The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  Of the several motives that drove Bill Ash to attempt escape over and over again, the feeling that he was in some way fulfilling a duty to his French saviours was a strong one. The story of the weeks between crash-landing and capture make it clear why he felt this sense of obligation so powerfully.

  He had been shot down on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24 March 1942, on his way back from a mission escorting six Boston bombers tasked with attacking the power station at Comines, in the Pas-de-Calais on the border with Belgium. After the war Bill would give several accounts of his subsequent wanderings. The first occasion was when he, like all returning prisoners of war, was questioned by an officer of IS9, the British intelligence service charged with maintaining contact with the POW camps. The details are very sparse and it is essentially a list of names of French civilians who helped him – some of whom did not appear in his subsequent memoirs. The full story of what happened after the crash-landing emerges from various sources. As we have seen, he was helped by a woman who gave him a jacket and trousers. Her name, although he did not know it at the time, was Pauline Le Cam, and she would pay a high price for her bravery.

  After he left her house, and after the incident with the open sewer, he spent several days living rough, then he knocked on the door of a small bar and restaurant in the hamlet of Neuville, about fifteen miles south-west of where he crashed. It was run by the Boulanger family, who hid him in their cellar. This act put them at great personal risk. The place was sometimes visited by Germans, and once a staff car stopped outside and a party of officers came in for a meal. He was looked after by the owners’ daughter Marthe Boulanger, a clever and practical 16-year-old. They tried to teach each other English and French and he entertained her with stories about the bright lights of London and his Texas upbringing.

  One night word arrived that the Germans were coming to search the village. Marthe and her brother Julien led him across the dark fields to the home of a local flour-mill owner called Emile Rocourt, a few miles away near Alquines. Rocourt appeared to have a good relationship with the German occupiers. But in fact he and his brother Gaston were kingpins of the local resistance network, and he looked after Bill until the danger passed. At the end of April Bill was taken again to the Rocourt house, where a man was waiting for him. He was small and dark and quiet, and gave his name only as ‘Jean’. Ash would learn later that he was Jean de la Olla, an Algerian-born 37-year-old, who worked for the ‘Pat Line’. This was the escape network set up by Albert Guerisse, a Belgian military doctor whose alias was ‘Pat O’Leary’. The organization had successfully passed Allied prisoners to the south of France for onward passage to Gibraltar and Spain. It had almost been destroyed by the treachery of a British soldier and conman called Harry Coles, who had gone over to the Germans. La Olla had been sent north by Guerisse to revive the network and this was one of his first missions.

  He escorted Bill to Lille and left him with a single woman whose name Ash never learned. There were visits from a young woman and her brother, an easygoing young man who played the latest hits such as Rina Ketty’s ‘J’Attendrai’ on his guitar. Bill was shocked to learn that he was on a Nazi death-list, liable to be arrested and shot in reprisal if the resistance mounted an operation in the area. Bill tried to persuade him to come with him when they moved on. The boy explained that there was no point. If he escaped, his sister would take his place on the Germans’ list.

  After a week, Jean reappeared. He took Bill to Paris and left him with a young married couple, Joseph and Giselle Gillet, who lived in an apartment on the Avenue du Général-Laperrine near the Porte Dorée on the eastern side of the city. Joseph had been a fighter pilot until the French defeat. They put Bill up in a bedroom, where he was to stay until a courier arrived to take him on the next leg of his journey to Angoulême in south-west France, a step nearer the Pyrenees. Despite the risk, Bill was soon slipping out to explore Paris. He went for walks in the Bois de Vincennes opposite the flat, and swimming at an indoor pool near Denfert-Rochereau. Sometimes Joseph and Giselle went with him to the cinema or the zoo. Early one morning in the middle of May the flat was raided. After the war, when questioned about his experiences by IS9, he told his debriefer that ‘a Frenchman living in the same block of flats informed the Germans of my presence’.11 He was dragged out of bed and driven away to a headquarters building near the Opéra. Joseph and Giselle were taken off separately and he never saw the couple again.

  He was taken into a basement and locked into a room. After an hour, two soldiers took him upstairs to an office. A grey-haired man in civilian clothes, who he assumed to be a Gestapo officer, sat behind a desk. The man motioned for him to sit down on a small chair in front of him while the guards withdrew to the door. Speaking in halting French he told his story, making no mention of those who had helped him along the way and doing his best to shield Joseph and Giselle. He explained that they were simply Good Samaritans who had found him destitute on the street and taken him in.

  The Gestapo man behind the desk told him to speak English. He seemed businesslike and, at first, reasonably polite. He suggested he stop worrying about the couple and start trying to convince him that he was who he said he was. Ash repeated the date and place where he was shot down. Surely they would have a record of a smashed-up plane being found at Vieille-Église with no one in it? The man replied that this did not prove that he was the pilot. He had been picked up in Paris and in civilian clothes. He might equally be a spy who had been dropped in subsequently. Bill could not help pointing out that, with his poor French and non-existent German, he was hardly spy material. The interrogator produced a pen and paper. The only way he could prove his identity, he said, was to write down the name of every person he had been in contact with since he left his aircraft. Ash made a brave joke, claiming with some justification that he had always been terrible remembering names. The fake civility evaporated. The man rose and left him to the guards. One jerked him to his feet and pinned his arms while the other punched him in the face. The next blow drove the breath from his lungs, leaving him sick and gagging for breath. The soldier paused to wrap a handkerchief round his knuckles, then resumed punching him in the face.

  He began to lose consciousness. Then a hand grabbed his hair and wrenched his head back. The grey-haired man was back. Bill described what happened next in an account published thirty-six years later:

  He placed an official-looking form on the desk and invited me to have a look at it. One of my eyes was almost completely closed and I could not focus very well on the paper which was in German anyway, so I asked him what it said. ‘It’s from the Kommandantur and it says that if the person calling himself William Ash fails to provide satisfactory proof of his identity he is to be executed by firing squad at 6 a.m. on June 4th.’

  ‘What’s today?’

  ‘June 3rd.’12

  The interrogation continued. They wanted to know whether he had ever met someone called Monsieur Jean. They seemed to know all about la Olla’s activities, but Bill denied any knowledge of him. Eventually they took him back to his cell. It was still morning. They left him alone for the next eighteen hours. His mood swung between despair and defiance. He tried to convince himself that they were bluffing. If they were not, he could save his life by offering up a name or two. Even as he thought this, he knew he could not betray people who had risked their life for him. He remembered that Dostoevsky, a hero of his, had been sentenced to death by the Tsar. He had always wanted to be a writer. Only now he would not be able to make use of his experiences. He tried to imagine the firing squad, ‘thinking that I must steel myself to be very steady and self-controlled when it happened, and then I remember thinking why in hell should I? Who was ever going to know whether I had died well or not and it certainly was not going to make the slightest difference to me how I had gone.’13

  In the morning the hours passed and no one came. His hopes began to rise. Convention had it that you were shot at dawn. Yet the day was well on and he was still alive. About
noon a guard appeared with black bread and sauerkraut soup. Surely they would not waste food on him if they were about to shoot him?

  Later the guards returned and led him back upstairs. The grey-haired Gestapo man was waiting and this time he seemed relaxed, almost playful. He began talking about time he had spent in London, before the war. He remembered the steaks at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. Had Ash ever eaten there?

  There seemed no reason not to play along. No, he hadn’t, he replied. But he was fond of Lyon’s Corner House, just off Piccadilly Circus, where at the salad-bowl counter you could eat all you could manage for five shillings.

  The man smiled and pushed a box of cigarettes across the table towards him. Bill didn’t really smoke but something made him take one.

  Then suddenly his manner changed and he shouted at me. ‘You’ll never see London again! They’ll see it.’ He pointed at the two soldiers. ‘They’ll be in England living off the fat of the land, and do you know where you’ll be?’

  I did not like to say.

  ‘Dead. You’ll be dead unless you give us some names.’14

  The Gestapo man nodded at one of the guards, who slapped Bill across the face, knocking the cigarette from his mouth in a shower of sparks. So it went on. A sort of rhythm was established. Blows, then questions and entreaties to see reason. They had already picked up most of the people who had helped him. Why not just confirm their names and corroborate his own story in the process? Through the pain, he heard himself replying logically. Surely if they had really arrested his helpers, then they would have told the Germans all about him? They stopped when he was almost unconscious and dragged him back downstairs.

  The next day was the same, and the day after. Later he could never work out how long it went on. Initially he thought a week, later ten days or even a fortnight. Then one evening he heard shouting outside his cell door. He had become something of a connoisseur of German bellowing and felt that this display ‘had the quality of equals screaming at each other rather than one of the Herrenvolk bawling out an Untermensch’.15

  Soon after, the door was opened and he was led out. A man in Luftwaffe uniform was arguing with the Gestapo man. ‘What it turned out to be was an emissary from the Luftwaffe dressing down my interrogator for not informing them of the capture of someone claiming to be RAF and insisting on questioning the prisoner himself.’16 He was the subject of a demarcation dispute. As far as the Luftwaffe was concerned, any shot-down Allied airman belonged to them, to be pumped about dispositions, equipment, anything that would add to their intelligence picture. There was a further consideration. There were hundreds of Luftwaffe aircrew in British prisoner-of-war camps. If it was learned that Allied fliers were being tortured and beaten, the assumption was that reprisals would follow. The Luftwaffe won the argument. That night, under guard, Bill was taken to the Gare de l’Est and put on a train to Germany.

  He was very lucky to be alive. He knew that Giselle and Joseph were perhaps not so fortunate. In his post-war intelligence debrief he told the IS9 officer that they had been ‘sentenced to be shot by [the] Gestapo’ but that their ‘actual fate was unknown’. By then he also knew that Pauline Le Cam from Vieille-Église had ‘served three years in a concentration camp for assisting me’.17 The encounter with the Gestapo had dispelled any inclination he might have had to empathize with his enemy, who he had ‘come to hate with a passionate intensity’.18 He could feel satisfaction that he had not betrayed any of those who had risked so much to help him. As he left France behind he had learned enough about the Germans to fear the worst if his helpers were discovered. He had to find a way to damage the enemy. It seemed the only means at his disposal was to try and escape.

  FOUR

  Bill had listened to lectures on escape and evasion during his training. One thing he was told was that the sooner you tried to get away, the better were your chances of success. The journey into captivity offered many opportunities. It usually involved travelling by public transport accompanied by guards who needed to eat, sleep and use the toilet. But to take advantage, you needed to be alert, fit and optimistic. Bill was weak and bruised from constant beatings. His normally buoyant spirits were flat. ‘For me this was one of the lowest periods of the war,’ he wrote later.1 At Dulag Luft his feelings of frustration and guilt had deepened. But his natural joie de vivre and his tendency towards action over melancholy reflection soon asserted themselves. His revival owed something to having met Paddy Barthropp.

  Paddy was one of The Few, but there were few like Paddy. He had seen a lot in his twenty-one years. His mother died giving birth to him in Dublin on 9 November 1920. His father, he wrote, ‘was totally grief stricken and resented my very existence almost up to the time of his own death in 1953’.2 It was typical of Paddy to add: ‘I never blamed him.’ Elton Peter Maxwell D’Arley Barthropp was a successful racehorse-trainer whose patrons included the Duke of Westminster and the Aga Khan. He was also a compulsive gambler. After his bankruptcy forced Paddy’s departure from Ampleforth College, a Catholic private school run by Benedictine monks in the wilds of Yorkshire, he pulled strings to get his son an engineering apprenticeship at the Rover works in Coventry. Like most young men of his generation Paddy was fascinated by aeroplanes. After a visit to the annual air display at Hendon in London, he decided to apply for one of the short-service commissions the RAF was offering. After one failed attempt he was in, and flying a Spitfire in time to take part in the Battle of Britain. Paddy liked girls and parties and resented authority, yet he retained a curious innocence and felt a strong sympathy for the underdog. These were attributes that he shared with Bill Ash.

  He managed to get into trouble as soon as he got to Dulag Luft. His interrogator was a Major Binder, who had been a well-known racing-car driver before the war. Binder was charged with pumping Paddy for information about the new carburettor recently fitted to some Spitfires to overcome the loss of power they suffered when rolling out at the top of a climb. ‘It didn’t take me long to convince him that I hadn’t a clue,’ Paddy recalled.3 The major seemed relieved. He suggested that the two of them go off for lunch at a tavern in the woods beyond the camp. All Paddy had to do was give his parole that he would not try and escape. Ignoring all the RAF’s stern warnings against fraternizing with the enemy, he accepted.

  Lunch was a great success and went on a long time and they both ended up in the German-officers’ mess for supper. When a senior British officer at the camp heard about this he gave Paddy a rocket. Paddy didn’t mind. All in all ‘it was well worth it’.

  Their time at Dulag Luft was brief. The regime was relaxed, controlled by a ‘permanent staff’ of British officers who worked with the Germans. Their job was to explain the system to the new arrivals, issue them with clothes and prepare them for their onward journey. Over time they had assumed status and privileges. They messed separately from the transients and ate better food. Some of the newcomers, most of whom had just come from grappling with the Germans in the skies over occupied Europe, found their willingness to cooperate with the system surprising, even sinister. In time they would learn that this was a misjudgement.

  Some of the staff gave off an air of weary superiority. They knew the way the system operated, what was possible and what was not, and were not gentle in puncturing naive illusions. It seemed to Bill that, having resolved to escape, he should try and do so as soon as possible. When he approached a senior officer and asked him how he should proceed he got a cool response. ‘Not from here, old boy,’ he was told. ‘Wait till you get to the main prison camp… It’s all properly organized there.’4

  Paddy shared Bill’s determination. His motives for wanting to escape were unclear, perhaps even to himself. His complete lack of pomposity prevented him from attempting any deep analysis in the brief, hilarious memoir he left behind. The crushing tedium provided a spur, as did concern at how things would end if the war turned bad for the Germans. It was, he wrote, ‘a time of boredom, a deep sense of homesickness, constant hunger
and the nagging thought that in the end we would probably be disposed of’. But it was also a question of character. A spirit as free and anarchic as his could not submit to incarceration without a struggle.

  From their neighbouring bunks in Barrack 64 they plotted their escape. They lived to the rhythm of fixed routines, and one day bled indistinguishably into another. They woke at eight and mustered outside with the other kriegies for morning Appell. Then they drifted back to breakfast before deciding how to fill the time before lunch. ‘In our small room, stuffed cheek-by-jowl with normally hyperactive but now frustrated and often short-tempered young men of different interests and outlooks and nationalities, time dragged by leadenly,’ Paddy remembered. ‘Every hour was another sixty minutes to kill.’5 Bill found it quite easy to keep himself occupied. Until now he had always been too busy to fulfil his hopes of being a writer. Here there was all the time in the world. He lay on his bunk, filling page after page of his first novel.

  Sometimes they wandered over to the dusty sports areas behind the latrines in the south-east corner to join in whatever game was in progress. The players came from several different sporting traditions. The Brits were rugby men, the Australians played ‘Aussie rules’, while Bill had been brought up on American football. ‘As the game progressed, the players and ball were passed, thumped, bounced and tackled in every way possible, with heated disputes about whether a goal was a try or a try was a touchdown,’ Bill remembered.6 The game was too strenuous for some of the players weakened by the poor food or the trauma of being shot down. Once, while charging down the wing, he threw the ball to a teammate who caught the pass then keeled over in a faint.