In the late post-war years of the Royal Army Service Corps (ultimately the Royal Corps of Transport), few officers remained who could claim notable service in the war. Of those, even fewer wearing khaki wore wings and ribbons earned with the Royal Air Force. While an Aerial Gunner with an Aircrew Europe Star and later service in the auxiliary was a humble arrangement that many airmen could claim, what was not reflected on the chest of Major A. C. Smith was a wartime service spent only briefly as a gunner before capture and months behind wire.
Among the silhouettes of bombers in the skies over Germany flew a type of aircraft that did not carry the usual arsenal. It lacked the typical ball turret and, instead of gun barrels, carried specialized electronic warfare aerials, notably two vertical antennas on the upper fuselage. Its belly was cut with chutes designed not just for bombs but for bundles of reflective foil – chaff – meant to blind enemy radar. The aircraft was a Flying Fortress in name, but its mission belonged to a different war altogether. These specialized B-17s of 214 Squadron were dedicated to deception, disruption, and electronic warfare. It was one of only three squadrons of modified American aircraft within the Group.
During March 1944, a month of poor flying weather and routine tests, Arthur Clive Smith joined the squadron as a wireless operator / air gunner with six others from 1657 Conversion Unit. Those arriving together with Smith were Warrant Officer John R. Lee, Pilot; Flight Sergeant P. Barkess, Mid Upper Gunner; Sergeant P.J. Curtis, Flight Engineer; Warrant Officer II G.H.P. Gibbens (Royal Canadian Air Force), Navigator; Flight Sergeant John E.M. Pitchford, Air Bomber; and Sergeant Donald Williamson, Air Gunner. Already with the squadron was Flight Sergeant George Boag, DFM, Waist Gunner; and Sergeant Gordon John Joseph Caulfield, Waist Gunner. Their Special Wireless Operator, Sergeant Anthony John McNamara, would join weeks later to complete the ten-man crew.
The remaining days of March were defined by local circuits, dinghy lectures, and familiarization – preparation for the missions ahead, until the tempo gradually increased. The first half of April saw limited flying, punctuated by ground training and system familiarization, particularly with new equipment like Monica and Visual Monica. By mid-month, the squadron was rotating crews through formation and fighter affiliation flights. Full-scale operations began to increase in frequency, including flights across occupied France and Belgium, a growing reliance on electronic warfare tools like Jostle and ABC, and the squadron’s relocation to RAF Oulton on May 16th.
Smith’s first confirmed operational sortie with 214 Squadron came on June 16th, 1944, aboard Fortress 382. The patrol took them over Sterkrade at 23,000 feet over a thick blanket of cloud that obscured the fire below, but the crew recorded scattered explosions, and persistent Morse signals crackled across the ether. He would fly several more over the coming months, each one part of the quiet, deliberate campaign to fracture Germany’s night defense network. Operational flights were infrequent as it seemed there was always tinkering to be done with the jamming equipment.
On July 14th, they flew to the marshalling yards at Villeneuve St. Georges where the clouds hung low over the Seine. Beneath the aircraft, sudden flares snapped open, and the dull pop of flak came rolling up through the overcast. The gunners called out two fires in the distance, visible through fractured cloud as faint orange blossoms.
Three nights later, the crew took a seaward track dispersing window type MB and N, dumped in staggered intervals over the North Sea. At altitude, it was a lonely operation. The sky was featureless, but for broken stratus cloud and the drifting echo of distant flares. On their return, yellow signals floated above the horizon, but nothing else - no fighters engaged them, but the tension remained wound tight and the first cigarette after leaving the target area was blissful.
Not every mission ran clean. During a run over Bottrop, their Jostle set – the heart of their jamming suite – suffered an electrical failure. The crew flew on regardless, but without their primary defensive tool, they felt more exposed in the night sky. Below them, the Ruhr lit up in arcs of flak, every flash a reminder of how easily a jamming aircraft could be found when it lost its voice. Three nights later, they were routed to Kiel. Smith’s Fortress – HB765 – took a burst of shrapnel near Neumünster. The blow rocked the aircraft but did not break it. The Heligoland flak zones were active that night, hammering the sky with mechanical precision. But the Fortress held together, and the jamming sets did their work. When they landed, the fuselage showed new scars.
August brought only two logged flights. On August 9th, the crew flew a standard patrol and then came August 25th. Their Fortress, HB763, lifted off from Oulton at 2038 hours. It was a deep Jostle mission to Russelsheim. As the wireless operator, Flight Sergeant Smith cut off the intercom from the rest of the crew and sat at his station with headphones on, listening to the murmur and crackle of transmissions. All went quietly for some time until, without warning, the aircraft dropped. A sudden dive threw Smith forward at his wireless desk. Gunfire erupted across the fuselage – short, stuttering bursts from the turrets answered the unseen threat outside.
The Fortress bucked and twisted and Smith could hear the other gunners shouting, their weapons hammering into the dark, but the rhythm of the fight was one-sided. He reached up and switched back to the intercom to hear the crew planning their jump. He grabbed the parachute stowed just behind his station and began clipping the harness, careful to avoid tangling with the intercom leads. Somewhere near Darmstadt, the pilot gave the final command: “Abandon aircraft. Emergency jump.”
Flashes of fire lit the fuselage from within and without, illuminating the inside of the aircraft like a strobe. The roar of the wind and engines was constant, as Smith made for the rear of the aircraft, moving with difficulty as the aircraft lurched around violently. He reached the door and grabbed the ripcord in his gloved hand. Beyond the opening was the vacant night sky – he jumped. The canopy opened above him, its pale fabric glowing faintly in the darkness. Smith looked around, the night silent and vast. For a long time, it felt as if he wasn’t falling at all, only suspended above the cloud cast with an amber glow. They rose to meet him and he knew somewhere beneath was land.
Of the ten-man crew, four would be killed in the crash. Clive, though wounded, with five others survived to be captured by German forces, processed and interrogated. During a session in Frankfurt on August 30th, he noted how detailed the Luftwaffe’s understanding of RAF jamming operations had become. The questions were specific and the German officer conducting the interrogation seemed less interested in biography than technique. Smith offered little.
BANKAU
He and his fellow survivors were transported to Stalag Luft 7, a relatively new camp in Bankau with its infrastructure still under construction. By the end of its first month, it held just 230 prisoners, but that number would rise quickly, reaching 1,578 by January 1945. In a wooded area far from major towns, the camp was isolated and difficult to supply. The barracks sat low in the mud, their timbers drafty and floors uneven. Rain fell often and without warning, and the ground churned to soup beneath the constant tread of boots. For prisoners like Smith, it meant a cold reception – unfinished huts, irregular rations, and limited medical care.
The International Committee of the Red Cross described the state of the camp as "deplorable." Overcrowding became a serious issue, with poor sanitation and common food shortages leading to malnutrition. The men did what they could to maintain a thread of normalcy. There were clandestine educational classes, makeshift religious services, and even occasional theatrical performances.
Days passed to the rhythm of roll calls and queueing, then shuffling around finding ways to pass time before nights that came early. On Saturdays, if the Germans allowed it, there were concerts. The national anthem was forbidden, so they sang "Land of Hope and Glory" instead.
Food dominated everything. German rations were meagre – grey broth, boiled potatoes, the occasional crust of dense, bitter bread. Sometimes there was nothing. The Red Cross parcels, when they arrived, were treasured: powdered milk, hard biscuits, thin tea, a tinned something that might be meat. Men learned to stretch each item, trading the precious bits in quiet barters. A cigarette might fetch a spoonful of jam.
By early autumn, the food situation worsened. Parcels grew scarce. The potato ration shrank. Some men folded inward, ceasing to speak, disappearing in plain sight. One morning, a man crossed the warning wire deliberately and called to the guard. Hidden radios buzzed with half-heard reports. Rumors traveled fast: the Russians were close; the war would be over by Christmas; Churchill had demanded repatriation for airmen. The guards offered nothing. There were nights when distant flak rolled across the sky. Once, flares floated down, casting the trees in an eerie orange. For a heartbeat, the men believed liberation had come. Then the planes turned away, and darkness folded back in.
October brought rain, then cold. Frost sometimes lined the walls inside the huts, delicate as lace. The ground froze, then thawed to sludge. Huts flooded. Smith’s boots rarely dried. Still, they carried on – patching routines together from scraps. They sang on Saturday nights. They swapped stories and the last bits of chocolate. When even the Red Cross tins were gone, they brewed ersatz coffee from burned bread. They gnawed raw potatoes and imagined roast beef.
THE LONG MARCH
As the Soviet Army advanced from the east, German authorities ordered the evacuation of Stalag Luft 7 to prevent its liberation. On the morning of January 19th, at roughly 0300 hours, one thousand five hundred sixty-five prisoners – including Flight Sergeant Clive Smith – were roused in darkness, given meagre rations, and forced to begin what would become known as the Long March. Rumors about their fate were rampant – that those who could not walk would be left behind, that escape would mean execution for five others, that the Russians were too close for the march to succeed at all. The column moved west regardless, away from the guns in the east and into the snow.
It was minus twenty degrees and falling. The snow was fresh and deep, and the men’s boots, never meant for such distances, were sodden before they’d cleared the camp boundary. Each man carried what he could, which for most was little more than a blanket and their Red Cross parcel – if they had been lucky enough to hold on to one. Some men, doubting they would be able to carry their parcels, ate their entire Red Cross rations before the first step had been taken. The road to Winterfeld on the first day was over thirty kilometers, and it was only the beginning.
Columns of civilian refugees and shattered German military units jammed the roads ahead, forcing the prisoners to divert into fields thick with snow, where each step took twice the effort. Boots froze stiff as they marched by day and night and men pulled socks over their hands when gloves gave out. Along the roadside, Smith passed bodies frozen into the ditches, men who had collapsed and had not been found until the snow had already begun to cover them. Horse corpses too – burst open in the cold – left behind with shattered carts and sunken traces.
Rations were few slices of black bread, a spoonful of margarine, a few scraps of bully beef if the guards were in a generous mood. Some men shared their tins; others hid them. They boiled scraps of oats in melted snow, chewed raw carrots dug from frozen fields, and made tea from scorched hay or what was passed off as coffee.
At times, they slept in barns, packed in tight among other prisoners. At others, they were left to dig shelters into the frozen ground. One man tried to carry an accordion for the first two days – it was left behind in a snowbank somewhere west of Kreuzburg. At Buckette, there was talk of rest, but it never came. The following night they marched until dawn and crossed the Oder River, just hours before the Germans blew the bridges behind them.
At Jenkwitz, they boiled carrots and frozen potatoes in rusted tins. In Wansen, they roasted found spuds over small fires, smoke creeping into their clothes. Some villages gave quarter, others nothing but a barn and frostbitten straw. On the worst nights, snow drifted to their knees and they walked single file between stalled carts and the wreckage of civilian flight. The roads were full – not just with prisoners, but with refugees, soldiers, animals, dead and living all moving in the same uncertain direction.
Smith noted the toll as the days wore on – the men around him became more gaunt, more silent. At Heidersdorf, they were told they were still behind the Soviet line. By January’s end, they had walked over three hundred kilometers, and of the original one thousand four hundred who began, fewer than one thousand would reach the end.
At Goldberg on February 5th, they were packed into railway wagons – thirty-six men to each wooden car with no food, no heat, and barely enough room to sit. Condensation from their breath froze into thin layers on the inside walls, and fights broke out in the dark over who would sit or stand. The journey took days. They stopped often, sometimes for hours, sometimes for a night. A cup of acorn coffee was issued once. On the eighth day, the train finally stopped and they were marched the last short stretch to Stalag III-A at Luckenwalde.
The camp had been built for ten thousand, but held nearly four times that. There was barely space to lie down. The food ration of three small potatoes, a crust of ersatz bread, and when luck held, a ladle of barley soup was just enough to keep a man from dying, but not enough to keep him well. The coal ration came to five briquettes between sixteen men. Smith’s hands cracked and his feet stayed numb. They spoke of food and of home with hope and longing. Of what they would do if the war ended, of girls they had known, of the sky over England. Some days they read, but mostly they waited for the Russians who were audibly close, indicated by their artillery heard in the distance on some nights.
On April 22nd, they were woken not by roll call, but by the sound of cheering. The Red Army had arrived. The guards fled as Soviet tanks rolled through the perimeter. Some prisoners captured those who had not fled. They were free, but liberation was not immediate relief. They were behind Soviet lines now – ragged, hungry, and with no way to get home. The Russians fed them what they could – bread, tea, tins of meat – and treated them with wary courtesy. American troops reached the region weeks later and slowly, arrangements were made. Some men were driven to the Elbe. Others waited for flights that came days or weeks apart.
Smith returned to England on May 26th, 1945. He had survived the crash, captivity, and the long road through a dying Reich. What came next was quieter, and quiet stories rarely make for good ones. A tale of ease and routine does not sit easily alongside the excitement and tumult that came before, and so there is little here to tell. He stayed in the service, joining the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and accepting a commission in 1954 to the Fighter Control Branch. It was steady work, done far from the noise of engines or the glow of cockpit instruments. In time, he transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps in May 1959, later the Royal Corps of Transport, commanding 598 Company, Heavy General Transport of the Territorial Army. It was honest service – grounded service – delivered not in the skies but on the roads of peacetime Britain.