Escape to happiness for Frank and Kathleen.

Escape to happiness for Frank and Kathleen.

Flight Sergeant Frank Waters is reunited with his wife Kathleen at a secret location on 21 March 1945 after he had been released from prisoner of war camp by advancing Russian forces. Recently married, Kathleen Waters had been lodging with the Carter family when Frank based at nearby RAF Dunholme Lodge was shot down over Stuttgart.

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1945-03-22

One page of newspaper

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NCarterRH150629-01

Escape to happiness for Frank, Kathleen

By Murray Edwards

No high-priced Hollywood director could have arranged a reunion so perfectly as the one that took place behind a secret RAF depot in London yesterday.
Little Kathleen Waters, just eighteen, a bride who heard, a day or two after she was married that her husband had been shot down over Germany, ran forward with a little cry.
The 25s. 9d. pink hat that she chose with such care yesterday when they told her to come to London from her home in Ipswich fell unheeded.
They clung together for a long time, and we looked away. We could hear the sandy haired 21 year old flight sergeant saying over and over again, “I love you …I love you.”
Then she cried a bit, and the tears fell on her husband’s brand new uniform, and on her own new frock.
Frank Waters, just half a head taller than his wife, is one of the first men back in England from one of the German prisoner of war camps which were liberated by the lightning drive of the Russians through Odessa.
When I met his wife at Liverpool-street Station early yesterday she said “I wonder what he will look like?”
Then when she saw him, she said “Frank dear, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Escapers’ Club”
Today Frank starts seven weeks’ leave like the other eight who got away with him.
He must not say how they got away for security forbids it, “but” he said, still holding his wife close, “tell the people how good they have been to us here.”
The “they” he referred to were the RAF men who look after the secret depot – the “Escapers‘ Club” as they call it, where every man, whatever his rank, is equal.
It was from Mrs. Waters that
Continued on back page

[photograph]
Flight Sergeant Waters, released from a German prison camp by the Russians, is home again, to the bride he married not long before he went on a bombing trip to Germany and was shot down.

[photograph]
Kathleen Waters (this time wearing a hat her husband brought from Russia) meets the prisoners from Russia. Left to right: Warrant Officer Nevines, Flight Sergeant Dyson, Kathleen’s husband, Kathleen, Flight Sergeant McPhail, Flight Sergeant Naysmith and Pilot Officer Brooks.