Romance in Wartime

 

On 13 May, 1942, 57 Squadron took off from Scampton to attack a motor works. On the return journey the Lancaster flown by Pilot Officer Jan Haye was shot down over Ensched in the Netherlands. Haye, a Dutch airman who had fled to Britain when the Netherlands was overrun in May 1940, landed uninjured, but could not find his crew. He learned later that two had died and the rest had been arrested by the Germans soon after they landed.

 Haye dumped his flying gear and RAF jacket before setting off to try to find help. Unknown to him the Germans had recently arrested a number of locals for helping downed RAF crew. Although the farmers he approached would not take him in, they did give him food and a bike to help him get to his own home town Hilversum. At Apeldoorn, Haye cycled past a column of German infantry, none of whom gave him a second glance. Eventually Haye made contact with a man he had known before the war and who he guessed would be actively anti-German. The man was not involved with the Resistance, but told Haye to go to The Hague and make contact with a government official named Anton Schrader, who was.

 Having met Schrader, Haye was whisked off to a safe house in The Hague, where he stayed hidden for the next two months. Schrader was in charge of organising coastal barges carrying food from farms to towns and cities. He had had one barge secretly converted to carry a hidden boat that was used for various Resistance missions. Interesting as this was, Haye was more taken with Elly de Jong, the young woman in whose house he was hiding.

 On 26 July, Schrader took Haye to the docks where he boarded the converted barge to meet another downed RAF pilot and several Dutchmen who were wanted by the Germans. That night the men were launched into the North Sea from the barge aboard a small rowing boat with some food and a sail. After a voyage of four days and nights they were picked up by a Royal Navy destroyer in the Thames Estuary.

 Haye returned to his squadron, later transferring to the Pathfinders and winning a DFC for a later flight. As soon as Germany surrendered, Haye asked for leave and for permission to travel to Holland. He found that both Schrader and Elly de Jong had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and held in concentration camps. Remarkably both survived and that autumn Haye married Elly. They lived to celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1997.