23dayseu

He started flying late in the war about 1943. He started his training and he only went onto operations in about the middle of '44. So the flying he did was escort duties for the massive bombing groups that were raiding Germany at the time. I don't believe he saw many German planes due to the fact we were winning the war.

He did not make it to the final prison he was being transported to. He was on one of the transport trains. A train pulling lots of cattle wagons with lots of prisoners in them. He and 10 other men formed an escape party and managed to remove the bolts holding the floor of the train down. At a stop close to the prison they lifted the floor and made their escape. He and two others were the only ones to survive the initial escape.

He returned to Europe as a SOE agent and when the Nazis attacked Russia everyone headed East to avoid the invading Nazis. After a lot of moving about he ended up in the middle east to meet up with the Allies that were there.

But to be honest typing all that would be far to heavy handed for an AMA. Just using Russians to mean the Russian army.

Before the war he lived on a very large estate owned by his father. About 1000 hectares. They were a reasonably well off family. They had lots of land with fruit trees, bee hives, farmed land and all the normal wild life you find in a forest. So before the war he would have had a normal diet. A mixture of what was grow and hunted.

When the Russians invaded it was a lot harder to get food as he was living with a partisan group fighting against the Russians. Bread was a big part of their diet which was often made by locals for them.

While he was in prison it was mainly dry bread and thin soup. Sometimes he would get some extras either from a kindly guard or from a guard or prisoner that he had helped. He had some medical training so he because the medic of wherever he was at the time. The food that they wanted most was onions and garlic as most of the prisoners suffered from scurvy due to the lack of food.