Parachute to Berlin by Lowell Bennett. Casemate, 2023 (re-issue), 256 pp.
On 3 December 1943, CBS legend Edward R. Murrow sat behind a microphone at a BBC radio studio in London, preparing to deliver his latest report to a wartime audience in America. In just over five years, Murrow, considered by many to be the founding father of broadcast journalism, had risen from the network’s “Director of Talks”—essentially a booking producer—to the first star newsman of the fledgling medium, renowned for his coverage of the Nazi Anschluss of the late 1930s and the Luftwaffe’s Blitz against London in the fall and winter of 1940. Murrow’s rooftop broadcasts as the bombs rained down—beginning with the signature phrase, “This . . . is London”—made him an international figure.
After a celebratory homecoming, Murrow returned to Europe and the battlefronts. Barely 24 hours before he walked into that BBC London studio, Murrow and two other journalists had set out on their most dangerous assignment. As he told listeners at the broadcast’s start, “Last night, some of the young gentlemen of the RAF [Royal Air Force] took me to Berlin.”
What followed was one of Murrow’s most memorable broadcasts, later dubbed “Orchestrated Hell.” For 17 minutes, he described the flight of an RAF bomber command crew to the German capital and back again, an account punctuated by flak bursts, attacks by enemy night fighters, the spectacle of a city on fire, and the loss of other Lancasters in the attack wave—bombers simply exploding in flight or plunging to earth in a comet of flame.
Murrow offered a personal reminder of the cost of war, noting that two other correspondents on the mission, Australian reporter Norman Stockton of the Sydney Sun and a fellow American, International News Services’ Lowell Bennett, had failed to return. Murrow’s broadcast represented a “tradition among reporters,” filing stories for colleagues who were unable to do so themselves.
What Murrow did not know was that Bennett was very much alive. The young reporter—only 23 when he volunteered to cover the RAF raid—had managed to bail out of the stricken Lancaster along with the rest of its crew. That alone was nothing short of miraculous; Bennett, like other journalists on the raid, had received only minimal training in emergency procedures, and the “Lanc” was a notoriously difficult aircraft to escape from. By some estimates, only one in six crew members exiting a stricken Lancaster made it safely to the ground.
Though quickly captured by the Germans, Bennett would soon embark on an epic journey, one that would include interrogation by the Gestapo; a “tour” of devastated Germany cities arranged by his minders; a successful escape from German guards; and an extended evasion trek into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He was eventually recaptured and sent to a prisoner of war (POW) camp, where he helped run an underground newspaper for Allied POWs. It is an adventure for the ages, expertly retold by the author who lived it.
Bennett, who passed away in 1997, had a journalist’s eye and ear for details, dialogue, and storytelling, and those qualities are evident throughout Parachute. Bennett’s captivity took a rather unusual turn a few days after his capture, when his primary interrogator, former Stuka pilot Joseph Borner, proposed taking Bennett across Germany, allowing the reporter to witness the impact of the Allied bombing campaign. In return, Bennett would agree not to escape—and might be repatriated in a future prisoner exchange—acquiring material for stories that might present Germany in a more favorable light.
Realizing it was a propaganda ploy, Bennett accepted the offer and spent eight days visiting cities that had been attacked by American and British bombers, describing the devastation he witnessed in exacting detail. The first city on the itinerary was Hamburg, still recovering from the devastating RAF fire raid in July 1943 that killed an estimated 40,000 civilians. Bennett noted that the city’s civilian areas were devastated while key military and industrial targets, such as the Blohm & Voss shipyard, were seemingly untouched and furiously churning out U-boats and other war materiel.
Bennett found similar scenes in Munster, Essen, Dusseldorf, and other cities, providing one of the first eyewitness Allied accounts of the bombing campaign from the ground. He even survived an RAF raid on Bremen, huddling in a bomb shelter with local residents as Bomber Command pounded the city. Originally published in late 1945, his account was among the first to question the efficacy and morality of “round-the-clock” bombing. First volumes of the landmark U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey were published in September of that year, but there is no evidence that Bennett had access to the study, instead relying on what he saw inside Hitler’s Third Reich.
Sadly, that is where Parachute to Berlin falls short. Bennett’s early post-war account concludes that the Allied strategic bombing effort was a grand failure, a colossal waste of lives and resources on all sides. He is hardly alone; a number of historians—American, British and German—have adopted similar views. But such assessments are clearly one-sided; as the Bombing Survey reported, there were notable successes in the air, albeit at a high price. The bombing plan reduced production of oil products and aviation fuel by up to 90 percent in 1944. Ammunition was similarly impacted; by early 1945, with supplies of nitrate running low, the Germans were forced to pack some of their bombs and artillery shells with rock salt, making them far less potent. Truck manufacturing, vital to the war effort and transportation networks, was decimated with the destruction of the Opel complex at Brandenburg in August 1944 and the Daimler-Benz complex a month later. German truck production never recovered, and attacks on the German transportation network left the vital Ruhr industrial region cut off from coal shipments during the war’s latter stages.
In many cases, the “failure” of Allied bombing was not due to a lack of effort or tactical deficiency but to persistence or changing priorities. Air planners sometimes shifted the bombers to other targets, unaware how close they were to success in a particular economic or military sector, or they were tasked to focus on support to ground operations, as they did during the run-up to D-Day. That type of nuance and detail is missing from Parachute, though in fairness to Bennett, such information was largely absent from public discourse as he finished the book in late 1945.
Happily, the rest of Bennett’s narrative is brisk and eminently entertaining. After his German “tour guide” returned him to Berlin, he made his escape, hopping a freight train to Prague. With support from locals, Bennett remained on the lam for almost five weeks before the Germans re-arrested him. After an interlude with the Gestapo, Bennett managed to escape again, only to be recaptured and sent to the POW camps, winding up at Stalag Luft I on the Baltic coast.
Bennett is modest about his accomplishments at the prison camp, but by many accounts he was instrumental in starting an underground newspaper, POW-WOW (Prisoners of War, Waiting on Winning) that served over 9,000 detainees. He also had a front-row seat for the only peaceful transfer of power at a POW camp, thanks to the leadership of fighter ace Colonel “Hub” Zemke, who in refusing German orders to put the camp’s population “on the road” to avoid liberation by the advancing Russians saved hundreds of Allied lives. Zemke’s courage receives little coverage from Bennett, who focuses instead on the liquor-fueled “link-up” and subsequent celebrations with advancing Soviet columns.
Bennett produces a number of vignettes, profiling some of the more remarkable POWs he met at Stalag Luft I. Bennett describes activities—theatrical productions, sports teams, and gardening—familiar to readers of other POW books, stories of men with nothing but time on their hands. Yet readers will find little information on that other, favored POW activity—escape—and for good reason. According to Bennett, German teams at Stalag Luft I were particularly effective in detecting tunneling work and other escape projects. There were only two successful recorded escapes from the camp in more than three years of operation. Facing such long odds, most prisoners—even men like Bennett with multiple escapes under their belt—decided not to press their luck and simply waited until liberation arrived.
As a personal memoir, Parachute to Berlin is a fascinating read, chock-full of details that could only be obtained by experiencing the bombing campaign from both sides. As a polemic against the strategic bomber offensive, Parachute is far less effective, though Bennett deserves grudging credit for postulating some of the arguments that have dominated debate on the Allied bombing campaign for more than 70 years. Parachute is a rousing adventure yarn—it will not disappoint. Yet do take Bennett’s commentary on the bombing campaign with the obligatory grain of salt. The arguments are familiar, and many do not hold up against a more contemporary historical record.
Major Gary Pounder, USAF, Retired