FRENCH AIRMEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 August 1942, Page 6

FRENCH AIRMEN

OFTEN MENTIONED IN NEWS. MEN WHO ELUDED THE NAZIS.

Free French pilots have been mentioned in successive communiques. It was a French flyer who brought down one of the attackers over York, and other French flyers have brought down Germans in other fighting, including operations over northern France. The mention of Free French pilots will become more and more frequent. It is to the initiative of a French air commander-instructor that we owe the presence in England of no fewer than 150 of these pilots. They were in training at a flying school in the west of France when the Germans broke through in 1940. The commander of the flying school rang up nearest headquarters for instructions. It was a German who answered at the other end of the line. He put down the receiver, and then began rapidly giving orders. First he had every training plane destroyed, then set fire to hangars and oil stores. Lastly, he made the aerodrome unuseable. When this was completed, he marched his men nearly thirty miles t'o the coast, commandeered a boat, and brought his charges safely to our shore. The French pilots finished their training in the British Isles. Some of the experienced flyers already, have creditable scores to show. One alone has damaged or set on fire more than 20 enemy ships. Another has had the great satisfaction of- sending a number of German planes crashing to earth close to the village where he was born in France. One of the ’ French pilots reached England after escaping from a German prison camp. He managed to get civilian clothes, and with money received from his family he bought a car, which happened to resemble cars used by the German staff officers. When he was approaching the demarkation line separating the occupied from the so-called unoccupied zone and was wondering how he would get across, he came yip behind a line of German army lorries and cars and passed over with them unchallenged. He eventually abandoned the car and tried to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, but was turned back. After that he made his way to Marseilles, where he got on a boat that took him to Canada. It was from there he came to London to join General de Gaulle’s Free French.