Flight Sergeant Ronald Wood
Unit : 45 Squadron, RAF.
Served : North Africa (captured)
Service No. : 968970
POW No. : 30270
Camps : Stalags VIIIB / 344, XIB
Ron Wood was born on the 15th May 1921. His POW questionnaire notes that he had been a clerk, residing at 42 Lucan Road, Liverpool, when he joined the RAF on the 27th September 1939. He was captured at El Adem near Tobruk, Libya, on the 22nd November 1941. He was held at Benghazi from the 3rd to 8th December, and from 14th December 1941 to 8th February 1942 was at a military hospital at Caserta, near Naples in Italy, then until 24th June was at another hospital at Parma, before being sent to PG 52 at Genoa where he remained until the 12th September 1943. Transported to Germany, he was at Stalag VIIIB / 344 from the 16th September until 22nd January 1945, and from 21st February was at Stalag XIB until he was liberated on the 19th April 1945. He remained in the RAF after the war and retired with the rank of Wing Commander. In 2003 he submitted the following account, and although it is written in the third person it is his personal testimony.
Wing Commander Ronald Wood, was a Blenheim pilot with 105 & 45 Sqns in the Second World War. He completed 33 operations in Europe and the Middle East before being shot down and taken prisoner in November 1941. The final operation, an attack on Rommel's transport, was met by a squadron of Me109F's against which the Blenheim had no chance. With his aircraft controls shot away and himself shot through the leg, he and the crew managed to bale out before the aircraft crashed in the desert about 30 miles south of Tobruk.
Ron Wood said he owed his life then, to his navigator 'Bert Turton' a New Zealander, who was uninjured and after a bitterly cold night set off at first light to find a Bedouin camp which he had seen during his parachute descent. He returned some hours later with a donkey. Having got Ron Wood safely on board the donkey and heading northwards for the Bedouin camp, the navigator and air gunner 'Ben Whiteley' set off walking eastwards hoping to get through the enemy lines. Due to a leg injury Ben Whiteley could not make it and was captured. Bert Turton, however, after 10 days surviving on snails and grubs got through to our own lines and rejoined the squadron, unfortunately to be later killed on operations in the Far-East. After some hours on the donkey, Ron Wood found the Bedouin camp where he had hoped to do something to fix his injuries and hide out until our troops advanced through, en route to Tobruk. He was taken in by the Bedouins and given some coffee and gruel but his freedom was short-lived as one of the Bedouins had set off and notified the Italians at nearby Fort Acroma and who duly staged an heroic capture. And so began three and a half years of incarceration in hospitals in Italy and prison camps in Germany relieved only by two abortive escape attempts.
Ron Wood was educated at the Oulton School in Liverpool and subsequently applied for a short service commission in the RAF. Although provisionally selected for future pilot training the pending emergency in the months of the summer of 1939 resulted in cancellation of these arrangements and he was informed to report to the local recruiting depot. He qualified as a Sergeant pilot one year later and at the beginning of 1941 started operations on Blenheims with No.105 Squadron.
In 1941, the Blenheim squadrons were heavily engaged in low-level attacks on shipping covering the enemy coastline from Norway to the bay of Biscay. In March the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau took refuge in Brest after an North Atlantic foray in which they sank 22 ships. Churchill did not want to disclose this unpalatable news to the public until he could add that these two battle cruisers had been put out of action and for this purpose just about the whole Blenheim force together with many other types were tasked but without much success. Later, in May when the Bismark was in Bergen 105 squadron was engaged in operations off Norway and lost their CO, Wg Cdr Christian, shot down by a flakship in one of the fjords. The replacement was Wg Cdr Hughie Edwards later to be awarded the VC for a low level attack on the docks at Bremen. Ron Wood felt that he was lucky to survive these days and he was somewhat relieved to be posted to the Middle-East in June 1941. After a long haul, for a Blenheim, via Gibraltar, Malta and Egypt Ron Wood joined No.45 Sqn at Aqir in Palestine and operated on targets in co-operation with the 8th Army advancing up the coast in the Lebanon; opposition being mainly Vichy French Dewoitine fighters and light ground fire. After victory in that theatre the squadron moved to Habbaniya in Iraq for operations on Iran. This was a short campaign and in October they moved to the Western Desert, Egypt for a somewhat different conflict. In November 1941 the squadron was engaged in 'Operation Crusader' the army's planned advance to Tobruk; but 45 sqn was now up against the Luftwaffe which had just been equipped with the latest Me109F fighters. The Blenheims suffered heavy losses and on the 22nd November Ron Wood was shot down. After being captured by the Italians, Ron Wood was hospitalised in Derna and Benghazi before being transported by hospital ship to a military hospital at Caserta near Naples. Subsequently he was moved to a hospital at Parma and then to a prison camp near Genoa. After the Italian capitulation in September 1943 the Germans took over the camp and transported the prisoners in cattle trucks to Germany. En route, Ron Wood managed to escape during a train stop for nature calls at a marshalling yard near Trento. He had worked out that they were heading for the Brenner Pass and knew the Swiss border was not too far away to the west. Although the Germans had their machine guns mounted at each end of the line of defecating prisoners Ron Wood, with his trousers down, managed to get away, backing slowly under the coupling between the trucks. He hid in an orchard but rather foolishly fed ravenously on the fruit which quickly affected his starved stomach and debilitated him. He was re-captured and in a sorry state entrained again in a cattle truck for Germany, eventually arriving at Stalag VIIIB near Breslau, Ober Silesia, where he was immediately admitted to the camp hospital with gastro-enteritis.
In January 1945 the Russian advance caused the Germans to evacuate the camp and in temperatures well below zero the POWs were marched out onto the road westwards. There was no provision for food and only the little the POWs had managed to take with them kept them going. After three days in these conditions, sleeping in the open or in an open barn the situation was looking desperate. A stop at a brick works on the fourth night gave Ron Wood and three colleagues the opportunity to escape from the column and after hiding in a disused kiln the column moved on in the morning without them. They made their way to a farm where the slab labour workers had been driven out and only the owner (a female) and a foreman remained. They busily set about making a red flag and a red cross flag, the idea being to await the Russians arrival. Two days later it was not the Russians but the Waffen SS who arrived. Their job was to take stock of what food and facilities were available for their retreating front line troops and when they heard that Ron Wood and party had killed a pig for food it really was touch and go whether or not they were to be shot for looting. Fortunately an SS officer decided to have them taken to the civilian jail in the nearby deserted town of Strehlen. They were locked in the town prison where the cells and corridors were full of dead and dying Russians captured crossing the river Oder. Ron Wood said there was quite a marked difference in the treatment of us compared to that accorded to the Russians who were treated as cattle and we were suddenly taken out of the jail and put in the cellar of an empty hotel. During this period a Russian recce tank roared through the town and out again. With a constant background of heavy gunfire, Ron Wood and his colleagues decided that if they could hide out that night they could be overrun by the Russians with the next day or two. Unfortunately the Germans decided to evacuate the town that night and all the prisoners were marched out into the blizzard. And so it went across Germany through January and February 1945 until the survivors arrived at Stalag XIB Fallingbostel from where they were liberated in April 1945.
After the war, and now commissioned, Ron Wood was posted as a staff pilot to RAF Driffield where the purpose was to train navigators and convert wartime bomb-aimers to navigators. In the nearby town of Bridlington he met the young lady who would become his wife. They had a son and daughter who moved with them to a variety of RAF stations before his retirement from the RAF as a Wing Commander in 1974. The son, Donald is also a pilot and has a display team of Vampire and Venom aircraft at Bournemouth airport where he also has his business. Daughter Karen is in the nursing profession and having followed in her father's footsteps obtained a commission in the RAF where she served as a nursing officer and was engaged in aero-medical duties during the first Gulf War.
After leaving the service Ron Wood took his civilian aviation licences and obtained the post in charge of the air traffic at Southampton airport. Ron Wood has always been a golf fanatic and with the endorsement of Peter Alliss he marketed a 'lost ball timer'. Although this was not a great success with the Company he had started, his association with the Swiss manufacturers led to other promotional projects until his final retirement, when golf and family alone seem to occupy all his time.