Most Memorable Operations

 Pierre Maroldt, husband of Margot Maroldt, who sheltered John in the City of Luxembourg, was executed. Reflectingon his terrifying experience, John asks: “What can you say to a lady whose husband was executed because he helped you?”
On his return to the UK, John was posted to #267 Squadron in Italy, later to Burma and Malaya. With #353 Squadron, he was involved in VIP duties, during which he was personal navigator to Field Marshal Auchinleck ,C-in-C, India. John was demobbed at Warton, England on September 15, 1947.

John served 25 years with BOAC (now British Airways) in airport management positions in Kano, Nigeria, Karachi, Pakistan, Gander, Newfoundland and Toronto. He took early retirement in 1974
Married to Ann, John took out Canadian citizenship and live in Toronto where he is active with the RAF Escaping Society, Canadian Branc.
January 11, 2001

En route to Nurenberg, August 27/28, 1943, John’s aircraft was attacked by a German night fighter. They were over the Moselle River when the order to bail out was given. John made it out safely and landed in a ploughed field, buried his personal effects and began wondering where he was. He started his trek by sleeping in ditches and walking by night. One night he was awakened by an elderly, German-speaking man who led him to a farm house where he learned that he was in Luxembourg.

He was hidden from a German search party and then moved to a “safe house”, two miles from the German border. There he met a young English-speaking woman from the Resistance who planned on getting him to Paris via the underground, hidden in a grain truck. They went first to the City of Luxembourg to another safe house where he was joined by an American airman and a member of John’s own crew who informed him that three crew members had been killed and four had survived Then began the perilous trip to freedom, first being smuggled across the Belgian border to Brussels, to Paris and eventually to Spain from where he returned to the UK.

John parted company with the young Resistance worker, Claire, in Brussels and did not see her again until 1967 when she came to Canada during the Centennial celebrations. John credits the many Resistance workers who fed and clothed him, providing him with documentation, hid him from searching German soldiers and Gestapo, and transported him from hide-out to hide-out, with saving his life at very real risk of losing theirs. One woman who sheltered him in Paris had her legs broken and spent the last years of the war in concentration camps.

This was the pilot of the Me 110 that shot us down. We were one of his 36 kills. He was shot down and killed on Aug 6/44.