COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER FIFTEEN FULL CIRCLE
perimeter after dinner and retired to bed in reminiscent mood. The
following morning my meeting with Herr Deckart started in a cool if
not unfriendly manner, until I happened to mention my airfield hotel,
then he really opened up.
What had I been flying, that I knew about the Rheine Group of
airfields? Typhoons - then I must have been in his sights, and he in
mine, a few times during that dramatic spring more than 30 years ago.
He had been called up under age, as a trainee flak gunner, in the last
winter of the war and it was enough for him that we had fought on the
same sector. From then on he behaved as if we had been comrades in
arms!
When, inevitably, we went off to lunch together, he suggested that
we avoid one particular restaurant and that we kept our voices down
when we spoke in English. No, it was not a question of German
antagonism towards former enemies. Munster was a BAOR garrison
town and some British squaddies had gone on the rampage the night
before. Local feelings were running high.
If British faces were red on that occasion, German ones must have
been redder still in the spring of 1983. That was when STERN
magazine published the first of a series of six articles about the sinking
of prison ships by RAF fighter bombers during the final days of the
war. The implication conveyed to STERN's mass circulation readership
was of a cock up, followed by a hush up, as if we were totally to
blame. But there was no explanation as to why the wretched inmates
of Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg had been put on
board the Cap Arcona in the first place - nor, as was alleged, why
those who managed to escape and get ashore were shot out of hand by
the German troops.
The first indication here was a piece in the Daily Telegraph one
Saturday which described the STERN article and questioned its
conclusions. Having been involved at the time, I was incensed at what
had been published in Germany, and determined to try and set the
record straight. My friend Derek Wood was, inter alia, Air
Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph at that time. So I gave him a
ring and he wrote a pretty forthright column about it, which appeared
the next day.
The articles, and the readers' letters, which followed must have
been acutely embarrassing to many a decent German. Of course there
had been a mistake by the RAF. For the very understandable reason
that everything pointed to a final Nazi retreat into a Northern
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