Anthony Frank Barralet
Title
Anthony Frank Barralet
Description
A biography of Tony by his daughter, Rosemary Barralet Mortimer.
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Spatial Coverage
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Format
One printed sheet
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
BBarraletMortimerRBarraletAFv1
Transcription
[underlined] Anthony Frank Barralet [/underlined]
(30th August 1916 – April 6th 2003)
58 Squadron (1939 – 1945)
My father, Anthony (Tony) Frank Barralet flew Tiger Moths in the late 1930s. He joined the RAF as soon as war was declared in September 1939, was sent to Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire and was assigned to 58 Squadron.
He flew a Wentworth Whitley V bomber, a large, rather cumbersome plane. His logbook details the sorties and raids that he carried out, including to Bremen and Berlin.
On November 14th 1940 (the same night Coventry Cathedral was bombed by the Luftwaffe), my father (aged 24), with the rest of his crew had to use their parachutes to escape from their plane ((Whitley V T4239), which had been shot down over Berlin. All five of the crew were lucky to survive and all spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps.
My father was sent first to Stalag Luft 1 (in Barth, by the Baltic Sea), where conditions were grim and then to Stalag Luft 3 in Sagan (now in Poland), which consisted of allied aircrew, where he remained for the next five years. The POWs survived largely thanks to British Red Cross parcels. These even included such things as musical instruments so the POWs were able to form an orchestra (Dad played the double bass), useful items for digging etc which were sometimes hidden in the instruments and food boxes, including chocolate. They saw their mission as causing maximum distraction and disruption to the Germans, and succeeded in this with various escape attempts. The largest escape effort was ‘The Great Escape’. My father took part in digging the ‘Harry’ tunnel for this during 1943-4. Around six hundred POWs took part in all the preparations. Two hundred were chosen for the actual escape. Lots were drawn to determine the order of escapees – my father was number 106. The escape took place on the night of 24th March 1944. Seventy six men got through the tunnel before the Germans discovered what was going on. Although my father wasn’t able to escape, this probably saved him. Of the seventy six, all were caught except three, who managed to escape to freedom. Of the remaining seventy three, fifty were shot in cold blood by the Gestapo, having been driven into the forests in ones and twos. The remaining twenty were returned to the camps.
The shooting of ‘The Fifty’ was declared a war crime after the war, for which the perpetrators paid with their lives after the Nuremburg Trials.
My father finally came home in June 1945, after all the POWS had endured gruelling forced marches through the snow earlier that year, in which many POWs died. (The camps had been evacuated in the face of the Russian advance.) The picture shows him with his parents, Frank and Nancy, his brother, John (with wife Edythe and children Derek and Anne) and his sister, Barbara (with children Paul and Linda.)
My father married my mother, Sheila Barralet, his cousin, on June 11th 1949. My brother, Michael, was born in June 1950 (died 1967) and I was born in 1952. (Our family adopted David in 1968). My father lived a long and happy life, never taking anything for granted and making the most of every moment. He possessed much ingenuity, being able to make things ‘out of nothing’ and mend things seemingly impossibly broken (maybe due to his POW life). He rarely spoke about his war experiences. He was a great and kind man, humble, and with a great sense of humour. Rosemary Barralet Mortimer
(30th August 1916 – April 6th 2003)
58 Squadron (1939 – 1945)
My father, Anthony (Tony) Frank Barralet flew Tiger Moths in the late 1930s. He joined the RAF as soon as war was declared in September 1939, was sent to Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire and was assigned to 58 Squadron.
He flew a Wentworth Whitley V bomber, a large, rather cumbersome plane. His logbook details the sorties and raids that he carried out, including to Bremen and Berlin.
On November 14th 1940 (the same night Coventry Cathedral was bombed by the Luftwaffe), my father (aged 24), with the rest of his crew had to use their parachutes to escape from their plane ((Whitley V T4239), which had been shot down over Berlin. All five of the crew were lucky to survive and all spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps.
My father was sent first to Stalag Luft 1 (in Barth, by the Baltic Sea), where conditions were grim and then to Stalag Luft 3 in Sagan (now in Poland), which consisted of allied aircrew, where he remained for the next five years. The POWs survived largely thanks to British Red Cross parcels. These even included such things as musical instruments so the POWs were able to form an orchestra (Dad played the double bass), useful items for digging etc which were sometimes hidden in the instruments and food boxes, including chocolate. They saw their mission as causing maximum distraction and disruption to the Germans, and succeeded in this with various escape attempts. The largest escape effort was ‘The Great Escape’. My father took part in digging the ‘Harry’ tunnel for this during 1943-4. Around six hundred POWs took part in all the preparations. Two hundred were chosen for the actual escape. Lots were drawn to determine the order of escapees – my father was number 106. The escape took place on the night of 24th March 1944. Seventy six men got through the tunnel before the Germans discovered what was going on. Although my father wasn’t able to escape, this probably saved him. Of the seventy six, all were caught except three, who managed to escape to freedom. Of the remaining seventy three, fifty were shot in cold blood by the Gestapo, having been driven into the forests in ones and twos. The remaining twenty were returned to the camps.
The shooting of ‘The Fifty’ was declared a war crime after the war, for which the perpetrators paid with their lives after the Nuremburg Trials.
My father finally came home in June 1945, after all the POWS had endured gruelling forced marches through the snow earlier that year, in which many POWs died. (The camps had been evacuated in the face of the Russian advance.) The picture shows him with his parents, Frank and Nancy, his brother, John (with wife Edythe and children Derek and Anne) and his sister, Barbara (with children Paul and Linda.)
My father married my mother, Sheila Barralet, his cousin, on June 11th 1949. My brother, Michael, was born in June 1950 (died 1967) and I was born in 1952. (Our family adopted David in 1968). My father lived a long and happy life, never taking anything for granted and making the most of every moment. He possessed much ingenuity, being able to make things ‘out of nothing’ and mend things seemingly impossibly broken (maybe due to his POW life). He rarely spoke about his war experiences. He was a great and kind man, humble, and with a great sense of humour. Rosemary Barralet Mortimer
Collection
Citation
Rosemary Barralet Mortimer, “Anthony Frank Barralet,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed June 15, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/collections/document/38688.