Luck played a role in the escape or capture of every Allied aviator, but it wasn’t possible to predict whether the luck would be good or bad. Take the story of an American gunner whose B-17 crashed in the Netherlands in November 1943. We’ll call him Ken. It was 13 days before his 22nd birthday and only his second bombing mission. Bad luck.

The entire crew was arrested at the scene of the crash, more bad luck, but they had a career military man with them who had studied the question of escape and evasion. That was good luck that combined with some impressive determination to allow our man Ken to jump out of a moving train and run away in the dark. He had the good luck to approach the farm house of a family that was not only sympathetic but who had connections to an escape line. The Dutch resisters took Ken and two of his crew mates to Belgium, where they passed them to Dutch-Paris.

Ken just happened to be in Paris when German counter-intelligence officers rolled up Dutch-Paris there. As good luck would have it, he and the other aviators had removed themselves from a basement hiding place while the Germans were torturing the information about that hiding place out of a helper. Fortunately one of the aviators spoke French. He found the help of a sympathetic man who was not part of Dutch-Paris per se but who did end up in a concentration camp as part of the line. Ken and seven other aviators walked out of Paris that day, a testament to good luck, sang-froid and the importance of speaking more than one language. They divided up into groups of two and made their way towards the coast.

Over the next few weeks most of those aviators were captured, but Ken and his partner found another escape line and made it to Spain in April 1944.  Was Ken plagued by bad luck or blessed with good luck?

There’s some pretty bad luck in that story – crashing in enemy territory, being in a safe house on the day of a raid. But there’s good luck too – asking for help at a resistance house, moving out of the safe house during the couple of hours when the Germans were not there that day. But you have to notice that although Ken had nothing to do with the bad luck, he had everything to do with making the good luck good. Sure, good luck might have presented the opportunity to jump out of the train and to knock on that door, but it was Ken who did the jumping and the knocking. Good luck wouldn’t have done him any good unless he had had the wits and courage to take advantage of it.