On the night of 28/29 June 1944, three weeks after the D-Day invasion, Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force (RAF) sent a force to attack railway yards at Metz, France. Many of the aircraft were Halifax bombers from 6 (Canadian) Group of Bomber Command. Seven were lost on the raid, including two from 426 (Thunderbird) Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), based at Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, England. One loss was Halifax LW198, in which one crew member died. The pilot, Flying Officer Gerard, and the rest of the crew parachuted safely, evaded capture, and eventually reached the safety of Allied lines. The other loss was Halifax NP683.
The crew of NP683 on this night consisted of five RCAF men and two men from the RAF. The pilot was Flight Lieutenant Percival Logan from Alberta; the navigator was Pilot Officer Hugh Birnie from Toronto, Ontario; and the bomb aimer was Flying Officer James Willis from Calabogie, Ontario. Both gunners were Canadian: Pilot Officer Donald Jamieson from Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the mid upper turret and Pilot Officer R.S. Kennedy from Prince Edward Island in the rear turret. The RAF men were Pilot Officer G. D'Arcy the wireless operator and Sergeant J. Docherty the flight engineer.
After bombing the Metz railway yards, Logan took a return route to England which took the aircraft near Rouen in Normandy. Near there, in the early hours of 29 June 1944, a German night fighter attacked the Halifax bomber. The first burst of enemy gunfire hit the starboard inner engine and set it on fire. The fire quickly spread along the wing and onto the fuselage. Pilot Logan saw it was too late to save the aircraft and ordered the crew to bale out.
The navigator (Birnie) opened the forward escape hatch and he, the wireless operator and the flight engineer went out through it. Logan set the automatic pilot and moved towards the forward hatch, only to find the bomb aimer (Willis), who had difficulty in putting on his parachute, had not yet left. Before they could both leave, the aircraft began to spin as the automatic pilot was not able to control it. Logan returned to his seat and managed to regain control.
As soon as the bomb aimer had left, the pilot again moved towards the forward hatch, but then there was an explosion on the starboard wing and Logan was thrown forward into the nose, with his feet protruding through the escape hatch. The aircraft was now spinning violently and the pilot was unable to move. Fortunately a further explosion occurred and threw the pilot out of the aircraft, which was breaking up. Although somewhat dazed, Logan activated his parachute and landed safely at approximately 02.50 hours, 29 June 1944, at Bourg-Achard, about fifteen miles south west of Rouen.
On receipt of the order to abandon the aircraft, Jamieson had left the mid upper gun turret and fought his way through the flames to the rear door from which he left successfully. The rear gunner Kennedy seems to have jumped out direct from his turret.
All the seven crew reached the ground safely, except for some minor injuries. Of the seven men Logan, D'Arcy and Kennedy would successfully evade capture by the Germans and return to Allied lines; Docherty and Willis would eventually be captured and sent to prisoner of war (POW) camps in Germany, being liberated at the end of the war; while Jamieson and Birnie would be captured by the Germans and executed.
The RCAF naturally tried to find out what happened to Jamieson and Birnie. On the basis of several reports, they decided in 1946 that the two men had been captured, taken to a prison at Pont-L'Eveque, and later removed to an unknown place and executed, their bodies not being found. According to a French civilian witness, Jamieson and Birnie were last seen alive at Pont-L'Eveque on the evening of 21 August 1944, when they were taken away by the Germans. This report led the RCAF to decide on 22 August 1944 as the presumed date of death of the two men. This information was passed to their parents in September 1946 and it is also the date of death given on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website.
However, as war crimes investigators looked into the case, they came across French civilian witnesses who claimed Jamieson and Birnie were taken away from Pont-L'Eveque at an earlier date, variously given as 5,6 or 10 August 1944. The investigators now took the view that the victims might have been killed in early August. Yet they included in their report details of the testimony from Sergeant Docherty, given after his liberation from POW camp, which contradicted that view.
According to Docherty, on 8 August 1944 he, Willis, Jamieson and Birnie were still free and being hidden by French resistance people who had picked them up soon after they landed by parachute. The evaders were later split up. Willis, Jamieson and Birnie went away with one resistance group, while Docherty went with another group. This was the last time Docherty saw Jamieson and Birnie. Docherty was captured by the Germans at Lisieux on 14 August and initially sent to a POW transit camp at Amiens. There he met Willis, who had been captured on 16 August. Unfortunately Willis seemed to have suffered a mental breakdown and was unable to give any information regarding the fate of Jamieson and Birnie. Docherty and Willis were sent to separate POW camps in Germany.
Given such confused accounts, all that can be said with certainty is that the last place Jamieson and Birnie were seen alive was at Pont-L'Eveque and that at some point in August before 22 August (when British troops reached that town) they were taken away and executed at an unknown place. Only in the autumn of 1948 did the RCAF give up looking for their bodies in Normandy.
The 'prison' at Pont-L'Eveque was in fact the local boys school and it was run by the German security police - the Sipo (or SD) rather than the Gestapo - but still part of Himmler's SS empire. The prison was under the authority of the Sipo chief at Caen, Harald Heyns. After the war he was apprehended and was to be put on trial before a British military court in Hamburg in August 1948 on a charge of murdering the two Canadian airmen. However, Heyns escaped from custody at the start of the trial and fled to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (later East Germany). In September the court found Heyns guilty and sentenced him to death in absentia.
The French were also pursuing Heyns as they blamed him for a massacre of French prisoners in Caen jail on D-Day (6 June 1944). In 1952 a French court also sentenced Heyns to death in absentia for that crime. Meanwhile Heyns was living under a false name in East Germany. His true identity was discovered in 1964, but the East German authorities refused to take action against him, claiming neither the British nor the French had provided adequate evidence of his crimes. Even after the reunification of Germany in 1990, the federal German authorities made no effort to prosecute Heyns. He died in Berlin in 2004 at the age of 90.
At the time of their murder in 1944, Donald Jamieson and Hugh Birnie were aged 20 and 22 respectively. They are commemorated at the Runnymede memorial to missing aircrew in England and on the memorial wall at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada at Nanton, Alberta, Canada.
(The author is a distant relative of Donald Jamieson)
Saturday, May 25, 2019
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