Interview conducted by Malcolm Mackay (MM)
EH: I joined the Air Force in 1932. I started flying here in Scotland with the Auxiliary Air Force and then went into the regular service through Cranwell. I had done quite a bit of flying in the years between 1932 and the outbreak of war and was a Squadron Leader by the time the war started.
I had read Chemistry at university but during that time got interested in flying. I started flying with the Auxiliary Air Force.
MM: Your father was a minister of religion, indeed Minister of Paisley Abbey for a good deal of his life. Were you the kind of son who shared those outlooks, or did science take you off into a more hard-bitten life?
EH: I grew up in a very Christian home. I had every opportunity of learning what it was all about from my father and mother and had a normal church home upbringing until I went to university. When I went to university I got in with a crowd of people who didn’t believe in anything. They were having a lot of fun and, to me at that point, simply seemed to say ‘no’ to all the things I wanted to do. So, I gave up religion and became an agnostic, virtually an atheist. I became an officer in the Air Force and moved around with a fast-moving crowd of very delightful friends who didn’t have any time for those sorts of things. We were having fun and that was the object of life, to have a good time.
When war broke out we were ready for it, being in the regular service. We were prepared ahead for the event and nothing very much happened at the beginning of the war. There was a whole period with the phony war. I was flying all kinds of aeroplanes. I flew Spitfires in England. Then I was posted to the Middle East and eventually got a Hurricane squadron there. The Spitfires were just coming into service. During the time of the Battle of Britain squadrons were re-equipping with Spitfires and it was the Hurricane in fact that fought most of the Battle of Britain.
I commanded 33 squadron of Hurricanes in Crete. We lost all our aircraft before the invasion of Crete and my men were put under the New Zealand infantry who were guarding the airfield. We joined up with them to help protect the airfield. I was fighting on the ground against the German parachutists when I was wounded.
MM: As I remember the events at that time, it was an overwhelming force that came in on Crete with gliders used.
EH: I don’t think it was the first time the Germans tried it but it was the last time the allies tried a parachute operation because they lost so many in Crete. They never tried it again. I think it was the first time any territory had been taken by air invasion. They employed an enormous number of aircraft and the sky was full of parachutists. The Battle of Crete was a unique occasion.
I was hit by a parachutist whom I didn’t see behind a bush. He hit me with a Tommy gun in the left shoulder and the right forearm. I lost all my blood virtually and was left for dead on the battlefield. I was eventually picked up by German paratroopers on the third day and carried into a village, then flown over to a prisoner of war hospital in Athens. My arms were broken and the arteries had gone so that I had lost all my blood.
It is a mystery really how I remained alive. A lot of doctors have been surprised by it. One thing that happened was that a man tried to put a tourniquet on my arm when I was first hit. Because we were under fire at the time and the stick broke when he was tightening up the tourniquet, the tourniquet was not tight enough to entirely stop the flow of blood but was tight enough to slow it. It was then able to clot and I was therefore able to retain a minimum of blood in my body that kept me alive. The stick broke at just the right amount. Any more and my arm would have lost circulation and come off, any less and I would have bled out.
I remember being carried onto the aircraft because it was very painful and I remember being carried off the aircraft again. The landing in Greece I also remember because the bumping of the aircraft was painful. I wasn’t really concerned with anything at that time except my own condition and my pain, discomfort and thirst. Particularly thirst because I had had to do without water for 3 days in the sun in Crete. That was a very unpleasant experience indeed.
At the prisoner of war hospital, the doctors were our own doctors - New Zealanders, Australian, British who had been taken prisoner earlier and were looking after all the wounded prisoners. The Australian doctors were first-class, from the 5th Australian General Hospital. They had volunteered to give up their liberty in order to look after the wounded. I have seen three of them since and I kept in touch with them for many years. I am afraid most of them are dead now.
The German doctors were deciding to amputate both my arms because of the severe infection I had on both sides. I had osteomylitis in my left shoulder and in my right arm and I was poisoned. Therefore, the German doctors would normally have amputated both arms which would have been a terrible thing. No penicillin. This Australian doctor’s principle was to let you go as far as you could without amputating and that is why I can play golf now.
I was in this bad condition for the best part of a year. To begin with I was very nearly dead for about 6 months. They didn’t know whether I was going to live or die. I was very weak and went down to about 90lbs in weight. I was a skeleton really and I couldn’t use my arms at all for anything. I had to be fed and completely taken care of by nursing. I was stretched out in splints on a bed for 6 months. I never really had any hope. At that point, I really wanted to be dead because conditions were so unpleasant that the only thing I really would have liked would have been to have died. Although I was very nearly dead, it never actually happened. It was a very unpleasant experience of course, and the only thing one thought of was ‘how much longer does it have to go on?’
By this time, I had been moved from Athens to a prisoner of war hospital in Salonika. One night, for no apparent reason, at ten o’clock in the evening on one of those nights when I couldn’t sleep and my mind was roving around as usual thinking about myself and my condition, I suddenly really became aware of how intensely self-centred and selfish my whole life had been: that I had really had no motivation in life before except to promote myself. I don’t know what it was that made me suddenly think like that. When I did see myself the way I was, I also remembered my parents and the kind of life they had lived. I remembered my brother who had become very radically different in his way of life. I remembered the things that they had told me. I thought of my cousin who had also become very different at a certain point in his life. The things they had told me then came to mind. They said that, if you were prepared to let God run your life, he made you different and that you actually did acquire a new motivation and that you would change. That had happened to my cousin and my brother. They had become very different. My brother also went into the Air Force during the war and flew bombers when I was in fighters. He was a navigator in Bomber Command but before the war he had been in horticulture. He was a nursery gardener.
It suddenly occurred to me when I saw myself the way I was that, if there happened to be a God, which I hadn’t believed up to then, and God was the sort of person that he was represented to be, there must be some way of being in touch with him. One ought to be able to communicate. I realised that I was prepared in fact to turn myself over to him - and I did, then and there. I said, ‘If you are around I am your man for the rest of my life’. At that point I had an experience which changed my life.
I had this extraordinary experience which would be hard to describe but was very real to me – an experience of being in touch - of actually being in communication with God - of him speaking to me and my being able to speak to him. That was the beginning of it. I went into a state of ecstasy which I stayed in for probably a couple of hours. I felt myself warmed and bathed in light, warmth, security and generally a feeling of ecstasy came over me. As I say, I was in it for about a couple of hours.
At the end of it I thought it might have been some sort of hallucination or something and I asked God to give me a sign that it was all real. My hands were bent up at the time. I couldn’t use either arm, my right hand was all bent up. I said, ‘Straighten out my hand for me’. I took my fingers and I tried to bend them straight. It was painful and it didn’t work! I thought ‘aha’. And then God said to me quite clearly, ‘You are not going to get signs like that. You are not going to believe because I can do things like that. You have just got to take what I give you.’
I realised this was true, it made sense. I was at peace about it and I didn’t bother. The next morning when I woke I was a different person. For one thing I felt terrific, the beautiful day. Then the people that were around - people on the street looked different. They were interesting. I wanted to be able to communicate with them. The nursing orderlies, who were Australians, came in to do the dressings on my wounds. They were usually people that I didn’t like because they hurt when they were doing the dressings and were rather a gloomy pair. This particular day when they came in I suddenly thought, ‘What on earth has happened to these two men, they are so pleasant!’ We had a joke or two and we talked away. I thought ‘These are really delightful people’.
Then the Germans came on their usual tour around the prison hospital on inspection. They seemed to be different. They smiled at me and I smiled at them. We didn’t communicate very much, but I realised that they were very nice people. It wasn’t until about half way through the day that I realised that it was I who was different. I was enjoying people. I was interested in people. I realised I was fond of people in a way that I never had been before. I had a lot of friends and got on well with people usually but this was something new. It was a new experience of interest in other people which is the basic change of heart that I had experienced. That is the centre of it. If you can be interested in and care about people that you wouldn’t otherwise care about, that is a central experience of the Christian religion. It happened to me and I became more and more aware of it.
There is no explaining the way God gets in touch with you, puts his hand on you and does things to you. It is his business but that was the first time I was prepared to respond and there was no other person involved. It all began to have meaning. Whereas before the Bible had just been a rather boring book that I had to study in my childhood, it suddenly became a book of intense interest to me. I had a New Testament which an Australian chaplain had given me in the hospital when he was moved on to Germany. He left a New Testament with me because I was the senior officer and I had to take the services when there were any in the camp. I think he may have had a hunch also that it would be a valuable book for me to have. I started reading it. I read it through I think three times from cover to cover. He was a very delightful fellow, Padre Forrest. He was a minister in Queensland. I was in touch with him after the war and he knows what happened to me.
I thought to myself ‘Why on earth did nobody ever tell me that this was in this book?’ and I would underline some passage that was particularly meaningful. I went right through the New Testament from cover to cover and then started again. Then I found to my surprise I had missed certain bits and I started underlining them. On the third time through I realised there was not much point in underlining because the whole thing was so new to me and so full of unexpected meanings. I realised that I was beginning to make sense of it.
I had just got to the point then where my left arm was able to move enough for me to feed myself. I could get my hand up to my mouth - with considerable difficulty but I could get it there. Otherwise, my right arm was completely helpless, bent at right angles. My hand was shut, and the left arm was also fairly bent and very weak. I could just get it up to my mouth and that was the extent of the use I had from my arms. They were pretty useless.
From the moment I had this experience I became extremely happy. My chief interest in life became reading the Bible and being with people. I was surrounded by people at close quarters and they were all delightful, interesting people that I wanted to get to know better. I had every opportunity to do so and life really became extremely interesting. I wouldn’t have changed it for anything. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I was happier in prison than I had ever been in my life before, although we were still starving and although I had still lost my liberty, I had lost my health and I had lost my career. All the sorts of things that you normally value had been taken away from me but in fact I had never been happier than I was there.
From that moment on I had put my life on the basis that I would do whatever God wanted me to do. I would ask him every day, and many times a day. I would keep saying ‘Now what do you want me to do?’ and he would give me very specific instructions. If I said, ‘What am I supposed to be doing now?’ I would immediately have a thought which made sense and which was clearly the right thing to be doing. My experience is that if you actually wish to know what it is that God wants to say to you and what he wants you to be and do, then the thought becomes clear in one way or another. Circumstances sometimes have something to do with it. Something will happen that will indicate the right thing to do. You know what is right, what seems morally right, and what God’s intention is for you to be doing at any one particular moment.
You basically develop a conviction of what’s right for you to be and do at any particular time. God has his ways of communicating that to you. It could be that you read it in the Bible or you read it in another book, or somebody speaks to you, or you get a thought in your mind which is clear and seems right. Or you can even have the mystical experience, very frequently, of feeling that you are in conversation with God and that he is telling you things. I have had a lot of that kind of thing too - of direction from God.
One of the American Presidents said, ‘I believe that if God wants me to do something he has his way of telling me.’ That is the secret that, when you want to know, then God has an infinite number of ways of telling you the answer.
The thought about escape came from that kind of source. I was taking exercise, because God told me to, and I was disciplining myself in taking exercise. While I was walking up and down in the grounds of the prison hospital, I thought about escaping. The whole general principle of whether it was right to do or not. I asked him, ‘Is it right for me to escape or to try to?’. I had a very clear answer that it was. It was my duty as an officer, but I also felt that there was some further purpose in it, that it wasn’t just because it was my duty to attempt to escape but that God also had some other reasons.
MM: Just looking back on it now, from 30 years afterwards, how do you sum up for yourself what you feel those reasons were?
EH: I think it was part of God’s way of developing my own inner convictions and my own personality, my own inner life. To give me the experience of trusting him, of obeying him, then of finding that it worked out. I think from my point of view that was the first and most obvious thing. Looking back on it now, I can see that there were all kinds of other outreaches from that, people I would meet, things I would do with my life, which were involved.
In fact, my hand is now straight - within a reasonable period, I think 2 or 3 years, my hands were quite normal.
The prison hospital had a high wall around three sides and a barbed wire fence on the fourth. It was guarded by towers on the corners with sentries and guns. There were patrols round it at night. They had sentries patrolling with dogs in the grounds. Of course, the building itself was shut, locked and we had bars on the windows and that sort of thing. So that getting out of the building was one thing. Getting out of the compound was another. It didn’t look at all possible for somebody who couldn’t use their arms to climb or to find any way out. I was one floor up in a little room with barred windows and one other bed in it. It was a very small room and the other bed had an Australian officer very badly wounded. There was a corridor leading to that room. That corridor led to the main staircase in the building which went down to the ground floor and other corridors there. There were usually orderlies at key places, and there was also a great deal of movement because the hospital was used by German troops as well as by prisoners. There was one section for prisoners of war and the other for German wounded. So, they had a great many troops moving about normally through the corridors.
As soon as I had this thought that it would be right to escape, I didn’t know whether it would be then in Greece or whether I would have to wait until I was a lot stronger and better, and whether it might be in Germany or something like that. But I seriously started looking for possibilities there and then. There was only one place in the whole surroundings of the building where there was any chance and that was where there was a grass bank that you could walk up. From it you could step onto an inner wall, which led to the outer wall, which you could walk along. Where it met the outer wall it was about 4 feet below the top of the other wall and I thought that 4 or 5 feet would be possible for somebody without the use of their arms, to get over. I wasn’t quite sure how it would work but I thought that was the only possible place where somebody who can’t climb might have a chance of getting over the stone wall. The main wall had some barbed wire on top of it and bits of it had broken glass cemented in the top. The whole thing was within 20 yards of the sentry on the corner. On the other side there was a drop of about 9 or 10 feet.
One day the Germans informed me that they were going to move us all on to Germany the following morning at 8 o’clock. They said, ‘Be ready to be moved’. I consulted with God about what that might mean, ‘What am I supposed to do about this? Is this the time you want me to try and escape?’ The answer quite clearly came to me, ‘Yes half an hour after dusk tonight’. So, during the day I made what preparations I could. I put together a raincoat with as many things as I could get in the pockets which would be useful. I had had a parcel of chocolate and things from home that I put in the pockets and my Australian friend in the room with me gave me his army boots. I got them on eventually, with a great deal of difficulty, and got myself dressed and ready.
During the afternoon I suddenly developed a fever which was not unexpected, because every 10 days I used to get a temperature of about 103 or even 105. It was caused by the infection in my arms and it would suddenly jump up and then take about 10 days to come down. This fever suddenly took me in the middle of the day and I went to bed. I felt maybe it was a sign from heaven that I was on the wrong track and shouldn’t be doing this at all so I prayed about it and said to God, ‘Why is this happening? Does it affect whether it is right or not to escape?’ The thought came quite clearly to me that it made no difference to the rightness or wrongness, it only made what was already an impossible thing a little more difficult. It added a further obstacle to what was already a prospect full of obstacles. It was still right.
So, fever or no fever, I decided I was going to try. Half an hour after dusk I got out of my bed, said goodbye to my friend and walked out of the room. The door had been left unlocked in our room because people felt that two badly wounded men had no need to be locked in. I got out into the corridor without difficulty, expecting to be stopped almost immediately by German troops in the corridor who knew I wasn’t allowed out of my room. There was nobody there. I walked along the corridor to the main stair and again, although it was only 7 in the evening when normally the main staircase would have been busy with people going up and down, there was nobody in sight. I went down the stairs to the ground floor and walked along about 50 yards of corridors, normally busy corridors, with nobody in sight. I still don’t know why. The most likely explanation I think is that there was an important broadcast on. Maybe Hitler was making a speech on the radio. Anyway, something had taken everybody and it happened to be at the right moment, half an hour after dusk.
I walked along to a ward where a lot of my men were in bed, badly wounded men whom I had got to know and become good friends with and I wanted to say goodbye to them. I went round each bed saying goodbye and they all tried to stop me going. They all said I was crazy, that it was quite impossible and I shouldn’t attempt it. They produced all the arguments they could to keep me from going. Normally they would have persuaded me if I hadn’t been so sure that it was vitally important to my relationship with God to obey him. If he told me to do something I was meant to do it and I felt I would lose my faith and the whole of this marvellous new experience that had happened to me if I didn’t play the game the proper way, which was to believe and obey.
One of the men in the ward had been wounded in the legs but could hobble all right. The others were worse off. This man volunteered to come with me because my hands were both so disabled that I couldn’t even turn a door handle. He came with me to open doors. I had this hunch to go to a little side door in the hospital building which opened out near the place which I had prospected earlier on the wall. I thought this would be the ideal place to go out from. Of course, the door was normally locked and would specially be locked at night. They all said that in the ward. I went right across the hospital, again not meeting anybody, and with this fellow in the Black Watch called David Blair with me, hobbling along. We got to the door and he said, ‘You’ll see, it’ll be locked’, and I said, ‘You try it’, and he turned the handle and the door opened.
Outside it was a full moon and very bright. I could see the wall and I could see the sentry in his box. I told my friend David Blair to go back to the ward. So, he said goodbye and went off. I waited until he was away and then I tiptoed out of this door. I had to cross a sort of ash-covered roadway about 10-15 feet wide which crunched when you trod on it. I knew that, so I was tiptoeing in my army boots across this road. Of course, every step made a terrific noise and I was sure the sentry, who was only about 30 yards away, would hear and see me in the bright moonlight. But he didn’t move and I got across the road. I walked up this bank in front of me and from it stepped on top of the inner wall and started walking along the top of this inner wall. I was, by this time, between 20 and 30 yards from the sentry. The full moon was the other side of me, so I was silhouetted by the moon in his line of vision. He was awake. He kept making little movements and so on, but he never looked at me. My boots were sounding very loudly on the stones as I walked along. I was sure he was going to hear and see me but he didn’t.
I got to the end of that bit of wall and I was up against the outer wall. I thought my difficulties were probably largely over and that I would find it quite easy to get over but when in fact I tried to sling one leg over the wall it was just too high. I couldn’t get my leg up there and there was no way I could put my weight on my hands. I couldn’t jump. I was too weak to make any sort of jump so I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do so I stood there in the moonlight, with the sentry a short distance away. Down below there was a little hut with an open window and inside, sitting around a table, there were 4 German soldiers playing cards. If any one of them had looked up he would have seen me against the moon. I could look right through the window at them, about 5-10 yards away. So, there I was. I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed to God and said, ‘Here I am. I have done everything you told me to do and it doesn’t seem to work. I am stuck here. What do you want me to do now? If you like I will shout hello to the sentry; if you like I will make some sort of noise for these men in their hut down there; if you like I’ll walk back in the way I came. I’ll do anything you say but I just don’t know what to do.’ I was ready in fact to do anything that came to mind.
In those circumstances God spoke again very clearly to me. He said, ‘You have come to the right place at the right time. There is a way over the wall.’ I looked at the wall again and suddenly I realised that if I could put a pad down on the spikes on the top of the wall, then I could lean on it with my stomach without getting pierced. If I threw my legs in the air I could probably sort of wriggle round a bit and drop over the far side. That was the idea anyway.
So, laboriously I managed to get some material out of my pocket - my scarf and a balaclava helmet and other things and made a sort of pad which I put over the shards of glass on the top of the wall. I then bent over. Meanwhile the sentry was still there and not paying any attention to me. I couldn’t see the ground because it was in shadow, but I had previously estimated that it was about 10 feet down. I put my weight on the pad and I kicked my legs in the air and fell off. I fell off head first on the outside. Head first, I just fell off the wall. I don’t know even now what sort of manoeuvre I did because I wasn’t consciously doing any acrobatics but I landed very comfortably on my feet at the bottom of the wall, facing the wall. I don’t know how that happened. I had landed without hurting myself. As I stood there with my hands in front of me because my arms were bent, the pad I had put on top of the wall fell onto my hands. I didn’t even have to stoop to pick it up off the ground.
It was difficult. If it had fallen on the ground I couldn’t turn my hand around at all, I would have had to pick it up with the back of my rather weak fingers. Anything I picked up off the ground had to be picked up with the back of my fingers. It was an absolutely unique gift. I was really very convinced that God was at work and that I was experiencing unbelievable miracles. I felt terrific also being free for the first time for a year to go where I wanted to.
Then, of course, the first snag arrived, because I wanted to go up the hill immediately and get out of the town. So, I said to God, ‘I expect I had better go up that path up the hill’, but I realised as soon as I thought it that this was not the way to do it. What I really ought to do was to say, ‘I am ready to do anything now. You tell me’. So, I did, and to my surprise he said, ‘Tell the others that you are safe.’ The people that I had left behind.
Where they were the wall was very close to the window. The wall was about 20 feet high there and the other side of that wall was a quite main street. I realised that if I got to the street and walked down it, I could stand just outside the window on the other side of the wall. If I made a noise there they would hear me. So, I got the idea I would do this, and walked up to the street, full of Greeks and Germans, soldiers and civilians strolling up and down in the moonlight. I strolled with them, although I didn’t look like a Greek or a German. I had my raincoat on - a British forces raincoat - and I must have looked a strange figure. I am 6’4”, and the Greeks are not normally that big so I was unusual. But nobody paid much attention. I got down to the place on the street which is just the other side of the wall from the window and there I had an inspiration. I whistled as loud as I could whistle the good Scots tune ‘Loch Lomond’. ‘I’ll be in Scotland before you’. Sure enough, David Blair, my Black Watch friend, was back in the ward. They heard it and realised I was safe. They had been waiting for shots and to see me carried back and all that sort of thing. It immediately took the pressure off them I heard later from the people who were left behind there.
Of course, the whistling was attracting attention and German soldiers were looking at me. People were wondering what I was doing, so I stopped it. Then again I had this inclination to go up this path, up the hillside, which was unfrequented and would have led me up the hill behind Salonika, where it was out of the town. Again, I asked God first and he said nothing about the path. As I was saying ‘Where should I go?’ I saw the star in the sky, the bright evening star. Much bigger and brighter than anything else in the sky and it was in the east. So, of course, I connected it with the star in the east which had led the wise men to the place they wanted to go. I felt that God was showing me this star and intending me to follow it, so I did. The only snag was it led past the main gate of the prison hospital, which was heavily guarded with sentries and so on. It also led up another fairly frequented street where there were German troops and it was a risk. I was by this time feeling very convinced about the way in which God was arranging things, so I set off and followed the star up the street. Eventually the street ran out after I had walked along about a mile I suppose. It finished up on the hillside where I wanted to be anyway.
Now, I had been going about 2 hours. I was walking very slowly because I was weak. When I got up on the hillside above the town I was sitting resting and suddenly I saw the searchlights come on down at the prison camp and I heard dogs barking. I thought to myself, ‘They have found that I have escaped and they have turned the dogs out to try and pick up my scent.’ The fact that I had walked up a busy and frequented street made it absolutely impossible for the dogs to pick up my scent, whereas if I had taken what I thought was the best way, that little path up the hill, it would have been easy for them to track me. It certainly comforted me a great deal to feel that there was no danger of being tracked. Then, as I was sitting there, I realised also that my fever had disappeared. I had no headache, no fever. It would normally have taken 10 days and it had just disappeared.
Two days later, I stopped in a village home. There I met a wife had lost her son on the Albanian front and was very sympathetic with my wounds and so on. She, insisted on undoing the bandages. There was absolutely no discharge and my wounds had healed for the first time in a year. It was usually a frightful mess under the bandages, with pus coming out every day. They would have been an awful mess normally and there was none. In fact, the discharge of pus from my wounds had stopped the evening that I escaped. There was nothing on the bandages even, so it had actually dried up when I escaped. So, I know what it means to experience that sort of inexplicable healing. It was extraordinary.
Of course, with having no fever, I felt very much better. Although I was weak I kept on going up the hill and trusted God with every step. I remember coming to a stream. I could hear the water and by this time there were clouds over the moon. I couldn’t see what the stream was like and I stepped out into it, not knowing how deep or wide it was or anything. I just felt God will look after me. My feet came down on stone and I didn’t even get my feet wet. It may have been very shallow or there may have been stepping stones but the point was I didn’t know. There was water there, fast flowing water, and I walked right across it without getting my feet wet in the dark and not knowing how it had happened. I was on stones, of course but I couldn’t see them and it wasn’t my effort. It was done for me and it was again a very reassuring thing.
Then a little further up the hill I was attacked by dogs. The sheepdogs in Greece are very large and aggressive. Their job is not herding sheep the way ours do in this country. Their job is to protect the flock from wolves, bears, robbers and so on. They will attack anything. I was attacked by a pack of 6 or 8 of these great big dogs. They came bounding up, barking and came straight at me. Because of what had gone before, I really had no fear at all of them. I just felt it was another ‘interesting’ thing happening. When the dogs got to me, they had never found anybody who wasn’t frightened of that sort of thing. They didn’t know what to do when they sensed my lack of fear, so they just barked loudly and jumped in the air and snapped their teeth near me but they didn’t touch me. I walked on and they were bounding around. This noise was terrific. After I had gone 15-20 yards with this kind of thing going on, I suddenly had a doubt about it. I thought ‘Well really, this is a bit dangerous after all’. At that moment a dog took me by the leg and bit through my trousers, tore my leg, and the rest of them would have pounced on me but the shepherd at that point appeared, called them off and I was saved. It was another very graphic lesson in having confidence. If I had kept on trusting God I don’t believe I would have been touched but he taught me that I should have complete confidence by allowing that little incident to happen.
I went on and I finally went to sleep in a bush that night. The next day I walked on up the mountain behind Salonika. There is a 6,000’ mountain there. I went over a shoulder of the mountain and a shepherd fed me. I had a very nice time with him. I don’t know how we conversed, because he didn’t speak any English and my Greek was non-existent but we communicated somehow with signs. I understood him and he understood me. He fed me on goat’s milk and he shared his bread with me in a starving country. I went on my way like that, across the country.
The Greeks were really wonderful to me, wherever I went. They would risk their lives because, if they had been caught helping an escaped British officer, they would have been shot. Not only would they have been shot but their villages would have been burned to the ground. I never had anybody hesitate to help me. In fact, I was in a starving country where people were dying in the streets in Salonika of starvation. Although I once went four days without food, I always had food when I needed it. Somebody would come up and share a loaf of bread with me or a piece of cheese, whatever they had. Wonderful people!
That was a wonderfully dramatic beginning and a series of amazing things happened to me while I was escaping, which I suppose I needed because I really started with nothing. I was a total unbeliever when I started and maybe I needed to go through all these experiences in order to give me a new start in life. Coming back to the story - I finally got away in a smuggler’s boat from Greece to Turkey and got back to civilisation again.
During my wanderings in the hills which took about 6 weeks, I stopped in one village. I didn’t usually go into the villages but I went into this village. It was raining and I went into the local coffee house. There were men sitting there and one was a doctor who spoke French, so we were able to talk. They told me then that they were beginning to organise resistance in that area to the Germans. The men said to me as I left, ‘When you get home, if you get home, tell Mr. Churchill’, they said in the nice way that the Greeks have, expecting you to know everybody, ‘tell Mr. Churchill that we are here in this village and that, no matter how long it takes for the Allies to come back, we will still be here fighting.’ Well, at that time we were running backwards in the desert, the Japanese were advancing all over Asia, the Germans were running forwards in Russia. It was really a very bleak-looking moment in the war for the Allies. It really couldn’t have been a worse moment from the point of view of the Allies. Yet here were these little people in the village saying they were going to be fighting when we came back. It was very gallant. So, lightheartedly I said ‘Yes, I’ll tell him’.
I left them and went on my wanderings again. I finally connected up with a smuggler’s boat which was going over to Turkey with 20 Greek officers who took me with them. We went over by night from the holy mountain, Mount Athos, to the island of Imbros in the Dardanelles. There were one or two adventures - the boat went on fire, we landed on the wrong island which was full of Germans and one thing and another, but we got there. We were safe in Turkey. I had been there before with the RAF on a mission in Turkey and I knew the Chief of Staff of the Turkish Air Force. So, when I was in Turkey I was among friends. They were very helpful and, in fact, they flew me from Ankara back to Cyprus. From Cyprus I was picked up by the RAF and taken off back to HQ in Cairo. That was the end of my escaping adventure, in that sense. My arms were in very bad shape and Air Marshall Tedder, who was my Chief in Cairo, arranged for me to be flown back to England to the doctors, to get patched up and I came home.
Coming home after those sort of experiences was extra special and to be able to come home to my father and mother and tell them what had happened to me, was a very special experience.
My father had retired to St Andrew’s from being Minister of Paisley Abbey. I came home to St Andrew’s and met him on the railway station. He could hardly believe that his rather difficult son had become so different and it was a great time.
I was so against religion and that sort of thing that when I started flying I would go on a Sunday, when my father was preaching in Paisley Abbey, and do aerobatics over the roof. So, all the congregation would say, ‘Oh there’s that minister’s son, you know’. They knew perfectly well who it was doing it.
My father was marvellously patient. He never used to let it get him down, but obviously when I came home with this sort of experience, it was very moving.
I was back home again after being in hospital and operated on and they were doing work on my arms. I had to come home and convalesce. One morning I was doing my usual practice, starting the day by asking God what he wanted me to be and do that day. As I did this opening my heart and mind to whatever might come, God said, ‘What about those men you said that you would tell Mr. Churchill about them?’ And I remembered this village and these men who had said, ‘Tell Mr. Churchill we are here’. And I realised I had forgotten them and that I wasn’t doing anything about it, and that I should.
I didn’t know how to be in touch with Mr. Churchill and it seemed an impossible task. Then I had the thought to call up a friend of mine who had taught me to fly, who had been an MP and who knew the Prime Minister. He said, ‘Oh I won’t be seeing the PM in the near future. Why don’t you just write him a letter?’ And I thought this was a very silly idea, that a complete stranger writing to the PM would have very little chance of his letter being read. However, as I had no other option I wrote a fairly cursory letter, just outlining the facts I felt that at least I was discharging my obligation to these people and I posted it.
Within a couple of days there was an urgent phonecall from the Air Ministry saying, ‘The PM wants to see you.’ Mr. Churchill had written one of his little notes in red ink saying ‘I want to see Wing Cdr Edward Howell’ - I was a wing commander by then - and they didn’t know what for, so the entire Air Force was put on the job of tracking me down and getting me down there to London. They said ‘The Prime Minister wants to see you. Get down here quick.’
I jumped down to London and by that time they had found that all he wanted was that I should go and have lunch with him at 10 Downing Street. I found that I was able to arrange that into my busy schedule and turned up at 10 Downing Street at lunchtime one Thursday in September or October 1942.
MM: 1942, the height of the war struggle and a very busy PM.
EH: And when I got there Mr. Churchill was in a Cabinet meeting. They were living in the basement of 10 Downing Street at the time because of the bombing and so on. Mrs. Churchill and their daughter Mary and one other man was there being entertained because he had just given his house to the nation. We waited for some time and then finally we went in to lunch without the Prime Minister. Then this other man had to leave and finally Mr. Churchill came in, dressed in that one-piece boiler suit that he used to wear.
He was very preoccupied. He had forgotten, I am sure, that he had invited me and Mrs. Churchill had to remind him and say who I was and so on. He just sort of grunted, sat down to his lunch and his wife said, ‘Wing Cdr Howell, tell my husband about your experiences in Greece. We want to know what it was like.’ So, I told them about my experiences in Greece, omitting nothing, and the PM listened but didn’t show a great deal of interest until the point at which I had been shown by God a star to follow. At that point he suddenly put his fork down, looked at me and was absolutely riveted with interest, I could see. He then asked, ‘What was the name of the star?’ I didn’t know. He thought that an Air Force officer ought to know the stars. I said perhaps it was Venus, the Evening Star. Anyway, he was terribly interested from that point on, and when I finished he said, ‘Did you ever read the story of my escape?’ I said, ‘No’ and he said, ‘Well I was in the South African war, I was a prisoner and had to escape by climbing over a wall. I didn’t know where to go and I prayed about it. God showed me a star, I followed it and it led me to the only house in the whole area where I wouldn’t be shot or betrayed.’
MM: So, Churchill had prayed, although he is not known to be a very religious man, and he had had a similar experience.
EH: Yes, one of the interesting things to me is how an ordinary person like myself, following the experience of the kind I had, was immediately projected into the life of the country to a PM, for whom this experience must have been certainly one of the most memorable spiritual experiences of his life. I seemed to have been sent to remind him about it at a time when he certainly could have used any help of that kind that he could.
MM: Did it recall to him things of his own faith?
EH: I am sure it did, because after lunch when Mrs. Churchill and their daughter left for coffee and I was left alone with him, he told me that he felt God had intervened in the war at the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk and again at the time of the Battle of Britain. The Germans had given up at just the time when we were desperate and were down to one aircraft in reserve. Also, at the evacuation of Greece, he felt there had been divine intervention and the clouds had come down so the German air force were grounded when we were getting 64,000 men away from the beaches and so on. He really quite clearly believed that only God had intervened to save us at those crucial moments. It was a very memorable time for me to have the chance to be with the PM at such a crucial time in our history.
MM: Do you think it directed his thoughts toward the Greek people particularly? Did he show any subsequent moves?
EH: I think he was naturally inclined to be a friend of Greece because of his interest in history and the classics and all that. I certainly feel that my story would have reinforced any friendship he would have felt for them because I told him how wonderful the Greeks had been to the prisoners and how they had gone out of their way to risk their lives for us and share what they had with us. It touched him very much and Mrs. Churchill too. She, in fact, I think became head of the Save the Children Fund for Greece shortly after that.
Mr. Churchill, as you know, at the end of the war sent British troops in to prevent the Communist take-over of Greece. When there was a danger that the Communist guerillas would take over the country, he helped the Greek army. He flew in himself and addressed a huge crowd in Constitution Square, urging them to accept a plebiscite to determine what sort of government they would have. Really, modern Greece owes a great deal I think to Churchill’s intervention on their side at that crucial time. He was a good friend to them.
MM: Can I just go to another angle on all this? You were helped enormously and at great cost and risk, by a lot of people. Have you ever seen these people since? Have you ever done anything to re-establish a connection with them?
EH: I certainly have. During the war we did what we could, through the Red Cross and so on, to help and with the Save the Children Fund and so on. After the war, I revisited Greece, met the King and Queen and members of the government and had a chance to thank people who had played a part in helping the British at that bad time. Up in Salonika I was in touch with the village people who had helped me. All those who were still alive anyway. (further interesting stories on this are to be found in the Harding tape with Michael Barrett, who travelled with Howell on this post-war visit to Greece)
I think I discovered where they all were and at that time the communist civil war was in progress. The villages were being terrorised by guerilla bands. We were able to help by taking children from some of our helpers and putting them through an American agricultural school in the outskirts of Salonika where they would be safe, get food and decent education. My family and I were able to arrange for 8 children from the villages to be put through the school.
I have stayed in touch with these people. Every year pretty nearly since the war I have been able to get back to Greece for a visit and I keep in touch. We have the RAF Escaping Society, which was formed by those of us who managed to escape from prison camp. The Escaping Society exists for the purpose of helping those who helped us, so that when they are ill or have been in trouble we have been able sometimes to come to their help with funds. We collected money to help our helpers.
MM: Have you been present on some of the anniversary occasions?
EH: Yes, my wife and I have been several times back to Crete on anniversaries of the battle and had wonderful receptions from the Cretan villagers. On one occasion especially, the 30th anniversary of the battle, there was a big group of New Zealanders came over with their wives, mostly farmers. They were back for the first time since the war. Some extraordinary things happened. They got a wonderful welcome from all the villagers, garlanded with flowers and that sort of thing. One man found the tree that he used to billet himself under throughout the battle of Crete. Before being captured he had buried his rifle in the ground. He went back to the tree and dug up the ground and there was his rifle, 30 years later.
MM: On another score, there must have been some of your guards who weren’t as bad as others and some that you even made friends with. Have you had any contact with the former enemy?
EH: Interestingly enough, there was one of our many commandants at the prison camp - some were much better than others. He was one of the ones who was very fair and for whom we had a real respect. I put in a report on him saying that he had behaved entirely properly according to the Geneva Convention and that we had nothing against him. When we occupied the Ruhr I was over there on an inspection team from the RAF and I arranged with the army locally there in the Ruhr that when he arrived back from the Eastern Front he should be allowed to go back on his farm and farm again instead of being put in prison as most of the others were. That happened and he was very grateful. He wrote to me and to another person who had put a good report in for him. In fact, just after the war he asked if his daughter might come to England to learn English. It wasn’t all that easy to find a family who were prepared to have a German girl come at that time but one of my colleagues in the RAF had three children and wanted help with them. He was delighted to have her come. She came and spent I think 3 years in that home and they are still friends to this day. It was a great thing that this girl was able to learn English and I was kept in touch with the man who had been my jailer. Later when I went back to live in Greece with my wife - not very long ago we spent 3 years there - this girl came and stayed with us and was able to see the place where her father had been and so on.
MM: The father was sent to the Eastern Front. Was this a disciplinary thing?
EH: He didn’t do anything disloyal to his higher command, but he did whatever kindnesses he could to us. For example, there was an American couple brought in when America came into the war. People who ran the American farm school near Salonika, a wonderful couple, who were brought in to our prison camp. He used to take them back to the farm school on Sundays so they could have tea with their friends, pick up some milk and eggs and bring them back. We were starving and any food that could be brought in was a great help. They used to bring supplies of milk and eggs back with them from the farm every Sunday and were actually driven out there and back by this officer. So, he really was a good friend.
MM: Have you subsequently met leading Greek figures?
EH: Yes, I went back in 1947 after the war - that was my first visit back there. I was able to meet the King and Queen, the PM and members of the government. In fact, the Minister of Defense arranged for me to be flown back to Crete for the anniversary of the battle so we could put wreaths on the graves of our men. The Greek Air Force flew me there and helped take part in the ceremony. I met Archbishop Damaskinos, who was a great hero of the resistance and was the Archbishop of Athens. I met the Patriarch of the whole Eastern Church, Athenagoras, in Istanbul, and so on. It was a wonderful chance to meet them all.
The drama of my start in life, of escaping and all that, is a dramatic story and life is not always quite so dramatic but I aim to live my life the same way as I did then. I start each day with the discipline of taking time to study what God wants me to be and do, in the Bible and other books. I also to take time quietly to pray and to listen for direction from him so that I can have a chance for my plans and contacts to be directed by him and my way of life can be run by him.
MM: After you had returned to Britain, did these amazing experiences continue in the same kind of way as during your escape?
EH: Yes indeed, and it still does. I suppose one learns more about it every day and every year. One incident was a rather dramatic one when I first got back to England. I was in an RAF convalescent hospital which was in the Palace Hotel at Torquay, a nice place to be by the sea. We were being worked on by physiotherapists to try and get my arms going again. One Sunday morning I was, as usual, starting my day off by a time of quiet in which I said my prayers, read my Bible and asked God to direct me. I had in my mind to write what I thought were some rather important letters that morning but the moment I made my heart and mind open to any other suggestion from the Almighty the thought came ‘Go to church’. Now I was not a churchgoer in those days and the idea of going to church didn’t appeal to me at all, so I argued. I said to God, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea at all, it would just be a lot of old ladies in there and I don’t know any of them anyway. What do you want me to go to church for when I should be doing these useful letters? However, I do want to do what you want me to do. Please let me know.’ And at that point again I had the same thought, ‘Go to church’. And after about half an hour of arguing I gave in, and I said ‘All right. I don’t know why you want this or even if you do want it but this thought keeps coming so I am going to do it.’ I felt at peace about it and eventually I got ready for church. At 10.45 I went out of the hospital and I walked 400 yards up the road to the church. At one minute to 11 as I was going in the door two German fighters flashed overhead. All the anti-aircraft guns in the area started firing and there was a tremendous noise. The two aircraft had each dropped two 1,000lb bombs into the basement of the hospital. As they turned and flew out to sea the whole hospital went up in the air. Just down the road from me.
You might say my guidance saved my life, and it did. When I finally was able to get back to my room I got up a fire escape and found the bed that I would have been sitting on had been sliced as if with a razor, every three inches there was a great slice taken out of the bed by the glass from the windows. The man in the room next to me, a Group Captain whom I knew, his head had been found 100 yards away on the lawn. I forget how many people were killed and a good many injured.
One amusing thing happened. My surgeon, who later became a very famous orthopaedic surgeon, was operating, doing some minor operation in the theatre when the bombs went off. His patient who was anaesthetised soared out of the window of the operating theatre and landed on the ground outside. When this patient was picked up and taken off to some other hospital and finally became conscious again he found himself all covered with cuts and bruises and he cursed the medic saying ‘I went in for a minor operation and look at me now. What have they done to me?’ All he knew was that he woke up in a hospital bed after an operation covered with cuts. He didn’t know he was lucky to be alive. Fortunately, all the personnel in the operating theatre were unhurt but it was a serious blow. My little thought to go to church had repercussions which I had no idea of.
MM: But why you and not 40 or 50 others in that hospital? Do you ask yourself that?
EH: Yes I do often. And I do believe that God has an individual purpose plan for each individual person. If you choose to cooperate with it, he will follow with you through life, leading you into the places, circumstances and people’s lives and in all the intricacy of life. His purposes will be promoted as you look for them and aim to follow them.
MM: Do you think you were the only one who prayed to God in that hospital that morning?
EH: Not necessarily. I mean it may have been God’s purpose for some of them to move on to the next world. We are all going to do that, some day. I don’t believe that handing your life over to him and trying to be guided by him is going to save your life every day or keep you out of trouble, because trouble is part of life. What it does do is enable you to turn the things that would otherwise be hurtful into helpful. For instance, nobody would have chosen to get wounded in the battle of Crete, to be nearly dead for a year, to go through what I went through etc. Yet that has been the single most valuable experience of my life. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world because it led to my making a decision which I needed to make. God has turned what was a very negative experience into the very best experience it could be for me. I find that with all troubled circumstances. When I get into trouble, if I accept that God’s hand is in it, he has allowed me to get into trouble, therefore he has a purpose for it and he can turn it to good account. And he does That is where the negative gets turned into positive, and the lead gets turned into gold.
MM: Maybe there were many people who prayed that morning but perhaps not many who went the further step of allowing God to speak to them.
EH: I think the key to the inner life that I know is the business of laying down your own will and accepting what you think to be the will of God. The business of laying down your own will is always involved. That is where the self-denial, the business of sacrifice comes in. That is the meaning, in effect of the garden of Gethsemane for Jesus, that he had to lay down his own will and accept crucifixion. And in our little ways we have to lay down our particular preferences and prejudices and preconceptions. To lay them down as an offering and then get back whatever God chooses to give you. It is a sacrificial business, laying down your will. You have to be prepared to do what you don’t want to do, as well as what you do.
Through life - it is now 37 years ago when all this happened - I have failed more often than not, but I have stuck to the concept that I am meant to be directed in this way. I do intend to, and it has led me in and out of business, all the relationships of my life have been radically affected by this way of life. It has been wonderful. I hate to think what would have happened if I hadn’t been working at it, however much better I could have done. At least what I have known of it has been absolutely wonderful.
I am very optimistic because wherever I go in the USA and in Europe and to some extent in Asia, where I have been abroad, I have been looking for evidence of the hand of God at work in people’s lives. I see it when I look for it more than ever today. I think that the spirit of God is at least as active in our generation as it has ever been in history before, therefore there is an enormous unseen tide running, whatever the news, whatever the circumstances in the world and the rise and fall of civilisations and nations going their different ways. Through it all this tide, this unseen tide, is at work, which is remaking the world to God’s design and will in fact do that in his time and in his ways. I find it very exciting to see that at work in people’s lives and to see the effect it often has on world events.
I think Solzhenitsyn is a great example of the creativity that can come from the most difficult situations. The very powerful effect that he has for thinking people in re-orienting their values and putting truth to them in different ways. I think those are the sort of things that are very valuable and are going to play a much bigger part. The things of the spirit are not easy to evaluate but it doesn’t mean that they are any less powerful for being difficult to foresee the effects of. There are tremendous forces at work, I believe, and I am not pessimistic about it. I believe that God’s spirit is mightily at work and that he will triumph.
We all have both spiritual and material forces at work in us daily. We have to cooperate with the right forces and fight against the wrong ones.
MM: We are in your home Ed, talking about these things and you are now happily married but you had better tell us how that came about because I am sure that was a decision you took with a bit of an ear cocked for the Lord’s voice as well.
EH: We have been very happily married for 15 years now and, as you say it was - in both our cases - we felt we were not only in love with one another but we were also guided by God to each other and given to each other in that way. We aim to apply this way of life to our life together and to our relationships with other people to our work and so on.
Wanda: Our whole way of life is based on aiming to find out what God wants of us together. We feel our home is meant to be used that way and we have done it in different ways. Sometimes in jobs in different countries. Right now, living here with Edward taking time to do more writing, we find living in a university town, people come from all over the place and St Andrew’s, being famous for golf, we have a constant steady stream of visitors who come into the house to stay. It is one thing to pick your friends, who you want to come. It is another thing to feel that people are being sent to you and to be available and ready to receive them when they come, whoever they are. Sometimes the ones you think will be the least interesting turn out to be the most interesting. We have had some very fascinating and rewarding times with our constant stream of visitors.
EH: Strange things happen sometimes. We don’t always get the same ideas about what the right thing to do is and we have to sort that out between us. I remember one day the simple matter of trying to buy some shutters - wooden shutters - for our windows. I felt sure that I knew what shop to go to in order to get them and was rather anxious to get on with it. While Wanda…
Wanda: I had met a lady at a party and she was having a garage sale in the States She said, ‘Oh I have got some second-hand shutters. Maybe you would like to come and see them.’ Partly because she had been nice enough to offer it, I thought it was a good idea and we would go round and see her shutters. But our time was short and when I said to Edward that I had agreed to go round tomorrow and see the shutters in this garage, he said, ‘Oh what did you want to do that for? They won’t be the right size. They will be the wrong colour. Much better to go to the shop and get them direct.’ So, I said I had made the arrangement now and felt we had to stick with it. Reluctantly he came along the next day when we drove over to her house, thinking we knew what we were doing - that we were going to see wooden shutters. When we arrived, her neighbour had just dropped dead that morning, so she was in a great state on her front doorstep because the neighbour lived alone and she had had to pick up the pieces and see to things. Then, when we did go and look at the shutters, they obviously were the wrong size and colour and everything. Just before she left she began to ask how she could cope with the situation in her family where someone was an alcoholic. We ended up having a talk with her at a moment which was needed in her life. That is just an example of where I think you might get a thought from what you believe to be God and you follow it up. What you think is going to happen is not necessarily at all what God has in mind.
If you are such a materialistic person as I can be who likes things in the house to be right and you are much more interested in going and getting a ‘thing’, he uses that to get you where he wants you, even if it is a ‘thing’ that isn’t that important.
MM: You were how old when you married, Edward?
EH: 52. All through this experience I have found that relationships is the name of the game. People are put in your way all the time. We always have people who are given us to be good friends to and who are good friends to us. The building of the right sort of relationships with people and helping them to share the experiences that we have ourselves is the greatest opportunity that you can look for anywhere. In the end, it is your relationships you take with you. They are the only things you do take with you into the next phase of life, so it is a good thing to be building some good ones when you are going along. And if you have a wife like mine to do it with, it is extra.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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