Alea jacta est - Par Léon DEGRELLE

My first feeling when the airplane left Norwegian soil was one of relief. In taking off we had cut the last mooring ropes of uncertainty.
Now everything was clear. When the airplane landed either we would have succeeded or we would be irremediably lost.


Alea jacta est.. Life or death! We would soon know which definitively. We didn't have to do any more thinking, planning, and weighing.

It was almost midnight. The war had in fact been over since the German radio transmission at 1400 hours. Nonetheless the
capitulation would not be officially in force until the next day, 8 May 1945.


We were between war and peace, as between earth and sky. We flew for a time above the Skagerrak. From this time on, only the
compass on our in-strument panel and the marvelous skill of the pilot would guide us in the storm. Naturally we couldn't take our
bearings from the radio. We didn't even have a map of Europe.

All in all our aviators had a magnificent map... of Norway :

One of them had in addition a minuscule map of France which came from a pocket atlas. It lavishly displayed three rivers: the Seine,
the Loire, and the Rhone.

We climbed to 4,000 meters in order to save fuel, but a storm quickly forced us to fly fairly low.

Obviously an isolated plane launched thus across 2,000 kilometers of oc-cupied territory without any protection would run twenty
times the risk of being brought down. Our only chance of salvation lay in the monster celebration which had been going on all afternoon
in the Allied Op.

On all the airfields in the West the victors were in the process of swilling rivers of champagne and whiskey. Thousands of British and
American com-bat pilots, freed from the worry of nocturnal missions, would be on the edge-or in the depths-of inebriation at the hour
our Heinkel was crossing their surveillance zones. Of all nights, this was the one to pull it off. Besides, who would imagine that a solitary
plane still proudly bearing its swastikas would dare fly over Holland, Belgium, and the whole of France, now that the war was over? Above
all, who would imagine that one of the Reich's planes would come out of the North Sea from along the coast of Scotland? We had taken
care, in truth, to use this stratagem, heading first straight toward England, then approaching the European continent as if we were coming
from British shores.

I watched the dark lands beneath. Automobiles were hurrying along with their headlights on. Little towns shone like boxes of burning
matches. Everywhere people would be singing and drinking.

It was perhaps one-thirty in the morning when I noticed a disturbing phenomenon. A big searchlight had been turned on behind us and was
scan-ning the sky.

My heart began to beat faster.

In spite of the celebrations on the ground, we had been spotted. Search-lights were now probing at out altitude. Others were lighting up far
in front of us. The airfields were outlined in great squares of light. The runways shone like white sheets.

Our machine flew as fast as it could to escape those accursed lights, but always other searchlights lit up and rose toward us as though to
seize us. Glimmers of light spattered our wings.

The radio began to crackle. The Allied observers called us: "Who are you? What are you doing?"

We didn't reply. We fled, pushing harder and harder.

Belgium was below me. Antwerp was there, shining in the first night of the return of peace. I thought about our rivers, our roads, about
all the towns where I had spoken, the plains, the hills, the ancient houses that I loved so much. These people who were there under the
plane, these people I had wanted to raise, to ennoble, to bring back to the paths of glory. To my left I saw the lights of Brussels, the big
black splash of the Soignes forest which had long been my beloved home.

Ah! The wretchedness of being beaten and seeing one's dream die! I gritted my teeth to keep from shedding tears. It was in the night and
the wind, pursued by a bitter fate, that I had my last rendezvous with the sky of my homeland.


We had not passed Lille. Always the airfield searchlights harassed us. But the further south we penetrated, the more hope we had of
cheating death.

We approached Paris, which our Heinkel flew over at a very low altitude. I could make out the streets and the squares, silvery as doves.

We were still alive. We flew over the Beauce, the Loire, the Vendee. Soon we would reach the Atlantic.

The pilots, however, were exchanging worried looks. Certainly we now ran less risk of being brought down by the Allied anti-aircraft
guns or night fighters. But the fuel was running low.

The night was terribly dark.

I searched the ground anxiously. The luminous hands showed five o'clock in the morning. An ephemeral glow eased the darkness. I
recognized it instantly. It was the Gironde estuary. We were on the right route.

We followed along the sea.

We could just make out the leaping line of the waves at the edge of the beach. To the east, at the very end of the sky, the horizon
shimmered almost imperceptibly.

We were running lower and lower on fuel.

By the bluish lights on the instrument panel I scrutinized the drawn features of the pilots.

The plane slowed and descended.

We passed opposite Arcachon. I had once lived there under the aromatic pines. The harbor was lit up as if for Bastille Day.

From a distance we followed the black mass of the Landes, broken by the gleaming lake of Biscarosse.

The Heinkel misfired a number of times.

One of the pilots brought us life jackets. The fuel gauge showed empty. We might fall into the sea at any moment.

With a tension that ate at my nerves I studied the probable line of the Pyrenees. Daybreak was glimmering feebly.

The peaks of the mountains ought to be visible. We couldn't see them. The plane was misfiring more and more loudly.

To the southeast a distant blued curve hemmed the sky. The chain of the Pyrenees was there.

But could we stay in the air as far as the Spanish coast?

Because. of the storm we had flown almost twenty-three hundred kilometers. We had to list the airplane onto the left wing, then onto the
right wing, to make the last liters of fuel from the tanks flow into the motors.

I knew the region of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. I could barely make out the whitening bend of the Pyrennes at the mouth of the
Bidassoa. But the plane wanted no more of it and had come down almost to water level. We were going to die twenty kilometers from
the Iberian coast. We had to shoot the red shipwreck flares. Two military patrol boats headed towards us, coming from the French
coast.

What a tragedy! And to think that a searchlight was now blinking in the distance, a Spanish searchlight!

It was strange to see the white-capped crests of the waves and the sea lap-ping close beneath us, ready to swallow us up. We still
hadn't fallen in. The coast was coming closer, pushing its reefs and rocks toward us and its green and black peaks, barely detached
from the shadows.

Suddenly the pilot stood the plane up vertically, almost turning it com-pletely over, and revving the motor so as to catch the last drops
of benzine. Then he charged over a rocky hill and, with an awful racket, grazed several red roofs.

We no longer had the time to think.

We had seen a short ribbon of sand in a clearing. The Heinkel, which hadn't lowered its landing gear, slid on its fuselage at two
hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. I saw the right motor explode, glowing like a ball of fire. The machine turned, lunged toward the sea,
went into the waves, and crashed.

The water flooded into the back cabin and rose up to our waists. I had five fractures. On the beach at San Sebastian the civil guards with
black two-cornered hats rushed back and forth in agitation. Some Spaniards as naked as Tahitians swam out to our wrecked plane.

They pulled us up onto a wing of the twin-engine, then into a canoe. An ambulance came alongside.

This time the war was really over. We were alive. God had saved us. My injuries themselves were a blessing.

I spent months in a hospital bed, but I had kept my strength and my faith. I hadn't experienced the bitterness of falling uselessly into the
hands of my enemies.

I remained, a witness to my soldiers' deeds. I could defend them from the lies of adversaries insensible to heroism. I could tell of their
epic on the Donets and the Don, in the Caucasus and at Cherkassy, in Estonia, at Stargard, on the Oder.

One day the sacred names of our dead would be repeated with pride: Our people, hearing these tales of glory, would feel their blood
quicken. And they would know their sons.

Certainly we had been beaten. We had been dispersed and pursued to the four corners of the world.

But we could look to the future with heads held high. History weighs the merit of men. Above worldly baseness, we had offered our youth
against total immolation. We had fought for Europe, its faith, its civilization. We had reached the very height of sincerity and sacrifice.
Sooner or later Europe and the world would have to recognize the justice of our cause and the purity of our gift.

For hate dies, dies suffocated by its own stupidity and mediocrity, but grandeur is eternal.

And we lived in grandeur.