As the months passed and the seasons turned, it became easier to accept and harder to rebel. Time no longer hung quite so heavily on the prisoners’ hands. There were plenty of uses to which it could be put. By the middle of 1943 a regime had evolved in which a kriegie could exercise his brain studying Shakespeare and his body playing football or doing gymnastics. The camp was full of experts, eager to impart their skills. He could learn a musical instrument, study a language, play chess, bridge or poker, or take part in the increasingly sophisticated productions being staged in the camp theatre. The mail functioned efficiently enough for kriegies to be able to take correspondence courses in the law, accountancy or some other subject that would help set them off on a career after the war was over.
The signs were that the end was not so far away. Try as they might, the Germans could not keep the progress of the war a secret. Each compound had its clandestine radio, built and maintained by the bomber wireless operators whose numbers had increased as the Allied bombing campaign rolled over Germany. The details were taken down in shorthand and disseminated by word of mouth. The Germans offered their own version of events through bulletins broadcast over the camp loudspeakers. By now, though, even the guards seemed to doubt their veracity.
In June 1943 it was clear the war was not going Hitler’s way. The catastrophe at Stalingrad had ended the great surge forward. It was Germany’s turn to be on the defensive. A landing in Western Europe was inevitable. The only question was when and where it would fall. Bill detected a new attitude among the camp staff. While no longer sure of victory, they were by no means convinced that the war was lost. The most likely scenario the Germans now believed was a truce in the west followed by a joint campaign against the Communist menace in the east.
This view was not entirely unrealistic. Since the summit meeting in Casablanca in January that year, the Allies were supposedly committed to accepting no terms short of unconditional surrender from Germany. The policy had been insisted on by President Roosevelt, but there were some highly placed figures in Britain and America who believed that it would be abandoned if Hitler was overthrown. Bill was convinced that turning on the Soviet Union was unthinkable for another reason. The ordinary people who had gone to war against Hitler regarded the Russians as friends and allies. An attack on their partners would receive no support.
Despite the petty persecutions, the camp authorities often strove to treat the kriegies with something approaching respect. Their motives were mixed. They regarded the British as equals, worthy opponents who should be handled in as civilized a manner as the circumstances allowed. At the same time, as the war progressed and the outcome became increasingly uncertain, the prisoners became an appreciating asset. An individual guard might decide that if Germany lost, a good report from the prisoners might be helpful in allowing him to adjust to the new conditions. A more sinister calculation was that the kriegies might come in very useful as hostages, whose lives could be used as bargaining chips by officials seeking to escape punishment for their crimes.
The Germans were therefore anxious to convey their essential decency. At times, the prisoners were prepared to accept that their enemies were not so different to themselves in their values and their outlook. ‘Towards us the Germans behaved themselves with a disciplined formality and correctness,’ wrote Tommy Calnan. ‘They liked us to think they were gentlemen and we were often stupid enough to think this way.’3 There was much evidence in and around the camp to undermine that assessment. It was there in the shape of the forty or so Russian prisoners who lived on starvation rations in the Vorlager and were used, as long as their diminishing strength lasted, as slave labour.
Calnan looked on them and felt a shudder of pity. ‘These men were being deliberately destroyed by a long drawn-out and carefully phased programme of cruelty,’ he wrote. ‘To our comfortable British consciences, they were a nasty embarrassment. It was easier to pretend they were not there, rather as one crossed the street to avoid a passing beggar.’
The growing evidence of a programme of mass extermination of the Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich had not reached the kriegies. But beyond the wire there were occasional glimpses of the nightmarish world the Germans were building in the conquered lands. Calnan glimpsed ‘one single horrifying sight of reality’ from the window of a truck which was taking him from the camp to Sagan for a trip to the dentist. ‘At a level crossing I saw ten or a dozen figures, herded in a group and surrounded by SS guards. They were not human figures, just angular skeletal forms clad in pyjamas with yellow and grey vertical stripes. There was no substance to them and no personality.’ They disappeared from sight as the truck turned a corner. He was ‘left with a strong sensation of evil and an unexpectedly powerful fear of something unknown’. Some instinct prevented him from asking questions of the guards.4
Bill had already seen a similar sight from the window of the Schubin cooler when he witnessed the party of women being herded along the road. His theoretical hatred of the Germans had hardened into a practical one. He was also driven by convictions and sentiments that few of the other kriegies shared. When he looked at the starving Russians he felt not just pity but comradely solidarity. He and they were more than temporary allies. They were profoundly and ideologically on the same side.
Ever since childhood he had been angered by injustice. He had seen how white Americans treated black Americans and it sickened him. An episode he witnessed while at a boys’ summer camp in Texas stayed with him all his life. A black youth was employed to do the cooking. While returning to the camp at night-time after an excursion into town, the young man was confronted by two of the camp counsellors dressed in sheets daubed with luminous paint. ‘Not unnaturally the youth took off across the fields with the two figures in close pursuit emitting eerie wails,’ he wrote. ‘There was a loosely strung barbed-wire fence at the edge of the ploughed area and he ran into it full tilt, becoming enmeshed in the strands whose vicious barbs punctured him in a dozen places.’ Bill remembered ‘looking at him, trussed up on the ground, eyes rolling, and I recall the anger I felt – not just because they had hurt him but more because they had made their humiliating little contribution to the racist myth that black people are ignorant and superstitious.’5 He felt a profound hatred for ‘those who degrade other human beings to make them into menials and then despise them for their degradation’. His experiences of Nazi Germany would provide plenty of material for the hatred to feed on.
His upbringing had also given him first-hand exposure to the inequities of raw capitalism. He had watched the indignities suffered by his father as he struggled to make a living. Bill himself had slaved to put himself through university only to find when he got his degree that there was no proper job waiting. He had been forced to hop freight trains, live rough and go hungry in his search of work that barely kept him alive.
There were millions like him in 1930s America, but most survived the experience with their faith in capitalism undented. Bill was different. From the outset he was drawn to socialism, a creed with few followers in 1930s Texas. He watched the struggle of the Spanish Republicans against the Nationalist rebels and their Nazi and Fascist backers and boiled with frustration that he was too young to join the fight. When the next war came he went eagerly. He would not be fighting for Canada or Britain or America but in the great cause of anti-Fascism. The pathetic Russian starvelings being worked to death by the Germans were as much his brothers-in-arms as his comrades in the RCAF and RAF.
These convictions fed his determination to keep on trying to escape. There were enough like him to ensure that, once back in Stalag Luft III, the business began anew.
All the returnees from Schubin were put into East Compound, their old stamping ground. Meanwhile a large proportion of the camp’s population was occupying the new North Compound, which was half a mile away and out of sight. Between the two lay the Centre Compound and the Kommandantur administrative area and German quarters. The Schubin escape committee reconvened, but wi
th Jimmy Buckley’s disappearance Harry Day took over as chairman. They gave the go-ahead for several new tunnels, but as they soon discovered the ferrets had grown more cunning during their absence. Inspection tunnels had been dug beneath each barrack to check for signs of excavated soil. If a tunnel was discovered, the German security team was inclined to let it be, leaving the would-be escapers to toil away for weeks or months until they neared the wire before moving in to shut it down and cart the diggers off to the cooler.
Those involved in the Schubin latrine tunnel found their ability to participate constrained. As notorious escapologists they were under closer surveillance than the other kriegies and, despite their expertise, their assistance on an escape project actively increased the chances of detection. Bill had time on his hands. He read voraciously and for a time he kept up a correspondence with a girl who worked in the Red Cross department in Geneva, which despatched books to the prisoners. It ended when she took to regaling him with steamy details of amorous weekends spent with her boyfriend, in the mistaken belief that it would be good for Bill’s morale.
He consoled himself in other ways. Since first hearing classical music drifting from a church hall one night in Texas he had been enchanted by it. In London he had attended lunchtime concerts, laid on by the authorities, which brought beauty to the drabness. There were fewer opportunities in the messes and anterooms of the fighter stations where the squadron was based. When they were at Digby someone had made the mistake of giving Bill some mess funds to go into York and buy some records. To the disgust of his colleagues he returned bearing not the latest discs by Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters but the works of Bach and Beethoven. As far as his fellow pilots were concerned he was welcome to them and he whiled away many hours listening in solitary rapture.
There was no such possibility in Stalag Luft III. The few gramophones were monopolized by the non-classically minded majority and the radio was far too precious to risk it being discovered while broadcasting a symphony. Kriegie life taught you that there was always a way round a problem, and Bill found one.
‘In every camp there was only one place where classical music was sure to be played,’ he wrote, ‘and that was on the gramophone or radio in the German officers’ quarters.’ He was prepared to risk ‘a long spell in the cooler, or even being shot, by slipping out of my hut after curfew and crawling and running between the huts until I reached an internal fence that separated us from a hut full of off-duty German officers.’ He ‘crouched by the wire, spellbound as the music drifted across, an unwitting gift from my captors’.6 That a culture that could produce and love such music was capable of such gigantic cruelty was an enduring mystery.
Bill’s reading had led him to the conclusion that the Allied treatment of Germany after the First World War had created the conditions that encouraged the rise of Hitler. He also believed that Western capitalism had at first regarded Hitler with favour, as a bulwark against the Bolshevik menace in the east. None of this reduced his hostility to the Nazis. Now, it seemed, the battle against the Fascists had reached a turning point. He itched to be a part of it. His obsessive urge to break out was practical not symbolic. This was not merely a pastime or a gesture of defiance to embarrass his captors and expose their inadequacies. It was a warlike exercise, designed to get him back in action at the controls of his Spitfire as soon as possible.
The chances of making it out of Stalag Luft III seemed severely limited. What he needed was a change of circumstances that would allow his skills and experience to be put to their best use. One day the camp rumour-mill produced an interesting item. The sergeant pilots in Centre Compound were being moved. They were to be shipped out in batches of two hundred to Stalag Luft VI, a new camp built amid flat, swampy terrain near the small town of Heydekrug, nearly two hundred miles away to the north-east, in the wilds of Lithuania. The first party was due to leave in June.
Bill immediately saw an opportunity. ‘If I could get to a different camp, I could use the period of chaos [that exists] at the founding of any camp as a happy hunting ground for future escapes with untrained guards and fresh routes for new tunnels.’7 The problem was that he was not an NCO.
That difficulty was soon resolved. Bill had made friends with a young New Zealander in Centre Compound called Donald Fair. He managed to persuade him that the two should swap identities. Fair would avoid being sent off to the wastes of Lithuania, and he became a Flight Lieutenant (Bill had been promoted in absentia). The main problem was how to change places. East Compound and Centre Compound were separated by a ten-foot-high double fence, which was within sight of the perimeter fence watchtowers.
To get across would require speed, agility and a major diversion to distract the guards. Bill enlisted the services of Paddy Barthropp and other friends. At the agreed time, Bill took up his position on his side of the divide while Don Fair loitered innocently on the other. Paddy and his accomplices began to play a noisy game of football. The guards’ eyes wandered towards the group of shouting, jostling kriegies, scuffling in the summer dust. Their interest mounted as the game became more boisterous, then degenerated into a minor brawl. Bill and Don took their chance. They skipped over the warning wire on their respective sides of the fence – beyond which they were liable to be shot –and scrambled over the wire, dropping into the gap between the two fences. There they crouched down, shook hands and swapped their identity papers and discs.
Then they were off again for another heart-stopping assault on the wire to the other compound. Behind them the shouts of the fight subsided. The guards’ gaze turned away. If they glanced towards the boundary between East and Centre compounds all they saw were two insignificant figures strolling harmlessly back towards the huts.
Bill never saw Don Fair again. In order to maintain their false identity they had to keep up the imposture in their letters home, which were read by the camp censors.
TWELVE
As Bill Ash prepared to set off for Heydekrug an unexpected difficulty arose. Commandant von Lindeiner-Wildau decided to bid a personal farewell to the departing NCOs. He was in paternal mood, making a short speech in which he urged them to behave themselves in their new camp. In retrospect it sounded like a veiled but well-meant warning: the days of gentlemanly correctness were coming to an end and henceforth it was the methods of the Gestapo that would prevail. Bill tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible at the back of the parade. He was well known to Lindeiner from the numerous dressings-down that preceded his despatch to the cooler. After the risks he had taken it would be a bitter anticlimax if Lindeiner spotted him and demanded to know what an officer was doing among the ranks of the NCOs.
The speech ended. They marched out of the camp like soldiers and the Luftwaffe officers watching held their salutes until the last man passed. At Sagan station they climbed into special carriages, with a wired-off section in the middle where armed guards kept watch, for a meandering and eventful journey to Heydekrug.
Bill soon learned that the NCOs had their own way of doing things. In contrast to the system prevailing in the officer compounds they organized themselves along democratic lines, electing a leader, a ‘man of confidence’ who liaised with the German authorities. The leader of Centre Compound was a figure who commanded the respect and admiration of all who came in contact with him. Warrant Officer James Deans was a 29-year-old Glaswegian who joined the RAF before the war. On 10 September 1940 his Whitley bomber was shot down over Holland after a raid on Bremen. He and the rest of the crew survived and spent the war in a succession of camps. ‘Dixie’ Deans was a man of quiet natural authority. He had mastered German which helped him develop a grasp of his captor’s psychology. He was correct, and courteous, always neatly turned-out in uniform and tie, and highly adept at manipulating camp life to the kriegies’ advantage. His diplomatic skills wrung many concessions from the staff. Through bribery and charm he extracted escape materials, vital components for the clandestine radio, and information which he sent back to IS9 by way of
coded letters. At the same time he exercised subtle control over the men who had chosen him, settling disputes and setting the tone for how camp life was lived.
Bill saw him as ‘a brilliant example of someone who could use his head as well as his heart… he tended not to waste words but said what he meant and meant what he said. Jimmy was proof positive that you didn’t have to shout to be a commanding presence.’1
*
As he sat on the train waiting for it to depart, Bill was about to catch his first sight of another remarkable character. He noticed some of his new comrades staring at a smartly dressed German civilian who was sitting at a table outside the station cafeteria drinking a stein of beer, while the German officer in charge of the prisoners rushed up and down the platform shouting orders. Eventually the civilian rose and approached the harassed officer. In the conversation that followed it seemed clear that the civilian was the one with the authority, and the officer cringed and nodded. ‘Gestapo,’ said one of the kriegies. ‘No it’s not,’ said another. ‘It’s bloody Grimson.’
George Grimson was a stocky Londoner with close-cropped blond hair and a pugnacious manner who, like Deans, had joined the pre-war RAF and was flying in Bomber Command when he was shot down in 1940. He was a dedicated and daring escapologist. His preferred method was impersonation and he had managed to bluff his way out of camps twice disguised as a German. As the move to Heydekrug approached he decided to try again.
The scheme succeeded brilliantly. It was, in Aidan Crawley’s view, ‘one of the cleverest escapes of the whole war’.2 Grimson’s plan required great assurance, considerable acting ability and icy self-control. He intended to disguise himself as a German electrician tasked with carrying out tests on the telephone wires which ran from the Kommandantur offices over the top of the perimeter fence. His aim was to get into the German area, where the main gate was situated, and walk out. Assiduous bartering by the compound’s escape organization provided him with all the props he needed for his imposture. Grimson dressed up in a dark-blue boiler suit, Luftwaffe cap and leather belt, and carried a dummy electrician’s meter for testing wiring. He was also armed with forged documents and some bars of escape ‘mixture’.
The Cooler King Page 17
