The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  During a spell in a holding camp on their way north they met Flight Lieutenant Jack Best. A farmer in Kenya before joining the RAF, Best had been captured after crashing into the sea off southern Greece. All three were sent to Stalag Luft I. Bill Goldfinch had been a civil engineer before the war. With the other two he devised a novel approach to tunnelling, but there was no opportunity to try it out before they were all moved to Sagan.

  A conventional tunnel was one that led from an entrance to an exit, dug deep to avoid detection and requiring timber to shore up the walls and ceiling, and ventilation to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning and possible suffocation. Goldfinch argued for something which quickly became known as a ‘mole’ tunnel. A man or men would burrow under the earth, shifting earth past their bodies, packing it behind them and sealing themselves in. In this way, the tunnel would always be moving forward with them. Apart from the initial displacement of dirt needed to get the tunnel going, there was no problem with disposal. It was true that, without shoring, the tunnel might collapse. But as the intention was to work only eighteen inches below the surface, the risk of disaster was greatly reduced. Nor was ventilation needed. Air holes bored at regular intervals would enable the mole-men to breathe. The amount of time that men could work in such conditions was obviously limited. A mole tunnel would also have to be a rapidly executed ‘blitz’ tunnel – started close enough to the wire to make the feat physically possible.

  Goldfinch, Best and Lamond took the plan to Jimmy Buckley and the escape committee, who gave it their blessing. All they needed now was a spot from where they could begin digging. An ongoing problem plaguing the compound bathhouse seemed to offer an opportunity. The waste water collected in pools that never seemed to drain away. The trio decided to approach the Germans to volunteer their help. ‘Bill Goldfinch… had already gained a good reputation with the camp staff [offering] advice about drainage and water problems,’ Lamond recalled, ‘so that when it was suggested that he be allowed to work on a soakaway to get rid of the mess caused by the flood they not only consented but also provided a shovel.’19

  The plan was to first dig a ‘starter’ tunnel – an approach shaft that would get them to the point where they could begin the final blitz. The Germans agreed that the soakaway be dug at a point which was about 150 feet from the outside fence. The starter tunnel was to be fifty feet long. They would then have to burrow more than a hundred feet to be sure of getting beneath the wire. Even with three men the task seemed hugely ambitious.

  The first part was relatively easy. They dug the soakaway pit deep enough so they could work at the starter tunnel out of sight of the watchtowers. The spoil from the tunnel was mixed in with the soil from the pit. ‘There were a few hitches when guards came to inspect progress,’ wrote Lamond. ‘The worst of these was when I was in the starter tunnel and Jack Best was in the soakaway. He saw a ferret coming, shouted at me to stay still while he endeavoured to close the entrance, which he did not have time to do, so he had to squat in the hole wiping his brow and saying “sehr heiss”, which he hoped meant “very hot” and was sufficient excuse for him to be squatting and not working.’ A German-speaking kriegie then moved in to divert the ferret and Best breathed again.

  The whole enterprise trusted greatly to luck. They made few preparations for life on the run once they had broken out. None of them could speak German or any of the languages of the hundreds of thousands of workers drafted into Germany from conquered territories, which would make them very vulnerable if they travelled on trains or buses. At first they decided they would walk to freedom, following railway lines by night and lying up by day. Then they came up with a better idea. There was known to be an aerodrome somewhere to the west of the camp. If they could reach it they might steal an aeroplane and fly to Sweden, the nearest neutral territory.

  On 21 June 1942 – the longest day of the year – they were ready to go. They travelled very light – trousers, sweater and shoes, bottles of water and a few specially made high-energy food bars.

  They turned up for the evening Appell. Then they returned to their hut, where there comrades donated their rations to give them a special farewell supper. As it was still broad daylight they were allowed to return to work on the soakaway. When they were sure the guards had lost interest in them they unblocked the entrance to the starter tunnel and climbed in. Another prisoner sealed the hole behind them.

  Bill Goldfinch led the digging, with Lamond behind and Best in the rear clawing back the soil. They worked in darkness. Kriegie ingenuity had already devised a makeshift lamp using a margarine-filled tin and a wool wick, but they could not risk the light being seen through the air holes when dusk fell. They had already decided that it would be impossible to dig fast enough to get under the wire in a single night. Even so, they were disappointed at their slow progress. ‘Perhaps we were tired before we went in,’ wrote Lamond. ‘Perhaps the quality of the air was not very good… we had to rest often.’ Exhaustion set in. It was midsummer’s day but the earth was cold and they slept huddled together. In the morning their friends watching from the huts were alarmed to see wisps of condensation rising from the air holes, but mercifully the guards did not notice.

  At the first Appell, arrangements had been made to rig the count so their absence was not noted. Throughout the day they toiled away while the life of the camp went on as usual above them. In the early evening a dog began to sniff at one of the air holes, but its handler called it back. They passed under the final fence around midnight but waited for two more hours until the camp was at its quietest. Goldfinch was just breaking through the crust of earth above him when he heard German voices. It was the guards having a chat as they passed each other on their tour of the outer perimeter. Once their footsteps faded he punched through the soil and they dragged themselves from the tunnel and ran to the cover of the forest. ‘The initial reaction was one of how glorious the fresh air tasted,’ wrote Lamond, ‘and the next, on looking back into the compound, was a tremendous surge of exhilaration.’

  They were soaked in sweat and dirt but had used up their water supply. They found a pool near a railway line, sluiced themselves down and slaked their thirst. Then they stripped off their tunnelling togs and buried them, dressed and took their bearings. The aerodrome where they hoped to steal an aircraft was meant to be somewhere beyond the railway. The night was short and they had no map but they found it just before dawn. There were no aeroplanes to be seen. They crept around the boundary to where a trailer for transporting gliders was parked, climbed in and immediately fell asleep.

  It was a very hot day but they slept through most of it. When they emerged at dusk there were still no aeroplanes to steal. Reluctantly, they fell back on the original plan. They returned to the railway, which ran north out of Sagan towards the Oder river. There they hoped to steal a boat and row the two hundred miles downstream to Stettin, then out to sea, where with any luck a Swedish ship would pick them up. It was, as Lamond admitted, ‘not a very hopeful plan but something to do’.

  Walking down the railway track was not nearly as easy as it sounded. The sleepers were spaced just short of a comfortable stride and the ballast made a lot of noise under foot. They only had a few of hours of darkness before they would have to find somewhere to lie up during the long day. Water was difficult to come by. They were forced to drink from pools covered with scum. The escape rations they had been issued with were soon gone. They were reduced to gnawing raw potatoes.

  After five days trudging down the track, sleeping in haystacks and woods, they reached the river. The banks were deserted and they found a heavy, flat-bottomed boat equipped with oars which they managed to wrench from its moorings.

  ‘It was a very clumsy outfit and [it] took some time to learn to control it,’ Lamond remembered. ‘There were many barges going up and down the river and some of their crews shook their fists at us, so presumably they were not very happy with our seamanship.’ After a few hours they moored in a reedy backwater, intending to rest be
fore setting off again at nightfall.

  They were sound asleep when a policeman arrived and arrested them for stealing the boat. The escapers had not bothered to prepare a cover story. It took no time to discover their identities. A week later they were back in Stalag Luft III. They were welcomed back as heroes. They might have failed in their ultimate objective of a ‘home run’ to England, but no one had really expected them to succeed. What they had done was equally valuable – they had transformed the psychological landscape of the camp. Until then, the kriegies were becoming inclined to accept the Germans’ confident assessment that the camp’s design and procedure made escape impossible. That premise had been exploded. ‘Our success changed the attitude… completely,’ said Lamond. ‘Morale was restored. POWs could gleefully taunt the staff that their escape-proof camp was not escape-proof after all.’ For Goldfinch and Best it meant the end of their stay in Stalag Luft III, and they were packed off to Colditz. They left behind an example of what tenacity and ingenuity could achieve, one that inspired all those determined not to spend the rest of the war behind the wire.

  THREE

  The picture of Allied POW camps that has come down to us from books and films has tended to obscure the fact that only a minority of prisoners were ever interested in escaping. Bill Ash wrote that ‘as a result of their experiences of crash and capture, most… were understandably not overly keen on pushing the odds even further by escaping in the heart of Germany.’ Though every kriegie might dream of escape, and most were willing to help others to get away, ‘the chances were so slim of making it home and the dangers of being shot before you were out of the camp perimeter were so great, that most decided to wait it out.’1

  The proportion of would-be escapers to those who accepted their fate is difficult to establish with precision. The RAF’s history of Stalag Luft III lists 138 men who had some involvement in escape activities in East Compound during the thirty-four months of its existence.2 Many of them were engaged in ancillary roles such as acting as lookouts or forging documents, rather than digging tunnels. The document records that about 1,850 prisoners passed through the compound in that time. That means that more than 90 per cent of kriegies were content to wait out the war to its end. The RAF’s internal history of Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug, a camp for NCOs, estimates the proportion of escape-minded prisoners at only 5 per cent.3

  Bill Ash put the figure somewhat higher, but pointed out the significant variations in the degree of commitment. ‘There cannot have been a single POW who did not think about escaping,’ he wrote. ‘Yet… maybe only a third in an average camp would have been actively involved in escaping-related activities. Most of the other two-thirds would assist if possible behind the scenes and undergo some hardships to help.’ The majority of pro-escapers did a vital job ‘keeping an eye on the guards over long, dull shifts… or helping to prepare anything from documents to clothes and maps or digging implements’. But he reckoned ‘maybe only 5 per cent were committed to getting outside the wire at all costs.’ And of those, one attempt was usually enough. For the 1 or 2 per cent who remained, ‘escaping became a way of life.’4

  At the other end of the spectrum were those whose experiences had ‘so scarred them that keeping their heads down and surviving the war was all they could manage’. The reluctance of men who had already cheated death to dice with it once again is understandable. At the beginning at least, inertia was strong and the attractions of camp life powerful. Inside the wire you were out of the firing line for good. Your captors sheltered and fed you. The German rations might be meagre, but if Red Cross parcel deliveries were running smoothly, you enjoyed chocolate and other luxuries that were denied to the guards. The daily life of the camp was monotonous and filled with remorseless tedium. There were, though, ways of escaping it. There were many opportunities for self-improvement which could fill some of the vast acreage of spare time. The camp was full of men with peacetime expertise to pass on. Kriegies could learn a language, study Shakespeare or painting, get involved in the camp theatre or, via the Red Cross, take a correspondence course to gain a qualification that would serve them well in post-war life.

  What is harder to explain is the attitude of what Bill Ash called ‘the escapologists’. It was sometimes stated in prison-camp stories written after the war that prisoners had a duty to escape. If so, any such imperative was implied, rather than stated. In 1936 the Air Council issued a document titled ‘The Responsibilities of a Prisoner of War: Instructions and Guidance for All Ranks in the Event of Capture by the Enemy’.5 The text is largely taken up with how a prisoner should conduct himself under interrogation. It explains that, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, prisoners were required to give only their name, rank and number and to ‘maintain a rigid silence thereafter avoiding even the answers “yes” or “no”’. They were to ‘avoid all fraternization and refuse all favours’, and the airman was to ‘establish at the outset that he is a type from whom nothing can be learned’.

  There is a presumption that the prisoner will be interested in escape, for example in the instruction to ‘keep your eyes and ears open after capture – you may learn much which may be of use both to your country and yourself if you succeed in escaping.’ There is nothing, though, that says that once in enemy hands you were compelled to try to break free.

  The pressure on prisoners to escape then was largely self-created. The impulses that animated the escapologists were both military and personal. The escapers felt the need to provide sound practical arguments to justify their activities. They were summed up by Aidan Crawley. After the war he was invited to write the official history of escape attempts by RAF airmen. ‘From the first moment of captivity… there began in every prisoners’ mind a conflict which lasted often until the day of liberation,’ he wrote. ‘Should he, or should he not, try to escape? Ought he to spend his time in what would almost certainly be fruitless endeavour, or should he use it to equip himself to be a better citizen later on?’6

  Crawley judged that ‘no one could blame those who decided escape was not worthwhile.’ But he believed ‘the arguments in favour of trying to escape were overwhelming.’ Crawley was one of those who felt an obligation was involved. He said it was ‘laid down that, should a prisoner see a reasonable chance of escape, it was his duty to take it’. But he accepted that ‘the question turned upon what a man considered a reasonable chance and it was left to each individual to decide.’ However it was not merely a matter of form. Escape, he wrote, ‘was a duty because the return of a prisoner had considerable military value’.

  In wartime, every able-bodied man – especially an airman who had received a long and expensive training – was an asset. The mathematics were clear. For every four men immobilized behind the wire, only one German was immobilized looking after them. By escaping, a prisoner reversed the ratio. Even an unsuccessful bid could disrupt the German war-effort. The Germans took breakouts very seriously. Any escape by more than a handful of men was automatically reported to the high command. Thousands of men were turned out of barracks to comb the countryside for the escapers, diverting them from other tasks. If a man succeeded in making it home, he would not only return to fill a place in the ranks. He would also be able to provide valuable intelligence on areas he had passed through that was unavailable from photographic reconnaissance, as well as information on the outlook and morale of the enemy.

  These arguments did not carry much weight with some of the kriegies. ‘There were those who just wanted a quiet life,’ wrote Bill Ash, ‘people for whom any of us escapers were at best a necessary evil.’7 The objection was that the activities of the few could make life worse for the many. Though the Geneva Convention forbade collective punishment, the camp history reported that ‘mass reprisals were instituted against the whole compound when escape attempts or escape activities tried the patience of the German authorities too much.’8 The penalties were not very harsh. They included closing the theatre, forbidding visits of theatre shows from other compound
s, and stopping inter-compound games. In response to an escape bid in 1942 there was an attempt to stop the issuing of Red Cross parcels. The ban ceased after a complaint was made to the International Committee in Geneva, which intervened with Berlin. The result was a flood of goodies in time for Christmas.

  Whether military considerations were foremost in the minds of many determined escapers is open to question. Bill Ash would never describe the impulse that drove him in such utilitarian terms. His motives were complicated. They mixed the personal and the political. At times he would describe it as something beyond his control. ‘Escaping is quite addictive,’ he wrote, ‘and, like all addictive drugs, extremely dangerous.’9

  It was something he had felt ever since arriving at Dulag Luft, the doorway through which airmen passed on their way to a permanent camp. The processing began with a long interrogation. The Luftwaffe’s intention was to extract what information they could from their enemies, but despite the dire warnings about the subtlety and skill of the interrogators issued in the official instructions, their techniques seem to have been often quite amateurish. The man who questioned Ash claimed to be a Red Cross official and had insignia to prove it. Unfortunately the effect was spoiled by the jackboots sticking out from under his coat.

  Bill confined himself to name, rank and number, but the questioning nonetheless went on for some time. In between sessions, the prisoners were held in solitary confinement. It was not the first time he had been placed in a cell on his own, but on this occasion the experience shook him profoundly. Later he would describe how he was swept by a feeling of ‘utter depression’. He felt a sense of shame at being taken captive. The word ‘caitiff’ kept swimming into his head. It was an archaic term for ‘captive’, but it also meant ‘base and cowardly’.10 In his frustration he slammed his fist into the cell wall, bruising his knuckles and drawing blood. He was disgusted at himself for letting himself be shot down before he could inflict any real damage on his enemy. Most of all he felt guilty for failing the many French civilians who, risking imprisonment, torture and death, had helped him after he was shot down.