Great Escape Grandad remembered with Goldfish Club membership

A Totnes man’s grandfather has become a posthumous member of the Goldfish Club – 86 years after surviving a dramatic wartime ditching in the North Sea.

Pilot Officer on Probation Bernard ‘Pop’ Green MC was 53 when, on July 20, 1940, the aircraft was on a mission to lay a mine off Frederikshavn Harbour in northern Denmark.

Green had joined the RAF as a commissioned aerial gunnery instructor and, despite being a twice-wounded veteran and far too old for aircrew duties, found himself flying as rear gunner aboard Handley Page Hampden when he took the place of a sick crewman.

The mission - laying a mine off Frederikshavn Harbour - initially went to plan, but after the mine was jettisoned, the Hampden was hit by anti-aircraft fire and its port engine caught fire.

Pilot Sergeant E L Farrands flew the stricken aircraft over the narrow northern tip of Denmark before ditching around 400 metres from the beach.

Two crew members were killed in the impact and are buried at Skagen Cemetery, close to where the North Sea meets the Baltic.

Green and Sergeant Farrands survived and swam ashore, only to be separately arrested later that day and taken prisoner.

Green was eventually held at Stalag Luft 3, where he took part in the famous Wooden Horse escape in 1943 and the Great Escape of March 1944.

According to his grandson, he helped distribute excavated sand during both escape attempts, while also sending coded letters home.

He was then the 33rd man out of the tunnel before being recaptured almost 50 miles from the camp. 50 Allied airmen were murdered by the Gestapo following the Great Escape on Hitler’s order, but Green survived and was sent to another prisoner-of-war camp.

Now his grandson, Laurence Green, of Ashprington, has secured his grandfather’s posthumous membership of the Goldfish Club, which recognises aviators who survived ditching or parachuting into the sea with the aid of a life jacket or inflatable raft.