First Air Raid of WWII – 41

Fate of the German prisoners

Whilst civilian eyewitness accounts and reports by pilots suggest that a far greater number of German aircraft had been shot down by the two Scottish auxiliary squadrons, the Luftwaffe actually lost three aircraft with eight aircrew killed and four taken prisoner.

After Helmut Pohle had recovered consciousness in Port Edgar Hospital in addition to the fractured skull and facial injuries he had incurred, he was also suffering from having had three of his front teeth pushed in, as a result of the crash, which were subsequently straightened with a clamp, which was turned every second day. At the time he had little confidence in the treatment and thought: ‘This is the famous Scottish thriftiness.’

That evening he received a visit from one of his 602 assailants, George Pinkerton, along with Squadron Leader Douglas Farquar, Officer Commanding 602 Squadron. The comradeship of fellow airmen superseded the fact that already lives were being lost in the war.

At the end of October Pohle was taken by stretcher to the Military Hospital in Edinburgh Castle where he was put in a single room with a restricted view overlooking Princes Street, guarded round the clock by a sentry. There he received the best of medical care.

One day John Kerr and Petty Officer Buffer who had been injured during the attack on the Mohawk found themselves in the same company as Pohle. Kerr remembers him being very nervous: ‘All the time he acted as if someone was going to give him a pill, he even hesitated before drinking a cup of tea.’

When, at the end of 1939, Pohle eventually arrived at Grizedale Hall in Westmorland, as the senior officer with the most ‘time in’ he came to know Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot who became famous as ‘the one that got away’, the only German PoW to make a successful home run during WWII after having been shot down over Kent by P/O Stapme Stapleton of 603 on 5 September 1940. Von Werra was planning an escape and required the Hauptmann’s permission. Helmut Pohle was later sent to Canada.

On returning home after the war Pohle discovered the Nazi propaganda machine had presented his mission on 16 October 1939 as a success and that he was a national hero.  This was something he found hard to live with, particularly in light of the fact he had been shot down. To him the raid bad failed and at a high price.

For many years after returning to farming in his homeland his recollections of that day haunted him, in particular the memory of his navigator’s brains spattered over the inside of the front windscreen after a burst of machine-gun fire had smashed through the perspex.

After many years he found he was able to record his memories of 16 October 1939 and. with affection, his time in Edinburgh. Although he had not been shot down by 603 Squadron, whilst in hospital he received a visit from a 603 pilot:

One day – I remember gloomy – I had a visitor, Flt Lt Gifford at my sick bed. He was the pilot who had shot me down [602’s George Pinkerton had shot him down]. I am sorry to say, there was not much conversation because of my tiredness. But the visitor gave just the right impression of a nice young officer of the Royal Air Force. I was violently shaken to hear of the death of Flt. Lt. Gifford during May 1940.

During the last week of November I was allowed to take a walk around the [battlements] of the Castle with the escort of my private and his rifle. One of them explained to me all the objects of interest of your marvellous town. For this walk I got a kind of jogging suit, a sky blue blouse, white trousers and a red band. I didn’t know what to do with the band. Now I got the instructions: HM Queen Victoria had introduced this suit for sick soldiers and the red band must be for the British colours around the neck. As a through and through conservative much have I admired your great Queen Victoria . . . especially because Europe is obliged to her moreover for the washout W.C. [a reference to the flushing toilet and Pohle’s belief that Queen Victoria or Prince Albert were behind the invention]. I put the red band around my neck with pleasure.