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General Leon Degrelle Alea Jacta Est My first feeling
when the airplane left Norwegian soil was one of relief. In taking off we had
cut the last mooring ropes of uncertainty. Now everything was clear. When the
airplane landed either we would have succeeded or we would be irremediably
lost. Alea jacta est. Life or death! We would soon know which definitively. We didn’t
have to do any more thinking, planning, and weighing. It was almost
midnight. The war had in fact been over since the German radio transmission
at 1400 hours. Nonetheless the capitulation would not be officially in force
until the next day, 8 May 1945. We were between
war and peace, as between earth and sky. We flew for a time above the
Skagerrak. From this time on, only the compass on our instrument panel and
the marvelous skill of the pilot would guide us in the storm. Naturally we
couldn’t take our bearings from the radio. We didn’t even have a map of
Europe. All in all our
aviators had a magnificent map ... of Norway: One of them had in
addition a minuscule map of France which came from a pocket atlas. It
lavishly displayed three rivers: the Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone. We climbed to
4,000 meters in order to save fuel, but a storm quickly forced us to fly
fairly low. Obviously an isolated
plane launched thus across 2,000 kilometers of occupied territory without any
protection would run twenty times the risk of being brought down. Our only
chance of salvation lay in the monster celebration which had been going on
all afternoon in the Allied Op. On all the
airfields in the West the victors were in the process of swilling rivers of
champagne and whiskey. Thousands of British and American combat pilots, freed
from the worry of nocturnal missions, would be on the edge-or in the depths-of
inebriation at the hour our Heinkel was crossing their surveillance zones. Of
all nights, this was the one to pull it off. Besides, who would imagine that
a solitary plane still proudly bearing its swastikas would dare fly over
Holland, Belgium, and the whole of France, now that the war was over? Above
all, who would imagine that one of the Reich’s planes would come out of the
North Sea from along the coast of Scotland? We had taken care, in truth, to
use this stratagem, heading first straight toward England, then approaching
the European continent as if we were coming from British shores. I watched the dark
lands beneath. Automobiles were hurrying along with their headlights on.
Little towns shone like boxes of burning matches. Everywhere people would be
singing and drinking. It was perhaps
one-thirty in the morning when I noticed a disturbing phenomenon. A big
searchlight had been turned on behind us and was scanning the sky. My heart began to
beat faster. In spite of the
celebrations on the ground, we had been spotted. Searchlights were now
probing at out altitude. Others were lighting up far in front of us. The
airfields were outlined in great squares of light. The runways shone like
white sheets. Our machine flew
as fast as it could to escape those accursed lights, but always other
searchlights lit up and rose toward us as though to seize us. Glimmers of
light spattered our wings. The radio began to
crackle. The Allied observers called us: “Who are you? What are you doing?” We didn’t reply.
We fled, pushing harder and harder. Belgium was below
me. Antwerp was there, shining in the first night of the return of peace. I
thought about our rivers, our roads, about all the towns where I had spoken,
the plains, the hills, the ancient houses that I loved so much. These people
who were there under the plane, these people I had wanted to raise, to
ennoble, to bring back to the paths of glory. To my left I saw the lights of
Brussels, the big black splash of the Soignes forest which had long been my
beloved home. Ah! The
wretchedness of being beaten and seeing one’s dream die! I gritted my teeth
to keep from shedding tears. It was in the night and the wind, pursued by a
bitter fate, that I had my last rendezvous with the sky of my homeland. We had not passed
Lille. Always the airfield searchlights harassed us. But the further south we
penetrated, the more hope we had of cheating death. We approached
Paris, which our Heinkel flew over at a very low altitude. I could make out
the streets and the squares, silvery as doves. We were still
alive. We flew over the Beauce, the Loire, the Vendee. Soon we would reach
the Atlantic. The pilots,
however, were exchanging worried looks. Certainly we now ran less risk of
being brought down by the Allied anti-aircraft guns or night fighters. But
the fuel was running low. The night was
terribly dark. I searched the
ground anxiously. The luminous hands showed five o’clock in the morning. An
ephemeral glow eased the darkness. I recognized it instantly. It was the
Gironde estuary. We were on the right route. We followed along
the sea. We could just make
out the leaping line of the waves at the edge of the beach. To the east, at
the very end of the sky, the horizon shimmered almost imperceptibly. We were running
lower and lower on fuel. By the bluish
lights on the instrument panel I scrutinized the drawn features of the
pilots. The plane slowed
and descended. We passed opposite
Arcachon. I had once lived there under the aromatic pines. The harbor was lit
up as if for Bastille Day. From a distance we
followed the black mass of the Landes, broken by the gleaming lake of
Biscarosse. The Heinkel
misfired a number of times. One of the pilots brought
us life jackets. The fuel gauge showed empty. We might fall into the sea at
any moment. With a tension
that ate at my nerves I studied the probable line of the Pyrenees. Daybreak
was glimmering feebly. The peaks of the
mountains ought to be visible. We couldn’t see them. The plane was misfiring
more and more loudly. To the southeast a
distant blued curve hemmed the sky. The chain of the Pyrenees was there. But could we stay
in the air as far as the Spanish coast? Because of the
storm we had flown almost twenty-three hundred kilometers. We had to list the
airplane onto the left wing, then onto the right wing, to make the last
liters of fuel from the tanks flow into the motors. I knew the region
of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. I could barely make out the whitening bend
of the Pyrennes at the mouth of the Bidassoa. But the plane wanted no more of
it and had come down almost to water level. We were going to die twenty
kilometers from the Iberian coast. We had to shoot the red shipwreck flares.
Two military patrol boats headed towards us, coming from the French coast. What a tragedy!
And to think that a searchlight was now blinking in the distance, a Spanish
searchlight! It was strange to
see the white-capped crests of the waves and the sea lapping close beneath
us, ready to swallow us up. We still hadn’t fallen in. The coast was coming
closer, pushing its reefs and rocks toward us and its green and black peaks,
barely detached from the shadows. Suddenly the pilot
stood the plane up vertically, almost turning it completely over, and revving
the motor so as to catch the last drops of benzine. Then he charged over a
rocky hill and, with an awful racket, grazed several red roofs. We no longer had
the time to think. We had seen a
short ribbon of sand in a clearing. The Heinkel, which hadn’t lowered its
landing gear, slid on its fuselage at two hundred and fifty kilometers an
hour. I saw the right motor explode, glowing like a ball of fire. The machine
turned, lunged toward the sea, went into the waves, and crashed. The water flooded
into the back cabin and rose up to our waists. I had five fractures. On the
beach at San Sebastian the civil guards with black two-cornered hats rushed
back and forth in agitation. Some Spaniards as naked as Tahitians swam out to
our wrecked plane. They pulled us up
onto a wing of the twin-engine, then into a canoe. An ambulance came
alongside. This time the war
was really over. We were alive. God had saved us. My injuries themselves were
a blessing. I spent months in
a hospital bed, but I had kept my strength and my faith. I hadn’t experienced
the bitterness of falling uselessly into the hands of my enemies. I remained, a
witness to my soldiers’ deeds. I could defend them from the lies of
adversaries insensible to heroism. I could tell of their epic on the Donets
and the Don, in the Caucasus and at Cherkassy, in Estonia, at Stargard, on
the Oder. One day the sacred
names of our dead would be repeated with pride: Our people, hearing these
tales of glory, would feel their blood quicken. And they would know their
sons. Certainly we had
been beaten. We had been dispersed and pursued to the four corners of the
world. But we could look
to the future with heads held high. History weighs the merit of men. Above
worldly baseness, we had offered our youth against total immolation. We had
fought for Europe, its faith, its civilization. We had reached the very
height of sincerity and sacrifice. Sooner or later Europe and the world would
have to recognize the justice of our cause and the purity of our gift. For hate dies,
dies suffocated by its own stupidity and mediocrity, but grandeur is eternal. And we lived in
grandeur. |
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