Sqn Ldr Stanley Booker MBE – 55th (Ruislip) – Obituary – Daily Telegraph

My grateful thanks to Garry Hoyland (Treasurer) for passing on the Obituary for Stanley Booker that recently appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Stanley passed away in January 2025.  The Association expresses our sincere condolences to his family.    RIP Stanley Booker.

Sqn Ldr Stanley Booker, Bomber Command navigator who survived torture and Buchenwald

Squadron Leader Stanley Booker, who has died aged 102, was a Bomber Command veteran and one of the last survivors of the 168 Allied airmen captured and interned in Buchenwald concentration camp after their capture.

On the night of June 3 1944, Booker was the navigator of a 10 Squadron Halifax bomber sent to attack the marshalling yards at Trappes, near Paris. Enemy night fighters had congregated and attacked. Twelve per cent of the bomber force was lost, including Booker’s aircraft. His pilot was killed and the crew baled out.

After landing safely, he was assisted by the Resistance but was betrayed to the Gestapo and captured. He was taken to the large Fresnes prison south of Paris, where he was severely beaten and tortured.

On August 15 1944, five days before Paris was liberated, he was taken with a group of 167 other airmen in grossly overcrowded cattle trucks to Buchenwald, a journey that took five days, with little water, food or sanitation. The senior member of the party was a New Zealand pilot, Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, who insisted on military discipline and bearing in order to show their captors that they should be treated as military captives and in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

Kept on a near-starvation diet, the men witnessed many horrors, not least the execution of some Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers. The RAF contingent, ably led by Lamason, won the respect of the camp commandant for their discipline, and in the help they provided after the camp was bombed by the USAF on August 24 1944.

In early October, the airmen learnt that the Gestapo had ordered their execution, and efforts to contact the Luftwaffe, who always insisted that airmen PoWs were their responsibility, were increased. Lamason told a trustworthy Dutch contact who worked in the camp administrative area of his efforts and on October 19 Luftwaffe officers arrived at Buchenwald and demanded the release of the airmen.

They were transferred to Stalag Luft III, the scene of the Great Escape, where the appearance of the shaven-headed and emaciated men shocked the PoWs at Sagan.

At the end of January, the camp was evacuated as the Soviet Army advanced from the east. The prisoners were force-marched westwards in the worst winter weather experienced for many years; Booker and his colleagues suffered badly on the “Long March”.

He was liberated at the end of hostilities, having been held back with hundreds of other prisoners by the Russians as a bargaining chip with the West.

Stanley Booker was born at Gillingham, Kent, on April 25 1922. He joined the RAF as an apprentice clerk on April 26 1939 before volunteering for aircrew duties later in the war. He trained as a navigator and joined 10 Squadron at Melbourne, near York.

After recuperating from his ordeal as a PoW he returned to flying with Transport Command. He flew in Dakotas with 77 and 62 Squadrons before joining 206 Squadron at Lyneham, which was equipped with the four-engine Avro York.

Following the closure of the overland and air routes to the Allied-controlled city of Berlin, the Western powers established Operation Plainfare to deliver vital supplies to the western zone of Berlin. Between November 1948 and August 1949 Booker flew an incredible 227 sorties as part of the now-famous Berlin Airlift from the RAF-controlled airfield at Wunstorf in West Germany into Gatow, the RAF terminal in Berlin, at a time when one aircraft was said to be landing in the beleaguered city every three minutes.

He was recruited into the Intelligence services, and served first in Hamburg before being promoted, in his words, “to the first team” in Berlin. He was responsible for monitoring the activities at Gross Doelln, a large airfield then under construction north of Berlin in 1954.

The length of the runways (more than 3,000 metres) convinced the intelligence community that they were being prepared for use by Russia’s long-range bombing force of Bear and Bison aircraft, which could reach the eastern coast of the US. When the first fuel was pumped on to the site, a sample was “secured” within 24 hours for analysis. Shortly afterwards, however, shorter-range Ilyushin Beagle bombers arrived, not the long-range aircraft that had been predicted.

After returning to the UK and to 206 Squadron, now as a navigator on the RAF’s long-range maritime reconnaissance force, Booker returned to Berlin for a second tour in intelligence. He told his biographer, Sean Feast: “Berlin was John le Carré at its best, a murky world of intrigue and dirty goings-on in which I felt completely at home.”

His return coincided with the unmasking of the spy George Blake, who shared a neighbouring office – after which, Booker recounted, “all hell broke loose.”

Blake had betrayed the presence of a secret tunnel into East Berlin that the Allies had been using to listen into Russian military communications. Booker also feared, but never knew for certain, that he had betrayed what they knew of Gross Doelln.

Booker retired from the RAF in June 1973 having been appointed MBE.
In later life he was a fierce campaigner for the compensation due to Allied prisoners, which he was, in part, denied because there was no evidence that he had ever been in a concentration camp. In the early 1980s he risked going back into East Germany, despite being a known former intelligence officer, and not only found the evidence he needed, but also ensured that the British were part of future commemorations.

He prepared an official report on the presence of the British military at Buchenwald on the instructions of the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. He continued campaigning about the historic injustices suffered by surviving prisoners until well into his 90s.

In 1999 he wrote about his experiences in Jump into Hell. In 2021 the French government appointed him a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. In later life he retired to the south coast to be near his family.

Stanley Booker married Marjorie, a nurse, in 1942, and she died in 2016. He is survived by their two daughters.

Stanley Booker, born April 25 1922, died January 26 2025