A great escape
Tell me what I want to know or I will shoot you,' said the German officer. But Guernseyman Lloyd George Richards was having none of it. Simon Partridge recounts the story of the war veteran's part in the fateful air attack on the enemy ship, Scharnhorst, and his subsequent capture - and escape
Tell me what I want to know or I will shoot you,' said the German officer. But Guernseyman Lloyd George Richards was having none of it. Simon Partridge recounts the story of the war veteran's part in the fateful air attack on the enemy ship, Scharnhorst, and his subsequent capture - and escape IT WASN'T until I phoned Lloyd George Richards in July 2006 and invited him to a reunion of the few remaining Blackburn Skua veterans at the Fleet Air Arm Museum that October that his long dormant memories of naval flying and wartime came back to life.
But it was only when I returned with Lloyd and another veteran to Trondheim in June 2007 for the 67th anniversary of the fateful Skua dive-bomb attack on the Scharnhorst that it came home to me how lucky he had been to survive the war and what an unusual tale he had to tell.
Lloyd was born in July 1919 at his family home on the edge of Delancey Park. At four-and-a-half he went to Delancey Park Boys School (now St Sampson's) and left at 14.
The only job he could find was as a carpenter, but two years of building greenhouses was enough. He saw an advert to join the Royal Navy and decided that would be the life. Off he went to Southampton to undergo some tests, passed and joined up as a wireless operator.
Lloyd was called up just before Christmas 1935. He went for a year to HMS St Vincent in Gosport, which was a tough induction.
He continued with his training aboard HMS Royal Sovereign, HMS Royal Oak and HMS Guardian for the next couple of years.
His next step was the diving school in Plymouth, but he wasn't happy.
He saw an advert for the Fleet Air Arm, and, with a long-standing interest in flying, applied for the position of trainee telegraphist air gunner and was accepted.
TAGs sat in the rear cockpit, worked the wireless, gave navigation help and protected the plane from attack. Lloyd started his flying training at Royal Naval Air Station Lee-on-Solent and after a few months moved to RNAS Southampton. Once qualified as a leading airman, he returned to Lee-on-Solent. By the time the 'phoney war' was over in March 1940, his job, at only 20, was to accompany pilots being ferried up to Wick airbase in Scotland. Towards the end of April he was appointed to FAA Squadron 803 flying Blackburn Skua fighter/dive-bombers from RNAS Hatston, Orkney.
The squadron had been heavily involved in the Norwegian campaign since early April. By May it was in need of new aircrew and planes.
Its CO, Lieutenant Bill Lucy DSO, had been killed and his replacement, Lieutenant-Commander John Casson, had the task of picking up new pilots and TAGs and leading 803 back onto the aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, as she returned from replenishment.
Sub-Lieutenant Dick Bartlett was Lloyd's rookie Canadian officer pilot, with only nine hours on a Skua.
By 4 June the Ark was off Narvik in northern Norway to provide air cover for the evacuation of British forces. On the 8th, evacuations complete, she withdrew south along with sister carrier Glorious. Disaster then struck as Glorious and her escorts were caught and sunk by the battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
However, Scharnhorst had been damaged in the engagement and was discovered by the RAF on 10 June sheltering in Trondheim fjord. By the 12th the Admiralty in its wisdom decided it was the task of 800 and 803 Skua squadrons to avenge the sinking by a dive-bombing attack.
Just before midnight on 12 June nine Skuas of 803 and six of 800 ranged up on the flight deck. The sun still hovered above the horizon and there was no cloud cover: the crews were full of trepidation. A few minutes later, the heavily laden aircraft lumbered into the air, 803 in the lead, for the two-hour flight.
The raid went wrong almost from the off when the Blenheim escort fighters failed to show up.
They continued anyway.As they got to the end of long Trondheim fjord where Scharnhorst anchored, 800 in the rear was jumped by Me 110 fighters and all three planes in its last flight were shot down - eight in all were downed. Seeing this, Lloyd grabbed his machine, his parachute stowed so he could better manoeuvre. Almost immediately they were set upon by two Me 109s. Despite Lloyd and Bartlett's determined evasive efforts, soon the starboard wing was hit followed by a cannon shell through the main fuel tank between the cockpits - miraculously, it didn't explode. Worse, Lt Bartlett had been struck in his stomach by shrapnel and started to faint from loss of blood.
At this point he told Lloyd to bale out, unaware that his parachute was unreachable.
Somehow Lt Bartlett managed a diving attack, released the bomb and at the last minute pulled out of his dive. With Bartlett wounded, there followed a terrifying, barely-controlled flight over the roof tops of Trondheim under machine gun fire and then south down a valley. Lloyd felt sure his time was up, but viewed his fate with resigned detachment: 'At one point we were over a soft, green carpet of trees. I felt as though I could jump out and walk on it.'
Incredibly, Bartlett flopped the Skua down on a hilly field.
The impact left Lloyd trapped in the back several feet up. Hardly believing himself alive, he found the emergency axe, hacked a hole in the fuselage and dropped to the ground. He rushed to lift the semi-conscious Lt Bartlett out of the cockpit, almost certainly saving his life. Keeping his wits, he then set fire to the plane so that its top secret direction-finding wireless didn't fall into German hands.
A nearby farmer provided a mattress for the bleeding Lt Bartlett, but shortly afterwards a local Quisling turned up with a very large pistol in his holster and put paid to Lloyd's thoughts of escape. Before long two German officers arrived in a staff car and Lloyd and Lt Bartlett were bundled into it. The badly wounded Lt Bartlett was dropped off at a hospital - they were not to see each other again for 45 years - while Lloyd was transported on to a PoW camp near Trondheim.
When Lloyd revisited the crash site in the summer there was a moving moment as he was met by Ola Vagnild who, as a 15-year-old boy, had watched the plane come down from his farmhouse bedroom window.
'I never came across real brutality. The Germans deprived us of most things and the food, what there was of it, was atrocious. But the ordinary guards didn't have much either.'
This pretty much sums up Lloyd's attitude to being a PoW: monotony, petty regulation, cold and hunger rather than outright oppression. Nonetheless, a few events stand out from his five years banged up.
After capture he was quickly transferred to jail in Oslo and interrogated in perfect English by the senior officer. He was particularly interested in radio matters but calmly Lloyd gave nothing away. The officer picked his gun off the table, cocked it and said to him, 'Tell me what I want to know or I will shoot you.' Lloyd's instant response: 'Well, you're just going to have to shoot me.'
To his great surprise the officer put down the gun, pulled out a packet of Capstan Full Strength and offered one to him, saying: 'Now get out, you're a good soldier.'
Lloyd fetched up in Stalag Luft I, a camp for flyers on the Baltic.
It was very cold there in the winter and to keep the men amused and warm, he and a couple of others flooded an area and fashioned skates out of old leather boots and sharpened metal brackets from the dining tables.
Later, a long, very uncomfortable train journey in cattle trucks took him and others south-east to Stalag Luft III, made famous by the tragic Great Escape. There Lloyd and a few mates devised a strange form of amusement. A small stream ran through a corner of their compound and in the summer the dragonflies hovered. Some were caught and onto a back leg, with a thin cotton thread and on even thinner Polish cigarette paper, were tied rude messages such as 'Deutschland kaput'. The dragonflies were then released in the direction of an anti-aircraft gun school just over the fence. That is, until word came back from the A/A Kommandant that 'theze anti-German messages must ceaze - or elze!'.Towards the end of the war Lloyd was moved around quite a bit. One move took him all the way to Stalag Luft VI, in east Prussia.
This was the time of the assassination attempt on Hitler and orders went out that all Allied prisoners were to give the Nazi salute to German officers in camp. Lloyd naturally refused and was given 30 days in solitary confinement. On the way out he was again ordered to Heil Hitler and refused again: back in for 60 days.
By the beginning of 1945, with the Russians advancing from the east, prisoners were decamped, often in terrible conditions - many died - to be taken on foot and by cattle truck to other camps further west. Lloyd ended up near Bremen in north-west Germany. But by March the Brits and Americans were closing in from the west. Soon the PoWs were on the march again but going back east. Lloyd didn't fancy 'going the wrong way' and hatched his own one-man escape plan.
Not long after they'd left the camp, he hung back a little and when no German guards were looking, jumped into a ditch. Once the columns had passed, he got up and started to walk back the way they'd come.
At first he travelled only by night in the direction of the Allied searchlights. He slept rough, living off a meagre diet of carrots, swedes and anything other edible he could find, drinking dirty ditch water. Later he travelled during the day and in his soiled clothes blended into the thousands of other refugees also fleeing. After three weeks he stumbled across a PoW camp, but now guarded by a gun-wielding British PoW - the German guards having fled. Exhausted, bedraggled and emaciated, Lloyd was taken in. He was ill with dysentery and doesn't remember much except finding somewhere warm to sleep things off for a couple of days. After that the British Army proper turned up and rescued the inmates.
He soon found himself on a convoy of lorries bound for an airfield in the neighbouring Netherlands. Several Douglas Dakotas took them back to an RAF base near London. It was about a month before VE Day.
Next morning, still wearing the same dirty clothes, he travelled to Waterloo Station to catch a train to his old base at Lee-on-Solent. He gave the naval pass given him in the Netherlands to the duty officer only to be informed that he'd been discharged from the Navy, assumed dead after the crash in Norway. So, next day Lloyd had to formally rejoin and then he was given a new uniform and #100 and told to go home for a well earned break. But home was in still-occupied Guernsey and nobody had thought of that.
He was sent back to London and a Sally Army hostel near Leicester Square, where he recovered his strength.
Then Lloyd headed back to Lee for some refresher flying and was posted to flying control duties in Belfast.
A few days before Xmas 1945 and Lloyd was finally able to begin his journey to Guernsey. And what a homecoming: on the back of his motorbike, in a specially purchased suitcase, Lloyd brought with him a plump Ulster turkey, adding one to the ration of only 20 for the whole island that Christmas. His mum cooked the bird as only she could and all the family gathered round, delighted to see Lloyd again and share the unexpected feast.
* Simon Partridge is the son of the late Major Dick Partridge DSO RM, CO of 800 Sqn FAA during the Norwegian campaign, also taken prisoner on the same raid. He gratefully acknowledges the help of Lloyd, his great-niece, Lianna Bichard, and øyvind Lamo in the compilation of this feature.
