Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A fine Second World War ‘immediate’ 1943 Evader’s D.F.M. group of five awarded to Halifax rear gunner Flight Sergeant J. ‘Joe’ Sankey, 10 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, who was shot down over Germany after a losing fight with three Ju.88’s, 14 February 1943, and successfully made the torturous journey home out of Germany via the Netherlands, Belgium, France, over the Pyrenees and into Spain. Having survived a brush with a German spy, a faltering interview with French police, and an attack by German dive bombers on a ship out of Gibraltar - Sankey safely returned to the UK at the end of July 1943

Distinguished Flying Medal, G.VI.R. (119320. F/Sgt. J. Sankey. R.A.F.) suspension slack; 1939-45 Star; Air Crew Europe Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45; with the recipient’s Caterpillar Club Badge, gold with ‘ruby’ eyes, reverse engraved 'Sgt J. Sankey’, mounted for display, generally very fine (6) £3,000-£4,000

Ian Tavender Collection, Spink, April 2006 (when D.F.M. and Caterpillar Club Badge only)

D.F.M. London Gazette 7 September 1943 (jointly listed with Flying Officer’s R. Taylor and A. Hagan both for the award of the D.F.C.). The original recommendation states:

'Flight Sergeant Sankey was the rear gunner of a crew of a Halifax aircraft of No.10 Squadron which was detailed to attack Cologne on the night of 14th February 1943. On the way to the target, the aircraft was attacked by three Ju.88s. One they shot down but the Halifax was hit and immediately caught fire. The pilot gave the order to bail out. Flight Sergeant Sankey landed between Kempen and Crefeld. After walking some distance, a man was met, and Flight Sergeant Sankey eventually arrived safely back in this country (M.I.9/F/P.G.(-) 1324 refers). For the courage and initiative shown by this N.C.O. in making his escape, I recommend the immediate award of the Distinguished Flying Medal.’

Joseph Sankey was born in Blackpool, Lancashire in October 1920. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in October 1940. After initial training as an Air Gunner, and advancing to Sergeant, Sankey was posted to 10 Squadron (Halifaxes), Melbourne, Yorkshire in October 1942. He subsequently advanced to Flight Sergeant and flew in eight operational sorties as a Rear Gunner including: Genoa (2); Lorient; Minelaying, 9 January 1943, in Halifax II DG230 V, piloted by Sergeant Illingworth, ´Laid mines in area allotted at 1828 hrs from 900ft weather was heavy.... this aircraft was attacked by a JU88 from astern at 100 yards range. Hits were sustained which caused a hole in the starboard elevator, many holes in the fuselage, the trailing aerial was shot away.... Both gunners replied...... Safe landing at Pocklington´ (Squadron’s Operations Record Book refers); and on an attack to Cologne, 14 February 1943, Sankey took off from Melbourne at 1632 hours in Halifax II DT788 ZA - E, pilotted by Sergeant Illingworth, and was shot down by night fighters at 2020 hours, crashed near Velden (Holland).

The crew baled out, one was killed, five were taken prisoner of war and Sankey, ´was the last to leave the plane. I landed in a large garden somewhere between Kempen and Crefeld [Germany]. About a quarter of a mile away I saw our aircraft burning, and I think it was completely wrecked. I took off my parachute and Mae West and hid them in a wood. I then opened my aids box, transferred the contents to my pocket, and buried the box. I started walking in a North Westerly direction. About 0100 hrs (15 Feb) I came to a canal. I followed this until I came to a bridge, which I crossed. I then realised that the canal made a circuit, and was about to turn back on my tracks, when I saw a torch flash and a voice in English called out "Are you English? We are friends". I approached the voice, and found a young Dutch boy who had been sent to work on a farm in Germany. He had with him a companion of about the same age. They told me that our engineer, Sgt. King, was in a house nearby. This boy took me to his room at the farm where he worked, which was owned by some Germans. I produced the maps which I had taken from my aids box and he showed me my approximate position. He told me that he had a brother living on the other side of the frontier in a village which I believe to be Velden. He said he could not take me there, but would tell me how to reach the village. However, after I had given him my Irvine coat and 200 of the Dutch guilders which I found in my purse, he said he would take me there himself. We crossed the border at about 0300 hrs (15 Feb) almost due East of Velden. There was no control. He roused his brother and explained to him who I was. The boy seemed very scared and immediately went out to get other help. From this point my journey was arranged for me.´ (M.I.9 Debrief refers).

More detail is provided in Home Run, Escape From Nazi Europe by J. Nichol & T. Rennell, which was serialised in The Daily Mail in 2007, and gives the following:

‘There was a war on and to be young meant living in the moment, taking risks, daring all.

So when Miss Auriol Bannister and RAF Sergeant Joe Sankey danced the tango in their local ballroom, they squeezed out all its drama, intimacy and sexual innuendo. Other dancers on the floor stopped to watch in admiration.

Auriol, a 20-year-old stunner from Pocklington, Yorkshire, was a Ginger Rogers in the making. Men from the local air bases would queue to take her in their arms and stare longingly into her eyes in a glide across the floor.

But the longing in her eyes was for handsome, 25-year-old Joe, a rear gunner stationed at RAF Melbourne, not far from York. His dancing skills, polished at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, were a match for hers, and they made a smashing couple, everyone agreed on that.

Everyone, that is, except Auriol's mother. She was certain it would end in tears.

For several months, whenever Joe was not flying, the couple went everywhere together, did everything together, threw caution to the wartime wind.

There were consequences. On a night out at the cinema on February 13, 1943, she tearfully whispered that she was pregnant.

Joe was quick to reassure Auriol he would stand by her. Their worry was what her mother would say. So they decided to meet at her Auntie Ivy's the next evening to discuss what to do.

He did not show up. On the afternoon of February 14, Valentines' Day, Joe was sent on a raid on Cologne. He didn't come back.

A German night fighter swooped in on his Halifax bomber as it made its run into the target. In the rear turret, Joe fired at the same time as the German.

"I know I hit him, but I also heard the thuds of his hits on us," he said.

The night fighter came in again, guns ablaze, and then a third time. "By then we were well alight, and the captain gave the order to jump."

Joe wriggled out of his turret, dropped into the void - and landed feet first in Germany. It was the worst situation any airman could find himself in. Unlike Belgium, France or Holland, there was no Resistance or escape line to help him. Capture seemed certain.

But Joe was lucky. Limping from an injured ankle and with blood running down his neck from an eardrum that had burst during his fall, he ran into a young Dutchman, one of the millions of forced labourers inside the Third Reich, who told him the border was nearby.

Joe gave him 200 Dutch guilders - the escape money every flier carried - and his flying jacket to guide him there. Once in Holland, he was hidden in local homes by the Resistance.

He was quizzed, as was usual, to ensure he really was English and not a German infiltrator. This went fine, until his interrogator asked what a 'jag party' was.

"I didn't understand what he was saying and the tension rose. Eventually, he showed me the question paper and it was obvious there had been a mistake in the translation. He meant a stag party."

The mistranslation could have cost Joe his life, as could a moment's clumsiness when he fell off a bicycle while being moved from one safe house to another. He found himself sprawled at the feet of two German soldiers - who merely laughed and let him remount.

Determined to return to the girl he loved, Joe embarked on the classic escape route home for airmen on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe. They would be smuggled into Belgium and then France, before going south to the Pyrenees and into Spain. It was fraught with danger - and agonisingly slow.

Back in Yorkshire, his girlfriend was in despair. All the pregnant Auriol knew was that Joe had not turned up at her aunt's house as agreed. She presumed his promise to stick by her had been a lie. The man she loved and whose child she was carrying had abandoned her.

Soon she had no choice but to tell her mother, who hit the roof. The formidable Mrs Bannister stormed to the RAF station to look for Joe. In the wing commander's office, she was told Sgt Sankey was missing in action.

Normally, such news was accompanied by an assurance this did not necessarily mean he was dead. Letters to relatives always held out hope - a man was missing, yes, his plane had been shot down, but he could be a prisoner of war or on the run. Only time would tell.

But time was not what Mrs Bannister and her unmarried, pregnant daughter had. Perhaps she was being kind, doing what a mother thought best, not wanting her daughter to hold on to hope when probably there was none, but the message she took home to Auriol was that Joe was dead and best forgotten.

Looking back on these events a lifetime later, the child born out of this union, Joanna Jones, could only imagine the distress this news caused because her mother could never bring herself to talk about it.

"Other members of the family have told me she was very upset. It must have been hard contemplating being a single mum. But in those war days, you didn't wear your heart on your sleeve. You just got on with it, and that was what she did."

Joe was far from dead, even if the mother of his unborn child believed so. Four months after being shot down, he was on a train to Paris using false papers, alongside a Canadian air gunner and two Polish army officers who had escaped from a PoW camp. Three Resistance members were shadowing them, and one saved his life.

"I got through the French border with my false ID, but then we went through Customs and a gendarme asked me a question. I just stared at him, stumped."

One of the Resistance saw what was happening. He came up and created a diversion by grumbling loudly to the gendarme. As he brushed past me, he whispered - in English! - "Take your shoes off."

"That was what the gendarme had been asking, to check I wasn't smuggling anything. Later, I was able to laugh about it, but I'd had another lucky escape."

In Paris, nervous escape line helpers had Joe's authenticity checked again by a British undercover agent, identified only as Major X. It was a curious interrogation: the major played cards with Joe and then declared him genuine.

The spy told Joe he made frequent trips back and forth from Britain, and Joe asked if he would pass on a message to his parents that he was alive.

Major X agreed - and assured him word would also get to Auriol, by then seven months pregnant. But he did not keep his promise, and the airmen's family and girlfriend were not told he was alive.

Joe's journey took him to Lyons and Carcassonne and then into the mountains for a perilous three-day trek into Andorra. He went with a large party of Frenchmen trying to join de Gaulle's Free French forces in Britain. It was not an easy hike.

"The first night, we came under machine gun and rifle fire. I was seized with terror as bullets pinged from the rocks, and I ran bent double to get away, until the firing eventually stopped."

At the end of the climb, there was another shock. One of the Frenchmen in the party was unmasked as a German agent. He was shot immediately.

As Auriol's confinement neared, Joe was at last safe - though stuck in Spain while he waited for a visa to get into Gibraltar. Finally, after the local police were bribed with a box of cigars, he was given the nod.

He left the Rock on July 17 in a ship which, two days out, was attacked by German dive bombers. Given all he had been through, it seemed the last straw.

"I was blown across the cabin by a blast from a near-miss."

But he survived, docked at Liverpool on July 24 "and as I stepped ashore, I kissed the ground, as I had promised myself I would". His intention was to kiss Auriol, too, and to marry her.

After a lengthy debriefing by military intelligence, he returned in triumph a month later to RAF Melbourne, to be greeted like a hero.

He had intended to continue the extra five miles to Auriol's home straight away, but cold feet got the better of him. He imagined the reception he would get from her mother if he just presented himself on the doorstep, so he sought his wing commander's advice.

In the office where six months earlier his girlfriend's mother had come looking for him, he was shattered to be told there was no point in going to see Auriol.

Mrs Bannister must have made it clear that, in the unlikely event of her daughter's seducer coming home, he would not be welcome.

"Forget her and get on with your life," the wing commander told Joe. He got the same message from his friends in the barracks. One said Auriol had a new man and would be upset if he turned up.

Joe listened to this advice instead of going to claim the woman who had filled his thoughts throughout his danger-filled journey back home from Germany.

A few weeks later, on September 8, 1943, Auriol gave birth to a daughter. Convinced Joe was dead, she named the baby Joanna - Joey, for short - in his honour.

As the little girl grew up, she asked about her father and was told by everyone - mother, relations, friends - that he had died in the war.

"My uncle told me my dad was in the air force. When I asked my gran, she said: 'I don't know anything more than that, lass.'

"My mother eventually married and I had a stepdad, but it kept preying on my mind who my real father was.

"It wasn't until my mother was getting old and in ill health and I was afraid she would take the secret to the grave that I asked her for anything I could trace him by.

"She looked at me with a stony face and said she was very hurt that I should want to know.

"Later, she did give me his full name and an old address, but stressed she did not want me to pursue the matter. She didn't want the past raked up.

"She said she thought I would be ashamed of her and what she had done and that I was illegitimate.

"But I just wanted to find out about my dad and to look for his grave and put some flowers on it."

Joanna wrote to the Ministry of Defence and to every organisation she could think of. Then she went on a TV programme about tracking down people in the war and, astonishingly, someone rang from Canada to say he had Joe Sankey's medals.

"He had bought them from somebody who bought them from dad after the war. After the war! So Dad had survived. To hear this was such a shock, I dropped the phone. So then I started tracing anyone with the name Sankey and wrote them all letters."

One morning, Joanna was ironing when the phone rang. It was the matron of a Blackpool nursing home.

"She said: 'I've got your father standing here. Do you want to talk to him?'

"I wasn't sure. I felt so flustered. In the background I could hear someone muttering to her and then she asked me my date of birth.

"I told her, and she repeated it at her end and I could hear him say: 'Yes, that fits.' I asked if I could see him, and the matron said to come any time.

"I put down the phone and carried on ironing. Then I thought: 'What the hell are you doing. Drop the ironing and go!'"

Three hours later, Joanna was sitting in her car outside the nursing home, "shaking like mad and thinking: 'My dad's in there.'"

Eventually, she went inside and sat in the office preparing myself. Then she was taken to see her father.

"He was such a small person, very tiny. And I thought: 'This is my dad!' It was so emotional. All the staff were crying, so was I, so was he.
"I was overjoyed that I'd found him. The matron said: 'Your dad is one of life's gentlemen.' I know what she meant. He was shy, but articulate. He told me he'd been wondering all those years what had happened to me."

But Joe's happiness was mixed with distress. He grabbed Joanna's hand. "You're not angry with me, are you?" he asked. In old age he had come to hate himself for his lack of resolve when he got back home in 1943.

"I'll regret to my dying day that I took notice of what other people told me to do," he told her. She believes he felt sad about it all his life.

"He never told anybody anything at all about what had happened. He got married in 1950 and had a son, but his wife and child knew nothing at all.

"He had been a widower for 30 years when I met him and had lived on his own until he had a minor stroke in 1995 and moved into a home.

"I find it amazing to think that if all those years ago he had gone to mum's house first, everything would have been different. Why didn't he? He'd come so far to get home, to do the right thing, taken so many risks to get back to me and my mother. He only had to go those extra five miles."

Joanna had found her father, but this story does not have the happy ending it deserves. There was no reunion of her star-crossed parents, no teary greeting after 60 years of misunderstanding, no tango steps retraced.

"After meeting Dad, I told him I was going to see my mother. 'Please tell her I'm sorry,' he said, though in my eyes he had nothing to apologise for.

"When I went round to her house, I didn't tell her straight away. We chatted away as normal until my stepdad went to bed and then I said to her: 'Do you know where I've been today? I've been talking to my dad.'

"I thought she was going to faint. She put her hand to her mouth and said: 'How can that be? He's dead.'

"And I said: 'No, he's alive.' It was a massive shock for her. If I had ever doubted it, the look on her face convinced me she had spent her whole life believing he had been killed."

Auriol sat up all night crying, her mind in turmoil, her life turned upside down by this ghost who had just reappeared from a previous life.

"It was very difficult for her to try to come to terms with. She was walking around like a zombie," says Joanna.

"She refused to meet him. He asked me to tell her how he would always regret listening to other people instead of coming to find her. But she wouldn't see him. It was too much."

Undeterred by her mother's reaction, Joanna revelled in the time she now had with her long-lost father.

She didn't blame Joe for what had happened - or, rather, not happened - all those years ago. There was nothing else he could have done, she told him whenever he apologised. She was just happy to have found the father she never knew she had.

"We formed a close bond. I would drive up to see him and take him to his local for a pint. He was so keen to see me he would stand outside and wait for my car. He would tell everyone proudly: 'She's coming today.'

"In many ways, he saw being reunited with me as the culmination of his wartime journey."

Joanna had nearly a year with her father before he died at Christmas 2001. Just over two years later, her mother died, too. It was St Valentine's Day, just as it had been when Joe's plane went missing in 1943.

Sixty-one years had passed, but finally this sad, unfulfilled romance was laid to rest.’

Sold with 2 Newsletters for the Royal Air Force Escaping Society, of which he was a member; a copy of Home Run, Escape From Nazi Europe, by J. Nichol & T. Rennell; copied research, including copied newspaper cuttings, which include images of recipient in latter life.