Albania WW2 RAF Pilots Secret Grave Found is a story about a small. isolated Albanian village which kept a deadly secret for almost 50 years during the oppressive, communist regime of Enver Hoxha. The secret they kept lay unmarked and untended in the local village graveyard. So, what was this secret that if it had leaked out could have had potentially deadly consequences for the village?
The story developed thus:
During the long and hot Albanian summer of 1998, the embassy was contacted by the Mayor of Saranda.
Saranda was a medium-sized coastal town and popular holiday resort in the south of the country located near the Greek border and lying directly opposite the island of Corfu. The Mayor said that he had been contacted by a resident of the village of Drovian which was located in the mountains just above Saranda.
Apparently, this villager, his family and the whole village had been living with a secret for decades.
It transpired that during the second World War when the Italians invaded Albania, an RAF fighter plane, during the course of a dogfight, had collided with an Italian machine and the badly burned British RAF pilot had baled out.
He landed just outside the village and despite the tender ministrations of the villagers, had tragically died from his wounds. The villagers then buried him in an unmarked grave in the church grounds as they did not want the Italians to find him.
After the war, with the advent of the brutal and repressive Hoxha communist regime and his denial of the extensive British military aid given to him in terms not only of material but also of British lives in defeating his axis occupiers and liberating his country, the villagers did not dare inform anyone outside the village about the hidden British grave in case they would be taken for collaborators.
So there he lay for over fifty years, this unknown RAF pilot. It is remarkable that the villagers were able to keep this secret for so long under such trying circumstances. Informers and spies were everywhere during the life of this brutal regime. One word of this leaking out to the authorities, would have meant instant, draconian and possibly deadly punishment for the whole village.
The Ambassador asked me if I would like to take this on as a project as I was ex-Royal Air Force to which I readily agreed. Therefore, my first port of call was to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in Maidenhead in the UK.
This organisation is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all British war graves worldwide. They were more than happy to assist and I passed on to them all the details of the case that we had managed to glean so far from the Mayor’s office in Saranda.Â
CWGC researched the case and eventually got back to me. They confirmed to me that a British aircraft had indeed been lost over that particular area of Albania. What they proposed was that the grave should remain for the time being in situ in the village and not moved to the small CWGC cemetery in Tirana until a full investigation could be carried out.
Some weeks later, CWGC contacted me again and confirmed that they had identified from RAF after action reports and accounts from surviving members of the pilot’s RAF Squadron that he was Flying Officer Harold Sykes a young RAF pilot aged 22 and sadly recently married.
They proposed sending out an inscribed headstone to Tirana and asked if we could transport it down to Drovian and erect it. I reassured them that this was possible and that we would carry out the task and not long afterwards, an inscribed headstone from CWGC arrived crated through the diplomatic bag.
I then contacted the Mayor in Saranda and told him we would be on our way the next morning and that we proposed to overnight in Saranda before driving up to Drovian the next day to erect the headstone.
So, on a cold, clear, crisp winter morning, my driver, a locally employed Embassy interpreter and I set off by road for the 300 Km trip down south. We took the coast road, which was deemed safer and eventually reached Saranda late that afternoon. We met the Mayor and explained to him what we proposed to do. After spending the night in a small hotel, we set off the next morning for the village in the mountains accompanied by the Mayor.
Unfortunately, because of the steep and unstable mountainous terrain, even our 4 wheel drive Landcruisers were not able to negotiate the tracks and terrain that would lead us to Drovian. Thankfully, the Mayor somehow managed to contact a local corn supplier who agreed to hire out six of his mules to us and off we set with our cargo, not a comfortable experience!
Finally, after about 2 jolting hours in the saddle, we reached the village where, to our delight, the villagers, who had been forewarned of our arrival by the Mayor’s office had very kindly laid on a delicious, communal lunch.
After lunch we all took a stroll around the small village. The villagers obviously took great care of their fields and their homes. Everything was clean and neat and the fields were well tended though the vista was blighted by the usual blot on the landscape of the ever-present rash of pillboxes, even here high up in the mountains (Hoxha, who was obsessed with the fear of foreign invasion, had constructed over a million such concrete pillboxes throughout the country).
When asked why they just did not demolish these pillboxes, the villagers said they were in fact very useful for storing their tobacco crop, which I suppose was a very pragmatic and sensible use of these concrete bubbles.
They then led us to the courtyard of a small building which was called the Church of the 12 Apostles where the burial site was located. It transpired that Harold was not alone. Next to his grave was the grave of an unknown Greek soldier who the villagers had also buried after finding his remains in the hills towards the end of the war. They told us that they had also informed the Greek embassy in Tirana about the soldier and their embassy was still in the process of trying to identify him.
We offloaded the headstone from the vehicle and uncrated it. With the help of a couple of villagers, we cemented it firmly at the head of the grave. It felt appropriate I say a prayer over the grave which I did. It was touching to note that the villagers who had gathered at the site also paid their respects in a dignified manner with a couple of the women laying colourful, wild flowers on the grave. I then took some photographs.Â
Before taking our leave of the village, one of the elders produced a burlap sack which he asked me to take back with me. Inside were fragments of old uniform and bits of parachute and harness, which had belonged to the airman.
Taking our leave of the villagers, we remounted our mules for the trip back down the mountains to our vehicles. I said goodbye to the Mayor and thanked him for all his assistance and then set off on the 300 Km return journey to Tirana.
The next day, back in the Embassy, I wrote up my report for the CWGC and also despatched the various items given to me in Drovian. I learnt later that my full report, photographs and the returned items had been given to surviving members of Harold’s family.Â
To this day (as far as I know) Harold still lies in that mountainside village. At the time CWGC agreed that he could remain there and whether at some future date he was moved to the small CWGC cemetery in Tirana, I have no knowledge.
This was the first of my two discoveries and resolutions involving missing RAF airmen. My second was a few years later in North Korea where, working closely with the north Korean military, we found the remains of an RAF pilot who had gone missing during the Korean war. At the time he had been seconded to the United States Air Force when his jet had been shot down near Pyongyang.A Cruel Deception – RAF Pilot Remains Discovered In North Korea
*Image of Flying Officer Sykes RAF courtesy of Averil Dorego*
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