AIRMAN’S EXPERIENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 61, 15 March 1943, Page 3

AIRMAN’S EXPERIENCE

SEVEN MONTHS IN FRENCH CONCENTRATION CAMP CRASH LANDING IN WEST AFRICA (Special Correspondent—N.Z.P.A.) London, Mar. 10. Fourteen hundred miles out from Gibraltar on a flight to Bathurst (West Africa) last July, Flight-Ser-geant E. G. Rhodes, of Fukeatua, suddenly iieard the steady purr of his Hudson’s engines begin a jar. That change of note was to mean seven months in an internment camp on the banks of the River Niger for him, his navigator, who camp from Sydney, and two English wireless operator-air gunners. Rhodes checked up and found that the starboard oil pump had gone out of action without warning. He had to cut out the engine and then do some quick thinking, for the heavilyladen Hudson began to descend rapidly towards the sea. He immediately turned in towards the African coast and jettisoned 300 gallons of petrol to help lighten the aircraft and keep it flying. With 130 gallons left, he decided to attempt to reach Bathurst and bypass Dakar, in preference to heading for St. Louis or making a forced landing in the desert.

Soon the Hudson was flying lowover the desert and it was touch and go whether it could keep up in the air on one engine, but Rhodes, although he had already been flyng for 12 hours, hung on patently. Then the desert began to turn to malaria swampland.

Rhodes was looking down on it rather distastefully when the roar of the heavily overloaded port engine suddenly stopped. It had cut out. Rhodes had to decide where he was going to force land. He sighted a sandbank among mangroves. With the undercarriage retracted he made a perfect landing so that no member of his crew was even bruised.

For a few moments the crew heard nothing but the hot engine sizzling in the water. They checked up and found all were unhurt. Then the Australian navigator called out, “There is a horde of blacks coming.’’ Rhodes looked out and saw natives dashing un, waving hatchets. They clustered about the aircraft and he got out and stood on top of the fuselage and tried talking to them in French and English, without result.

Then followed a nightmarish period. The natives seemed friendly, despite their weapons, and they jabbered excitedly while the crew collected the navigator's compass, water and iron rations. Rhodes detonated secret instruments and set fire to the Hudson. Soon swarms of canoes collected and by signs the members of the crew got m and went to a village. It was only two days since they had been living in a peaceful English countryside, and now after n long flight, and weary and bemused by the heat, they were rather dazed and certainly did not appreciate their reception at the village, where natives shouted, danced, and ran around them, intending to be helpful but only getting in the way and adding to the confusion. Rhodes tried to buy a canoe in order to make off and escape the French, whom, he guessed, would probably arrive shortly, but the natives had no intention of letting them go, as a messenger had already returned from a French camp with a promise of 1000 francs for each member of the crew if they were held until the French arrived.

At midnight, when the excitement had died down, and the natives slept, Rhodes crept out of a hut, and in bright moonlight selected a canoe lor his escape. He was just returning to the hut for his companions when he saw French soldiers . That was the end of hopes of an escape. The French treated them politely but firmly, and took them by launch io a small township, where the residents sent them two bottles of gin. They were taken to Kaolack on the River Sal, in Senegal, where they remained for a fortnight. The French tried devious ways to extract information from them, once starting a conversation over a bottle of champagne. There followed a 42-hour train journey in the guard's van with four black guards, to Koulikoro, on the River Niger. Here they were taken to an internment camp, where for six months they lived uncomfortably. Sometimes tney found snakes in their rooms and killed them. The food was poor, but the French were poorly provided for themselves. Tney had no letters from home and no radio. Rhodes heard that two other New Zealanders were interned at Bamako, also on the Niger, and he wrote to them. They were Flying Officers Rex Mcllraith, of Lower Hutt, and Cecil Todd, of Palmerston North. They had been attacked by French lighters while flying a Wellington bomber miles out to sea past Dakar—thereby complying with international regulalations. The French attack resulted in their forced landing on the shore. Rhodes eventually met them in Gambia after the British and American landing in North Africa. They ail went to England in the same ship and they are now on leave in London with definite opinions about snakes, fever and tropics.