Reunited after 64 years: The RAF gunners who shook hands and jumped out of their plane thinking each other had died

As they stood looking into the pitch black sky over enemy territory, World War II air gunners Leslie Faircloth and Dougie Jordin shook hands and parachuted out of their stricken RAF bomber.

Each assumed the other had been killed trying to escape back to Britain and neither man expected to see his comrade again.

But astonishingly - 64 years after they last laid eyes on one another - Mr Faircloth and Mr Jordin have been reunited.

While researching his father's war service, Mr Faircloth's son, Paul, 53, managed to track down Mr Jordin and organise a meeting.

'When Dougie answered the phone it was the first time we had spoken since we shook hands, said goodbye and jumped out of the plane over enemy territory,' Mr Faircloth said.

'I had a job to speak because I was in tears.'

Mr Faircloth and Mr Jordin, both 83, were just 19 when they were forced to abandon their Avro Lancaster III bomber over Paris on June 27 1944.

The pair, who were both air gunners, and five other crew were returning from a midnight bombing mission when two of the plane's engines started overheating and failing.

With the aircraft rapidly losing altitude the men, who were based with 12 Squadron Bomber Command at Wickenby, near Lincoln, were given a quicker route home.

But their flight path took them directly over the fighting zone and, fearful they would be shot down, made the decision to bail out before the plane was struck or crashed.

After wishing each other good luck, all seven crew parachuted into the pitch black night sky.

My last memory of Les is in the plane,' Mr Jordin said. 'I was sitting on the ledge, my feet dangling out over the sky and Les shoved me in the back to get me out so he could jump himself.

'I remember turning around and telling him to 'Get off.'

'We'd had no parachute training, it was too expensive, so it was pretty terrifying.

'I landed in someone's back yard. It was cobbled and set off a dog barking - not a very good place to land really.

'I walked for about an hour and saw a cottage with a light on. I knocked on the door and it opened a crack. As soon as she saw my uniform the old lady snatched me inside.

'There was a little noise at the other end of the room and the pilot of our bomber walked in, which I thought was quite amazing considering I had been walking for an hour.

'I was the first out at the back, he was the last out at the front and we ended up in the same cottage."

Mr Faircloth also survived the jump and both men managed to make contact with the French Resistance in Paris.

'I was bit luckier than Dougie, it must have been my schoolboy French,' Mr Faircloth, of Wrexham, North Wales, said.

'I came across a couple working on a vegetable plot after about three days and they took me in.

'A couple of days later a police inspector turned up, which was a bit worrying, but he handed me a French identity card - I was now a Jean Henri Le Paul - and a travel card and wished me "bon chance''.'

Mr Faircloth decided to walk to freedom and trekked hundreds of miles to the Pyrenee mountain range and into Spain.

Once there, he was detained by Spanish troops and put into prison in Figueras, North East Spain, before being freed by the British consulate and returned to the UK 44 days later.

Mr Jordin, however, was not so fortunate.

He met up with two of the other crew members who also survived the jump but the trio were betrayed by a member of the Gestapo who had infiltrated the branch of the French Resistance which was helping them home.

They were taken to the notorious Nazi prison in Fresnes, near Paris, before being loaded onto cattle trucks and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany.

Mr Jordin, a retired farm manager, of Stalmine, near Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, recalled: 'On the way there, SS guards shot a young French man who was stood next to me in the truck because he was inadvertently playing with the barbed wire fencing.

'We had everything taken off us, were clipped all over and had sheep dip thrown at us.

'We were allocated a spot in the compound, just stones and sand, and were given a pair of trousers, a shirt and a funny envelope shaped hat.

'We had no shoes and lived outside. I lost a lot of weight - I dropped from 12 stone to just 7.5 stone and we lost two men, a British and an American, who died because of the conditions.'

After around four months the airmen managed to get a message out and were transferred to - Stalag Luft III - the prisoner of war camp for captured air force personnel, near Zagan, Poland.

This was where the 'Great Escape' - the bid for freedom immortalised in the famous film - took place just months before their arrival.

From there, Mr Jordin was moved to another POW camp near Bremen, Germany, before finally being liberated, 10 months after he was first captured, in May 1945.

On his return home Mr Jordin, who has three children, five grandchildren and one great grandchild, married his childhood sweetheart, Lucy, now 81, and set about raising his family.

'It was very difficult for her while I was away,' he said.

'She knew I was missing in action, but for months without word she feared I had died.

'I always wondered what had happened to the other lads, but never dreamed I would see them again.'

Mr Jordin, who is married to Megan, 82, has two sons, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, went into the pub trade after leaving the RAF, before working as a commercial salesman until he retired.

He and Mr Faircloth finally met for the first time for a pub lunch in Warrington, Cheshire, last Sunday.   

'We never knew whether we would meet again and we have, it's wonderful,' Mr Faircloth added.