In Denmark, at thirteen, in 1940, Gunnar was a slave on a farm
and lived in a barn. The house maid went to the barn for a toilet, and
Gunnar fell in love with her, Helga. He had begged for meat at the
butcher store, and they gave him a few bones. When he got home, his
mother screamed. She almost burned his hair off. "What are these? I
don't want any charity. Take them back!" He started back, but on the
way, threw them out, waited a while, and went back home.
He maintained machines on the farm, and found work in Copenhagen
as an automobile mechanic. But the war happened: the Germans invaded
and occuppied.
Gunnar took up sabotage to resist. He and a friend sneaked onto an
airfield, leaked gasoline from the tank, then went out beyond the
fence, and threw burning objects wrapped on stones, until the gasoline
caught, then ran before the explosion.
German officers came to the garage, to find the saboteurs. They
said Gunnar and his friend looked tired. Why? The girls. They were
dancing all night. But in a few weeks, they got too close and he had
to leave Denmark. He and a friend sneaked onto a German airfield and
into a plane. Gunnar started it and moved off down the runway. His
friend asked him if he knew how to fly. Gunnar said No, and the friend
jumped out. Gunnar pulled on something and the plane went smoothly
into the air. In hours, he saw the coast of Norway, a beach of stones.
running out of gas, he landed on them which destroyed the landing gear
and damaged the fuselage.
He walked rto a town and met the Norwegian underground. In a few
weeks, he was put on a train North to a fisghing town where he stayed
and with others were led to the hold of a fishing boat, and not
allowed to speak until they reached the north Sea.
He climbed the rope ladder to the dock, Aberdeen. He had no
passport or papers, so he was interned and interrogated for six weeks
and learned English. Since he had left a German aircraft disabled on a
Norwegian beach, he was credited with a German kill. Lying about his
age, he was inducted into the RAF at sixteen.
He was trained as a commando and a pilot, and sent to Burma to
join a reconnaissance outfit. They were ordered never to engage with
the enemy, because of their own few planes. One day, up in the sky, he
saw a lone Zero below him and couldn't resist. He dove down, machine
gunning and under and when he came back up, the sky above and behind
the plane was filled with Zeros. He dove toward the jungle, thought he
saw a clearing but crashed in a tree. He struggled out of the plane
but did not climb down. He had seen Japanese patrols and stayed in the
tree overnight. Parents should never tell children stories about
monsters. He heard every sound imaginable. The RAF found him in the
morning. They took the repairable plane and dragged it back to the
base.
Gunnar wore two pearl handled revolvers in hip holsters and a
cobra around his neck. He had bought the cobra defanged, then one of
the men woke up very sick. They looked in the snake's mouth and the
fangs had grown back. They pulled them out again. The Japanese finally
overran Burma. The platoon surrendered.The Japanese officer was
speaking to them, and Gunnar threw the cobra at him. They respected
him for that, because of Bushido.
They had to march to the prison camp with no rests but sleep at
night. Anyone who fell was beaten until they stood up, or left to die.
They had to shit while they walked and they all had diahroea. Gunnar
asked a peqsant family for some baking soda, a Danish remedy, and it
worked like a cork.
As soon as they arrived at the camp, some decided to escape. He
had to go because he was young. At night they crawled into thick reeds
outside the wire, waited twenty four hours and then walked South into
the jungle. They hid from Japanese patrols and bought food from
peasant huts they passed. One was bittten
by a snake. He said, "Leave me." because he'd weigh them down and they
left him there. At night, they reached a sea and saw an island beyond.
He thought they'd swim, but they said there were sharks. Gunnar would
rather face the sharks than the Japanese, so he dove in and reached
the island. The big house on top was owned by an Englishman who owned
some town shops. Gunnar told him he had escaped from the Japanese and
needed help. The man gave him food and money and a hacksaw and said he
could use his sailboat. Gunnar went down to the dock and cut the
chain. He pushed out among the Japanese ships and hand rowed out of
the harbor before he made sail.
He was out at sea just after noon. A Zero spotted him, cricled
behind the small boat and made a strafing run. Gunnar tried to zig
zag. The Zero missed and circled behind him to try again. Gunnar
steered from left to right. The third time, the Zero tried to get so
close, that his wing tip caught in the water, and the plane spun onto
the sea.
The pilot climbed out and swam to the boat. Gunnar beat him with
the oar, and wouldn't let him on until he dropped his gun in the
water. He told him to sit in the prow and not to move or speak or he'd
hit him with the oar. The next afternoon an English submarine surfaced
near the boat. Gunnar went aboard, the prisoner was taken to separate
quarters for interrogation; and Gunnar returned to Aberdeen.
He had to fly a two engine plane to Canada from Scotland, but it
snowed at night. They went above the clouds, but didn't know where
they were. They went down until they saw what looked like a clear
field and landed on it. They slept in the plane, since the temperature
was below zero. In the morning they saw they had landed on a glacier.
They started the engines but the plane wouldn't move. They climbed out
and saw that the wheels were frozen in the ice. Twenty four hours
later, a mountain ski rescue team arrived and brought Gunnar and the
copilot down. When the war was over, the plane was brought down in
summer and was the first aircraft in Icelandic Airlines.
In England, a friend asked Gunnar to take a mail package to a
window and drop it in.Gunnar did and gave it to the man behind it. He
began to notice he was being followed: some MI6 type up ahead read a
newspaper or trailed behind within forty meters. He went on bombing
runs to Germany, and flew spy and delivery runs to Denmark. Sometimes
he flew people in or out. He landed on a cow path, then wheeled the
plane into a barn while the farmers threw straw back on the cow path,
and swept over the entance to the barn. A German officer drove up and
parked in front of the barn. Someone had heard a plane noise. The
officer looked in the barn and said he smelled oil. Gunnar said they
had just oiled machinery and the officer left.
Gunnar was stopped on the street and asked where the police
station was. The pre invasion police helped saboteurs. Gunnar said he
didn't know. He was let go. He phoned an underground member to tell
them to phone the Danish police because the germans were looking for
them. Stopped again, he told the Germans the old police station was a
large house on the outskirts of town. They demanded he take them
there.
There were several. He chose the one with the longest pathway. He
started up to the door alone, then ran to the shore line on the right,
jumped into some thick reeds in shallow water, and tried to stay
submerged, with his mouth out of the water. The Germans found him.
They sent him to Stutthof, the concentration camp in Germany. He
ended up in the same barrack with some of the policeman he was
supposed to inform on. When Gunnar took his pants off, the germans
noticed he was circumcized and told him he was Jewish. They rifle
whipped him unconscious. He woke up lying on a long metal table with
other bodies, some dead. A doctor and a nurse came into the room with
hypodermics of gasoline, a lethal injection. There was a chute down,
like a laundry chute, at the end of the table. An angel came to him,
and told him to jump down it. He crawled down the table and fell down
the chute.
He came out on bodies in a yard where two men carried them from
the chute bottom to a large gas oven on the other side. He helped them
carry, but realized sooner or later he'd be noticed. To one side was a
wire fence, and beyond it a high pile of corpses. Gunnar tried to dig
under the fence, but there was planking. He helped carry corpses
again; then went back to the fence and squeezed through a tear. He
climbed the pile of corpses and lay on his back, arms out to his
sides.
A German truck arrived. They began to lift and throw bodies on. A
soldier poked Gunnar and said, "This one doesn't look dead."
The other said, "Take him anyway."
They threw him on the truck. They drove about a hundred
kilometers and dumped him in a bulldozed pit, covered over with more
bodies and then dirt. He did not move for what he thought was twenty
four hours. Then he dug his way out. He came up in the middle of a
field and headed North. He came to a scarecrow and since it was cold
took the clothes. By morning, he had to hide in a potato field. The
peasants came to pick in a square around him that came closer and
closer. They stopped for lunch, went on all afternoon and went home.
He walked to the beginning of hills. and knocked on a small
house. They had lost children to the Third Reich so they wanted to
help. They gave him food, clothes and a bath and let him sleep. In the
morning, he went on to a coast town. In a bar he heard sailors
speaking Danish. He told them had to to leave Germany.
They took him on board ship and put him in a hold under twenty feet of
coal. German soldiers came on board to inspect. They plunged long iron
rods down into the coal but missed him. Halfway to England, the ship
stopped for a submarine rendezvous, then let him up.
He had laid mines in the North Sea to explode German shipping.
Two years later, on a merchant mission from England to Denmark, there
was a loud explosion.Everything went black. The entrance door was on
its side. The light bulb was swinging. The ship fell on its side and
they sat on the edge. The next afternoon, the Royal Navy rescued them
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barry Titus
Date: Mar 1, 2009 4:08 PM
Subject: RAF
To: theoldie@theoldie.co.uk
Gunnar Pedersen, Flying Ace
recorded by Barry Titus
In Denmark, at thirteen, in 1940, Gunnar
