At 11 a.m. the pilots were called to a briefing. They trooped out of the crew room, along neat paths that ran between red-brick accommodation blocks and offices laid out like an architect’s maquette, to the briefing room, and sat down on folding chairs. The rafters were soon smudged with a blue-grey pall of smoke generated by some of the 25,000 cigarettes sent down as a present from RCAF Headquarters a few weeks before. The rumble of chat and banter faded as the door opened and an officer strode down the aisle and onto a low platform at the front. He was slim and not very tall, a good build for the confined space of a fighter cockpit. Squadron Leader Stan Turner had been born in Devon on the edge of Dartmoor but brought up in Toronto, where he joined the auxiliary air force. He returned home at the start of the war to join the RAF and had been in the thick of the action in the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain. Turner had just taken over after his popular predecessor was posted back to Canada, and was trusted and well liked.
He removed his pipe and turned to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by a map of Northern France. The pilots knew it well by now: there were the chalk heights of Cap Gris Nez poking into the Channel towards the White Cliffs of Dover, twenty-two miles across the water; above them the quays and warehouses of Boulogne and Calais; and behind, the drab working towns of the Nord, among them Saint-Omer, where the German fighters were based.
Turner announced that today’s action was a ‘circus’. This was the code word for a short-range bombing operation accompanied by a fighter escort. The target was the power station at Comines, a town about twenty miles behind Dunkirk, straddling the river Lys on the Franco-Belgian border. They filed out and returned to the crew room to pick up their helmets, parachutes and Mae Wests. As the pre-combat ritual progressed they seemed to have less and less to say to each other. The slightly hysterical good spirits that buoyed them up as they left the briefing had subsided to be replaced by a low hum of apprehension. By the time they boarded the shooting brakes that took them out to the dispersal areas where the aircraft were parked, most had lapsed into silence.
The wagon dropped Bill off on the concrete apron where his Spitfire stood.
Like every ‘fighter boy’ he adored his Spit, and it had been love at first sight. It was ‘small and so beautifully shaped, like a platonic idea of what an aeroplane should look like. Particular features were the gracefully curved elliptical wings and the long nose accommodating such a powerful in-line engine. Long noses, whether on borzois or members of the British upper class, always seemed very aristocratic to me.’11
Pilots claimed that flying a Spitfire was like flying an extension of yourself. The thing fitted round you like a second skin, and in the air it reacted to your desires almost as soon as you conceived them, climbing and banking, swooping and twisting as if flesh, blood and metal were operated by the same synapses.
The ground crew stood back as he clambered onto the wing root and swung himself into the cockpit. He smiled and gave the thumbs up. He pressed the starter, the engine barked and the five exhaust stubs each side of the nose farted plumes of dirty smoke. The needle looped round the rev counter and he eased off the brakes, feeling the power of the 1,200-horsepower Merlin sweeping him forward. The steep upward inclination of the fuselage meant that he was looking at the sky and he had to use the rudder to swing left and right to see where he was going.
He briefly touched the matchbox that he had stuck beneath the instrument panel for good luck. The light on the control tower flashed green. He pushed forward the throttle and felt power surging through the airframe, then, as he eased off the brakes, the thwock, thwock, thwock of tyre rubber hitting the paving. And then came the moment that never failed to delight, when the wheels kissed the runway goodbye and the ground dropped away, and despite the engine’s roar and the clanking of the retracting undercarriage and all the other evidence of mechanical contrivance, it felt that somehow a miracle had just occurred. They climbed over the mud-stained water where the Thames met the sea, through the clag and into the clean air above. Over the radio telephone Turner gave them their course for Comines, about forty minutes’ flying-time away.
He could not recall the details of the operation itself. He could never forget what happened on the way home. He was flying alongside Turner, and as they approached the French coast he glanced over to see if he had lit his pipe yet, a sign that they were out of danger. ‘He hadn’t,’ Bill remembered. ‘A garbled crackle over the radio from someone in the squadron called urgently for my section to break formation. I did a tight 180-degree turn, thanking my lucky stars that I had done so much aerobatic flying in my training.’12
From the lower edge of his field of vision he glimpsed the stubby outline of a Focke-Wulf 190, banked over on one side as it pulled away some distance below. He was in a perfect attacking position. One of the Spitfire’s few faults was its fuel-supply system, which momentarily cut the flow of petrol to the carburettor when the engine was tilted at too sharp an angle, causing it to falter for a second or two. To keep the petrol flowing he had to throw the Spit into a three-quarter roll. The manoeuvre cost him height but it didn’t seem to matter. To his delight he rolled upright directly behind the German at a range of just two hundred yards. He pressed the firing button and cannon shells sprang out in a wavy line to explode in a row along one of the Focke-Wulf’s wing roots, sending bits from the engine cowling spinning away. In a few seconds the fighter was screaming downward trailing a banner of smoke.
Jubilant, Bill pulled up and looked for the rest of his squadron. By now they were specks in the distance. To the left he saw another Spitfire straggler. The pilot seemed oblivious to the grey-green Messerschmitt 109 closing on him like a hungry pike. Bill shouted a warning over the radio and boosted the throttle, swinging round to bring himself onto the attacker’s beam. He followed the Messerschmitt round, holding his fire as he manoeuvred. Shooting at a small fast target at constantly changing angles and distances was a complex business. Simply firing straight was futile, as the target would be hundreds of yards ahead by the time the bullets arrived.
The answer was deflection shooting – calculating the speed and angle of the enemy aircraft then channelling a cone of fire at a precisely judged point ahead of it, so that it flew straight into the path of the bullets. It was easier said then done, and few pilots found it came naturally. It was much better to approach the target from dead ahead or behind where you could aim directly at your victim and no deflection was needed. ‘I worked my way round to quarter, then fine quarter, all the time reducing my angle of deflection until I was just a hundred yards dead astern before I opened up,’ he wrote. ‘I could see my cannon fire hitting home along his fuselage and was glad to give the pilot something to think about other than shooting down my colleague.’ He kept his thumb on the button, making sure his victim was going down. Then ‘suddenly there was a juddering thump. My guns had stopped working.’13
He knew that he was under fire. He swung hard left, kicking the rudder so the Spit skidded through the air in the tightest possible turn, out of the stream of fire from whoever was attacking him. It was already too late, for ‘the engine began to stammer and I realized I was in even bigger trouble than I had thought.’ The revs were dropping fast and he could feel momentum draining from the aircraft. In addition to the man behind him he could see Messerschmitts closing on him from opposite directions.
He was down to 10,000 feet and there was virtually no pull from the propeller. The Messerschmitt 109s had been joined by a few Focke-Wulfs. They were taking their time, circling unconcernedly, taking turns to come in to finish him off. He no longer felt fear but anger and frustration. All he could do was turn to face each new attack so as to present as small a target as possible. Now and then a thud would register another hit on the body of the Spit.
He was no longer thinking rationally. ‘As a Focke-Wulf screamed straight at me, guns blazing, out of force of habit or blind optimism I kept pushing my silent firing button in reply,’ he wrote. He even he
ard his own voice, ‘loud and surreal in the cockpit, shouting “Bang! Bang!” as I narrowly avoided colliding with one of my tormentors.’14
One way or another it was over. He had imagined this moment many times, wondering whether he would be able to remain in control of himself, but his brain was clear now as he ran through the possible endings. The fighters were heading away from him but only to wheel round for another attack. The next shell that hit or the one after would set the Spitfire ablaze and he would pass his last seconds being burned alive and praying for the collision with the earth that would end the agony. ‘I only really had two choices,’ he decided. ‘Pick a spot to crash land or bail out.’ Bailing seemed the obvious one. He was still a few thousand feet up, leaving a comfortable ceiling for his parachute to open. But he feared that he would ‘provide the Focke-Wulfs with target practice on the way down.’ More importantly, ‘it would give the [Germans] plenty of time to have a reception committee waiting to catch me on the ground.’
He knew very well the consequences of messing up a crash landing. The Spit would somersault and crumple and he would be dead by the time the Germans arrived. But, he calculated, ‘landing under my own steam seemed to offer a better chance of getting away.’ That decided it. He cut the engine. For a few seconds the only sound was the swish of wind pouring over the airframe. Then came the sound of more firing, but his going too fast to be able to line up on the Spitfire as it glided down.
Ahead he could see a broad flat field flecked with dead stubble, and beyond it a Gothic-looking church. There was no power to control the flaps and he knew he was coming in too high and too fast. ‘As I reached the ground, I dug a wing tip into the field,’ he wrote. ‘Almost instantly my plane began a cartwheel, careering over the ground. Flashes of grass and sky alternated as pieces of the plane started to disintegrate. One wing was practically ripped off and a shuddering crunch close behind told me my fuselage had probably gone too.’ He finally came to a stop ‘not too far from the church, which – like myself – was miraculously intact.’15
All this had happened only six months ago but it felt now like an event from a different life. The days in the cooler followed indistinguishably, punctuated only by the scrape of the key in the lock as the food arrived or he was led to the lavatory or out for the daily hour of exercise. When the fortnight was up, he and Paddy returned to the compound to hear some unexpected news. The more troublesome elements in the compound were being moved to a new camp in Poland. Unsurprisingly, their names were on the list.
SIX
By the autumn of 1942 the system could no longer cope with the number of Allied airmen prisoners. Stalag Luft III was supposed to hold them all but it was already bursting at the seams. As well as the officer prisoners there was now a large number of NCOs, who were held separately in Centre Compound. With the Allied air war gathering pace, it was clear that there would be many more to come and new accommodation was needed. Plans were made to add another compound on the north side of the camp. While the work was going on it made sense to move some prisoners to other locations. In the process, the authorities would be able to get rid of some of their more difficult customers.1
Once again, the Germans were finding that airmen captives caused them more trouble than soldiers or sailors. In theory, escape held the same appeal for everyone. It offered the chance to return home to your loved ones. It brought an end to a situation that offered only the indefinite prospect of boredom, frustration and privation, possibly culminating in violent death. For the most dutiful, worried that they were not doing their bit for the war effort, escape provided the only means available of continuing the struggle against the Germans.
The peacetime air force demanded an advanced level of education, dedication and aptitude from candidates, and the weeding process was rigorous. Those who got through tended to be smart, ambitious and resourceful. Even in wartime, high standards were maintained, and all aircrew roles required a significant level of skill. The result was that airmen tended to be better educated than their equivalents in the other services. Most of them had chosen to join the air force rather than been sent to it as conscripts. The RAF’s Bomber Command was manned entirely by volunteers. As the youngest service, the air force was eager to assert its worth and prove its mettle. In the eyes of military traditionalists, this could translate into a certain brashness, even aggression. Airmen were thus likely to be educated, self-confident and bold.
The tedium of prison life was consequently all the harder to bear. Air force men were used to operating in small groups or alone, and using their initiative, far from the control of higher authority. Added together, as one historian wrote, ‘the airman then was almost the ideal escaper. Well educated, aggressive, used to working in solitude and activated by all the normal impulses that make a human seek freedom, he brought an impressive arsenal of escape skills to the prison camp in which he was incarcerated.’2 As we have seen, not every prisoner was bent on breaking out, and those who were not viewed those who were with a variety of feelings.
The ‘escapologists’, though, were strongly represented among the group scheduled to be moved from Sagan to another camp, Oflag XXIB, which lay 150 miles to the north-east in Poland. They included Tommy Calnan, who had been shot down when flying a Spitfire with the RAF’s photo-reconnaissance unit, and who was recovering from the disappointment of a failed mole-tunnel bid. Before leaving Stalag Luft III he had managed to steal and copy the key to the padlock on the gate between the compound and the Vorlager. He had it with him now, in the hope that German locks might be of standard issue and it could come in useful in Poland.
There was the escape committee stalwart Aidan Crawley, a loud, confident Englishmen, educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, a county class cricketer who in peacetime worked as a journalist and flew with other gentlemen pilots in the Auxiliary Air Force. He had been shot down over Tobruk in July 1941 and taken prisoner. Since then he had been directing all his talents and energies to escape activities. Also in the company were charming daredevils like the French Canadian Eddie Asselin, and brooding intellectuals like Robert Kee, who had joined Bomber Command from Oxford University, trained as a pilot and been shot down over the Dutch coast the year before.
They were going to Schubin, Szubin in Polish, a small market town about 150 miles west of Warsaw, where Oflag XXIB had been created out of a large school for girls, requisitioned by the Germans when they marched in. They travelled in third-class carriages pulled by a wheezing train, under the gimlet eye of the chief ferret, Feldwebel Glemnitz. It stopped and started, speeded up and slowed down, according to no discernible pattern. To one of the kriegies aboard the opportunity seemed too good to miss. Even among such eclectic company, John Bigelow Dodge was an unusual character. He had been born in New York in 1894 into a well-connected family and was related by marriage to Winston Churchill. He joined the British Army shortly after the start of the First World War, took British citizenship, fought at Gallipoli and was wounded twice on the Western Front, where he ended the war as a lieutenant colonel commanding an infantry battalion. He was recalled to the colours at the outbreak of the next war and had been captured at Dunkirk. It was never clear how he came to be incarcerated in an air-force prison. He was one of the camp personalities, known as ‘the Dodger’, and although old enough to be father of most of the prisoners he retained a strong streak of recklessness.
The train journey to Schubin took all day. The guards were vigilant and hostile. The prisoners were forced to remain seated at all times and guns were brandished if anybody got to his feet. They had already been told to remove their boots, which most prisoners felt ruled out any possibility of making a run for it. ‘But it did not stop the Dodger,’ wrote Tommy Calnan. ‘In broad daylight, in full view of half a dozen guards, he leapt from the fast-moving train and disappeared into the woods amid a hail of bullets. He was recaptured quite unharmed a short time later, but his effort revived our flagging spirits and stopped the train for over an hour.’3 Bill
Ash remembered him turning to one of his guards as he was led back and remarking: ‘No harm in trying!’4
The journey ended at Schubin station. The prisoners were marched down the main street of the village on the two-mile journey to the gates of the camp. The guards seemed strangely reluctant to let them in. The prisoners soon learned the reason for the delay. Unlike the previous camps they had stayed in, Oflag XXIB was run not by the Luftwaffe but by the Wehrmacht – the German army. As the kriegies were learning, relations between the services were far from comradely. When Glemnitz tried to escort them in and sought an audience with the camp commandant to brief him on the wiles of his new charges, he was refused entry. The prisoners were not his responsibility any more and according to Bill he was sent ‘back to Stalag Luft III with a Wehrmacht flea in his ear’. As Glemnitz was saying farewell to some of the prisoners, ‘he confided the whole sorry exchange, complimenting us by saying that if he was a gambling man he would be laying bets on a mass breakout within a month, and it would serve the army blockheads right for not listening to him.’ He did ‘everything but wish us luck, and we assured him that we would do our best to make his dreams come true.’5
Once inside the camp, the prisoners were pleasantly surprised at their new home, which after Sagan looked like an English country estate. At its centre stood the school, a handsome, classically proportioned three-storey building faced with white stucco. There was a chapel, a modern sanatorium, a small brick bungalow, a bathhouse and a stable block, all set in spacious grounds, which included playing fields and vegetable gardens. A long drive lined with chestnut trees led up the hill behind the main building, which was known as the White House. This was where the camp administration had its offices and later rooms were made available for the senior British officer and his team. The prisoners were to be housed in four main barracks built on the terraced slopes behind the school buildings. The usual barbed-wire double fencing and watchtowers surrounded the school and the barracks. But in general, as Aidan Crawley noted, the overall effect ‘created a feeling almost of homeliness. Beyond the wire instead of a monotonous vista of pine trees, fields stretched away into the distance and all the business of farming could be watched every day.’6
The Cooler King Page 8
