The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  Then the run of good fortune ran out. Calnan was digging at the face with Cross behind him, pushing soil out to Kee who scattered it around the vegetable patch whenever the guards were not looking. His hand closed around a large piece of paper buried in the dirt. As he groped his way forward he began to suspect the tunnel was passing under an old rubbish dump. This was bad news. It meant the earth over his head would be unstable. Sensibly, he inched his way back. Then ‘an enormous weight hit me everywhere at once and I was completely unable to move my head, arms or body,’ he wrote. ‘As I drew my first terrified breath I inhaled so much sand that I almost choked.’ He tried to twist free but he was crushed by the weight of the earth. Only his legs remained loose and he kicked them violently to attract Cross’s attention. He felt hands grasp his feet and start hauling but it was no good. He was stuck fast under tons of sandy soil, fighting a losing battle to control his breathing, which was now coming in panicky gasps. Soon he was ‘panting like an exhausted dog and taking in more and more sand with each breath’. A terrible thought struck him: ‘I realized that I could survive for very few minutes and that they were going to be long, painful minutes.’

  It was the second time in his life that he had contemplated his own imminent death. The first had been on a clear winter’s day, 30 December 1941, when his aircraft had been hit by flak over the Normandy coast and with burning aviation spirit spraying his face he had tipped his Spitfire over and tumbled out into the air at 29,000 feet, only to realize that he was miles out to sea and certain to drown. An onshore wind had saved him then. Could anything rescue him now? His mind was surprisingly clear. He felt only ‘sad because of all the things I had not yet done, sad because it seemed so futile and meaningless that my life should end under a rubbish dump in an asparagus bed in Poland.’

  Then he heard the sound of spades hitting the ground above. Cross had scrambled out of the tunnel and alerted a kriegie rescue squad. It could not arrive soon enough, for Calnan was reaching the end of his endurance. ‘I was now snorting sand in and out of my nostrils at an incredible rate,’ he remembered. ‘It was an entirely involuntary reflex action induced by breathing carbon dioxide.’ A spade hit him in the middle of the back and hands grabbed his legs. With a ‘one, two, three, heave!’ his rescuers hauled him free. He lay gasping in the asparagus bed surrounded by German guards. He had turned a dull blue colour and for the next three days coughed up blood and sand. But in a week he was completely fit and ready to try again.

  The Germans were learning that they could never afford to relax. In December a van arrived at the camp carrying equipment to put on a film show. The van had a sagging canvas roof which attracted the attention of one enterprising British officer. While others distracted the guards he hopped onto the hood. It was dark when the film show ended and he was driven out through the gates to freedom. It did not last long. He was caught loitering round a nearby airfield, trying to steal an aeroplane, and sent back to Schubin.

  These attempts were good for morale and kept the Germans busy, but they were essentially individual efforts, lacking in resources and organization and therefore all the more likely to fail. The 450 air-force prisoners from Warburg, who had arrived at Schubin a few days before the first Sagan contingent, had their own escape organization and way of doing things. The camp history notes that initially ‘there was a certain amount of disagreement’ between the two groups about how to approach breaking out.21 It came to an end in November 1942 when a second group of about a hundred officers was transferred from Stalag Luft III to Schubin. Among them were Harry Day and Jimmy Buckley, who as senior British officer and head of the escape committee respectively had supervised the escape effort at Sagan. With their arrival came a more systematic and long-term approach. It started with the establishment of a new escape committee, along the lines of the set-up at Sagan. The members would vet proposals and accept or reject them. They would maximize the skills available among the camp personnel to provide technical expertise, food, clothing and documentation to those whose plans were given official backing.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Bill Ash was selected for membership of the committee.

  His fellow members included Charles Marshall, who had been forced to bale out over Essen in April that year, his friend Bill Palmer, Aidan Crawley and Eddie Asselin.

  Bill felt uncomfortable being in a position of authority, standing in judgement on other people’s dreams of escape. He justified his acceptance of the role to himself on the grounds that he planned to get away as soon as possible and would not feel the weight of responsibility for long. With Day’s arrival, though, it became clear that opportunistic attempts, cheering though they might be, would not get official encouragement. Day and Buckley favoured well-planned, large-scale projects aimed at freeing the maximum number of prisoners. And these would take time.

  The balmy autumn turned into a savage winter and the shortcomings of the barracks were laid bare. ‘We were assailed by a novel version of the biblical plagues,’ Bill remembered. ‘The main ones being famine, pestilence and ice.’22 Food – its presence or absence – was one of the great determinants of the mood of the camp. Schubin was a long way from anywhere and Allied bombing sometimes disrupted the flow of Red Cross parcel deliveries, causing supplies to halt for weeks or even months, so that contents had to be rationed.23

  On a parcel-less day a prisoner might breakfast on a single slice of black bread smeared thinly with margarine and jam, washed down with weak tea. For lunch there would be watery cabbage soup. Supper frequently amounted to no more than bread and a few potatoes. There was no fresh milk and other vegetables came from the prisoners’ gardens.

  Prisoners were naturally prone to any infection going. Jaundice was rife and to add to their tribulations the huts were infested with lice and bedbugs. Above all it was cold. The wind whipping in from the Baltic sliced through the walls and ceilings of the blocks, turning them into iceboxes. The ground froze and the football pitch now served as an ice rink for the kriegies, who glided around on skates which arrived in a Red Cross consignment. Tommy Calnan remembered the winter as ‘the coldest I have ever experienced. Instead of undressing to go to bed, one dressed. Double and triple layers of underwear, all one’s sweaters, two or three pairs of socks, covered by all the blankets and greatcoats one possessed.’24

  The barrack stoves failed to make a dent in the all-pervading chill. Before long everything that could be burned had been. The prisoners’ made themselves as comfortable as they could. As the Germans began to adopt countermeasures to thwart escapes, the prisoners sometimes found themselves turned out of their barracks and forced to move to one of the empty ones for long periods while their quarters were searched for signs of suspicious activity.25

  Day used all his considerable authority and powers of persuasion to try and improve the kriegies’ lot. Lindeiner-Wildau at Stalag Luft III could be relied on to give him a sympathetic hearing. Oberstleutnant von Bodecker, the camp commandant at Schubin, was less obliging. Their first encounter had not been a success. According to Crawley, Bodecker ‘tried to make Day stand at attention while in his presence, barked at him in German, and told him not to speak unless he was spoken to.’ Finally, during one encounter, ‘Day, without losing his temper, told the Kommandant that they were of the same rank in their respective forces, that he had served his king and country for twenty-five years and was only doing his duty by making complaints about the camp, which was no better than a pigsty.’ He then saluted and walked out. He arrived back in the compound ‘shaking with rage’, just as the prisoners were being dismissed from a roll call. He halted them and told them of the commandant’s rudeness. ‘He hopes to retire as a general,’ he declared. ‘But he won’t. We’ll break him.’ Thus began a protracted battle of wills between the RAF and the Wehrmacht.26

  The German military mindset, the prisoners had discovered, was complicated. By now the Wehrmacht had carried out its share of the routine atrocities that accompanied the campaign in the East, and
if this had caused individuals concern from time to time it did not seriously affect operations. Soldiers mainly hesitated if there was doubt whether their actions were covered by an order or official pronouncement. What mattered was not what they did so much as whether they were authorized to do it. The commandant felt constrained by the Geneva Convention and, under pressure from Day, would grudgingly respond to his demands. One day the prisoners were offered some moth-eaten greatcoats, apparently taken off the Polish cavalry. On another there was a consignment of clogs from France, similar to the ones Bill had foolishly chosen as part of his peasant disguise after he was shot down. The kriegies found it impossible to walk in them, but they burned splendidly in the block stoves.

  The prisoners’ spirits sank with the dwindling sun. They clung to the hope provided by odd bits of cheering news that they heard on the camp’s clandestine radio or gleaned from the German newspapers that circulated in the camp. The radio was assembled by Flight Lieutenant L. B. Barry, who arrived in Schubin in October. He managed to obtain two radio valves and some wiring from a Polish worker. Ingenuity provided the rest. He and his helpers made capacity condensers from tinfoil and margarine-soaked paper, solder out of molten silver paper, flux from resin, and the sensitive parts of the headset from old Gillette razor blades. The set was hidden under the stove in the medical officer’s room in the camp sick quarters. By November they were able to listen in to the BBC. The news was improving. A month earlier, Montgomery and the Eighth Army had smashed Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The bulletins were taken down in shorthand and transcribed for circulation. ‘The dissemination of news every day was of very great value in keeping the standard of morale high,’ the official history records.27

  Letters from home could be the greatest tonic, a physical link with the world the kriegies had left behind and a reaffirmation that love and familiar joys were waiting if they could only hang on. They could also bring sickening news. One of the hardest things for a prisoner was to be told that someone he loved and relied on no longer loved him. As the war progressed and absence grew longer such letters became increasingly frequent. They were known as ‘mespots’, a hangover from the First World War when extended service in Mesopotamia had ruptured many an engagement and marriage.

  It was impossible to keep the news secret. In Stalag Luft III some decided the best thing was to give it maximum publicity, pinning up their mespots to the camp notice board. ‘The effect was oddly therapeutic,’ wrote Richard Passmore. ‘All your friends understood and sympathized – at times they even found cause for laughter and this… wryly infected the victim.’28

  The content of some of the letters, no doubt embellished in the retelling, entered kriegie legend. One allegedly ran: ‘When you were reported missing I went round to see your widowed dad and we got on very well. Now I have to tell you that last week he and I were married. I hope you don’t take it too hard. Yours truly, Mum.’ Another announced: ‘I am sorry to tell you that I have been living with a soldier. He doesn’t get paid very much so I wonder whether you could see your way to increasing the allowance.’29

  For anyone in a fragile frame of mind, the weight of camp life was heavy, sometimes unbearably so. Among them was Flight Lieutenant Robert Edwards, who had been traumatized by the crash that preceded his capture. Bill Ash watched his deterioration with concern. As the weeks passed in Schubin he became ‘less and less stable… his unhinged arguments and nervous tics could be irritating to men already cooped up and spoiling for a squabble, but he was harmless and most of us did our best to look after him.’30

  No one took much notice when on 26 September 1942 he announced that he was ‘fed up with this place’. Shortly after, he strolled over to the warning wire, which as at Sagan stretched inside the perimeter fence, and stepped over it. He walked calmly to the barbed wire and in broad daylight began to climb. It would have been easy enough to pull him down and drag him off to solitary. Instead the guard called a single warning. The incident was witnessed by Bill Ash. Edwards ‘climbed on feebly, not getting very far up the wire. The nervous guard aimed low but shot him in the groin and he dangled briefly on the wire like a broken doll before being taken down.’ He was taken immediately to the camp doctor but died of his wounds.

  The incident brought a crowd of angry kriegies to the edge of the forbidden zone. ‘One particularly vicious guard known as the Blonde Beast was all in favour of mowing us down too,’ Bill remembered. ‘But some of the more moderate guards cooled the situation and we were spared.’ Instead he was grabbed and marched off to the cooler for shouting and raising his fist at a guard.

  Years later, when watching the film The Great Escape, he sat up when on the screen appeared what he describes as ‘a similar tragic moment in which an officer is shot down on the wire and a protesting American is led away to the cooler’. There is no record of such an incident happening at Stalag Luft III where the film is set, ‘but the real life tragedy at Schubin was burned into the minds of anyone who saw it.’

  One of his jailers was the ‘Blond Beast’, who made a point of taking Bill’s shoes away each night to further reduce the already non-existent chances of escape. The first time he came to collect them he asked Bill who he thought was winning the war. He replied ‘we are’ and was rewarded with a backhander to the face. The next night he repeated the question and this time Bill diplomatically gave what he thought was the right answer – the Germans. It made no difference: the Blond Beast struck him again. The routine went on night after night.

  The cell had a window set high in the wall, and to relieve the boredom he sometimes hauled himself up for a glimpse of life outside. It looked out on the main road that ran in front of the camp. One day he heard unusual noises drifting through the window. It reminded him of something from his Texas childhood: the sound of cattle being herded. When he looked out he saw not cows but a crowd of about two hundred young women. German soldiers and members of the Selbstschutz local militia were driving them along with sticks and whips towards the railway station. Whether they were Jews or young Poles being deported to forced brothels on the Eastern Front he never learned. The sight brought back all the anger and revulsion he had felt when watching cinema newsreels of storm troopers beating Jews and Communists. ‘Something inside me snapped,’ he wrote. ‘The year of abuse, captivity, beatings and a thousand tiny humiliations boiled up into one overwhelming desire to fight back and defend these poor women.’31

  Through the barred window he ‘screamed at the fascists herding the women, shouted and cursed, throwing every vile word I could at them’. Some of the women looked up and he liked to think later that his outburst had somehow brought them a little comfort. His shouts soon brought the guards running, and they tried to pull him down from the window. ‘I was so enraged that I hardly felt the blows raining down on me and the gun butts smashing my hands until I finally let go of the bars and fell to the floor, where the kicking continued,’ he wrote. Before they left him they nailed boards over the window. He lay in the darkness on the cold concrete floor. His face ached and his back and stomach throbbed. But he was glad for what he had done.

  SEVEN

  Soon after emerging from the cooler Bill was able to channel his anger and energy into a new escape project. He could claim some credit for coming up with the idea. One of the most significant buildings in the kriegies’ lives was the main latrine, known in German as the Abort. It was a long, low, brick structure, which stood in isolation a hundred yards from the nearest barrack block. In the mornings it was a busy place, a forum where the kriegies met to do their business and swap the latest ‘gen’ gleaned from whatever was picked up from the radio or the German newspapers brought in by the guards. The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial and they were rarely troubled by visits from the Germans. According to Tommy Calnan, it was reminiscent of a London club, even if it did not smell of old leather and expensive cigars. ‘It was here that all the lavatory rumours started which flashed round the camp at the speed of sound. It was h
ere that one first heard that there was a trainload of Red Cross parcels on the way, or that we were all about to be moved to another camp. It was here that plots were plotted and grievances grieved over.’1

  It was in this stimulating atmosphere that Bill and a group of his cronies were struck by a startling but potentially very promising idea. Why not use the Abort as the starting point for a serious, properly engineered tunnel from which a major escape of the type that Day was encouraging could be launched? After some initial preparatory work they revealed their thinking to a group of like-minded kriegies, hardened escapers who they thought could be trusted to appreciate the concept.

  One day in early November they met in a discreet corner of the barrack. It was a freezing day, ten degrees below outside, and two degrees above within. They cradled cups of Red Cross cocoa as Bill and his associates explained the plan to the gathering. Those present included Edouard Asselin, a comrade from 411 Squadron who had been a star athlete at Montreal’s Loyola College and played a mean game of poker. Bill found him ‘immensely likeable’ but also noted ‘a very well-developed streak of ambition… we all had an unshakeable sense that no matter what happened, Eddy Asselin would come up smelling of roses.’2 Also present were Charles Marshall and Bill Palmer. Marshall had been a London policeman before joining the RAF, spoke good German and was an outstanding organizer.

  They observed that the latrine had many things in its favour as the starting point for a tunnel. In the first place, it was reasonably close to the perimeter fence. Its construction provided excellent conditions in which to dig undetected. The interior was divided into two areas. At the northern end was the urinal. This was a simple affair. The rear wall and part of the two side walls were tarred and a trough laid along the bottom which emptied into a pit. The rest of the Abort was devoted to the sit-down facilities. These consisted of a row of broad wooden benches that ran along the remaining three walls, pierced at intervals of three feet by a series of holes. The planks were made of soft pine and the holes had smooth and rounded edges so they were comfortable and easy on the anatomy. There were a further two rows, arranged back-to-back in the middle of the Abort. Each space was separated from its neighbour by a partition but was open at the front. There were enough seats to cater for seventy men at any time.