Bill favoured an early break, not least because something told him that the psychic energy crackling around the project heightened the risk of discovery. ‘It is hard to quantify,’ he wrote, ‘but somehow the tension prior to a jailbreak is like an invisible wave of static electricity that spreads through a camp, and somehow the ferrets often seemed to sense it, just as some people or animals can sense a storm coming long before the first cloud has appeared on the horizon.’14
Though normally reluctant to take the floor he decided to speak out. The official history related how ‘Ash then addressed the meeting and stated his point of view which was that the tunnel should be used at once.’ He ‘contended that as the tunnel was now well beyond the fence, the risk of its discovery before it could be used should not be increased by further delay’.15
There was strong support for both points of view. Alexander decided to put it to the vote. When the count was taken there was a majority of one in favour of an immediate departure. There were no further interventions from the committee. All that remained was to sort out the order in which the escapers would leave the tunnel. Priority would be given to those who had put in the most work. That meant Bill was at the front.
There were about nine hours for final preparations. The former divisions were forgotten. ‘Immediately the decision was made, everyone, no matter how they had argued earlier, threw themselves completely into making the escape a success,’ wrote Bill. ‘The NCO camp, from its election of a sergeant as leader to its determination to have a vote, even on escaping, was one of the most democratic structures I have been in.’16
The committee had argued that there was little chance of a major search in the near future. But what if the guards decided, as they sometimes did, to mount a snap check of the barracks after lights out and discovered fifty empty beds? That eventuality had already been covered. A team of helpers had used their art classes to make papier mâché dummies, with real hair collected from the barber shop. To add to the potential confusion, holes were cut into partition walls so that prisoners could be counted in one room then slip through to an empty bed to be counted again.
At about 7 p.m. the escape team drifted over to the laundry room. The copper boiler was removed and one by one they followed Bill through the hatch and began to crawl along the tunnel. When the last man had disappeared, the hatch door and firebox were replaced and half-burned coals scattered over the latter. The boiler was not used at night, so the escapers would have to wriggle forward without the benefit of a cool draught.
Crawling for fifty yards along a passage two feet square, pushing your luggage before you, was an exhausting and frightening experience. The air got fouler the further you went down the tunnel, and the escapers soon felt they were suffocating. The sensation heightened the mounting claustrophobia. There were two hours of this to endure before the topsoil was breached and the column began to move. It was the end of August, and darkness did not descend until 10 p.m. It was then that Bill broke through the last crust of earth. It was a beautiful moment. He felt a ‘great first icy blast of air’ which ‘rushed and whistled along the tunnel’. From the kriegies packed in behind him he ‘could hear the gasps of delight as the… taste of potential freedom allowed them to breathe once again.’17
Before they set off the weather had been gusty and there was rain on the wind. If that pattern persisted they would be emerging into a wet, cloudy night. In the intervening hours, though, things had changed. When Bill cautiously poked his head through the hole, all was bright and still. He could hear the footsteps of the guard as he plodded the perimeter circuit. When Bill was sure he had passed, he scrambled out of the hole and began to commando-crawl to the cover of the trees. They were only ten yards away but the journey seemed to take an eternity. Once in the wood he looked back. The guard was nowhere in sight and the next man was wriggling free. He waited until he was safely in cover then set off, jogging through the woods towards the east, where he hoped his salvation lay. He had not got far when he heard gunfire coming from the direction of the tunnel. Searchlights were flickering through the branches and a siren wailed. There was nothing he could do. He kept on running.
Only eight men had made it out. The ninth mistimed his departure from the hole and emerged in sight of the sentry, who fired warning shots that stopped the escaper in his tracks. The guard soon found the exit and fired a few more shots to deter anyone thinking of making a break. Down below, the prisoners began to drag themselves in reverse back along the tunnel. Inside the camp, the hunt had begun for the tunnel entrance. A search of the laundry had produced nothing until the guards heard noises coming from the base of one of the boilers. The man at the rear of the column was trying to push back the concrete slab over the entrance.
As the escapers were led away to the cooler they managed to pass on the information that eight of the team had got away. One escapee, though, had been caught. The kriegies hoped that if they removed all but seven of the dummies placed in the escapees’ beds, the authorities would go on thinking that only a single prisoner had escaped. The tactic worked and the Germans retired for the night, satisfied that they had thwarted a major breakout. The following morning the prisoners were paraded and the numbers checked again. This time seven men manoeuvred themselves down the line so they were counted twice, creating an apparently full compartment of prisoners.
Later that day, one of the escapers was recaptured, revealing the deception. At 8 p.m. Major Peschel ordered another recount. The prisoners were lined up and marched in single file through a gate, while four or five officials counted them off. The kriegies were enjoying themselves. ‘The Escape Committee incited the mass of the POWs to upset the count and to treat the whole thing as a huge joke,’ the official history recorded. They lit bonfires of waste paper ‘and were dancing round them behaving like dervishes’. They bleated like sheep, jeered and catcalled. This went on until 11 p.m., when ‘the Germans gave it up in disgust with a count of seventeen men too many.’18
Next morning another special parade was ordered. This time the cards the Germans kept of every prisoner, with his photograph and fingerprints, were brought into the compound and placed on tables. Each man was called forward and checked against his record. Order soon broke down. The prisoners edged closer to the tables until they were milling around them. One of the trays holding hundreds of the cards was stolen from under the guards’ noses. By the time the theft was discovered the documents had been tipped into a hut stove. The antics continued for several more days before the Gestapo arrived. All the prisoners were transferred to another compound, then fed back in to A Compound, checked against their cards and fingerprinted. Those without a document were issued with a new one. Only then did the authorities learn the number and identities of the missing men.
The prisoners had enjoyed themselves and the Germans had suffered another humiliation. The satisfaction this gave the kriegies could not disguise the fact that the decision to break the tunnel early had been the wrong one.
THIRTEEN
Bill ran on. The shooting had stopped but in the distance he could hear guards shouting and the excited barking of dogs. He stumbled through the darkness, tripping on roots and crashing into overhanging branches. The noises seemed to be getting closer. Then the ground fell away and he was slithering down the bank of a small river. He plunged into the water and waded across. The dogs would not be able to follow him now. He was safe, at least until the next inevitable hazard appeared.
He felt a great burst of happiness. ‘There can be no sense of freedom like the first few minutes of a prison break,’ he wrote. This far north, at this time of year, the nights were short and strangely luminous, more twilight than darkness. He was running through a landscape of wood and water. The silver bark and pale leaves of the birch trees ‘seemed to glow in the grey dusk as though lit from within. The countryside seemed haunted, like something out of a sinister fairytale.’1 He could not maintain the cracking pace and his legs began to weaken. It was hardly surprising
. Eighteen months of bad food interspersed with numerous spells in the cooler, together with the exertions of digging the tunnel, had left him in poor shape.
Later, when he tried to recall those days on the run, they felt more like a dream than a reality. He walked eastwards as steadily as his legs allowed, crossing the Lithuanian border, skirting villages and fields where he might encounter workers. The escape rations were soon used up but, hungry though he was, he resisted the temptation to beg food from farmhouses. The Lithuanians were not the Poles. He was unsure of what kind of reception he would get and was not inclined to take the risk.
His condition got steadily worse. He found himself dizzy and short of breath. The going was treacherous in this land of bogs and marshy meadows. Stepping on what appeared to be grass-covered solid ground you might plunge up to your waist in a swamp. He learned to follow goat paths and stick to fields where livestock were grazing. He was hungry and felt desperately tired but when he tried to sleep he was soon jerked awake by the strange noises of the countryside.
One night he settled down on the shore of a lake. It seemed unusually deep and the water shone like a black mirror. He fell into a fitful, feverish sleep. When he woke it was still night. All around the lake he could see pinpoints of light, which he assumed at first came from the torches of a party of soldiers who were out hunting for him. Then he noticed that ‘the torches were different colours, blue, green and orangey red and… the soldiers kept throwing them up in the air so that they twisted and turned and gyrated above the reflecting surface of the motionless water, all without the slightest sound.’ He realized that he was seeing not flashlights but ignis fatuus, the phosphorescent light that flickers over bogland, caused by the spontaneous combustion of gases. The rational explanation did not help his nerves. He grabbed his bag and hurried on.
Another night, under a full moon and in the middle of nowhere, he came across an old manor house. It seemed deserted, so rather than making a detour round the walls he risked entering the grounds. He was in ‘the most beautifully kept Italianate gardens’ with hedges clipped into bird and animal shapes, stone-flagged paths and immaculate lawns. ‘I seemed to be walking through those gardens for a long time,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot say whether there was anything in that part of the world to give rise to such a vision, or whether the whole thing was simply in my mind.’2
The details of Bill’s strange journey are hard to establish. The accounts he left behind vary significantly. By far the fullest version is contained in two memoirs, published decades after the events he described. In one narrative he says he set off with ‘some half-baked notion of heading east rather than west as expected, in order to hook up with the advancing Russians or maybe a group of partisans.’3 He says he had decided to travel alone this time – but does not explain why.
The idea of meeting up with the Red Army was optimistic. The nearest frontline was three hundred miles away. The plan anyway came to nothing, for he was soon too tired and hungry to carry on. What happened next is unclear. One recollection was that he took the risk of knocking on a farmhouse door to ask for food. In another, he bedded down in one of the farm’s outbuildings and was prodded awake by a pitchfork. Either way, he fell into the hands of a Lithuanian farmer and his family. With no common language it took a while to convince them that he was neither a Russian nor German deserter but an escaped Texan airman.
Once persuaded, the farmer softened. He made it clear to Bill that if he wanted to stay on and work the fields in return for food and shelter he was welcome. Exhausted and half-starved, Bill thought it was a good idea. ‘That is how I found myself starting a new life as a Lithuanian peasant,’ he wrote. ‘If a German patrol went by I would stop and gawp with the rest of the farm workers, then turn back to shovelling whatever was on the end of my pitchfork.’4
It was harvest time and the work was gruelling. He was getting fed and evading capture but he could not stay a farmhand forever. After a while it was time to move on. The question was where? Through talking to his fellow workers he learned that the farm was only a few days walk from the sea. If he could get to the coast and find a boat, he might just make it to Sweden.
The peasants seemed quite sorry to see him go and sent him on his way with some food for the road. After a few days hiking, mostly by night, he arrived at dawn at the coast, just as the mist was rising. His spirits rose. The beach was lined with boathouses. He crept up to one of them and peered through the window. Inside was a sailing dinghy which appeared to have been laid up for the duration of the war. He broke the lock on the door and stepped inside. He knew next to nothing about sailing and had no idea how he would navigate across the Baltic to Sweden. There was no other means of getting there, though, and he decided to give it a try.
The first thing to do was get the boat into the water. He pulled and pushed for a while, before accepting that he would need help. He walked outside. In the distance were several men in overalls, digging in a field. His experiences on the farm had inclined him to feel trusting towards Lithuanian peasants. He walked over to them and explained by words and mime that he was an escaped American pilot who needed their help in getting to Sweden. ‘The diggers exchanged glances,’ he wrote later. ‘Then one wearily stopped digging and rested his hands on the top of his spade, eyeing me with something approaching pity.’ To his great surprise he then answered in good if heavily accented English. ‘Yes, we would love to help you,’ he said. ‘But we are soldiers of the German army, and you are standing on our cabbages.’5
Soon afterwards a large black car arrived to take him away. When it arrived in Heydekrug he thought at first he was going back to the camp. Instead he was taken to a building in the town, over which a large swastika flag was flying. He was back in the hands of the Gestapo. When the questioning began he gave his name, rank and serial number, using the identity of Don Fair, and produced the identity disc to prove it. The Germans were not satisfied. They took his fingerprints and put him in the cells, where he stayed for ‘a few days’. Then he was taken out and marched to the railway station with an escort of six armed guards. No one told him where he was going, but he assumed that this time, in the interests of bureaucratic tidiness, he was being returned to Fair’s camp, Stalag Luft III.
The journey was long and the guards told him nothing. He ‘looked out of the windows at the devastation caused by war – a world of refugees from the east and bomber raids from the west. Ragged children watched the train roll by from shells of burned buildings.’ Eventually the train pulled into a big city ‘heavily pockmarked with bomb-damaged buildings. As it hissed to a stop in the station and I saw the station nameplate, my blood froze. I was in Berlin.’6 This was the end of the journey. The station was decorated with gigantic pictures of Hitler and Himmler. He was driven to a building that looked like a prison or a courthouse and locked in a cell in the basement. The following day a long series of interrogations began.
In the earlier version of his memoirs Bill wrote that his true identity had been discovered while he was at Heydekrug. In the second, he was unmasked in Berlin. One way or another, the Gestapo now knew they had a hardened escaper on their hands. They were not inclined, though, to believe that he was an ordinary prisoner of war. Instead they accused him of being ‘a professionally trained escapologist’. According to his interrogator, ‘I had been parachuted in with a cover story about crashing in the Pas-de-Calais before I was picked up in civilian clothes in Paris. Then I fomented more than half a dozen escapes in Germany, Poland and Lithuania… I had moved from country to country training other eager POWs in the black arts of escapology.’7
He learned that he was to be charged with espionage and put on trial. The Gestapo man pointed out that if the charges against him were proved, he would no longer have the protection of the Geneva Convention. He asked Bill if he knew what that would mean for him. He knew the answer to that one. It was all familiar from his encounter with the Gestapo in Paris. Once again he was in line to be taken out and shot. The trial would
start immediately. Bill would get regular updates on its progress delivered in person by his interrogator, who, disconcertingly, would also be acting as his defending officer.
As he sat in his windowless cell he reflected on a characteristic feature of the Nazi mentality. ‘The strange thing [was] that as they obliterated innocent lives over an entire continent they always liked to do so under the rule of law,’ he wrote. ‘If they did not have a law that said they could torture or execute you, they would rustle one up and put it on the statute books, so they could kill you in a tidy manner.’8
By now Berlin itself was firmly in the firing line. Bill had arrived there just as Bomber Command was preparing its great assault on the ‘Big City’. Its commander-in-chief, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, had persuaded Churchill that his men could hasten the end of the war by battering Berlin to rubble. Over the coming winter, huge raids were mounted and huge losses sustained among the bomber crews. The Battle of Berlin did not bring victory for the Allies. It did, though, teach Berliners the price of supporting the Nazis.
One casualty of the campaign was Bill’s court case. The visits from his defending officer grew fewer and fewer. One day he turned up and explained apologetically that ‘a minor case like yours couldn’t have much priority under the present circumstances’. The case was being postponed. Bill joked later that he ‘assured him that I harboured no resentment at all that my crimes against the Third Reich should be treated as insignificant’.9 A few days later he was put on a train and sent back to Stalag Luft III.
The Cooler King Page 19
