Last Man Out

His life. Or the man beside him. Sergeant Ron Wade had seven seconds to choose.

On the night of 16 January 1941, twenty-three-year-old Ron was about to jump from a burning Whitley bomber over the Dutch coast. Then he saw his navigator coming up the fuselage, parachute and harness in his hands, unable to put them on. The aircraft was on fire. The silk was on fire. The North Sea was below.

Ron turned back. He zipped the navigator's harness shut, pushed him out, and jumped after him. He was the last man out of Z6462.

Of the 125,000 men who flew with RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War, 55,573 were killed. 9,838 were taken prisoner. Ron was one of the 9,838. And what came next was harder than the falling aircraft.

Last Man Out is the true story of the four and a half years that followed: four German prison camps, the camp the world would later know from The Great Escape, a 500 km forced winter march that killed men by the hundred, a homecoming that was harder than the wire, and a postwar Air Ministry that quietly stripped him of the rank he had earned behind it.

Inside Last Man Out you will discover:

- The seven-second decision that defined a life, and the navigator who lived because of it.
- Stalag Luft III, the camp Hollywood made famous, where Ron helped dig the first tunnels.
- The Long March of 1945: 500 kilometres on foot in the bitter winter, with dysentery, raw horsemeat, and SS troops shooting stragglers from behind.
- The rescue Ron never talked about: how he organised the rota that carried failing men to safety, and the 25 to 40 prisoners who walked home because of him.
- 15 April 1945, Ron's birthday, when RAF Typhoons mistook his column for retreating Germans. A man he had been carrying for a week was cut in two beside him. British tanks were 25 kilometres away, rolling into Bergen-Belsen. Ron didn't know.
- The rank they took back: how the Air Ministry, after Ron came home with a fractured skull, quietly demoted him from Warrant Officer.
- The Caterpillar Club brooch, the one decoration nobody could take from him. He was cremated wearing it in 2016.

Told in Ron's own plain, unflinching voice. Drawn from his last recorded interview, given in his ninety-ninth year, and from a spiral-bound notebook his wife Amy kept for their grandchildren.

This is the story of a Master Grocer's son from the Potteries who flew, fell, walked, and came back. A man who, at the two worst moments of his war, turned back for people who could not walk out alone.

For readers of Make It Do by Ken Cam, First Light by Geoffrey Wellum, The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart, Tail-End Charlies by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, and Bomber Command by Max Hastings.