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Emotional return for Leeds war hero
An air Force hero who was blasted from the nose of his burning Lancaster bomber over Germany is to return to the place it crashed.
He will also visit the graves of two comrades and the prison camp where he was held captive outside Berlin by both German and Russian soldiers before escaping.
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The visit is being funded by the National Lottery in the final phase of its Heroes Return programme, which helps Second World War veterans visit sites which hold special memories for them.
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Bob Kendall's war-time experience reads like an adventure story from an action magazine, but it is all too real.
The retired manager from Beeston, Leeds, hopes to achieve closure on a period of his life which is still with him today.
Mr Kendall is 88. He was 19 when he joined the Royal Air Force in 1941 when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
He trained for bomber crew as a wireless operator and air gunner and was posted to 15 Squadron, based at Mildenhall.
In 1944, with the war moving against Germany, he flew his first mission in a Lancaster bomber in support of the D-Day landings at Normandy.
As Allied troops advanced across France, massive bomber attacks were mounted on Germany. Bomber crew losses were horrendous, as were deaths in German cities which were being razed to break resistance.
It was on his 19th mission that Mr Kendall's Lancaster was attacked by a German night-fighter.
"The target was Frankfurt," he said. "We were shot down just over Mannheim. We were badly hit, on fire. The pilot ordered us to bail out.
To me he was one hell of a hero, because he struggled to keep it flying so we could get out.
"I was the last one to get out. The whole aircraft was on fire. The crew were bailing out in front of me – the bomb aimer, navigator and engineer. We got out through the nose of the aircraft. As I got out the aircraft blew to pieces and blew me clear.
"The pilot was killed. The mid-upper gunner was killed too."
He landed safely and made his way to a railyard where he was captured by railway workers."
Captured British bomber crews faced fierce hostility in Germany and many did not survive.
"That same night we lost 17 aircraft, each with seven crew," said Mr Kendall. "There was one crew that came down and they were mutilated, murdered. Out of the 17 crews who came down that night, only five men survived. I don't know what happened to the rest of them, but some of them were murdered."
After capture he was interrogated, threatened with being shot, and placed in solitary confinement. He was brought out and put in a shed.
"I was the only one in there. The following day in came nearly 100 British paratroopers. I said 'what's this?' They said they'd just been captured at Arnhem."
Arnhem was the disastrous attempt to shorten the war by dropping tens of thousands of troops behind German lines to capture bridges leading the way to Germany. It was subject of the film A Bridge Too Far.
Mr Kendall was then sent to a prison camp in Poland, Stalag Luft 7. Meanwhile, the Russian army was advancing from the East.
"We were there until the beginning of January, 1945," said Mr Kendall. "We were assembled at 2am in thick snow, in a blizzard and force marched to Germany and it took nearly a month.
"There were 1,200 or 1,300 in the camp, but 800 arrived at a camp in Germany. We were put on a train and taken to another camp just outside Berlin. We were hostages more or less. The conditions were terrible. We were there until April when the Russian army arrived after a battle around the camp lasting three days.
"We were eventually liberated by the Russian army, but there was a political game going on between the Americans, the British and the Russians, and we were prisoners in the same camp but with Russian
guards."
With three other men he finally escaped and reached the American front line on the Elbe.
"The Americans were busy and couldn't help us," said Mr Kendall. "Me and a lad from London decided to try and make it to the British lines."
Walking down an autobahn they were picked by an RAF officer driving a military car. The next day they were flown home to England.
Mr Kendall returned to civilian life. He had married in the war, and he and his wife raised three sons. He worked at several jobs, but mainly as a manager at the Bass Charrington brewery in Cheshire, until he was made redundant in 1981. In 1984, after 43 years of marriage, his wife
died suddenly.
One of his sons had made a life in Australia so in 1985 he emigrated. While in Australia he met a woman from Leeds. They fell in love and married in 1986.
"My wife Pauline was homesick. She came home regularly every couple of years to spend a month in Leeds," he said.
"So eventually we gave it up as a bad job. We returned to Leeds in 1999."
His wife had three sons of her own. One of them heard about the Heroes' Return scheme being run by the Big Lottery Fund. The aim is to reflect the nation's debt to the British veterans of the Second World War.
He arranged for Mr Kendall to visit the sites which mean so much to him.
On Friday Mr Kendall, his wife, and her son and his wife, will be flown to Berlin.
"Then we're travelling to where the prison camp was with the Russians, Luckenwalder.
"The camp is still there I believe, and a museum. Then we're going down to Heidelberg, which is where the aircraft crashed. I want to go see where it crashed, and see if any people there remember it.
"Then we're travelling to the military cemetery at Badtolz – Dernbach military war cemetery, where all the RAF crews that crashed in southern Germany are buried.
"It's where our pilot and mid-upper gunner are buried."
Remarkably all the other four crewmen who parachuted from the blazing Lancaster also survived the war, and made it home to Britain.
"It's something I want to do. It will close a chapter, I hope," said Mr Kendall.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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