63 years later. About the airmen who were shot down and the liberation on 5 May 1945    
experienced by Knud Raunkjær

Eye witness account from Knud Raunkjær (born on 26 June 1923) written in April 2008 in Tarm. (He died on 26 August 2014.)

In the rainy twilight of the evening of 12 March 1945 I stood outside the gate to my home, the farm Raunkjærgaard (here), looking to the south. I was 21 years old then.

I heard shooting from Ølgod area. Suddenly a British Lancaster bomber appeared from the south west. It was humming a lot and tried to gain altitude. It looked exactly
as if it was going to crash directly down into our farm. A German night fighter had shot at it.

However, the plane made it a bit further and crashed into a field belonging to our neighbour Svend Jensen. (The crash was here, overview here.) I hurried in, put on my rubber boots and grabbed a couple of electric torches. Then I ran all that I could towards the plane. Here I hid behind the dike and had a look at the situation. Some
pieces of wreckage had also fallen down into our own field near the moor.

Our neighbour Svend had just come home from Ølgod, and he shouted that we had to get the two soldiers out, as the plane was on fire. I managed to get one of them
out. He was shot through his head and died. We placed him under a wing. The other airman had died in the air crash.

"Doctor" Bent Øllgaard had also seen the plane crash and he came on his motor-cycle at full speed. He was our family doctor, and both of us were active in the
resistance movement. He was a member of the nation-wide movement, and together we founded the "Lyne Cell" comprising tailor Frede Rasmussen, Knud Thygesen, Aage Thygesen, teacher Sinding of the Lyne School, Niels Persson, Laurids Bundgård, Knud Raunkjær and Oskar Mortensen.
(See "The Lyne Cell" by Knud Raunkjær, April 1999, based on 20 pages of memoirs from my diary written in June 1945.)

We saw the Germans coming at full speed from the Hedegaarden and from Ølgod. They had also seen the plane falling down from there. Then Doctor Øllgaard hurried away, as he did not want to be caught by them again. Once before he had been to an interrogation in Kolding where he had been tortured.

5 soldiers from the plane had managed to bail out. I heard them walk about in Vallund whistling for each other. All of them were helped by local West Jutlanders who
hid them from the Germans till all of them safely reached Sweden. One of them was hidden at the home of Åge Uhre whom we knew.

Right after the liberation of Denmark a memorial stone was erected to the two dead airmen, the Englishman Donald Morris and the Australian Harvey James Porter.
They looked very young. Their hands were so fine and they nearly had the faces of children.

I think that they were students from a university, who had volunteered to help in the war against Hitler. It was hard for me to see such young lives being wasted. Less
than a month and a half later Denmark was liberated.

A lorry came from the CB Corps from Tarm. The CB Corps (the Civil Defence) was established by a law in 1938 to help the civilian population. They assisted at
hospitals, in the fire brigade and in the police. Those who were called up to the Corps during the occupation had the popular name of "colts" - trainee assistants -
as they served the police and had to follow a "full-fledged" police officer. They began with a few hours of training in police work and to start with they wore yellow
boiler suits. Later they had a forage cap and a real uniform with a green armband.

The CB Corps took the deceased men to the hospital in Tarm, and later they were secretly buried by the Germans in "the British War Graves" at Østermarken
near Tarm.

In 1995 a memorial ceremony marked the 50th Anniversary of the event.

Shortly after the air crash we were ordered to accommodate some German soldiers on the farm where I was born, "Raunkjærgaard". They came in a lorry that was
parked at the stable. Their job was to collect the pieces of wreckage from the plane and transport them to the railway in Ølgod. All equipment and metal had to be recycled or melted down.

Our neighbour Svend had a housekeeper, Jenny. She sewed a dress of the fabric from one of the parachutes. She dyed the fabric, so that the dress had a fine
bluish-lilac colour. My sister Kirstine, who was living at home then, clearly remembers that.

The soldiers spent the nights in our rooms for farmhands in one of the wings with stables. They had their meals served in the kitchen. We had our meals in the
dining room. Every evening we listened to "the Danish voice" from London. Once we were listening to the radio from England they wept. They heard how the
Russians had attacked the places in Germany where they came from. They were married and thought of what would happen to their wives and children.

They were harmless people and they were treated well at our home. My mother, Else Raunkjær, my sister and a housemaid cooked for them and everyone took
it easy.

We learned about their feelings and found out that they were ordinary people, who could not help that Hitler had started World War II. They were longing to go back
to their families and like us they wished that the war would come to an end very soon.

I was afraid that they would discover the stock of hand grenades and ammunition that I had hidden in the far end of our potato cellar near the kitchen garden.

I had fetched it on my bike near the vicarage in Ølgod in the dark of night. We fetched it in sacks and none of us had been arrested.

They passed very near the potato cellar every day, as it was on the way to the crash site.

My father Christian Raunkjær and my sister knew  nothing about my part of the activities in the Lyne Cell, but I knew that my mother had sensed it. She did not
ask for any details. Quietly we agreed that the less she knew, the less she could reveal during an interrogation.

The liberation was on 5 May, and I have earlier written about that in the article "The resistance against Germans" published in Ringkøbing Amts Dagblad in 2005.

Flags flew everywhere and church bells pealed to express our joy that the war was over now, and here we were as members of the resistance movements, soldiers
under the command of Montgomery and Eisenhower.

I was to enlist as a soldier on 18 July 1945 in Haderslev, and I therefore stopped serving as a guard in Strellev on 1 July. The others in the Cell stayed another month.
On 24 June we filled a bus going to the big assembly of Region 3 at Skamlingsbanken. On the same day there was also a fine gathering in Ølgod for members of the resistance movement where we received badges of our Region.

Niels Persson, who was living in the village then, related, "It was a beautiful morning in spring and there was a very special mood. People assembled to get news.
There was no work in the fields and the animals were tended no more than absolutely necessary."

The latest months had been filled with excitement and concern. Would the war come to our village at last? We had worn our King pins and sung our patriotic songs.
The most daring of us had illegal newspapers hidden in the most peculiar places.
(See further description in article in the Vestkysten on Saturday 3 May 1975: "How Lyne experienced 5 May.")

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Memoirs collected by pupils or sent directly from people who have experienced the liberation or the occupation.
Updated on 8 January 2010. More on www.befrielsen1945.dk. (See version in Danish.)