On the 80th anniversary of D-Day and witnessing the French President Macron awarding the Legion d’Honneur (LdH) to attending D-Day/Overlord veterans still with us. I am reminded of this very special South African. Albie Götze took part in D-Day as a Spitfire pilot seconded to the Royal Air Force, he later took part in Operation Market Garden as a Typhoon pilot. After World War 2 (1939-1945), he took part in the Berlin Air Lift as a Navigator (1948 to 1949), he later took part in the Korean War as a Mustang pilot (1950 to 1953) and finished his career as a General in South African Air Force and took part in the Border War (1966-1989). Albie was one of those very rare war veterans having survived all of that.
As South African Legion I was involved in the obtaining of Legion d’Honneur, the supreme award given by the French government to all surviving D-Day veterans and at the time South Africa’s only surviving D-Day veteran. Here I am (left) with Albie (on the right) and the French Ambassador, his excellency Christophe Farnaud (in the middle) on the occasion of his medal parade and receipt of his LdH on the 13th February 2018 in Cape Town. I also took he opportunity to also present Albie with a print of my Dad’s painting of a Typhoon.
Over time I came to know Albie well and heard many of his stories, I kept my promise to myself to buy any WW2 veteran I meet a beer, and Albie shared this story with me on one such occasion when he and I were hitting a pint of beer and oysters at the Quayside cabin in Hermanus (Albie loved oysters). It says a great deal about this wartime generation, the guts and courage of these young men, they truly are a generation apart.
During D-Day, Operation Overlord and Operation Market Garden Albie’s aircraft was hit on many occasions and he made a few crash landings with damaged aircraft. He recalled on such incident as if they were yesterday, this is a very brave account of combat flying, honest, harrowing and even a little funny – in the darkest manner of ‘military humour’.
“I got shot one day, as a matter of fact I was watching this guy shooting at me, with a 88 mm, he shot at me and I looked and I said to myself ‘this bastard is going to kill me’ … he shot me at the back of the fuselage, but, the 88mm did not explode for some unknown reason, God must have said ‘I not gonna put this fuse on’, But it did cut my trim-wire to my rudder and all it does is that your aircraft just rolls over and you go strait in, but fortunately I was able to ‘catch it’ (arrest the aircraft roll with opposite ailerons);
… but I could only fly at an angle a friend radioed and said ‘Albie are you in trouble?’, I said to him ‘yes’, I can’t see out, at this time as I got down into the cockpit and grabbed hold of the rudder bar in order to keep on flying, otherwise I would go down. He said “I will fly on top of you”, been down there you can’t see out of the cockpit, all I could see was up, he brought me home like that, him flying on top (as a visual marker), me underneath. When I did the crash landing, that scoop on ‘the typhoon’ is full of oil and it sparked and catches fire quickly, I was so scared, before the plane came to a stop, I was out of the cockpit and I ran so fast that the ambulance could not catch me”.
Wow, there’s everything in that story, drama, bravery, camaraderie, action and comedy … and this was one of many many similar stories Albie could relate, not just from WW2, but the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War and the Angolan Border War … this was a man who had truly seen life and death, he had endured some of the greatest blows in history and survived.
When Albie died in September 2018, I had the privilege of giving his eulogy and our local veteran associations, The South African Legion, The Memorable Order of Tin Hats and The South African Air Force Association all saw him off. A true warrior of the sky, and one of the very last of his kind. His humility as a combat pilot is best wrapped up in his own words to me:
‘I survived because of sheer luck alone … with God’s grace.”
Written by Peter Dickens, a privilege to share this story again – lest we forget.
To read a little more about Albie – follow this link:
The Observation Post 