On May 22, 1944, Ernie Holmes and his crew of seven took off in a Lancaster bomber from RAF Graveley, south of Huntingdon. The raid included 261 Lancasters and 14 Mosquitos, and their target was the German city of Dortmund. It was Holmes’s 22nd Pathfinder mission with 35 Squadron, marking targets with flares for a main bomber force to attack later.
That he had survived that many missions already made him something of a veteran. During the war, 51 per cent of Bomber Command aircrews were killed on operations.
The crossing that night was not easy, with the weather closing in. Struggling to maintain height, Holmes jettisoned two bombs over the North Sea to lighten his load. A few minutes later, a brick-sized block of ice detached from the wing and smashed through the cockpit window, smacking him on the side of the head. Holmes, known as Shirley, short for Sherlock, flew on, dropping his target-indicator bombs on Dortmund.
By 1am he was on a homeward track, but while crossing the Netherlands at 16,000ft he was intercepted by Hans-Heinz Augenstein, the high-scoring German night-fighter ace of the war. Augenstein slipped his aircraft underneath Holmes’s Lancaster and fired upwards, setting the inner starboard engine on fire. “I realised I’d lost control of the aircraft,” Holmes told the BBC, adding that the Lancaster juddered violently and plunged into a dive. “I called out to my crew, ‘Bail out! Bail out!’ ”
A large explosion blew him forwards, knocking him unconscious for a few seconds. When he came round “the cabin had gone, I was hanging off the nose of the aircraft but still strapped to my seat. The control column was between my legs and the aircraft was going down in flames around me.” He managed to pull the ripcord on his parachute and abandon the aircraft. Moments later it crashed. Five of his crew died.
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A few seconds later Holmes landed in a muddy field west of Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands, 50ft from his burning wreckage. Other than scratches and a broken nose, he was unscathed. He hid his parachute and walked southwest across the flat, arable land. German troops had witnessed the crash and he could hear search dogs barking in the distance. To shake them off his scent he waded across a flooded field and walked through the night.
By sunrise he was staggering through a cornfield, hungry and hallucinating, when he heard what sounded like a blacksmith hammering on his anvil. He headed towards the noise, “visualising him to have sandwiches in a white handkerchief with red dots”. It was in fact 21-year-old Netje van der Heijden, who was cycling with two milk churns that clattered whenever she hit a bump. He leapt from the field and called: “Goedemorgen.” Startled, she indicated for him to hide again in the corn and cycled off. Some time later her father, Fons, a farmer who quietly supported the Dutch Resistance, arrived. Holmes would be the 23rd person he sheltered. “They were risking their lives to help me,” he said.
In Will Iredale’s book The Pathfinders (2021), Holmes tells how Netje helped to bathe him in a tin bath while her mother, Mina, burnt his flying gear, provided him with civilian clothes and fed him. During daylight he remained out of sight, hidden in the roof of a pigsty; by night he helped Fons and others who were in hiding to sort seeds by hand. After three weeks it was time to leave. He spent an uncomfortable few nights in a hay-lined hole in the ground, where he was reunited with one of his crewmen and was watched over by a Catholic priest, before being escorted on foot across the Belgian border and on to Antwerp.
There he was betrayed to the Gestapo, thrown into a tiny room and stripped. His interrogators spotted that he was circumcised and decided that he must be Jewish. “We shoot spies, but we have special treatment for Jews,” they said. One guard banged a weapon against the table shouting: “Jude! Jude! Jude!”
Later he was taken to Brussels by train, telling Iredale how on the journey he loosened a window in the lavatory, intending to return after dark and escape, but his plan was foiled when a guard spotted the loose screw. On arrival he was quizzed about the Pathfinders, this time by a Gestapo officer pretending to be a friendly rabbi. He was then transported to Stalag Luft III, the prisoner-of-war camp in Poland.
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As the Russians advanced from the east in January 1945, Holmes was one of thousands of PoWs forced to march westwards in freezing weather wearing unsuitable clothing and footwear. They survived on scavenged sugar beet and potatoes and drew milk from cows in the fields. Someone found eggs, which they cracked into the warm milk and eagerly devoured with ration biscuits, only to vomit them back up because the mix was too rich for stomachs accustomed to prison-camp food. The experience left him with a lifelong dislike of eggs. As aircraft buzzed overhead, Holmes and some of the men spread themselves out so that from above their formation spelt the letters RAF.
He ended up near Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, where he was liberated on VE Day by soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment. In one of the army trucks he recognised an old childhood friend. “What are you doing here?” Holmes exclaimed. “You should have been here weeks ago.”
Ernest Holmes was born in Hebburn-on-Tyne in 1921, the second of four children of Harold Holmes, a shipyard worker who was often unemployed during the Depression, and his wife Agnes (née McKenzie); his siblings, Harry, Margaret and David, predeceased him. He left school at 14 and started work as a delivery boy, using his meagre wage to pay for night classes and taking a course in painting and decorating.
In 1938 he cycled to an airfield outside Sunderland to inquire about joining the RAF Volunteer Reserves. Asked his age, he replied 16. “Go home laddie and get the whippies [nappies] off ya backside,” the adjutant told him. “I’d cycled 12 miles and I cried all the way home,” Holmes recalled.
Two years later he received a warmer welcome. “There was a war on. I could either go down the pits. Go to the army. Go to the navy. And I thought, I want to fly.” He was sent for basic training at RAF Scone, in Scotland. He went on to RAF Wirral, where a corporal spotted his potential and an examining board in London selected him for pilot training in Canada.
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By winter 1943 he was flying Pathfinder raids with 35 Squadron during the Battle of Berlin. On longer missions he was supplied with a “pee bag”, like a large condom with a spring-loaded aluminium cup. In the Halifax, where the pilot sat above the wireless operator, it led to added dangers. “Is it raining outside?” one operator asked over the intercom when the usually fastidious Holmes misjudged his aim. Later he converted to the Lancaster.
After being repatriated in 1945 Holmes remained in the RAF, flying transport aircraft to the Far East and taking part in the 1948 Berlin Blockade airlifts. In 1946 he married Irene Spinks, who had been a secretary at RAF Scone. They settled in Scotland and she died in 2015. They are survived by their children, Alison, a retired PA and editor, and David, a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist.
Holmes was later a flying instructor with university air squadrons in Glasgow and St Andrews. He deployed a parachute for a second time when he and a student had to abandon a Chipmunk that would not pull out of a dive. He worked as an instructor for Airwork Services at Scone, training pilots from all over the world, and in 1964 received a commendation for saving the lives of two Iraqi pupils when fire broke out shortly after they had taken off in a Cessna 310 and they had to crash land in a field of bulls.
He went on to set up a flying school in east Africa, but in his fifties learnt that he had a degenerative eye disease. He could not afford to retire, so went back to college, acquired some qualifications and retrained as a social worker, helping young offenders in Perth prison.
After the war he learnt that Fons van der Heijden, the Dutch farmer who had sheltered him and with whom he shared a birthday, had been betrayed. “The Germans came and they took him out of the church and they shot him,” he said, choking back tears. He kept in touch with the family, especially Netje who nursed him back to health, and in 2018 visited a Dutch memorial to Van der Heijden and unveiled another to his fallen comrades.
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Holmes was a religious man and to the end of his life carried a Bible he had been given in Stalag Luft III. In 2019 he appeared on Songs of Praise, recalling the risks that Van der Heijden had taken. Paraphrasing the Gospel of St John, in his rich Geordie accent he concluded: “There is no greater love, than he who will give himself for another.”
Flight Lieutenant Ernie Holmes DFC, wartime pilot, was born on January 29, 1921. He died on October 14, 2021, aged 100