Wellington Bomber Pilot Peter Walker

(by William Walker, UK) Wellington Bomber Pilot Peter Walker
Read the incredible story of a UK navigator on a Wellington bomber during WW II.

Peter Walker was born in 1915 on Christmas Eve. During the pre-war years, he attended Hotel college in Lausanne. However, in July 1939, he made a crucial decision to leave for England just before the Nazi invasion of Poland and the onset of World War II.

Joining the British air force, he was a navigator in a Wellington bomber and shot down over occupied France on his 1st. Mission. By a staggering coincidence, he was captured by two Germans with whom he had been at a hotel college in Switzerland. Wellington Bomber Pilot Peter Walker

Peter’s captors orchestrated his transportation to a prison camp by air. Fluent in both impeccable German and French, skills honed during his education at a hotel college, he found himself in a peculiar situation. Equipped with a small suitcase, housing essentials such as razor blades and soap, he suddenly confronted intense questioning by the British authorities.

He became a camp interpreter in Stalag Luft III (great escape camp), where he persuaded a camp guard to lend him, over five years, a camera to photograph general life in the camp.

Liberated by the Swiss lead team in 1945

he gave the reels of film to a Swiss liberator, asking him to forward the rare film to his English address, as he thought he might lose them. Six months after V-day, a parcel arrived with all his photos, and the Swiss liberator had them developed and printed! (they are all stamped by the Geneva Convention).

We, as a family, have a complete photographic record at home. My father, Peter Walker, has had to go into a home for the elderly; he is 96 years old.

Stalag Luft III (Stammlager Luft, or POW Camp for Airmen #3) Wellington Bomber Pilot Peter Walker

Situated amidst the tumult of World War II, this Luftwaffe-operated prisoner-of-war camp served as a detainment facility for air force servicemen who had been captured in the throes of battle. It was in the German Province of Lower Silesia near the town of Sagan (now Żagań in Poland), 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Berlin. The site was selected because it would be difficult to escape by tunneling.

Two famous prisoner escapes, depicted in the films The Great Escape (1963) and The Wooden Horse (1950), and adapted from the books by former prisoners Paul Brickhill and Eric Williams, have made the camp best known for tunneling.

Thank you very much, William, for contacting me and sharing with us this fantastic story and passport of your father. Wellington Bomber Pilot Peter Walker

 

 

Tom Topol | Passport History Expert & Author.
Featured in media incl. CNN, BBC, Newsweek. Awarded by the U.S. Department of State.
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