The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  The first account Bill gave of his wanderings told a different story. It was given to an IS9 intelligence officer a few months after he got back to Britain. All returning prisoners of war were questioned about their escape experiences, and the interview with Flight Lieutenant William Frank Ash took place on 20 August 1945. Whereas some, like Eddie Asselin, went into considerable detail, Bill confined himself to the bare outlines. In the report he described how, once out of the tunnel, dressed in civilian clothes and with an Ausweise identifying him as a Polish worker, he set off with map and compass, ‘walking towards Libau and received a few lifts, but when I got there, could find no ship, so started back towards Kovno on a goods train and was picked up on the way by station guards, as the alarm had been raised. I was taken back to Heydekrug and was given five weeks solitary confinement. My true identity having been discovered I was sent back to Stalag Luft III.’10 Libau is modern-day Liepāja, a port on the Baltic coast of Latvia, about eighty miles north of Heydekrug. Kovno is Kaunas, a major Lithuanian city more than a hundred miles south-east of the camp. There is no mention of his time on the farm or the journey to Berlin. But nor, in the same interview, did he give any details of his adventures in France following his crash. My researches in the Pas-de-Calais confirmed the account given in the memoirs. The lack of hard information in the passages dealing with Lithuania make it difficult to check. But as Bill pointed out with disarming candour in the introduction to his first book, A Red Square, ‘I am writing these memoirs off the top of my head.’

  During his absence Stalag Luft III had grown enormously. It now housed about 10,000 prisoners and was the size of a small town. Two new areas had been added, North Compound, where a large number of British and Commonwealth aircrew were rehoused in the spring of 1943, and South Compound, built to accommodate the increasing number of American fliers shot down since the US Army Air Force’s bombing campaign accelerated.

  Bill was put back in the familiar surroundings of East Compound. It was a homecoming of sorts. Some of his old friends were there to greet him, but others, including Paddy Barthropp, had been moved to North Compound, so were half a mile away on the other side of the camp.

  After his recent experiences he was inclined to take it easy for a while. In his absence, escape-minded kriegies had continued their battle of wits with the authorities and brought off one spectacular escape. It resulted, very unusually, in the three men who conceived it reaching Sweden, then home. The officers who had been transferred to Schubin while the expansion work was carried out at Sagan found on their return in the summer of 1943 that the new security measures made escaping much tougher. The inspection pits, dug beneath all the huts, meant that unless someone could find new ways of hiding a tunnel entrance and disposing of the spoil, digging was no longer an option.

  Once again, kriegie ingenuity cracked what appeared an insoluble problem. Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams and Lieutenant Michael Codner had already made one unsuccessful escape attempt when in Schubin. Undeterred by the tougher conditions at Sagan, Williams came up with an idea that carried a touch of genius. Remembering the vaulting horses that he had hopped over at school he proposed having a modified one built which could carry one or two men inside it. If a routine was established whereby the horse was placed in the same position each day, as close to the wire as possible, the hidden men could start digging, covering the hole with a wooden trap and loose earth at the end of each session. The proposal attracted much scepticism, but the escape committee decided it was worth a try and gave the go-ahead. Work began on 8 July 1943. Nearly four months later, on 29 October, the pair, joined by Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot, a Canadian who had helped with the operation, crawled through the tight, shallow shaft and broke out to freedom. Several weeks and many adventures later they were back in Britain after finding ships in Stettin and Danzig which smuggled them to Sweden.

  When Bill arrived back, another major tunnelling project was just about to reach fruition. A team led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was engaged in the most ambitious construction programme ever undertaken in a prisoner-of-war camp. It began after prisoners were moved into the new quarters in North Compound in the spring of 1943. Bushell’s idea was to dig three tunnels simultaneously, codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry. He intended to pass two hundred prisoners through them to freedom, the largest mass escape of the war. Even if one tunnel was discovered it did not mean the end of the enterprise, for the Germans were unlikely to imagine there were any others in progress.

  The Wooden Horse escape, as it became known, had faded into legend by the time Bill returned to Sagan at the beginning of 1944. If he had been placed in North Compound, and not back in East Compound, he would have undoubtedly joined Roger Bushell and the Tom, Dick and Harry team, alongside Paddy Barthropp. Soon after his arrival in East Compound he was placed at another remove from the action.

  Since his departure from Stalag Luft III he had racked up a number of offences for which he had not been punished, including impersonating another prisoner in Schubin and breaking out of Heydekrug. The fact that these offences had taken place elsewhere made no difference. Once again Bill found himself in the cooler – and for a protracted stretch.

  Bill was not dismayed to find himself back in solitary. ‘Despite the isolation it was good to be back,’ he wrote. ‘The Luft III regime, even in the cooler, was still more civilized than those I had experienced elsewhere, and considerably better than waiting to be shot in Berlin or flattened as collateral damage in the bombing raids there.’11 He had become the real-life Cooler King. The prospect of passing your days alone confined in a narrow cement cell would strike fear into most. Bill was able to regard it with something like equanimity. He might only have his thoughts for company, but he liked thinking and he had plenty of experiences to ponder on.

  He treated it as might a mediaeval hermit – an opportunity to retreat from the world and consider its follies and greatness and to form a philosophy with which to deal with both. ‘Never before or since have I had such a sustained period to think about myself, the world and the actions of those around me,’ he wrote. ‘I had seen heroism and treachery, selfless generosity and animal selfishness.’

  Bill had always had a leftwing outlook. Growing up in fiercely patriotic Texas, steeped in a tradition of red-blooded capitalism, such views were considered at best eccentric, at worst akin to treason. In a modern, forward-looking service like the RAF there were plenty of young men of progressive views. Bill was unusual in the depth and sincerity of his commitment, not just to socialism but to something more radical. That was to set him apart from some of his fellow kriegies, especially those whose trading activities he considered little more than racketeering.

  His travels around occupied Europe had given him plenty of exposure to the realities of fascist rule. When at Schubin, like Tommy Calnan, he had been moved by the sight of the Russian prisoners who were used as slave labour around the camp, fed a quarter of the rations that were given to the other prisoners and literally worked to death. He learned that when one of them died, the others would hide the body for as long as possible in order to keep getting his bread ration.

  The Russians at Schubin were comparatively fortunate. In the first, successful phase of Operation Barbarossa, the vast number of captives who fell into German hands were corralled in the open to die of exposure and starvation. In the winter of 1941–2, more than two million perished. To the Germans, Russian lives were valueless. In Heydekrug, Bill met British soldiers who had been put to work in a mine alongside Russian slave labourers. They had witnessed an incident when a roof collapsed trapping many Russians. For the Germans there was no question of going to the trouble of attempting to rescue them. They were simply left buried alive.

  Bill’s preference for a quieter life persisted after his release. Before going into the cells he had resumed contact with the book department of the Red Cross in Geneva. He returned to East Compound to find a stack of the material he had requested waiting for him: Pascal’s Pen
sées, works by Descartes, Leibnitz and Spinoza. After living on bread and water, he was too weak to do much more than read. After a time he felt strong enough to return to writing. He bought some notebooks, which were sometimes on sale in the canteen, and began work on a novel. He had whiled away many hours lying on his bunk, scribbling away at stories. This time the results were more satisfying. He called it Happy in Ulubrae. The title was taken from one of Horace’s epistles, which claimed that if you had the right frame of mind, you could be happy anywhere, even in Ulubrae, an insignificant village near Rome and a metaphor for the back of beyond. The project might have suggested that Bill had settled into passive acceptance of his lot and would be causing no further trouble to the authorities.

  In one way escaping was a displacement activity, undertaken with only a notional expectation of success. It was a very effective way of speeding up time, hastening the arrival of that unknown point in the future when the war was over and the gates would open.

  But there was more to it than that. Some prisoners had one go at escaping and, having failed, gave up. But men like Bushell, Barthropp, Crawley and Ash discovered that once they had started they couldn’t stop. They found it hard to analyse what drove them. Bill, who had had much time to reflect on the question, struggled to answer it as much as anyone.

  Occasionally he would wonder whether he would not have been better off settling down to learn a language or study for a diploma that might get him a job when the war was over. He soon concluded ‘I am simply not like that. The Houdini syndrome of getting myself into situations just to see if I can get out of them again is too much part of my nature.’12

  By the end of winter the manuscript of the novel was finished, inscribed in a pile of notebooks which he kept in a locker by his bunk. He now had time on his hands and it was not long before he was feeling the old itch again. One day he was walking in the compound when he noticed, close to the main gates, a parked lorry being loaded up with what looked like bits of broken-down machinery. He stood back and watched a guard poke through the junk on the lorry then walk away. For a moment he hesitated. He had enjoyed writing the novel. Why didn’t he accept that he had done his bit, enjoy the peace and stability of the camp; in short, heed the words of Horace and be ‘happy in Ullabrae’? The urge was too strong. Once the driver was in the cab and the engine was running, he jumped over the tailgate and flattened himself on the floor of the truck. It was, as he recalled ruefully later, ‘possibly my shortest and most badly planned escape of them all’.13 When the lorry stopped at the next gate, it took only a few moments for the guards to spot him and haul him out.

  He was escorted back to his barrack to pick up his washing kit before being parked in the cooler. The eye of the officer escorting him was caught by something as Bill opened his bedside locker door. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the pile of notebooks,’ Bill recounted later. He assured him that it was ‘a novel set a long time ago and in another land and contained no reference whatsoever to the present war, to any characteristics of the detaining power or to anything else that need trouble a security officer with so much to worry about already’. The officer appeared not to have heard him. He ‘took the notebooks out of the locker and very methodically, one by one, tore them into little pieces which he ordered a guard to sweep up and take away’. Of all his literary endeavours, he decided later, ‘it was perhaps the most definitive rejection I have ever received’.14

  During his time in solitary he was woken early one very cold morning by the blare of the camp’s sirens. He learned later that the alarm had been raised when a guard spotted a prisoner emerging from a tunnel just outside the North Compound fence. After eleven months of hard labour and intricate organization, the mass breakout that would be celebrated as the Great Escape had finally happened. It was a cheering thought to sustain him during the rest of his sentence.

  On the first day after his release from the cooler he learned the price that the escapers had paid for their audacity. He took his place in the rows of kriegies for the ritual of morning Appell. This was one that no one would ever forget. Instead of counting the prisoners, a Luftwaffe officer began to read out a list of names. There were fifty of them and they were all very familiar. It sounded to Bill like ‘a roll call of my old friends and comrades’. There was Roger Bushell, ‘one of the greatest natural leaders I ever met’, Ian Cross, one of the Schubin escape fraternity, and Tom Kirby-Green, ‘a tall, suave and very well-educated young man who shared my love of books and also my allergy to bullies’. The officer announced that all fifty had been recaptured but subsequently ‘shot while resisting arrest’.15

  ‘A great gasp went up from all the men on Appell,’ Bill wrote. ‘Even by the standards of this dirty and vicious war, this was a brutal deed.’ No one believed the claim that they had been shot while trying to escape. Otherwise why were there no wounded? The assumption that they had been murdered after capture by the Gestapo turned out to be all too accurate.

  When Hitler heard of the breakout he gave an order that all recaptured airmen were to be shot. He also demanded that Commandant von Lindeiner and other camp personnel be arrested and put to death. After an approach by the Luftwaffe and Army chiefs Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Keitel, who warned of possible reprisals against German prisoners in Allied hands, he modified his demands. He now wanted at least half of recaptured escapers killed. Of the seventy-six men who made it out of the tunnel, all but three were captured within a few days. In the end fifty would be murdered, shortly after their arrest. The prisoners were killed singly and in pairs. They were put in cars and driven off, as if they were being taken back to the camp. Their Gestapo escorts would stop the car in an isolated spot and invite them to relieve themselves. Then they would shoot them in the head. Of the remaining twenty-three some were returned to Sagan and a few to Colditz. Harry Day and Johnny Dodge, who were among them, were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The list of the dead might have included Paddy Barthropp. He was part of the ‘Great Escape’ but was still in the tunnel when the alarm was raised.

  The murders were a signal, if any were needed, that as far as the treatment of prisoners was concerned, respect for the Geneva Convention and for military formalities was over, and it was the methods of the Gestapo rather than the Luftwaffe that were in the ascendant. The lesson would soon be learned at Heydekrug. Undeterred by the failure of the August 1943 breakout, the escape organization began work on a new scheme which, in its way, was just as impressive and ambitious as Roger Bushell’s project. They decided to smuggle a man out of the camp tasked with forging strong links with the local underground and establishing an infrastructure of safe houses and contacts to speed escapees to Danzig and on to Sweden. The man chosen was George Grimson.16

  On 21 January 1944, in another brilliantly executed operation, he walked out of the compound dressed as a ‘ferret’ and then through the camp gates. He was followed a few weeks later by Sergeant Cyril Flockhart, who like Grimson spoke fluent German. They met up and after many difficulties Grimson helped Flockhart to board a cargo ship in Danzig and escape to Sweden. He stayed behind, giving assistance to two other escapers, one of whom made it back to Britain. In the months that he was at large, Grimson worked indefatigably, travelling up and down the Baltic coast, successfully navigating hundreds of security checks, making contacts and building the escape network and returning frequently to Heydekrug to pass on reports of his activities.

  The operation would not have been possible without the help of members of the camp staff. One was a young German interpreter, an idealist who hated the Nazi regime. Others were Poles connected to the underground. The operation collapsed in mid April when Sergeant Ned Leaman, who was next on the list to escape, was caught as he tried to walk out of the camp disguised as a member of the Abwehr. His friendship with the interpreter, who was one of the escape organization’s most important contacts, had been noted by the authorities. The interpreter was arrested and later shot. A Polish guard who had provided
shelter for Grimson was also believed to have been executed. A young Pole who worked as a Luftwaffe photographer and supplied the prisoners with film and other materials killed himself while awaiting interrogation by the Gestapo. Following Leaman’s arrest a message was sent to Grimson to get out of the country. It was too late. He was arrested at the end of April. ‘Little more is known about Grimson,’ the camp history recorded. ‘It is believed that he was executed by the Germans.’17

  Looking back on these episodes years later, Bill was struck by an overwhelming sense of waste. Persistent escapers tended to be exceptional men. They were unusually determined and undaunted by risk. He had also noted something else among his fellow escapologists. Many seemed to share a desire to build a better world after the war. Before it, Roger Bushell had lived a privileged life and seemed to share the assumptions and prejudices of the upper-class circles he moved in. The war changed him. By the time of his death he had developed a radical streak. At one of the camp’s mock parliamentary debates he had taken the role of a Labour Party leader and announced the nationalization of all the country’s major industries. Tom Kirby-Green, who had grown up as the son of a colonial civil servant, wanted to dismantle the British Empire. These were men who could have made a great contribution to a new Britain built on fairness. Instead they had literally been reduced to ashes, cremated by the Germans and their remains returned to Stalag Luft III.

  For days after the announcement of the killing of the Great Escapers, a pall of anger and sadness hung over the camp. It had become a different place. Lindeiner was gone, marched off to prison for his failure to prevent the outbreak. He survived the war and was to meet his former charges in happier circumstances. The Gestapo and the SS were now in charge. Whatever differences the kriegies might have had with the Luftwaffe staff, they had often shown a human face. The Gestapo seemed to belong to a different race. ‘They were peculiarly alike, as if poured from the same loathsome mould,’ remembered Richard Passmore, a long-time Sagan inmate. ‘They wore identical dark-green soft hats, pulled well down over the eyes, long drab overcoats reaching down to overlap the high military boots… The faces of these men were oddly blank, brutal, inhuman…We hated the Gestapo as we hated nobody else… we would have killed any of them, given the opportunity.’18