Boys at War

Russell Margerison writes of the dangerous but strangely unreal world of the air gunner, sitting high in the turret of a bomber over Europe, wrapped in several layers of clothes and awed by the destructive beauty of the scene below. His role was to keep a look out for enemy fighters and to take a shot at them if they gave him the chance. After many raids Margerison's plane was shot down. Weeks on the run with the Belgian underground were followed by many months of captivity in Germany. He describes the events of January 1945 when for eighteen days nearly 1500 prisoners were marched through blizzards to another camp, surviving on an inch of soup a day. A few months later, the prisoners' new camp was 'liberated' by the Russians and he made his way home across a devastated Europe. When Russell Margerison came home to Lancashire, he was still six months short of his twenty-first birthday. This edition includes a sequel telling of his return, fifty-nine years after he was shot down, to visit the Belgians who risked everything to help him.