Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

48 Chapter Three Prisoner of War Accompanying the errors about the origins of the umbrella field are misleading accounts of Carmody’s experiences as a wartime casualty and then PoW. He was wounded, but not during a parachute jump. He was picked up off the Hook of Holland by a German vessel, but not by a U-boat. He was imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, but it wasn’t ‘near Berlin’. He didn’t witness the execution of fifty escaped PoWs. Equally false are claims about his delayed return to England at the end of the war: he did come under Soviet control, but he neither escaped nor made several attempts to do so. Yet if conjecture and misunderstandings have been too casually re-cycled, nothing better illustrates that historical records contain few absolute truths than the way the only two witnesses – Keith Carmody himself and his navigator, Gil Docking – gave somewhat different accounts of events following the crash of Beaufighter UB-YNE688 on 13 June 1944. Only Docking’s version, sent to Bill Bullen in 1999, gave details of the crash landing. He was firing the aircraft’s machine-gun in the attack on the German convoy when they were hit by flak. With oil streaming from the starboard engine, he had no doubt Keith ‘did a magnificent job in ditching the damaged aircraft – very few airmen survived such a crash-landing at sea’ because Beaufighters ‘go down nose first instead of planing across the water and settling gently’. 25 Even so, Keith was thrown forward, hitting his face on the gun-sights, while Gil ‘ejected the plastic cupola and felt my last moment had come as the air suction lifted me out of my seat … I went into a tight ball, arms around my knees, saw a black wave – then nothing until I regained consciousness’. His Mae West life-jacket had inflated, bringing him through the escape hatch and up to the surface where he saw Keith climbing into their dinghy. From this point Keith’s PoW ‘Log’, begun very soon after his incarceration, takes up the account with more convincing detail than Docking’s. The dinghy had basic survival rations, pain-killing needles and 25 Beaufighters had twin propeller engines which projected forward of the fuselage and were thus notoriously front-heavy.