The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  After the encouraging first impressions the quality of the accommodation came as a disappointment. Two of the barracks were dilapidated and would not be used at first. The other two were single-storey buildings with pitched roofs and concrete floors. ‘The accommodation, if you can call it that, consisted of lice-infested brick buildings with no ceilings and only raftered roofs to keep out the elements,’ remembered Paddy Barthropp.7 There were no partitions but each pair of prisoners was given a double-decker bunk bed and a cupboard, and two benches and a table were provided for every twelve men. They arranged the furniture so as to create private spaces down each side of the barrack, making it a little more homely. Bill dragged a few lockers to barricade off a corner of Hut 6 and bunked up with Paddy, Aidan Crawley, Eddy Asselin and a few others.

  In the large space, talk echoed off the bare walls and floor, creating such a din that you had to shout to make yourself heard, and the partition gave them a quiet corner for private discussions. Each barrack had a night latrine, and a washhouse attached with boilers where food and water could be heated, which doubled as the kitchen and laundry. When the prisoners arrived the sun was still shining, but it was clear that once the Polish winter set in, the two brick-and-tile stoves at the end of the building would offer little protection from the cold. Nonetheless, noted Crawley, morale among the prisoners was ‘extremely high’. The reason was simple. Even to the most inexperienced eye it was clear that Oflag XXIB offered numerous opportunities for escape. Paddy Barthropp maintained that whoever had designed the camp ‘must have had a touch of British blood in him’.

  The compound was small. Some of the barracks were only seventy feet from the perimeter fence, much nearer than at Stalag Luft III, and the soil was well drained and easy to work, so that tunnels could be dug at any level. ‘From a point of view of escape the camp was almost ideal,’ said Crawley. ‘It had not been designed for any military purpose and not only were many of the buildings so placed that they created blind spots which were hidden completely from the guards in the sentry towers but the many large trees and steep banks also proved excellent cover.’8 Tommy Calnan was even more enthusiastic: it was ‘an escapers’ paradise’.9

  The Wehrmacht administration also made a favourable impression. The guards seemed anxious for a quiet life. Among their ranks were semi-invalids who had been wounded on the Eastern front, men who looked too old to be in uniform and unsoldierly types who seemed happy to be engaged in safe duties that kept them far from the fighting. Although the camp had been open since 1940, the previous inmates had been French prisoners who believed they were due to be sent back home under the armistice signed after France’s defeat, and had little incentive to escape. As a result, according to the official RAF history of the camp, the guards ‘continued to exercise only lax discipline until they realized that the new prisoners of war required much closer watching.’ The camp commandant, Oberstleutnant von Bodecker, who had lost a leg on the Western Front and wore a monocle, ‘left the administration of prisoner-of-war affairs to the Senior British Officer, except in connection with roll calls and searches.’10 Nor did the camp security officer, who had been a Professor of English at a German university before the war, seem to take his duties particularly seriously. According to Crawley, he was ‘an attractive character with a large red face and a deep husky voice. He treated the whole business of war as an absurd episode in which the one thing that mattered was to preserve a sense of humour.’11

  Some of his colleagues took a less relaxed view. The camp adjutant was a Czech renegade, a former grocer called Simms, who showed all the zeal of the convert in his treatment of the prisoners. He was ‘irascible, anti-British and vindictive’, wrote Crawley. Within hours of arrival the prisoners were introduced to him at the first Appell. Simms was affronted by the prisoners’ shabby appearance and began haranguing them. He was unpleasantly surprised when the kreigies screamed and shouted back. Simms’s posturing could not disguise the fact that he was barely competent. ‘Had Simms thought a little less of inflicting discomfort on the prisoners and a little more of his duties the story of Schubin might have been different.’ As it was, his odious personality ‘added spice to every attempt to defeat the enemy’.

  There was another factor which played in the prisoners’ favour. The bucolic surroundings of the camp were misleading. The area had recently seen some terrible events. It had been part of Germany until 1920 when, under the Versailles treaty, it was granted to Poland. It was home to a large minority of ethnic Germans. In September 1939, about 250 of them were killed in the town of Bromberg – Bydgoszcz in Polish – about twenty miles to the north of the camp. The circumstances would be endlessly disputed, but it was clear that some had been victims of massacres. The SS, Wehrmacht and local German Selbstschutz (‘self-defence’) units responded with a series of atrocities, killing hundreds of Polish hostages before going on to murder up to 3,000 Jews and Poles deemed to be members of the intelligentsia. The terror unleashed by the Germans had failed to cow the Poles. ‘That meant,’ wrote Bill, ‘that if we got out and managed to knock on a door we were just as likely to be helped as not.’ This was ‘in stark comparison to Luft III in the heart of Germany, where every Nazi boy scout was on the lookout for escaped flyers and every blonde-haired apple-cheeked lass would sooner stick a… dagger in your ribs than help you.’12

  This assessment turned out to be largely true. There was inevitably much contact between the camp and the local population. Some of the guards were Polish. Local people came in every day to maintain the infrastructure, carry out repairs, wash, cook and clean. Through them the escape organization could establish links with families who were prepared to shelter escapers and with the local underground.

  Any Pole caught offering even the slightest assistance to a prisoner faced certain death for himself and possibly his family. Yet in Crawley’s experience, ‘of the dozens of Poles with whom the prisoners at Schubin came into contact only one proved unreliable. All the others, including many women, helped in every way they could.’13 The prisoners knew that beyond the wire were friends. It was a further boost to their spirits.

  The Stalag Luft III arrivals were joining another contingent of about two hundred RAF officers who had been transferred to Schubin from Oflag VIB at Warburg in north-western Germany. Added to the numbers were about eighty-five Army NCOs who had been in Warburg but had volunteered to move. Ostensibly they were going to serve as orderlies to the officers. Their real motive was that they believed the new camp would offer a better chance of escape. Another fifteen NCOs arrived with the Sagan party.

  As it was, it was the orderlies who achieved the first successes. They were housed in the stable block which had been converted into a barracks. Under the Geneva Convention, officers were not required to work. NCOs could be used as labour by the ‘detaining power’. Fatigue parties were regularly sent out of the camp under escort to deliver swill to the pigsties on the estate or collect fuel. Larger groups were taken into Schubin to collect bread and Red Cross parcels from the railway station. At the end of October an army corporal and an RAF warrant officer both managed to get away from work parties, but both were soon recaptured. Six weeks later Sergeant Philip Wareing of the RAF made another attempt. His story gives an idea of the fortitude, stamina and copious good luck that was needed to bring off a ‘home run’.

  Wareing was a Spitfire pilot with 616 Squadron and had been shot down over Calais in August 1940. On the afternoon of 16 December he was sent with other prisoners by lorry to Schubin station to collect a delivery of bread from a wagon in the sidings. As they loaded the truck, someone dropped a loaf on the line. Wareing went to pick it up, then ducked under a railway wagon and ran off. It was about 5.30 and in the darkness no one saw him go. Wareing had always intended to slip away if the chance presented itself. He was dressed in a pair of dirty and faded army trousers, an RAF tunic with all the badges removed and which could pass for a civilian garment, and a cloth cap, an outfit that would not stand out in shabby
wartime Poland. By the following afternoon he had covered the twenty miles to Bromberg, where he stole a rickety bicycle and pedalled and walked to Graudenz (Gruziadz), a town on the Vistula river. Gossip in the camp suggested that some British soldiers had managed to board ships at Graudenz bound for Sweden, but when Wareing reached the river there were no big ships to be seen. He would have to press on to Danzig (Gdansk), seventy miles away. He did not dare try and take a train. Instead he stole a new-looking bicycle and set off northwards. To get there he would have to cross the Vistula. There was a checkpoint on the bridge but Wareing blithely rode round it while the guards were checking the credentials of two soldiers.

  He arrived in Danzig on 19 December and spent all day dodging policemen and trying in vain to get into the docks. Early the following morning he finally wheeled the bike into the port area. He saw three or four ships were flying the Swedish flag and two flying the Blue Peter, the latter a signal that they were preparing to sail. Sentries were posted on the quayside beside the ships so he hid himself and the bike between some stacks of timber. He waited there until he saw the guard being changed and walked to the last ship on the dock. It was taking on a cargo of coal but there was a lull in the loading. He ran up a gangplank and dropped into the hold. There he stayed for the next twenty-four hours. Once a work party of Russians escorted by German guards appeared to trim the coal. One of the Russians saw him, hiding behind a pillar. He whispered ‘Angliski pilot’ and the man kept quiet. He slept that night in a hole he had dug in the coal. The following morning the Germans searched the ship and one shone a flashlight into the hold, but Wareing was well concealed. At 9 a.m. on 21 December he heard the anchor chain rattle and then the shuddering of the engine, and the ship moved away from the pier. For the next two and a half days he stayed in hiding, eating nothing and coming out at night to warm himself against a boiler pipe. Half-starved and black with coal-dust he left his hiding place in the early hours of 23 December and was spotted by a member of the crew. When the ship reached Halmstad early that afternoon he was handed over to the Swedish police and taken a few days later to the British legation in Sweden. A short time later he was back in Blighty, where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his pluck.

  The black farce of the shower-room escapade had only sharpened Bill Ash’s determination to get away. The casual set-up at Schubin seemed to promise every chance of success, and he was ‘intoxicated by the opportunities’.14

  The camp arrangements, so much less constricted than at Stalag Luft III, opened up possibilities for the quick-witted which required none of the tedium and effort of tunnelling. The access which the NCO fatigue parties had to the town seemed particularly promising. Of Bill’s numerous escape attempts, his next one was more a caprice than a serious effort, carried out with little planning and no preparation. The chances of success were small. The prime purpose seems to have been to satisfy his nagging urge to break free, which he admitted amounted almost to a mania. It came about when Bill persuaded an army private to allow him to take his place in a group that was being sent to Schubin station to unload a goods train.15 He got to work, biding his time and awaiting his chance. It came when the guards were looking the other way. ‘I managed to roll myself under the train,’ he wrote. ‘Looking up at the sooty, oil-smeared wheels I prayed that the train wouldn’t move and rolled as quickly as I could to the other side of the line.’16

  He looked up. In front stretched about half a mile of open ground, devoid of cover, but beyond it lay a wood. He hesitated for a moment. There was a great deal of open terrain in which even a bad shot could pick off a fleeing prisoner. But ‘the woods were calling me. It was too tempting and I set off like a greyhound.’ A few seconds later he heard shouting behind him, and what he hoped were warning shots whistled over his head. The German officer in charge of the work detail calculated Bill’s chances of reaching the distant woods and decided to take pity on him and ordered some soldiers mounted on pushbikes to head him off. ‘There are few experiences more depressing than racing as fast as you can for an unattainable target while your enemies overtake you in a leisurely manner and are waiting for you, guns at the ready, just in front of your objective,’ he remembered. If they had expected him to come quietly they were mistaken. Having come this far he ‘decided [he] might as well really go for it’, He tried to charge through them as if he was ‘an American footballer, determined to score the winning touchdown’, He was brought down with a rifle butt to the face. The guards then punished his defiance by administering a severe beating.

  Back in the camp he was taken off for his first spell in the Schubin cooler. Bill seems to have known his attempt would end in failure. One preparation he had made was to tape a small metal file to the inside of his leg before setting off. Following the beating, the guards had not troubled to search him too closely.

  Over the next few days, he sawed away at the three thick iron bars set in the small window. He disguised the marks with a paste made from his bread and water rations, mixed with dust from the cell walls. ‘Each day I was able to cover up my handiwork with Reich bread putty and, when the coast was clear, continue with my sawing,’ he wrote. After a week he had cut through one bar. It seemed unlikely that he would finish before his sentence was ended. It turned out to have been wasted effort. For no apparent reason he was moved to a new cell. While cleaning out the old one, a guard noticed his efforts on the bars. He was searched and the file, so blunt by now as to be almost useless, was taken from him. He was then sentenced to another two weeks in the cooler.

  He was released one lunchtime. Two friends of his, Mike Wood and Bill Palmer, had prepared a feast for him from their Red Cross parcels to make up for all the bread and water. Both belonged to the fraternity of escapologists with several failed attempts behind them. As Bill ate, they explained that they were making another bid that night, and outlined their plan. At the end they asked him if he would care to join them. ‘I really could have done with a rest,’ he recalled. ‘But the one thing time in the cooler does for you is to make your priorities very clear, and mine was escape.’17 His mind was soon made up: ‘“Well,” I thought. “What the hell.”’18

  As soon as it was dark they slipped out of the hut and sheltered in a dip in the ground which Wood and Palmer had identified as being out of sight of the watchtowers and shielded from the searchlight and arc lamps that lit up the camp at night. Then they wriggled through a vegetable patch, one of several cultivated by the kriegies, towards the wire. ‘I found myself trying to huddle under a potato plant that was about six inches tall, and I began to wonder why I kept on doing such stupid things, reasoning that I would probably have another month in the cooler to figure it out,’ he wrote. Then Bill Palmer clamped a pair of homemade shears around the first line of barbed-wire fencing and pressed hard. The wire was ‘stretched so tight that it went off like a gunshot… whipped around and nearly caught us. An incredibly loud twang, like the first note of a crazed bluegrass banjo solo, filled the air.’ The three scuttled away in different directions as sirens sounded and guards ran towards the noise. Wood and Palmer were soon discovered, but for once Bill’s luck held. He lay in the cover of the vegetable patch a few feet from the boots of the guards. Satisfied that there had been only two escapers they eventually departed and Bill ‘crawled very slowly back to our hut and fell into a long sleep’.19

  The wealth of opportunities brought a profusion of attempts. Within a fortnight of arriving, Tommy Calnan had devised a shallow ‘blitz’ tunnel by which they would burrow out in a single burst of digging. The prisoners’ vegetable patches around the inside of the rail that defined no-man’s land provided a good place to start digging. ‘In September the asparagus ferns grew tall and bushy and were covered with pretty red berries,’ he wrote. ‘My plan was to dig a short vertical shaft behind an asparagus bush and then to mole out.’ He would carry out the operation ‘in broad daylight, right under the nose of the sentry’.20

  He recruited Ian Cross and Robert
Kee to join him. The two were unlikely best friends. Cross, a squadron leader with 103 Squadron was ‘built like a small bull, compact and muscled’, as if he had been genetically designed for tunnelling. While normally good natured and extrovert he had a hair-trigger temper. Kee was ‘studious, vague and entirely non-athletic’. He was known as the most argumentative man in the camp and in Calnan’s opinion treated escape as a form of recreation from more serious occupations such as studying Russian.

  One morning the trio arrived in the vegetable garden armed with crude homemade tools and began hoeing between the long rows of asparagus, raking the sandy earth into ridges. The guard outside the fence barely gave them a second look, even when they neared the fence. Calnan could barely believe their luck. They would never have got away with it in Stalag Luft III.

  He started to dig the vertical shaft from behind a sheltering asparagus bush about twenty feet from the wire, while the others hoed and kept watch. After three days it was four feet deep. They now began to burrow horizontally towards the wire. As they were working mostly in full sight of the guards, progress was slow. Eventually they had cleared fifteen feet of tunnel. A little further and they would be able to seal themselves in and ‘mole’ out in one night.