Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

49 a Very pistol with red flares. They had a sea anchor, which they threw overboard, and a cover for shelter but no wireless or transmitter. After some 21 hours they heard engines, avoided firing a Very flare and drifted between two speeding vessels until one stopped, swept them with a searchlight and pulled them and their dinghy aboard. The two both reported that the youthful crew of the fast R-Boat treated them well. But Keith gave a gloomier account of events than Docking, who recalled that he himself had two flesh wounds, while ‘Keith sustained a couple of black eyes but was otherwise unscathed’. 26 ‘Both of us,’ wrote Keith, were all in after having bled continually for many hours. Sea was very rough and weather very bad most of the time, keeping us very wet, cold and miserable. We had saved our rations, except for two pieces of barley sugar … When we were taken aboard I collapsed with bad cramp in both legs and was weak from loss of blood. TheygavesimilargeneralaccountsofinterrogationbytheLuftwaffe, brief transfer to a hospital and journeys across devastated landscapes to imprisonment in south-eastern Germany. But in his different recollection of many aspects of their treatment, Docking may have also drawn, perhaps unconsciously, on half a century of movie portrayals. There was no place in Keith’s account for many of Docking’s enlivening details: the meerschaum-smoking R-Boat captain and his crew’s ‘For you the war is over!’ greeting; the ‘SS officer in a black uniform with silver braid’ haranguing the hospital orderlies ‘mercilessly for fraternising with the enemy’; a whispered ‘Good luck, boys!’ from a Dutchman on a railway platform in Eindhoven; or ‘the suave German who spoke perfect English and asked me why an Australian would bother to come to Europe!’ As airmen, wrote Keith, ‘we weren’t worth two cents’ to those in the naval hospital where they were taken by the R-boat. After being handed over to the Luftwaffe, who confiscated their personal possessions, they changed trains many times before reaching Eindhoven, where ‘a large following of Dutch children in wooden shoes joined them on a five-mile march’ past the bombed Philips factory – ‘what a walk that was!’ The solitary confinement that followed was in Eindhoven, remembered Docking. It was, wrote 26 Docking was wrong. On 27 February 1954 The West Australian reported that Carmody was to have ‘a slight operation for the removal of splinters of bone from his face … embedded in his cheek, just below his left eye, for more than ten years.’ Prisoner of War