Franz von Werra did indeed get his hands on a Hurricane at Hucknall and it just happenned to be one of the new Mk.II’s (perhaps even the very first,I can’t remember.) He was posing as ‘Captain Wilhelm Van Lott’,a former KLM pilot who had been posted to the ATA and had been given instructions to test fly the aircraft.(He had been driven to Hucknell after walking to a remote railway station not too far from the prison camp he’d escaped from,saying he’d just crash-landed in a Wellington in nearby fields and needed to be taken to the nearest RAF station.)
Hucknall was a dual civvy/military airfield,with the RAF on one side of the station and Rolls Royce on the other.He was very lucky to have walked into the R-R part of the field as there were many Poles and Czeks under training over on the RAF side,and who knows what they’d have done to him if they’d rumbled him!
It’s also extremely fortunate that he only saw the Hurricane as there was a Kestrel-engined He70 at Hucknall which had been used for a number of years as an engine test-bed by RR.If he’d found that,he may well have been able to fly it without having to ‘fraternise’ with the ground staff beforehand,which was what lead to him being rumbled before he could get away in the Hurri (he’d needed instruction from one of the ground staff on the navigational instruments and had also had to ask for help with a trolley-acc,all of which delayed him long enough for him to be caught.)
On the allied side,I remember reading about an American Mustang pilot who came down behind German lines and spent several days on the run.He eventually came across a Luftwaffe airfield one evening,where he saw ground crewmen fuelling up an FW190.He waited until dawn and then snuck out to the aircraft,pushing likely looking buttons and hoping for the best.Amazingly the engine fired and he took off from the taxi-way. It took him ages to get the gear retracted and when it finally did he didn’t know how he’d done it.He flew over the allied lines and found an airfield,the defences of which promptly opened up on him.He circled the field under fire for some time,trying to work out how to get the gear down again,but eventually he had to give up and belly land before he was shot down by his own side!He walked away from the landing,but the machine was a write off.
This story was recounted by the pilot at the first Mustangs and Legends show back sometime in late 90’s (97?),and was published in Flypast shortly afterwards.Could someone dig out the name of the guy and more details of the event?
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