The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  The only bright spot for the Allies was the recent declaration of war by the United States. The German U-boat campaign had sunk one too many of its merchant ships for President Wilson to bear. However, it would take some time before American forces were mustered. Britain was heading into the most perilous moments of the war, and its forces needed to redouble their efforts until help arrived.

  Leonard James Bennett was a doer. His family had toiled the land in Somerset for hundreds of years. His father, William, had done so too until he’d been crippled after falling from his horse. William’s wife, Harriet, tended to her husband while also raising Jim and his four siblings and continuing to run the farm. Jim took after her. In 1904 the Bennetts moved to north London, following the many others who were leaving their farms because of mechanization. Jim left school at fourteen and took a job with a carpet installer, pushing a wheelbarrow through the city streets. Other such jobs followed, then work as a draper. For fun, he ran races and proved a fast miler.

  After his twenty-first birthday, he signed up for the Royal Naval Reserve to earn a few more pounds. At five feet ten inches tall, with dark hair, a round face, and an easy smile, he looked like any one of the hundreds of young men from modest means who joined. A little over a year later, Germany invaded Belgium. Since there were not enough ships for men, some of those in the naval reserves became part of infantry battalions. Bennett fought in the defense of Antwerp in September 1914 and earned the Mons Star. He was one of the fortunate ones to survive the devastating battle.

  By spring the following year, he was aboard the HMS Riviera as an able seaman. During his next posting, on a seaplane carrier, he served as a gunner and radio operator. One day, he stopped a plane from sinking off the side of the carrier and rescued its pilot. Afterward, Bennett asked the captain to recommend him for a commission in the RNAS. The captain agreed straightaway. When Bennett arrived at the service’s training headquarters at Crystal Palace in south London, he alone wore the uniform of an enlisted sailor. The other recruits, most of whom were from private schools, wore suits. After months of training to become an observer, Temporary Sublieutenant James Bennett left for Dunkirk to hunt U-boats. He proved very good at his job.

  The Sunbeam raced over the sea, roughly fifteen miles off Zeebrugge. Bennett was thinking they might well return empty-handed when he finally saw a submarine. “There it is!” he shouted. Laurence pushed his stick forward. Before Bennett could prepare a bomb, there was an alarming grinding of metal, and the Sunbeam’s engine seized up. A second later, the propeller shaft ripped loose. Helpless but to land, Laurence put the plane down on the water. Bennett quickly tossed his lead-covered wireless-signaling book overboard, and he and Laurence emptied their pockets of any papers. Bennett dispatched a hastily written note by carrier pigeon to inform Dunkirk that they had gone down—and to give them the submarine’s location.

  They drifted toward Ostend for about an hour, Bennett ready at his Lewis machine gun the entire time. He had three trays of ammunition—they could put up some kind of fight if the submarine approached. Then, without warning, the nose of the U-boat rose out of the water, right between the plane’s floats. They were trapped. For a moment, Bennett considered dropping his Hales bomb onto the vessel, but he quickly decided against suicide. Armed crew emerged from the U-boat and led Laurence, then Bennett, down into the submarine, separating them into different quarters.

  As the U-boat dove below, several explosions sounded overhead. Another patrol must have spotted them. Speaking English, the submarine captain interrogated Bennett for information on British minefields in the Channel, but Bennett denied knowing anything about those. “Then we might all be blown up together,” the captain warned.

  “That suits me fine,” Bennett said, unwilling to talk.

  For the next nineteen hours, Bennett and Laurence remained in the submarine as it laid its own mines. Finally, they docked at Zeebrugge, and the men were transferred to a civil prison in Bruges. Bennett was questioned by a German intelligence officer who, in return for his cooperation, promised to send him to “a lovely seaside camp on the Baltic” to bathe, play tennis, and “generally have a wonderful time.” All he had to do was share what he knew about the British fleet and a potential attack on the Belgian coast. Bennett divulged nothing.

  Over the next week, these interrogations continued. He and Laurence were given very little food or exercise, and only a cache of chocolate provided any comfort. On May 30, the day his mother received notice from the Admiralty telling her of her son’s capture, Bennett wrote her his first letter from captivity. It began, “As you see, I am a prisoner of War but you do not want to worry about me as I am quite all right . . . I must say that we are being treated very well here.” He asked after her vegetable garden, sent his best to the family, and concluded, “I am your loving son.”

  From Bruges, Bennett and Laurence were sent by train to Germany. They were weak from hunger, idleness, and long hours of interrogation. The train stopped at a POW camp for enlisted ranks, and the next morning they were put into the fields to work with them. The two airmen learned that the Dutch border was only thirty miles away; it would have been an easy run into the woods, but such was their depleted physical condition that neither Bennett nor Laurence even contemplated such a move.

  The next day, the two were put on a train, this time with little guard. The cars rattled down the track so slowly that had they excused themselves to go to the toilet, they could have jimmied open a window and jumped out without injury. Again, neither considered such a possibility. Only after Bennett found himself behind two rectangular sets of high, barbwire fences at the Ströhen prison camp, set in the middle of an empty moor, did he realize that his two best opportunities of escape had passed.

  The doer in Bennett refused to sit in the dark, dilapidated hut where he was housed and wallow in regret. Straightaway, he started to prepare for escape, first by getting back into shape. His fellow officers, most of whom had been transferred from Crefeld, found his propensity to walk around the prison for hours on end somewhat odd. But the distance to the Dutch border amounted to three marathons, and with Ströhen quickly descending into a nightmare of abuse, Bennett would have to make his move soon.

  Ströhen, Schwarmstedt, Clausthal, and several other camps under the remit of the 10th Army Corp Division were all now in the hands of General Karl von Hänisch, an ogre of a Prussian officer, as the prisoners would soon learn.

  On Friday morning, June 8, 1917, David Gray awoke at Schwarmstedt. He shared the small matchboard-walled compartment with twelve other officers, their beds stacked like berths on a steamer ship. Through slits in the uneven, warped roof, they could see clear blue sky. These same slits allowed entry to a host of fleas, flies, and mosquitoes from the surrounding swamp, which mounted a nightly assault on the prisoners. Open latrines situated eight feet from the barracks also allowed the insects to flourish. The stench stung the eyes and nose.

  Two weeks before, the prisoners had been welcomed to the camp by its commandant, Colonel Dietz. Close to seventy, Dietz was tall and dressed in a resplendently medaled uniform that barely buttoned over his overfed waist. “Gentlemen,” he began in a courteous voice, “I’m sorry not to be able to welcome you to a better camp. I do not think it a fit camp to put officers, and I think the best thing would be for you to write home and see if you can’t get both yourself, and myself, out of it.”

  He continued, with no apparent order to his thoughts: The rooms would be crowded, so they could be with their friends; he “knew all that was to be known about the English” because of a visit to Scotland; the water at the camp was not fit to drink. He then offered to sell the prisoners local maps so they could know exactly where they were. “You see,” he said, “it would be quite useless for you to try to escape because the whole of this heath is surrounded by impassable bogs.” Gray and the others did not know whether the jumbled speech was a calculated threat or simply the ravings of a mad old soldier.

  The next
day, two prisoners tested out his theory about the heath. They cut through the wire fence and ran off. Soon after, half a dozen others followed suit. Still weakened from his stint in solitary confinement and the journey from Crefeld, Gray did not make an attempt. Few made it out of the bogs; none made it to freedom. Soon enough, every prisoner at Schwarmstedt understood two things: they had been sent to “Swamp Camp” by the German command to suffer, and Dietz was its willing accomplice.

  That Friday morning, General Hänisch, the fifty-six-year-old officer who had ordered them sent there, was to pay a visit. After a hurried wash at the two water pumps, the prisoners assembled for morning roll call, and Dietz presented the general. On looks alone, there was little to distinguish Hänisch from any other Prussian career officer in the Imperial German Army: cropped hair, humorless expression, all iron in the frame.

  The prisoners knew, according to rumors that preceded his visit, that Hänisch had led divisions at the Battles of Arras and the Somme. At both, the British overran his lines to embarrassing effect, and as a result he had been removed from active command. In the early spring of 1917 he was sent back to Germany to run the 10th Army Division. The Poldhu also spread the information that Hänisch’s son had been killed by the British, and from the moment he swaggered in to address the Schwarmstedt prisoners, it was clear he felt nothing but hatred toward them.

  After a short speech in which he shared his recommendation that the prisoners be moved just behind German lines in order to be shelled by their own troops, Hänisch carried out an inspection of the camp. In one room, he found a British flag beside a bunk. He ripped it away, shouting, “There is only one flag in Germany.” In another he discovered an unopened tin and chastised a guard, ordering him to inspect it immediately. When the senior British officer recommended that the food be improved and lights allowed in the barracks at night, Hänisch went on a tirade. If the prisoners wanted better conditions, they should send a letter to their prime minister to plead the end of the blockade of Germany. With that, he left the camp, in a storm of rage.

  The next day, guards raided the barracks and confiscated any contraband—including area maps that had been bought by the prisoners. Gray managed to keep his hidden. Fearing that the visit from Hänisch would lead to an increase in patrols or camp defenses, he determined to make an escape attempt as soon as possible with two fellow officers.

  Their plan was to open the gate by the parcel room. Gray would be disguised as a German private, his two accomplices as orderlies, the three of them setting off to collect wood. Schwarmstedt had a roster of men willing to help them out. One had stolen the gate key from a guard and created a mold of it. A key was then made out of melted-down Lagergeld coins. Another officer helped fashion their uniforms.

  For the run to the border, another prisoner provided a makeshift compass through a particularly ingenious solution. He engineered the flywheel on a wristwatch to rotate freely on its mount. Then, by running a current from a disassembled light fixture through a sewing needle, he created a magnetized compass pointer. This was fixed onto the flywheel, and the watch face and hands were replaced. It looked like a normal timepiece.

  While Gray readied their breakout, there were other attempts in the offing, including another Pink Toes tunnel, this one through soft peaty ground. Mossy, who had been caught in his tunnel hideout before the transfer from Crefeld, was leading the effort. Gray thought his plan had a better chance of success.

  With clothes prepared, and an assembled kit of food, he and his two partners set off. They got outside the camp easily, but as they crossed toward the cart track, Dietz and his lieutenant emerged from their nearby quarters. Gray kept his cool, giving Dietz a firm salute, and the three continued on without incident.

  They did not make it far. At evening roll call, they were missed, and Dietz sent out a hunting party that captured them in the bog. A few days later, at sunset, a fire broke out on the heath. Its heat and gray plumes colored the sky in wondrous layers of pink and orange. Gray saw none of it. Confined to a thin-walled solitary cell, baking under its tarred roof, he could only choke on the thick smoke.

  Seventy-five miles south, in Clausthal, Blain and Kennard endured their punishment for the revenge attack on Allouche. For almost two months, the two men were in solitary confinement, inhabiting ten-by-six-foot cells between a pigsty and a mechanic’s shed on the northern end of the camp. The maddening squeals of the pigs bothered them more than the tight confines and the absence of windows. At the end of May, at long last, they were allowed out. They had not bathed or exercised in weeks. They had to shield their eyes from the piercing sun coming over the Harz Mountains, and the short walk to their rooms in the former Peacock Hotel was a trial.

  Commandant Wolfe, or Pig Face—so called by the men for his bald round head, puffy face, and tiny, closely spaced eyes—had stripped Clausthal of everything that had once made it a tourist resort. Six officers crowded into each guest room, and the overflow was housed in wooden barracks. Mattresses were replaced with wooden planks and straw paillasses. Guards roused any prisoner sleeping past 7:00 a.m. and limited the 260 imprisoned officers to four shower heads whose pressure was little more than a trickle—they had a better chance of washing themselves by squeezing a damp rag over their heads. Flies infested the latrines, meals were rushed, roll calls were deliberately drawn out, and searches were frequent. Sentries and guard dogs patrolled the fence, and all parcels, including those from the Red Cross, were hacked apart to test for contraband. Hänisch instructed his staff, “Cut up their soap in pieces, cut up their bread in slices, and remember you are a German.”

  The prisoners made the best of the limited grounds available to them. They laid tennis courts and imported a net at their own expense. They built a six-hole golf course, staged boxing matches, and organized a theater troupe, bridge tournament, gambling den, and language instruction. When allowed out on parole, on the promise not to escape, they hiked through the pine-forested hillsides under a limited guard.

  Compared to their solitary cells, the camp was a paradise to Blain and Kennard. As is the case in most such institutions, the prisoners tended to congregate with those of like mind. Some groups were content to do nothing but entertain themselves. Others passed their days reading and studying. Others were do-nothings. Blain and Kennard were a different breed—they fell into the small but distinct class of Clausthal men that one veteran labeled “escape fiends.” They were indefatigable.

  It began with tunnels. Kennard was invited to join a breakout effort underneath one of the wooden barracks; then he brought Blain into the fold. It was tough going. The sap needed to be only ten yards in length to reach beyond the fence, but the earth was a mix of granite and shale, and it took hours of digging to proceed just a few inches. The work also caused quite a din. During the noisiest stretches, the tunnelers tried to distract the guards by holding boisterous tennis matches.

  Their effort would have continued, but Commandant Wolfe discovered a separate tunnel scheme in progress, initiating under the stage the prisoners had built for their makeshift theater. Any further digging would have been a fool’s errand.

  One of the other escape fiends, William Colquhoun, decided on a new course: directly through the wire. The Canadian lieutenant, twenty-eight years old and six foot six inches tall, had proved his mettle on the front, leading a platoon to take out German snipers and sapper teams. In early 1915 he earned the Military Cross while retrieving from the front line, under intense fire, a mortally wounded officer.

  A month later, during a scouting mission in no-man’s-land, he was knocked senseless—and half-buried in dirt—by an explosion. His platoon mates thought him dead. When his German captor brought him into the trenches, he looked Colquhoun up and down and asked, “Are all Canadians as tall as you?” To which Colquhoun responded, “Well, they call me Shorty.”

  One day, in broad daylight, Colquhoun cut a hole in the fence around Clausthal, stepped through it, and ran. Such was the brazenness of the att
empt that the guards were oblivious to his flight. Some children playing in pine woods outside the camp spotted him on the run, but none of the guards believed their tale. By the time Wolfe determined that Colquhoun was gone, the Canadian was far away. A week into his 212-mile flight to the border, he was captured by a German soldier searching for an escaped Russian prisoner. Hours after being sent to the nearest internment camp, Colquhoun busted through a skylight in his cell. He was caught again three days later by some trackers with dogs. Undeterred, he used his long arms to grab the keys to his cell door through the spy aperture used by the guards. Starving and exhausted, he stole a bicycle and pedaled to the north. The bike broke, and while trying to fix it he was detained yet again. This time he was returned to Clausthal.

  A squadron mate of Blain’s, John Tullis, hatched a plot of his own. One afternoon, he dug a shallow ditch by the fence between the two tennis courts, ostensibly as part of his grounds-repair duties. Then, when the guards were distracted, he lay down in the ditch, flat on his chest and holding some wire clippers, and had a friend cover him with eight inches of dirt. He kept his left arm positioned near his head so he could read his luminous wristwatch. By breathing through a pipe shaped like a snorkel, camouflaged at the top with a tuft of grass, Tullis planned to remain there until nightfall. An accomplice would answer his name at roll call. Once it was dark, Tullis would climb out of the trench, then cut his way through the fence to freedom.