For Bill their recapture was merely a setback. It would do nothing to deter him from trying again and again. ‘For me the issue was simple,’ he declared. ‘I had joined the war to resist and I would keep resisting with every breath until I escaped or until the enemy helped me to get away on a more permanent basis, six feet underground.’ It was not really a matter of choice, he explained, for ‘my escaping gene was just as much a part of me as my instinct to keep breathing.’ They went back to Schubin by way of several other prisons. On their return they were subjected to repeated interrogations before being sentenced to a fortnight each in the cooler.
Paddy and Wilf’s adventure had also come to an end in Hohensalza. Their joy at having apparently hitched a ride on a goods train was short-lived. A few minutes after apparently setting off down the track towards Warsaw it stopped without even leaving the goods yard. They passed the night in the wagon, hoping that their luck would change. But next morning they heard the sound of barking dogs and peered out to see a line of soldiers searching the train. They jumped down onto the tracks without being seen and made it out of the yard, only to be spotted by a local official who summoned a patrol, and they were hauled off to the police station. Before being transferred to Gestapo headquarters they managed to get rid of their false ID cards, but not the rest of the escape kit. Paddy’s carefully maintained insouciance crumbled on arrival, as they underwent ‘an extremely frightening and unpleasant experience’.
‘Here were two filthy, smelly, unshaven individuals with no identification documents claiming to be British,’ he wrote. ‘From time to time I could hear screams coming from the other inmates and I really thought my luck had finally run out.’7
The pair were subjected to a thorough body-search but the expected beating never came. Instead they were taken out and paraded in front of a gathering of troops and Hitler Youth. By now the RAF night-bombing campaign in Germany was taking a terrible toll on German cities. What would become known as the Battle of the Ruhr had just begun and in the days since the break-out, Bomber Command had mounted mass raids on Essen and Nuremburg. In Essen nearly five hundred people had been killed, matching or perhaps exceeding the number who died in the ‘thousand-bomber raid’ against Cologne ten months before. The Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, had branded the bomber crews Terrorfliegen. The opportunity to put two captured terror-fliers on show was too good to miss. As the Germans stood and stared, one of the Hitler Youth said in English: ‘Hitler is a good man and Churchill is a very bad man.’ Paddy could not hold his tongue. ‘My answer was somewhat unflattering to the Führer whereupon the boy spat at me. This gave his friends a good excuse to follow suit and I ended up looking like a slimy creature out of a Hammer horror movie.’8
They were taken back to their cells and spent a fearful few days before deliverance came in the form of a Luftwaffe major, who prised them from the Gestapo. After another night in Hohensalza they were sent back to Schubin, arriving on 13 March. They were sentenced to ten days in the cooler. It was only what they expected and seemed much preferable to captivity Gestapo-style.
Since boarding the train at Bromberg, Tommy Calnan and Robert Kee had made good progress. While waiting at Schneidemühl for the train to take them further west to Küstrin (Polish, Kostrzyn nad Odra) they had been stopped by two plainclothes policemen. Calnan had feared that their forged letters supporting their claims to be Krupp technicians would not bear close scrutiny. Thanks to Kee’s excellent German and impressive self-assurance, however, they had been sent on their way, with the policemen’s best wishes and a telephone number to call should they need any assistance en route.
From Küstrin they caught a train to Berlin, arriving at the Schlesischer Bahnhof in the east of the city. They spent the day walking the streets, to avoid the feeling of anxiety that overwhelmed them if they remained stationary for too long. Initially they had been excited by the idea of penetrating the enemy citadel, but they were so exhausted by now that they barely noticed their surroundings. Early that evening they took a local train from the Zoo station to Stendal, eighty miles west, where they were to change for Hanover. It was packed with civilians taking refuge in the suburbs for fear of further raids on the city, which had been bombed heavily just over a week previously. At Hanover they took the midnight express for Cologne, which was due to arrive at five in the morning. Calnan’s research had told him that there was a workman’s train that left for the border town of Aachen shortly afterwards. From there it was only a short tram ride to Eupen in Belgium, where they could begin to try and make contact with the underground.
They were travelling second class and as soon as he settled onto the upholstered seat Calnan fell into a deep sleep. He was shaken awake by Kee. A policeman was standing over them and wanted to see their identity cards. They produced them and the policeman and his colleagues glanced at them and departed, apparently satisfied. The train stopped for a long time after passing through Hamm, whose railway junction was a favourite target of Bomber Command. By the time they crossed the long bridge over the Rhine on the approach to Cologne the sun was already above the horizon. It was then that the police returned. Kee began to repeat their story but they were in no mood to listen. They demanded to see their papers again and then left the compartment, taking the identity cards with them. It was obvious the game was almost up. They made a quick decision. They would jump out and make a run for it, but when they got to the door a soldier was standing guard.
At Cologne they were led away to a police station. They trotted out their story once more but by now the police seemed to be enjoying themselves, confident that they had their men. A search produced a quantity of ‘mixture’ food bars, a collection of maps and a supply of Player’s cigarettes. ‘We know all about you,’ declared the sergeant in charge. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble. Every policeman in the country has been looking for you. We did not expect you to come so far.’9 The following day they were taken to Gestapo headquarters. Their interrogator spoke good English and pressed them for information about how the escape was engineered. For a while they baited him, giving ridiculous answers until he lost patience with their impertinence. Calnan recalled how his ‘voice dropped to a whisper’ as he told them that he could ‘shoot you where you stand and never have to answer for it. Do you think the Geneva Convention means anything to us?’ It was a good question. In the world the prisoners had escaped from, rules had some meaning. The Gestapo operated under no restraints. For the first time, Calnan was scared. ‘There was a menace in that whispering voice which I recognized as real,’ he recalled. ‘That man had immense power and could have carried out his threat with complete impunity.’
It was, Kee realized, the other side of Germany, the one that until now they had seen remarkably little of. There was ‘the Wehrmacht Germany which saluted when it passed you in the camp and allowed you to write home three times a month’, and the other, ‘which beat you in the stomach with lengths of hosepipe and shot you in the early morning’.10 When later that evening he and Kee were put on a train at Wuppertal bound for the east and Schubin, they were careful to humour their Gestapo escorts, accepting their beer and sharing their cigarettes with them.
Aidan Crawley had made excellent progress since leaving Schneidemühl. He arrived in Berlin via Posen at the same time as Calnan and Kee. He was heading to Switzerland via Munich so took the underground to the Südbahnhof, where the southbound trains left from. Departures were disrupted because of air raids and he learned he might have to wait several days for a service. He knew that civilians could stay for up to three nights in a hotel without questions being asked, so he checked in to a small place in the centre. For the next two days of waiting he wandered unmolested around the city, eating in restaurants and visiting the cinema. So far the raids on Berlin had done little to alter the look of the city. It sprawled over eighty square miles and the townscape was interspersed with parks and lakes. The RAF was still acquiring the technologies and perfecting the techniques of concentrated bo
mbing. But they were learning fast and the ‘Big City’, as the bomber crews called it, would be the main focus for their efforts later in the year.
On the second day he learned a train was due to leave for Munich the next morning. He slept on the floor of the station waiting room and arrived at his destination late in the evening. An air raid was in progress and the passengers were hustled to an underground shelter. Crawley had never been in one before, but the atmosphere was how he imagined it would be in Britain. People talked constantly and handed around food and wine. One woman had been in Cologne, subject of a thousand-bomber raid. She teased the more frightened inhabitants, telling them: ‘You don’t know what air raids are like. When we were in Cologne we had buildings crashing all around us.’11
Next morning, 8 March, only two days after breaking out, he took a train to Innsbruck, intending to carry on westwards to Landeck in the Austrian Tyrol, where he planned to leave the train and continue on foot to the Swiss border, only twelve miles to the south. Not long after leaving Munich, border guards who were aboard the train asked for his papers. Crawley handed them over with confidence. By now they had passed inspection with ease on about twenty occasions. When the guards left the carriage telling him they would return his papers he failed to smell danger, missing the chance to jump from the train, which was moving slowly at the time. When they returned he was led off to a police officer on the train. The policeman who had checked his papers had spotted a defect on the stamp on his Ausweise. He was arrested and put off the train at Kufstein in the Austrian Alps, where he was taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. ‘I maintained my story of being a French worker for a time, but I realized that to continue to do so would be useless,’ he told an intelligence debriefer after the war.12 After a roundabout journey, including a day in Berlin accompanied by an SS officer who took him on a sightseeing tour, he was back in Schubin on 12 March.
By then almost all the other escapers had been rounded up. Tony Barber got as far as Belgard (in Polish, Białogard), only about seventeen miles from Kolberg, where he planned to take a boat to Denmark. He was strolling around town killing time before his train when he was stopped by two elderly storm troopers who asked him what he was doing. He said he was going to visit his sick brother, picking out an address at random in the street on which they were standing. They insisted on going with him. The woman who came to the door denied all knowledge of him and he was carted off to the Gestapo.
After two days Harry Day and Dudley Craig were starving. They made the mistake of asking a boy who they thought was Polish for food. He turned out to be a member of the Hitler Youth, who summoned help. They were captured after a short chase.
The countryside was full of trigger-happy troops, eager to play a role in the manhunt. When a senior officer in the Posen police failed to respond to a sentry’s challenge at a roadblock he himself had thrown up, he was promptly shot dead.
Charles Marshall and Flight Lieutenant Webster, travelling on foot, were caught after forty-eight hours, trying to bluff their way across a bridge over the Vistula. Bill Palmer and Flight Lieutenant J. W. Wood hopped a series of goods trains, which took them to Falkenburg (Polish, Złocieniec). Unfortunately it was in the opposite direction to Danzig, their intended destination. They too were nabbed by a member of the home guard.
In the end everyone who took part in the tunnel escape was recaptured. Most were caught within a few days. It was months, though, before the Germans caught up with Josef Bryks. The Polish contractor who smuggled Squadron Leader Morris and Ricks out in the honeywagon hid them in his house on the outskirts of Schubin, then took them to a German state farm where the workforce was all Polish, who fed and looked after them. They were joined by Flight Lieutenant Otakar Černý, another Czech serving with the RAF, who had arranged to meet with Bryks after escaping through the tunnel. After five days hiding in a barn they split up. Morris set off under cover of darkness for Danzig but was soon captured trying to cross a bridge. Bryks and Černý walked for three weeks, moving on by night and hiding by day, until they reached Warsaw, where they made contact with the Polish underground. They were arrested on 2 June when the house they were staying in was raided. The Gestapo accused them of being Russian spies and threatened to have them shot. They were saved when they produced their prisoner-of-war identity discs.13
The exercise confirmed the truth that getting out of the camp was the easy part. The German apparatus of repression was remarkably effective. It was honed to new levels of efficiency due to the belief that an RAF fifth column was abroad, seeking to open up a new front behind the German lines. The scale of the manhunt made it clear that this was more than simply a matter of rounding up absconding prisoners of war. The captives were subjected to exhaustive questioning, with particular attention focused on what aid they had received from the local population. Day’s Gestapo interrogators seemed convinced that he was working with the Polish underground.14
Two of the escapees would never be coming back. Jimmy Buckley, the cheerful, dauntless overseer of the operation, had been travelling with the young Dane Jørgen Thalbitzer, posing as Danish sailors. They made it all the way to Thalbitzer’s home in Copenhagen for a joyful reunion with his family. The local underground provided them with a two-man canoe for the short voyage to Sweden. They departed on a calm sea late on the evening of 28 March. Thalbitzer’s body was washed ashore some months later. Buckley was never found.
ELEVEN
The escapers consoled themselves with the thought that though they were back in captivity they had at least created a great deal of trouble for the Germans. They had also succeeded in revealing the fundamental incompetence of the camp authorities. In the process they lived an adventure; arduous, uncomfortable and nerve-wracking, but also exhilarating. The consequences of their defiance were surprisingly slight. Everyone got a spell in the cooler, with Day as the most senior culprit drawing the longest sentence of fourteen days. Once the cell door clanged behind them, though, there was plenty of time for longer reflection. Bill Ash was not the only one to weigh the effort against the results. He ‘stared at the concrete walls and bars and wondered if it was all worth it’.1
When they emerged from solitary they learned there had been big changes at Schubin. Simms and his team had gone, sacked and court-martialled for their failure to control their charges. Some of the old guard remained, but control was now in the hands of the Gestapo. The prisoners’ satisfaction at their old adversary’s humiliation was tempered by the fact that the devil they knew had been replaced with a much more venomous and unpredictable regime.
Dickie Edge and his team had been preparing their own tunnel when the breakout happened. They were determined to continue, despite the change in regime. The intense searching that followed the escape had left the tunnel undisturbed. From its starting point in the barrack night latrine on the western side of the camp it now stretched for 110 feet, which put it sixty feet beyond the perimeter fence. Undaunted by the failure of any of the earlier escapers to score a ‘home run’, Edge was now proposing to send an even larger number under the wire. On 26 March the last section of tunnel was dug out, leaving only a few feet to go. The night latrine was a urinal only, so there was no pit in which to dump the spoil. Dispersal was tricky and the team had to scatter it where they could, protected by a network of lookouts. On this day the system failed. A guard saw someone pouring sand out of a barrack window onto the slope behind and raised the alarm. Russian prisoners were set to work with shovels and picks and eventually discovered the entrance. Before they did, two prisoners managed to get into the tunnel, wriggle down it and break out. They were picked up a few hours later.
It was one of the last dramas in the Schubin story. The kriegies had known for some time, via the warning from IS9 in London, that they might soon be on the move. In April the rumour was confirmed. The expansion work at Sagan was now completed. They were leaving the escapers’ paradise of Oflag XXIB and returning to their old abode – Stalag Luft III.
&
nbsp; As they trudged through the gates once more they saw that the camp had been transformed. There was a whole new compound on the northern side and another was being built for US air-force prisoners in the south. Centre Compound was already full of American airmen. ‘It was good to glimpse so many Americans, if only through two layers of barbed wire,’ Bill Ash remembered.2 The camp now had many of the facilities of a small town. There was a flourishing theatre and the public rooms were booked solid by clubs and societies. Much of the ground was under cultivation by newly enthusiastic gardeners supplementing their rations with fresh vegetables. The food situation had improved considerably. The Red Cross parcels were arriving regularly now and there were frequent surpluses of some items, so that a flourishing commodities market had grown up, operated by camp entrepreneurs who to Bill’s honest eyes seemed little more than spivs. Nor did he approve of the long-running poker schools in which wily operators fleeced the gullible of years of back-pay.
The camp had an air of permanence. It was not just the size of the place, which had doubled in the intervening months. It was noticeable in the attitudes of the inhabitants. There were now about 8,000 of them, and most seemed content to sit out the war, spending their days as best they could.
The Cooler King Page 16
