The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  The eight-day journey from Sagan had taken the prisoners five hundred miles from the south-east to the north-west of Germany. Looking up, the inmates often saw the feathery condensation trails of high-flying American bombers or stepped-up formations of Lancasters on their way to targets in the east. Occasionally there was the cheering sight of predatory British fighters, scouring the land below for targets of opportunity. Sometimes the bombs fell on Bremen. Five times during the month of February the much-battered city was hit by small raids, designed to further drain the population’s all but exhausted morale. Of Allied troops, however, there was still no sign.

  As the weeks passed and the weather relented, Bill slowly recovered. For the first time in his war he felt resigned to his situation and all thoughts of escape were extinguished. There was no longer any point. The greatest victory over the Germans would be to survive. But how long would he have to wait?

  The advance into north-east Germany was in the hands of the British Army’s XXX Corps under the command of Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks. At its spearhead was the Guards Armoured Division, formed in June 1941 by taking elements from elite units of the Foot Guards and putting them into tanks. They had gone into action a few weeks after D-Day and since then had been fighting almost continuously. They took part in the Battle of Caen, then endured the harsh fighting and bitter disappointment of Operation Market Garden, aimed at capturing the bridges of the lower Rhine river system and speeding up the end of the war. They finally crossed the Rhine on 30 March at Rees, near Cleve in North-Rhine Westphalia, about 180 miles as the crow flies from Westertimke. In the fighting that followed they pushed ahead of XXX Corps on a north-eastern trajectory. Their mission was to cut the Bremen–Hamburg autobahn, block the retreat of German troops falling back from Bremen, and secure the ‘peninsula’ between the Weser and the Elbe.

  The march from the Rhine had been a long series of small but bitter clashes against a fanatically determined and skilful enemy. The defenders fell back, only to regroup and launch a succession of hard-fought delaying actions. The Guards advanced along roads that were cratered, mined and blocked by rubble from demolitions. The landscape was watery, criss-crossed with streams and rivers, each one of which presented a challenge to the armour. When they stopped to find a way round obstacles the defenders sprang ambushes which cost lives and sapped resolve. The German resistance was pointless. These actions might hold up the Allied advance and inflict casualties, but the war was lost and fighting on only added to the devastation of towns and villages and increased the toll of German dead and wounded. The nihilistic determination that had gripped the Germans since the start of the Nazi era was slow to die. It was reinforced by orders from the highest level, for the chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had decreed that ‘every village and every town will be defended and held by every available means’.3 Many German soldiers needed no encouragement. The Guards’ war diary is full of encounters that left thirty, forty, sometimes a hundred enemy dead. That their own casualties were comparatively light did not lessen the sense of futility and waste. To die at this point in the war seemed a particularly bitter fate.

  On 19 April the Guards crossed the Bremen–Hamburg autobahn from the south and captured some villages on the far side. Their next objective was the town of Zeven, which dominated the area’s communications. They paused for a while for artillery to come up and took the town with relative ease on 24 April. That night, 32 Guards Brigade, made up of one battalion each of the Coldstream, Scots, Welsh and Irish Guards, was ordered to move south-west the following morning to seize the only relatively high ground in the neighbourhood. This lay about eight miles away and dominated the rear defences of Bremen, whose fall it was hoped to hasten. There was also, the divisional history recorded, ‘a secondary objective of importance… a camp at Westertimke which lay just to the south of the high ground and was known to contain a large number of British prisoners of war’.4

  Everyone in Marlag–Milag had been hearing the sounds of battle for days. The camp was bursting with prisoners. Until the end of 1944 it had housed just over 4,000 Royal Navy and Merchant Navy Officers and NCOs. The arrival of the Stalag Luft III contingent boosted the numbers by 2,000. As the news of the British advance reached the camp, the administration began to fall apart. On 2 April the commandant announced he had received orders to evacuate the camp with most of the guards, leaving only a small detachment to hand over to the Allies. But on the same day a hundred members of the SS Feldgendarmerie (military police) turned up. They rounded up more than 3,000 men and marched them off to the east. The next day the column was shot up by RAF aircraft and several prisoners killed. As they continued there were further air attacks until the Senior British Naval Officer persuaded the SS men to accept the prisoners’ parole that they would not try and escape, in return for letting them sleep during the day and walk at night.5 The prisoners were finally liberated on 1 May after reaching Lübeck.

  On 9 April, the guards at Marlag–Milag disappeared, presumably ordered to take part in the rearguard fighting, and were replaced by members of the local Volkssturm, the last-gasp force scraped together from all males, young and old, who had so far been spared military service. They were stiffened by a contingent of SS guards who lived opposite the camp next to the hospital area. The prisoners watched the changes with a mixture of fear and happy anticipation.

  They longed for the clank and rattle that would announce the arrival of their liberators. Then one day, Bill heard ‘the rumble of mechanized infantry and self-propelled guns’. He hurried towards the gate, determined to be there to welcome the Allies. But instead of friendly British faces he saw ‘row upon row of white-clad German soldiers from a crack mountain division’ accompanied by caterpillar-tracked self-propelled guns and Tiger tanks.6 The troops were in fact from the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and their commander, Lieutenant General Roth, seemed intent on turning the camp into a redoubt, positioning his guns and armour around it in the apparent belief that if the advancing Allies knew that their own people were inside they would not open fire. The prisoners began digging slit trenches in anticipation of the coming battle.

  The Panzergrenadiers arrival came just as 32 Guards Brigade also arrived in the area. They were preparing to move on to Westertimke when two emissaries from the camp arrived. The commandant and one of his staff were bearing a message from Roth, who had decided after all to try and avoid a head-on clash. Roth was proposing a ten-hour truce during which the prisoners could be moved out of the danger zone and handed over to the Guards.

  ‘At first sight it seemed an altruistic gesture,’ the divisional history recorded. The Guards soon decided though that ‘General Roth was no fool and it was a transparent attempt on his part to get some extra time for the extraction of his division.’7 The next morning, 27 April, the Brigade renewed its advance. Between it and the camp lay the village of Kirchtimke, which the Germans held in strength. The weather was appalling. It had rained heavily overnight and the ground was a morass. As they approached the village, they came under intense shell and mortar fire. Mines were a bigger problem. They had been laid on not only the main route but on all the lanes around. The village was eventually taken and three self-propelled guns destroyed but the Guards took casualties in the process, especially from the mines. In the village the cobblestones contained metal traces that made the mine detectors ineffective. The Germans had laid the mines so deep that the leading tanks could go over one without setting it off, but in the process packed down the earth above it so the next vehicle would set it off. The Welsh Guards contingent lost nine tanks that way. The second battalion of the Scots Guards made up part of the force advancing on Westertimke. The official history recorded that, for them, ‘the shelling that day was the heaviest experienced… in Germany and was continuous from dawn to dusk.’ In the circumstances their casualties were ‘amazingly light’. Nineteen were wounded and three killed in the course of the day, among them Guardsman Gilbert McKeand who had survived many similar encoun
ters in North Africa and Italy.8

  A reserve force of one company supported by tanks was ordered to push on and try and reach the camp before nightfall. The approach to Marlag–Milag was dominated on the right by some thick woods on rising ground. They were occupied by Panzergrenadiers who opened up on the Guards when they came into view.

  ‘The company routed them after a fierce battle in which they killed about twenty and took about the same number prisoner,’ the history noted. As they moved on towards the camp gates they saw a self-propelled gun trundling away from its position in the SS quarters next to the hospital area. The history continued: ‘We were taking no chances and the tanks soon set most of the huts on fire with their guns.’

  The prisoners found themselves caught in the middle of the fight. ‘Rockets screamed over our heads, shells burst around us and shrapnel showered down like rain,’ Bill wrote.9 At first he felt no fear. Then his knees were shaking so violently that he had trouble staying on his feet. He was distracted by the noise coming from the hospital area. The patients were screaming in distress and Bill found his legs were working again. He and some other prisoners ran over and began organizing an evacuation. Those who were unable to walk they carried on their backs and laid down in a sheltered corner. The Germans seemed determined to fight on. Unless the battle was brought to a swift end, it seemed certain that many prisoners would die with them.

  Through the din of battle a clear thought formed in Bill’s head. ‘Here at last was something I could do to make myself useful in the war,’ he wrote.10 He was going to stage his last bid for freedom and make a run for the Allied lines. He glanced around to check the positions of the prisoners and the enemy tanks and guns. Then he was off, running as fast as his diminished strength would allow.

  Later he would try and analyse what it was that had driven him on. ‘I should not make out that my motives were altogether heroic,’ he wrote. ‘I wanted to help my fellow prisoners, and as always found myself on the side of the underdog, attempting to protect those who were unable to protect themselves.’ But he also had ‘simpler, more human motives. One was pride – I had come into the war on my own terms and I was going to leave it that way.’ He would ‘rather risk a bullet in the back than cower under a hail of shells wondering if the next incoming round would finish [him] off’.

  And then there was what he called ‘the old ticking clock, deep within me, that simply saw the chance for one last escape… after a wartime of escaping and being recaptured, this time I was going all the way. This time, for better or worse, life or death, would be my last escape: my home run.’ The air was thick with hurtling metal as he dodged round shell holes and negotiated gates and fences. Images of flight coursed through his head – back to when he was an 8-year-old in Texas and seeking freedom with nothing more than ten cents in his pocket and a yearning to discover the great wide world.

  As he ran on, the sounds of battle diminished. The camp was well behind him and the way ahead blocked by a hedge. He struggled through it and emerged onto a small road. He gathered his remaining strength and set off along it. Then there in front of him loomed a tank. Some soldiers stood beside it and they raised their rifles as he trotted forward. He slowed down but kept on coming until he heard the click of rifle bolts. Someone was shouting ‘Don’t shoot! He’s British.’ He heard himself replying: ‘Actually I’m American. And Canadian. And British. It’s a long story.’11

  There would be plenty of time to recount his adventures. His job now was to make sure the battle ended quickly. He reported what he knew about the enemy’s dispositions and the locations of the prisoners. Soon after, the Germans had withdrawn and when the Scots Guards visited the camp the next day they were mobbed by ecstatic prisoners, who were ‘absolutely amazed that we had been able to free them without any “overs” [stray shells] hitting them’.12

  That morning, 28 April, prisoner-of-war and medical-relief detachments arrived to take over. On 8 May, the war in Europe was officially over. A few days later Bill was back in the air again for the first time in three years, in the back of a transport plane bound for Britain. He had started life as an American and fought as a Canadian. But as the aircraft touched down and he stepped out into an English summer, he knew he was coming home.

  EPILOGUE

  Many of the things that Bill had dreamed of during the years of captivity now started to come true. He married Patricia Rimbaud, the beautiful Wren whose affections he had nurtured in monthly letters from the camps, and in time they had a daughter, Juliet, and a son, Francis. Having lost his American citizenship on joining up with the Canadian air force, he now became a British subject and won a place at Balliol College Oxford, to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, rubbing shoulders with the bright new generation of budding politicians, academics and journalists. After graduating he joined the BBC’s External Services and before long was sent as BBC representative to India and Pakistan, just as they took their first steps as independent nations. The job perfectly suited his talents and sympathies. Freedom was in the air, and with it the aspiration to build a modern, equitable society. He admired the Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru as a fellow socialist and the two became friends. He was on good enough terms with him to be able to arrange for his old friend Aidan Crawley to dine with the prime minister and his friend Edwina Mountbatten when Crawley visited India to make a television programme.

  As time passed his politics became ‘wilder and redder’.1 His journey to the far left was hastened by his experiences as a prisoner of war. Many years later he would remember how ‘whenever things got bad for us like on the march, everybody would become socialists. They helped each other. If anybody had any food at all they were sharing it with everybody else.’2 In times of plenty, though, the reverse happened, and entrepreneurial kriegies traded Red Cross parcel items to benefit themselves. Bill knew which system he preferred. He returned to Britain in the late 1950s and later applied to join the British Communist Party, but was said to have been rejected for being ‘too quirky and individualistic’.3 Eventually he co-founded a breakaway Marxist–Leninist organization.

  His views did not affect old friendships. Paddy Barthropp was no socialist. After the war he stayed on in the RAF, ending up a wing-commander captain. On retirement in 1958 he started a business with an old comrade from Battle of Britain days, Brian Kingcome, supplying chauffeur-driven limousines to the rich and famous. Bill and Paddy remained close, meeting regularly to reminisce and engage in good-humoured political sparring. Paddy’s widow, Betty, remembered that ‘Paddy loved the fact that Bill lived in a flat in Moscow Road.’4

  Many of the escapologists of Stalag Luft III seemed driven by a determination to make up for the time they had lost behind the wire. Tony Barber became a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer. Robert Kee was one of the best-known broadcasters of his time and an outstanding popular historian. Aidan Crawley won a seat as a Labour MP in the July 1945 election and went on to become a pioneer of independent TV, ending up chairman of London Weekend Television and a rich man. His leftist views faded with time and he disappointed Bill by defecting to the Conservatives. Eddie Asselin returned to Canada and gained prominence as a lawyer and politician in Quebec.

  Whatever they achieved, their experiences as prisoners of war had shaped them and could not be forgotten easily. Bill was drawn back to the period between the crash landing and his arrest two months later in Paris by the Gestapo. What had happened to the French men and women who had helped him? Some paid heavily for their courage. When Bill went on a voyage of discovery to the Pas de Calais in the early 1970s he learned that Pauline Le Cam, the woman who gave him civilian clothes in Vieille-Église,5 after arrest and imprisonment had spent three years working as a slave labourer in German factories, an experience which undermined her health for the rest of her life. She married a fellow resister and had two children and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1975.6 Marthe Boulanger, the Neuville innkeeper’s daughter, carried on her resistance activities a
nd eighteen months after her encounter with Bill was arrested, beaten, starved and sent to the Ravensbruck women’s camp in Germany. She survived, but her health was ruined. Bill visited her a few years later. ‘She sat up in bed to greet me but she was very weak and was not thought likely to survive for long,’ he wrote.7 She was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and General de Gaulle came to present it in person. She died shortly afterwards.

  It was some time before Bill identified his mysterious French underground courier as Jean de la Olla. He too was arrested in 1943, tortured and sent to a series of concentration camps, but miraculously emerged alive. For years Bill lived with the belief that Joseph and Giselle Gillet, the couple whose Paris flat he hid in and who had been arrested with him, had probably been executed. A memoir written by Louis Nouveau, a member of the Pat O’Leary network, gave him hope that there had been a happier outcome. Nouveau mentioned a man known as ‘Miquet’ – pseudonyms were obligatory in the underground – who with his girlfriend sheltered an Allied airman in Paris in May 1942. There had been no opportunity to move the airman on and he had stayed there for several weeks before they were all arrested.

  Miquet ended up in Fresnes prison, south of Paris, along with Nouveau and la Olla. According to la Olla, Miquet was saved from the firing squad when his girlfriend came forward to claim that she alone was guilty of harbouring the flier. Miquet’s death sentence was commuted to imprisonment and the woman was sent to Ravensbruck. Both survived the war. ‘I have no way of knowing for sure if this was the couple that sheltered me,’ wrote Bill, ‘but the circumstances, their remarkable courage and their devotion to each other all seem to fit the bill. I owe them my life.’8