SEQUIM – Don Leslie is a walking, laughing ray of sunlight, so one wouldn’t suspect that he’s witnessed one of history’s darkest moments.
Leslie, 85, took time out before this Memorial Day to tell a story so vivid it sounds like it happened last week, not six decades ago.
It was spring 1944, and Leslie was a young man from Haney, British Columbia, who had joined the British Royal Air Force right out of high school.
“We were antsy. We wanted to travel,” he said of the four buddies who enlisted with him.
As World War II ravaged Europe, Leslie was flying over Rouen, France, when his plane was hit by a German night fighter.
He had pulled only one of the two pins to release his parachute when the aircraft exploded in flames around him.
As he fell to Earth, “it went past me, all on fire and in pieces,” Leslie said.
Somehow he landed, uninjured, in a field.
He heard a dog bark and followed the sound to Huguette Verhague, a woman who lived in a modest farmhouse nearby.
“She was scared to death” at the sight of the Allied airman.
She disappeared into her house – and emerged with bread, a half-bottle of wine and a note from Reginald Joyce, the rear gunner who’d also survived the crash of Leslie’s plane.
Verhague, though terrified that she’d be discovered by German soldiers, offered the airmen shelter in her barn.
They hid there for six weeks before setting out for the city.
Walking on a rural road, the two airmen were picked up by a driver who said he was with the French Resistance, and could take them to Paris.
They got into the car, which did bring them to the Nazi-occupied capital.
But when they pulled up to an office building, they realized it was the headquarters of the Gestapo.
The driver was no Frenchman.
He was a German policeman.
“He pulled out a revolver and said, ‘You’re my prisoners,'” Leslie recalled.
He and Joyce were later loaded into a 30-by-10-foot boxcar with 90 others and shipped out.
