After parachuting out of a burning Lancaster bomber and landing in France in the wake of D-Day, 19-year-old Max Barry planned to hide out until Allies broke through German lines and he could return to England.
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But it would be almost a year of hardship before he found himself on safe soil.
Dr Barry, now 99 and living in Port Kembla, grew up near Colac, west of Geelong.
He was an 18-year-old trainee teacher when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 1942.
Dr Barry became the rear gunner in a Lancaster bomber, flying with the 463 Squadron in the Royal Air Force's (RAF) Bomber Command.
He and his crew arrived in the United Kingdom in May 1944 and the following month, on the morning of D-Day, they bombed German gun emplacements on the Normandy coast.
Disaster strikes
Just days later, as they returned from their seventh mission on the night of June 10-11, 1944, their plane went down.
"I was sitting there watching the outside, big sheets of flame came past... both the mid upper gunner and myself alerted the pilot the port inner engine was on fire," Dr Barry said.
The engineer put the flames out but then the other engine caught fire.
The pilot told the crew to bail out because they would not reach England.
Upon landing, Dr Barry hid his parachute and began walking.
"I thought I'd go north, wait till the Allies broke through, hide out on a farm, and get back to England," he said.
"That was the theory."
Dr Barry walked for weeks. Eventually he found a small village and asked a woman if he could buy food; he had learnt French back home, so could communicate with the locals.
She had no food but offered him the choice of one or two litres of milk.
"I didn't know what a litre was in those days, two sounded better than one, so I said two and promptly drank the lot," he said.
"She realised I was an airman on the run, I could see she was friendly, and she said they had a farm half a kilometre down the road.
"Nobody on the farm - empty house, barn - hide in the barn and they'd leave some food out at night, which they did."
It was on the run that he marked his 20th birthday.
'Halt!'
About a week or so after his arrival at the barn, the farm boy came down and warned him to leave because the Germans were in the village.
"So I grabbed my little bag and took off," he said.
"Got about three fields away. 'Halt!'"
Dr Barry's French was better than the German sergeant's so he was "OK for a while" but he was arrested when he couldn't produce any papers.
He was interrogated then handed over to the Luftwaffe for further questioning.
"I didn't tell them much other than my name and number, and he said, 'Oh well... we shoot spies in the morning. Sleep well'," Dr Barry said.
He was not shot. But he was sent to a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Bankau (what is now Bakow, Poland), arriving about August 1944.
On January 19, 1945, at 4am, Dr Barry and the 1600-odd other prisoners were told they had two hours to "get packed and get out" as the Red Army of the Soviet Union approached.
They trudged through deep snow as they set out on what became part of "the March", walking about 12 kilometres each day towards Germany in the bitter cold.
"We walked all night one night. It was a dreadful night really... very cold, snowing, and the doctor - we had a doctor, army doctor - he told us, 'Don't lie down and go to sleep, you'll never wake up'," Dr Barry said.
After more than two weeks the POWs were loaded into train wagons, about 55 men in each with standing room only, arriving two and a half days later at a camp in Luckenwalde, near Berlin.
Dr Barry was there when the Red Army first arrived on April 21, 1945. The well-equipped first group stopped briefly before moving, and the remainder of the soldiers pass through the next day.
"The people just walked past for two days, like a crowd going to the football match," Dr Barry said.
Finding a way home
While the Red Army liberated the camp, the Russians wanted to send Allied POWs home via Odesa, in what is now Ukraine.
But some POWs decided to walk towards the American lines, about 65 kilometres away. Among them were Dr Barry, the navigator from his crew, Glen King, and an English serviceman.
"We three walked together and shared the food... We had a blanket each, we took it in turns to sleep one in the middle, two on each side. The one in the middle was warm," Dr Barry said.
The Russians directed the POWs to return to camp and most did, Dr Barry said, but others - including himself and his two mates - fled.
They hitched a ride on Russian trucks to a town on the Elbe River and then got a lift in American tanks to an American camp, where they enjoyed the kinds of meals they had not seen for some time.
From there Dr Barry went to Brussels and flew back to England, arriving in early May 1945.
All but one of the seven men in Dr Barry's crew survived; four became POWs.
The bomb-aimer, Tony Matthews, got back to England a month after their Lancaster crashed and even wrote to Dr Barry in the POW camp, telling him, "I'm having a beer in London".
But the pilot, Joseph Fletcher, went down with the aircraft.
He was one of the 4149 RAAF airmen in Bomber Command - more than a third of those who served - to die in WWII.
Life post-war
Dr Barry returned to Australia a short time after arriving in England.
He later moved to Sydney to study veterinary science, where at a dance he met a medical student who would become his wife, Ruth.
The couple had two daughters, Katherine and Christina, and lived in Albury for much of their lives before moving to the Illawarra in the mid-2000s.
In 1985 Dr Barry and his wife returned to Normandy and found the farmers who had hidden him 41 years prior.
Their friendship endured over the following years and Dr Barry visited Normandy several times; two of the farmers' three daughters are still alive and are now aged in their 80s.
This Anzac Day, Dr Barry - who will celebrate his 100th birthday in June - will lay a wreath on behalf Shellharbour Probus Club at a service.
"We should remember the... men and women who served in the services and lost their lives keeping our way of life the way we like it," he said.
Natalie Croxon
Reporter at the Illawarra Mercury, mostly covering social affairs. Previously of the Bendigo Advertiser, Northern Daily Leader and Quirindi Advocate. Our Watch award winner.
Reporter at the Illawarra Mercury, mostly covering social affairs. Previously of the Bendigo Advertiser, Northern Daily Leader and Quirindi Advocate. Our Watch award winner.
