244027 P/O. Edgell Ralph "Carry" Carrington Royal Air Force 78 Squadron from:Port-of-Spain, Trinidad My Uncle Edgell Carrington was shot down in 1942 early in the war and hardly had time to know his crew. He had just finished induction. He was flying a Halifax Mark-2,JD330 to Essen on his very first mission and got shot down over Duisberg. The plane was on fire and Edgell bailed out hurting his leg on getting free of the cockpit. Only two others survived. He was upset about the loss of so many men when he was the pilot, probably had terrible guilt feelings. He was in his 30s and older than many men flying. He spent the next three years as a prisoner of the Germans. His POW no was L3 Camp 1810.
The young Luftwaffe officer that was in charge of them had met my uncle before the war in Trinidad, my uncle's home and birthplace. He had been in Bomber Command 4 Group with 78 Squadron at Middleton St. George, Durham from 10th of June 1942 and then went to Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire on 16th of September 1942
Edgell ended up in Stalag Luft 3 with other RAF officers and one of my cousins, Francis Carrington, recounts some of his dad's stories.
One day in the camp (Stalag Luft 3) one of the English prisoners sat down on the concrete that bordered the huts and it was the middle of winter. A young German guard came and gestured for him to get up. He just shrugged his shoulders to let the guard know that he should piss off. But the guard would not let it go. He started shouting in German. The prisoner continued to ignore him. Eventually the guard pointed his rifle at the prisoner. So this time the prisoner gave in and got up. But that became an incident because now the English felt they were being persecuted with a gun pointing at them just for sitting down. So grumbling started in the camp until some prisoner who understood a bit of German figured out what had happened. It turned out that the Germans knew only too well that if you sit on concrete in the middle of a German winter you get haemorrhoids because the blood flows to the area upon which you are sitting in an attempt to keep things warm. The German guards were used to being outdoors so they knew things like that. But the English were middle-class officers who were only used to (milder) English winters and did not have rural parents to pass down folksy information like that. So the guard felt it his duty to do the right thing and got so frustrated by his failure to communicate that he resorted to the only convincing argument he had - his rifle.
Dad said Stalag Luft 3 was really an officers camp so they were treated better than camps with enlisted men. His job with the tunnels was to be a lookout, he absolutely refused to go in any of them because he was convinced they would cave in. The camp was divided into two sections, one for Russians and one for everybody else. There was a fence between the two sections so the non-Russians could see the Russians through the fence, but there was no contact. The Germans hated the Russians because Germany was losing the war on the Russian front. They shot them quite frequently, by firing squad, for various transgressions of camp rules, but they did not treat non-Russians like that.
 Dad stated quite clearly that it was the Russians who won the war, it was their victory and nobody else's. When the Russians invaded Germany Hitler sent out the command that all prisoners of war were to be shot and Dad knew about it, or at least strongly suspected it. The German guards mulled over whether to carry out the order for a few days. Then they realised it was hopeless because the Russian army would soon be there and they would be killed for the crime. So they decided to take all the prisoners and try to march them as far as they could, away from the advancing Russians. When Dad found out he did what he considered his single bravest act of the 18 months he spent in Stalag Luft 3. He grabbed some photographs when the Germans weren't looking and stuffed them into the pocket of his RAF great coat. His idea was that the world did not know what war crimes the Germans were committing and he would risk his life to bring evidence taken straight from German files. Of course he had no idea about the concentration camps full of German Jewish civilians and what Hitler was doing to his own citizens. It turned out that, of the handful of photographs he grabbed, only one was of any value - it was of a Russian soldier being executed by firing squad. He let me look at the photographs and it was rather less impressive than it sounds. The Russian was blindfolded and facing the wall away from his executioners. He was just calmly standing there alone with his hands tied behind his back. The few Germans that formed the firing squad had not yet been given the order to raise their rifles so they were just standing around looking like they were waiting for a bus. At least that's the way I remember it. The other photographs were mostly wire fences and mud, no close-ups, no interior photographs, nothing interesting enough for me to remember. 
All these photographs were taken by German guards as part of required record-keeping procedures and they were kept in the files of the camp office. Dad said his great coat saved his life, because they were marching in winter. In the camp their diet had been mostly soup made with rotten turnips. I am not sure what they were able to eat on the march, but I remember Dad saying that everybody stuffed their pockets with as much stale German black bread as they could because they weren't convinced they would get anything to eat at all. 
He said the German guards were mostly too young or too old to fight on the Russian front so they were mostly the rejects of the German army. Even the soldier who arrested him the night he parachuted out of his bisected plane was just a teenager and was more scared than Dad was.
If anybody has stories of Edgell I would love to read them.
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