Bacon and eggs and the Great Escape

William Henry Hickson:

b Auckland, September 6, 1922;

m Kathleen Harden, 3s 1d;

d Wellington, September 2, 2011, aged 88.

Throughout his long life, World War II bomber pilot Bill Hickson had a love of bacon and eggs.

It was a taste he acquired on June 21, 1943, when a WAAF waitress offered him the dish before he flew out of his RAF Graveley base in Hertfordshire, England, on a mission to Europe.

He told the WAAF to put the bacon and eggs on hold. He'd eat them in the morning when he got back from a raid over Krefeld, Germany. It was a breakfast that had to wait.

Later that night the 20-year-old pilot and his crew in their Halifax bomber were shot down at Klein Oirlo, near Castenray in Holland.

The pilot who shot the Kiwi and his crew out of the sky in the early morning of June 22, 1943, was German fighter ace Gunther Radusch.

Bill Hickson's early life and education at Westmere Primary School and Mt Albert Grammar School in Auckland could never have prepared him for what happened that night.

Rear gunner Maxie Brown, and second pilot Henry Krohn were killed when the plane went down. As Bill Hickson struggled out of the bomber's escape hatch before baleing out, one of his flying boots was torn off in the slipstream.

The named boot was found and looked after by Dutch people for 66 years. Dutchman Wies Peeters returned the boot to Mr Hickson two years ago on Mr Hickson's 87th birthday.

During the Battle of the Atlantic, at the height of the U-boat crisis, Mr Hickson flew anti- submarine patrols in Whitley bombers out of St Eval in Cornwall.

He then flew four-engined Halifax bombers for 51 Squadron on raids over Europe, while based at an RAF base at Snaith in Yorkshire.

His flying skills were recognised in an invitation to join the elite Pathfinder Force, whose job it was to drop indicators to mark targets for following aircraft. Pilot Officer Hickson, as he was then, chose to ignore the slim prospects of surviving a 45-mission Pathfinder tour. In this role he was based at Graveley with the RAF's 35 Squadron.

He completed 30 bombing raids before his final operation. Many of those missions were to the industrial cities of the Ruhr Valley, known to aircrew as Happy Valley because of the heavy anti-aircraft defences. He found two operations to Berlin, within three nights, dodging searchlights, fighter aircraft and ground fire, to be quite harrowing.

There were narrow escapes associated with multiple engine failures and the bomber icing up over Duisburg.

After being shot down over Holland and parachuting to safety, he avoided immediate capture.

In RNZAF uniform, with only one flying boot on and with singed hair, he approached Mrs van Staveren on her family farm near the town of Venray, 115km south east of Amsterdam.

By chance, one of her sons, Cornelius, was a leader in the Dutch underground movement and the family took him in.

After the war Mr Hickson played a part in helping Cornelius van Staveren and his family to emigrate to New Zealand.

It was his way of saying thanks to the many Dutch people who helped him when times were tough. (Cornelius van Staveren became a farmer in the Waikato.)

While moving along an escape line, he was escorted to Tilburg by a girl who carried a Luger pistol in her handbag.

She took him to stay in the house of a frail-looking old lady, Jacoba Pulskens. This Dutch heroine, who offered shelter to Jews, members of the resistance and stranded allied aircrew, was later dispatched to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where she was gassed to death.

Mr Hickson was captured in Apeldoorn and taken to Scheveningen Prison, near The Hague, where he was interrogated by the Gestapo, who repeatedly threatened to shoot him.

He was eventually transferred to Stalag Luft 3 POW camp at Sagan, southeast of Berlin. There he helped in preparations for the real "Great Escape" - later the subject of a major movie focusing on the 76 airmen who escaped through a tunnel.

Fifty of them were shot, on Hitler's orders, after recapture, including two fellow New Zealanders, Porokoru Patapu (John) Pohe and Arnold Christensen.

In Stalag Luft 3 Bill Hickson was particularly close to his room- mate and friend, Nick Skanziklas. Skanziklas was a member of the Royal Hellenic Air Force, who took part in the escape, and he too was one of the 50 shot.

Recalling the executions of fellow airmen in his memoirs, Mr Hickson simply wrote, "the impact of the callous murders of the 50 officers was terribly depressing for us all".

At the end of the war he sailed back to Wellington and travelled north by train to his then home in Auckland.

The veteran airman arrived there on his 23rd birthday on September 6, 1945, and resumed the career in the Post Office which would take him all the way to the top.

He completed a Bachelor of Science degree at Auckland University.

In his Post Office career he worked in Auckland, Whangarei, Rotorua and at head office in Wellington.

In quick succession he advanced up the ranks of assistant engineer in chief, engineer in chief, deputy director general and then director-general.

Before sailing overseas to war, he started with the Post Office in a humble junior technician's position in the Auckland Telephone Exchange. By the time he retired he had responsibility for the working lives of 39,000 employees.

Following his retirement in Wellington he was awarded a CBE and worked voluntarily for several charitable organisations, including the RSA.

In 1984 he was appointed honorary commanding officer of the Royal New Zealand Corps of Signals, a position he particularly enjoyed.

Mr Hickson and his wife, Kath, were both keen golfers.

He had regarded himself as being on borrowed time ever since he was shot down.

He never forgot the crash that killed two of his crew and the memories often came flooding back in later life when he sat down to eat bacon and eggs.

When he returned to his RAF Graveley base in England at the end of the war, there waiting for him in the mess was the same WAAF who had served him two years earlier.

In her time this woman had served hundreds of allied airmen their final meals.

Despite this she never forgot Bill Hickson's food order. Without a word being spoken, she disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a plate of bacon and eggs.

Sources: Bill Hickson's memoirs, Peter Hickson, Pat Hickson, Kath Hickson, Reg Early, Max Lambert