Snowman’s Land (Part 2)
The concluding instalment of the two-part story of a seemingly routine Second World War air battle and its stranger-than-fiction aftermath.
With nightfall approaching on 27 April, 1940, Captain Richard Partridge was standing outside the small cabin in the snow-covered Norwegian wilderness where he and Lieutenant Robin Bostock had taken shelter after they’d crash-landed on a frozen lake. The man facing Partridge had just blown a whistle, summoning two other men in greyish-blue Luftwaffe uniforms. All three of them were carrying knives and revolvers, yet Partridge defused the situation by shaking hands with the nearest of the Germans and inviting them into the cabin. He was relieved when they gave him a British-style salute before accompanying him inside.
But the two groups could only communicate with sign-language and fragments of their respective languages. Of the three Germans, the senior-ranking of them was Horst Schopis, the man with whom Partridge had just shaken hands. The other Luftwaffe personnel were Schopis’s navigator, Karl-Heinz Strunk, and their plane’s co-pilot, Josef Auchtor, who had incurred a shrapnel wound that Schopis treated using a first-aid kit.
Schopis managed to explain that the other member of their crew had been killed during an attack by one of a group of three Spitfires.
It immediately dawned on Partridge that Schopis must have mistaken his Blackburn Skua for part of a formation of Spitfires. In other words, Schopis and the two other Germans were the crew of the Heinkel He. 111H, which Partridge had shot down earlier in the afternoon. Wary of admitting the truth, he said that he and Bostock were the survivors from a bomber that had crash-landed during a reconnaissance mission.
To escape from the potentially lethal awkwardness of the scenario in which he found himself, Partridge insisted the German aircrew should sleep in the cabin while he and Bostock moved to the building at the foot of a nearby hill. As the Germans settled down for the night, Partridge and Bostock went back into the thick snow and plodded towards what appeared to be a larger cabin. It turned out to be a small hostel, which had been locked up for the winter.
Partridge and Bostock broke into the hostel and found not just bedding but also a supply of muesli. Next morning they were joined by the three Germans, so the five men breakfasted together. Then Partridge decided to set off in search of a village where they’d be able to obtain help. Karl-Heinz Strunk insisted on going with him.
A few minutes later, Bostock—who had remained in the hostel with Schopis and Auchtor—heard a gunshot from somewhere outside. He rushed onto the verandah, from where he could see that Strunk and Partridge had been intercepted by a Norwegian ski patrol, one of whom had just fired a warning shot.
Partridge flung himself onto the snowy ground while Strunk put his hands on top of his head and shouted, “Eengleesh! Eengleesh!”
Brandishing a rifle, the leader of the patrol turned to look at Partridge. As he did so, Bostock saw Strunk reach for his revolver, at which point another member of the patrol shot and killed him.
They proceeded to search the four surviving aircrew before taking them prisoner. Although the leader of the patrol spoke English, he was dubious when Partridge and Bostock insisted they were British. Only by pulling out a half-crown coin and showing him the tailors’ labels inside their coats were they able to convince him they were telling the truth. During the subsequent chat, they discovered that he was the brother-in-law of a close friend of Partridge’s.
Before escorting away Schopis and Auchtor, who would go on to spend the rest of the war as prisoners in Canada, the English-speaking Norwegian suggested to Partridge and Bostock that they should walk twenty-one miles west to the port of Ålesund, which was still held by the British. They followed his recommendation, their epic trudge through the snow leaving them exhausted when they finally reached their destination. But the Royal Navy vessel due to evacuate the remaining Allied troops from the bombed out town failed to materialise.
Taking matters into their own hands, Partridge and Bostock commandeered a car and drove south to the British-held port of Andalsnes. Like the town they had left behind, it had been devastated by the Luftwaffe. The two airmen were nonetheless able to board the waiting Royal Navy vessel, HMS Manchester, which ferried them back to Britain.
They soon rejoined their squadron and resumed flying duties. On 13 June 1940, they were part of a formation of Skuas that tried to sink the German battleship, Scharnhorst, which was anchored in Trondheim harbour. As they attacked the ship, they were in turn attacked by German fighter aircraft. One of them hit Partridge and Bostock’s plane with a cannon shell that set light to its fuel tank. Partridge was badly burned, yet he managed to bale out. Bostock—who may already have been dead before their Skua plunged into the harbour—wasn’t so fortunate, though.
Rescued by some of the locals, Partridge was nursed back to health, only to be captured by the Germans soon afterwards. He then wasted the best part of five years as a prisoner of war.
Almost three decades after his liberation, a team of Royal Navy divers carried out what was dubbed Operation Skua. This entailed salvaging the wreckage of the Skua in which he and Bostock had crash-landed on the icy lake near Ålesund. When the aircraft’s remains were put on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton in Somerset, the now middle-aged Partridge and Schopis were brought together for a reunion.
In the wake of what proved a jovial occasion, which sparked a friendship between these former enemies, both men wrote memoirs of their experiences. These inevitably featured differing accounts of their long ago encounter in Norway, which was already the subject of a trio of archival documents—800 Squadron’s flight records and the debriefing statements given by Partridge and Bostock.
The publication of Richard Partridge’s Operation Skua and Horst Schopis’s Luftkampfgegner wurden Freunde (Air Combat Adversaries Became Friends) was far from being the end of the story. During the summer of 2004, Andrew Linsley—the now retired Royal Navy diver who had been in charge of the expedition to salvage Partridge and Bostock’s plane—teamed up with a trio of Norwegians and arranged a weekend-long commemorative event in the area where the two planes had crash-landed.
Horst Schopis, sole survivor from the opposing aircrews, and Simon Partridge, son of the Skua’s pilot who had died almost a decade and a half previously, were the event’s guests of honour. The two men were taken on a helicopter tour tracing the final stages of the flight-paths of both the Skua and the Heinkel. And they were shown around places connected to the ensuing drama, including the Grotli Hotel—the hostel where Schopis and Simon’s father had breakfasted together back in 1940. Schopis also had the chance to visit the nearby memorial to Karl-Heinz Strunk and their plane’s rear-gunner, Hans Hauck, whose corpse had been left in the crash-landed Heinkel.
As a gift for Schopis, who was celebrating his ninety-second birthday that day, a military aviation researcher presented him with several photos taken at the Fleet Air Arm Museum. These showed the oil pipe leading into the Skua’s engine. It had clearly been pierced by a bullet. Schopis said he’d spent years wondering how the Skua had been brought down—and now he knew that a shot from his rear-gunner had punctured its oil-feed.
In a contemplative moment on the mountainside, Schopis admitted that Simon Partridge’s father, Richard, had unwittingly saved his life by shooting down his plane. Schopis said that while he’d been living in a prisoner of war camp in Canada, all the other pilots and aircrew who served with him in the same Luftwaffe unit had been killed either during the Battle of Britain or on the Eastern Front.
Just before Schopis’s death in 2011, an Anglo-Norwegian movie inspired by the improbable experiences of the two aircrews went into production. It was eventually released under three different titles at different times—Comrade, Into the White, and Cross of Honour. Little seen outside Norway, where it was a box office success, it presented a heavily fictionalised and sentimental version of a story that would have seemed far-fetched in a novel.