Amazing Airmen. Ian Darling
works of William Shakespeare; the second was a copy of Reader’s Digest from 1926. His favourite Shakespearean play was Hamlet. Renner’s confinement enabled him to understand Hamlet’s isolation and introspection.
To get some fresh air, Renner would go to the courtyard at the back of the house, but he could do that only when no one was around.
He and Maria occasionally left the house after dark. Sometimes they went to her brother’s house, where Joseph Jr. told Renner about the progress of the war. They also went to see two other Allied airmen in Fairoul who were evading the Germans, Sergeant Charles Warren, an American, and Sergeant Alan Lucas, an Englishman. They stayed with the village priest.
In February 1944, another evader arrived at Maria’s home and stayed in a room on the second floor. He was Sergeant Norm Michie, a Canadian from Toronto who had been shot down over the Netherlands.
With two evaders on the second floor, Maria’s father realized strangers were in his home. Maria told him they were members of the Belgian Resistance who were staying overnight. Even though the father had seen them, Renner and Michie tried to stay away from him.
Some days the house was even more crowded. Brother Materne stayed there if he was travelling on behalf of the Resistance and needed a place to sleep.
Despite the stress of working with the Resistance, or perhaps because of it, Maria maintained a sense of humour. Once, when Désiré Croin, the head of the local movement, visited her house she offered him a cigarette she had rolled. It contained not only tobacco, but also the end of a match. Croin, who had a moustache, smoked the cigarette contentedly until the match flared and singed his moustache.
Renner and Michie talked to members of the Resistance when they came to Maria’s house. In particular, they could easily talk to Elisabeth Neuville. She spoke English well because she had studied in England before the war. Her brother, Walter Neuville, was the second in command of the local movement.
These conversations prompted the two evaders to think of joining the Resistance. They felt restless, and they wanted to help the war effort. They also thought the Resistance might eventually help them get back to England.
By mid-April, the winter had receded, and the Resistance in the area, known as Secret Army Zone 1C60, could concentrate on putting men in the woods. Croin, the head of the zone, and Neuville accepted the offer of the two airmen to join their Resistance group.
For Renner and Michie, leaving Maria was emotionally difficult. She had risked her life for them.
The two men walked for several hours to a camp that the Resistance had set up in a wooded area near the town of Walcourt. On his first night in the camp, Renner felt apprehensive. He had left the relative security of Maria’s house and he did not know what would happen next.
The camp was composed of two huts. One became the home of seven men: Charles Warren and Alan Lucas, who were the two other evaders in Laneffe; Pat Healey, a Canadian evader from Montreal; two Russians; and Renner and Michie. Two Yugoslavians lived in the other hut.
Renner’s hut provided rudimentary accommodation. About five metres by five metres, it was made of tree branches, parachute silk, and straw.
The men at the camp had a specific job to perform. They were responsible for retrieving supplies that the Royal Air Force occasionally dropped by parachute.
The group was always prepared, in case the Germans raided the camp. They wore their clothes at all times. They were also armed with Sten submachine guns. The Russians and Yugoslavians carried the guns. Those men were particularly tough.
A member of the Resistance came to the camp each day. In addition to bringing items needed for daily living, the visitors would tell the men when to expect an aircraft. The Resistance received information about the flights through shortwave broadcasts on the British Broadcasting Corp. Neuville had the radio to receive these messages.
The code was the French phrase “la carpe est muette,” which means “the carp is silent.” Those words designated a particular field near the camp as the drop zone.
The BBC broadcast the code on May 10, 1944. Renner was excited. This was what he had been waiting for. He and his colleagues went to the field in the evening and waited for the plane. The group had four big spotlights. When they heard the engines of a plane, the men shone the lights on the area where they wanted the pilot to drop the supplies.
Each drop included about ten or twelve canisters, and weighed about nine tons. The canisters, containing items such as guns, ammunition, and cigarettes, came down without any complications. The men went to them, removed the parachutes, sorted the contents, and hid the supplies in the woods for the night. The next day a member of the Resistance came to the camp in a truck to collect them.
The supplies were well protected. Belgian police, quietly working with the Resistance, travelled with the load, just in case problems arose on the way.
The Royal Air Force dropped supplies near the camp on two other nights during the spring and summer. Because the men in the camp could go several weeks without having to retrieve canisters and sort the supplies, they had a lot of free time. During this time the English-speaking men talked with the Russians and the Yugoslavians in broken French, which was their only common language. They spoke about their home countries, their families, and the war.
The three Canadians — Renner, Michie, and Healey — commiserated with each other. Even though winter was over, the camp was cold, and they wondered when they would get back to Canada.
One day the men in the camp collected some money they had accumulated and asked a member of the local Resistance to buy a few bottles of gin. That night, the camp had a party atmosphere.
On June 6, the camp had a different kind of celebration. On this day, Neuville and his sister came to say that the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches. It was D-Day, the day the men in the camp had been waiting for. From then on, they wondered when Allied troops would arrive in Belgium.
A Belgian army officer came to the camp with a member of the Resistance in early September, to tell them that the American Third Army had liberated the area. For Wilf Renner, the war was over.
Renner and Michie went back to Fairoul, and stayed with Maria for a few days. They quickly saw how the Germans had lost their power. Brother Materne brought a seventeen-year-old German soldier he had captured to the house. He put the soldier on a bed and chained him to a metal railing. The next day he took the prisoner away.
Maria finally introduced Renner and Michie to her father, the person they had tried to avoid meeting.
While at Maria’s home, Renner and Michie received British uniforms and were taken to an American base at Brussels. At the base, the Americans interrogated Renner to determine if he really was an Allied evader and not a German spy. He then flew to London, where the British interrogated him again. Finally, he was released to the RCAF.
The air force informed Renner’s parents that their son was alive and well. Even though Louise Renner had not heard anything about her son for almost a year, she always believed he was alive.
Renner came home on the Queen Mary, which docked in New York. He arrived back in Preston on October 31, 1944. Less than a month later, on November 25, he married Elizabeth.
He remained in the RCAF and stayed at several bases. He was prepared to participate in the war against Japan, but the air force discharged him in May 1945, the month the war against Germany ended.
JD463 crashed near the village of Thy-le-Château. All of Renner’s crewmates