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Flak and Ferrets: ONE Way to COLDITZ. (Signed by Author).
. 1995 SIGNED AUTHOR, bright clean copy, no markings, Professional booksellers since 1981
1000 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1995
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April 12, 2017
A fascinating WWII memoir by a former RAF pilot who had to parachute out during a bombing mission over Germany. As you can imagine, a British pilot in the heart of enemy territory in 1942—alone, unable to find his crew, with no contingency plan—is unlikely to make it very far before being captured by Germans as a prisoner of war, and that's exactly what happens to Walter Morison. The war may be over for the 22-year-old pilot, but at least the POW camps offer some degree of safety, as well as the opportunity to play an unusual game: attempting to escape.
The crux of the story centers around a cleverly-planned mass escape from Stalagluft III. Most of the escapees are caught almost immediately, but Morison and fellow RAF pilot Patrick Palles Lorne Elphinstone Welch (known as Lorne Welch), in their homemade Luftwaffe uniforms, are more convincing than most. With little food and water, and the awareness that the Germans are on the lookout for them, they spend the next 8 days in a peripatetic and increasingly desperate existence in the German countryside. They manage to get excruciatingly close to their goal of flying away in a German plane before they are caught and transferred to Colditz, where both Morison and Welch remained until the camp's liberation by Allied forces in 1945.
Don't read this book looking for suspense—after all, the subtitle "One Way to Colditz" kind of gives the game away, and the fact that the book was written at all tells you right off the bat that the author did in fact survive his ordeals. Read this for its depictions of the colour of everyday life in (and briefly outside) German POW camps, written with a characteristically British dry wit and a tone that fluidly alternates between joyful and sober, irreverent and poetic.
Some choice excerpts:
"We each took three cakes [...], also a six ounce bar of chocolate and quarter of a pound of oatmeal [...]. We made brassières to carry all this under our shirts. It was supposed to last for five days and although it sounds sickly, it was not." (p. 105)
"In the dusk, before the perimeter lights were switched on and we were shut up in our huts for the night, the uglier features of the landscape faded from view. The huts, the wire and the people could be forgotten and if you were lucky you might arrive back, lean in the window of your room and be given a cup of cocoa. The wilting tomato plants would look almost healthy in the cool of a May evening and the pine trees, dark and drab in winter, spread their scent over the camp." (p. 110)
"[...] Lorne went searching for pigeons' eggs and found two. I cut the top off one and sucked out the contents, but perhaps it was a bit too late in the nesting season because there was a bony sort of consistency about it, and although it was nearly dark Lorne must have seen my face, because he refused to eat his." (p. 125)
"We were trying to look like British officers again but we evidently still looked like Luftwaffe because a pilot who was in the office trying to fill up a form turned to me and asked how to do it. A tribute to the makers of our uniforms, but quite an embarrassment for him when he found out who he was talking to." (p. 135)
"This would have been the moment to run for it, except that we could think of no satisfactory answer to the question, 'What do you do when you find yourself in the middle of Leipzig, in RAF uniform, on a summer afternoon, with no money, no papers and no food?'" (p. 149)
[On the rutabagas-heavy cuisine at Colditz] "The Goon menu for the day would be chalked on a blackboard outside the cook-house and showed a distinct lack of variety. A disconsolate Frenchman gazing at it one day was heard to bemoan: 'Ah, les rutas, toujours les rutas'—and that about summed it up." (p. 155)
You may be wondering why I decided to read and review this fairly obscure title. After all, as of the time of writing this review, the book has only one rating on Goodreads, and this rating was given by the person who recommended the book to me, who himself only read the book because one of his relatives appears in the book. (This person's full name is Toby Lorne Roy Patrick Palles Elphinstone Welch-Richards, which gives you some clue about the aforementioned relative, and incidentally hints at a certain family pride in said relative.) I read this book because 1) I wanted to be a supportive girlfriend (or at least seem like one); 2) we had lugged this (admittedly quite light) book over the Atlantic with the express intention to bring it right back over in two months' time so I might as well just read the damn thing while it's here; and 3) I actually really love WWII history.
Anyway, even ignoring the family connection, it's a vibrant read if you like war memoirs or WWII history or aviation. Would recommend even if you're not dating someone with an overwhelmingly long name.
The crux of the story centers around a cleverly-planned mass escape from Stalagluft III. Most of the escapees are caught almost immediately, but Morison and fellow RAF pilot Patrick Palles Lorne Elphinstone Welch (known as Lorne Welch), in their homemade Luftwaffe uniforms, are more convincing than most. With little food and water, and the awareness that the Germans are on the lookout for them, they spend the next 8 days in a peripatetic and increasingly desperate existence in the German countryside. They manage to get excruciatingly close to their goal of flying away in a German plane before they are caught and transferred to Colditz, where both Morison and Welch remained until the camp's liberation by Allied forces in 1945.
Don't read this book looking for suspense—after all, the subtitle "One Way to Colditz" kind of gives the game away, and the fact that the book was written at all tells you right off the bat that the author did in fact survive his ordeals. Read this for its depictions of the colour of everyday life in (and briefly outside) German POW camps, written with a characteristically British dry wit and a tone that fluidly alternates between joyful and sober, irreverent and poetic.
Some choice excerpts:
"We each took three cakes [...], also a six ounce bar of chocolate and quarter of a pound of oatmeal [...]. We made brassières to carry all this under our shirts. It was supposed to last for five days and although it sounds sickly, it was not." (p. 105)
"In the dusk, before the perimeter lights were switched on and we were shut up in our huts for the night, the uglier features of the landscape faded from view. The huts, the wire and the people could be forgotten and if you were lucky you might arrive back, lean in the window of your room and be given a cup of cocoa. The wilting tomato plants would look almost healthy in the cool of a May evening and the pine trees, dark and drab in winter, spread their scent over the camp." (p. 110)
"[...] Lorne went searching for pigeons' eggs and found two. I cut the top off one and sucked out the contents, but perhaps it was a bit too late in the nesting season because there was a bony sort of consistency about it, and although it was nearly dark Lorne must have seen my face, because he refused to eat his." (p. 125)
"We were trying to look like British officers again but we evidently still looked like Luftwaffe because a pilot who was in the office trying to fill up a form turned to me and asked how to do it. A tribute to the makers of our uniforms, but quite an embarrassment for him when he found out who he was talking to." (p. 135)
"This would have been the moment to run for it, except that we could think of no satisfactory answer to the question, 'What do you do when you find yourself in the middle of Leipzig, in RAF uniform, on a summer afternoon, with no money, no papers and no food?'" (p. 149)
[On the rutabagas-heavy cuisine at Colditz] "The Goon menu for the day would be chalked on a blackboard outside the cook-house and showed a distinct lack of variety. A disconsolate Frenchman gazing at it one day was heard to bemoan: 'Ah, les rutas, toujours les rutas'—and that about summed it up." (p. 155)
You may be wondering why I decided to read and review this fairly obscure title. After all, as of the time of writing this review, the book has only one rating on Goodreads, and this rating was given by the person who recommended the book to me, who himself only read the book because one of his relatives appears in the book. (This person's full name is Toby Lorne Roy Patrick Palles Elphinstone Welch-Richards, which gives you some clue about the aforementioned relative, and incidentally hints at a certain family pride in said relative.) I read this book because 1) I wanted to be a supportive girlfriend (or at least seem like one); 2) we had lugged this (admittedly quite light) book over the Atlantic with the express intention to bring it right back over in two months' time so I might as well just read the damn thing while it's here; and 3) I actually really love WWII history.
Anyway, even ignoring the family connection, it's a vibrant read if you like war memoirs or WWII history or aviation. Would recommend even if you're not dating someone with an overwhelmingly long name.
Displaying 1 of 1 review