt and return to Toulouse and Francoise, get help and papers and start again. I told them I was going on. They accused me of being over confident and no doubt I was. But there was no option. They wished me luck and turned back. I’d never felt so lonely in all my life. I stayed where I was.”
Two hours later the pair were back. “Sheepishly they told me they’d learned the Germans were everywhere, checking trains headed for Toulouse. They said, ‘we’ll come with you.’ ”
The threesome began walking up the valley leading to the heights, bypassing the little spa town of Bagneres-de Luchon. Further on there were few villages or farms. Worsdale now made good use of the expensive compass he’d bought on impulse one day in Geneva. They walked that afternoon and into the night, keeping to cover where they could. They climbed all night, stumbling over shale and tussocky grass. By dawn they knew they were high at perhaps 2000 metre and close to the summit and frontier. They sought help from a French shepherd they found unexpectedly. He declined to act as a guide, recently threatened with shooting if he aided evaders.
But he provided vital information — “See those two peaks up ahead. The Germans patrol from each regularly as clockwork, meeting in the centre every two hours. If you get there about 12.30pm you’ll be right.” So it proved. “The last bit was really hard going,” Worsdale remembers. “Virtually straight up. Hard yakka.” But enveloped in mist, led by the New Zealander and his compass, they reached the border. No Germans. Just over the frontier, sure they were in Spain, Worsdale says Stephens shook his hand and said, “Thanks to you we’re here.” “He had no need to do that but it was the greatest compliment of my life.” They spotted a stone hut, sheltered there briefly before walking on down into Spain and safety. June 13 — eight days from Switzerland.
Sanctuary
On July 5 via various stopovers, one in a dirty jail while awaiting clearance from Spanish authorities, they reached Madrid and the British Embassy. Two or three days later they were in Gibraltar. The aircraft flying them home touched down at Whitchurch, Wales, on July 11. Worsdale’s long journey to attack Milan was finally over.
He stayed in London only a short time but it was long enough for Hargest, fresh from Normandy as an observer with 50 Division, to take him to lunch at the New Zealand Forces Club. “He talked to me about what Montgomery had told him of Allied plans. He’s a brigadier, I’m a lowly warrant officer in the RNZAF.” They yarned about their treks from Switzerland to Spain. A few days later Hargest returned to Normandy for a final visit. He died there on 12 August, killed by shell fire. By then Worsdale was on the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth, first leg back to New Zealand.
Footnote: Barnes was decorated for his work in prison camp, and later became Sir James, an MP and mayor of Dunedin. He died in 1995.
About the Author
Max Lambert spent the majority of his working life with the New Zealand Press Association including postings to Sydney and Washington, and several years as a news editor. He has written numerous books including Day After Day, Night After Night and Victory: New Zealand Airmen and the Fall of Germany. He lives with his wife in Wellington.
This article was first published in the March 2016 issue of Air Force News, the official magazine of the Royal New Zealand Air Force
