The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  Part III

  The Tunnel

  Twelve

  Shorty Colquhoun, all six and a half feet of him, wanted to dig a tunnel. He saw no other way out. Although the tunnels they had built at other camps had fallen shy of success, he remained confident that such a plan could be pulled off at Holzminden. Desperation steels the spine that way.

  Scouting the camp for the best place to start a sap was a simple exercise in eliminating options.

  Given the number of Germans inhabiting Block A, Colquhoun crossed this location off the list straightaway. The cookhouses and woodshed in the Spielplatz were easy to access but too public and too far away from the surrounding camp wall, so those were eliminated as well. That left Block B. But where? Most of the cellar space underneath the officer’s section contained detention cells, and guards watched over the corridor night and day.

  The cellars under the orderly quarters in Block B, which were used to store wood, tins, bread, potatoes, and other goods, emerged as a possibility. Although guards did patrol this area, they did so infrequently. Further in the cellars’ favor was their location adjacent to Holzminden’s eastern wall. A tunnel would need only stretch some fifteen yards to reach beyond the camp wall—out into an unguarded field.

  Now Colquhoun needed to get inside the cellars to see whether a passage could be dug there. Access through the iron-reinforced barricades that separated the officers’ quarters from those of the orderlies in Block B was impossible. He considered knocking a hole in one of the ground-floor rooms on the barracks’s eastern side to reach the eastern stairs, but any thorough inspection would likely uncover that.

  Officers and orderlies each had their own entrance to the barracks: the officers’ was in the west wing; the orderlies’, in the east. Officers were forbidden to use the orderlies’ entrance, and a guard posted twelve yards opposite the door took note of all comers and goers. But there was no oversight of orderlies entering the officers’ section to carry out their daily duties. And it was here that Colquhoun found his plan: Obtain an orderly’s spare uniform. Don the uniform inside the officers’ quarters. Walk out the door and onto the Spielplatz. Turn left and walk the fifty-yard length of Block B to the orderly entrance. Enter the building without arousing the suspicion of the posted guard.

  Colquhoun recruited his friend William Baxter Ellis, a young RFC pilot, to join him on the reconnaissance. A pair of orderlies they trusted provided uniforms and also managed to craft a duplicate key for the cellar door. On November 1, 1917, when most of the German guards were inside the Kommandantur during lunch hour, the two officers made their bid. Even though Colquhoun, tall and gangly, could hardly be considered inconspicuous, nobody paid him—or Ellis—any mind as, disguised as orderlies, they crossed the yard and entered the eastern wing.

  The door closed behind them. Inside, they found that the layout was a mirror image of their own wing. They could either take the short flight of concrete stairs to their left up to the ground floor, or the ten steps to their right down to the cellar. They went down. Before they arrived at the locked cellar door, something caught their attention. The Germans had completely walled off the space underneath the flight of steps that led up to the ground floor. A quick rap on the six-inch wood planks revealed the space behind the wall to be hollow. They guessed the wall had been erected to prevent anyone from hiding there, or lying in wait to jump an unsuspecting guard. The men agreed that the space might well present the perfect opportunity: it gave them access to the cellar floor and walls, it was out of sight, and it was out of the way of the normal foot traffic of the guards. Starting a tunnel in one of the open cellars would have risked discovery, whether by a guard coming into the storeroom or appearing in the corridor as they exited the cellar through the door. If they could construct a trapdoor in the planks, then, Colquhoun was sure, they had a very good chance of keeping their activities secret.

  “Will you join our tunnel effort?” That was the question on Colquhoun and Ellis’s lips. The answer was an easy yes for Mossy, Rogers, and the rest of the Pink Toes at Holzminden. They had attempted such an escape at every single camp in which they’d been held. Gray was not a sure thing. Despite his sapper education and British Indian Army experience, he had avoided tunnels in the past. Colquhoun must have thought this time might be different.

  He was right. Gray was in. He had good reasons to join this scheme.First, the access point in the cellar was absolutely ingenious. Second, the ground under Holzminden was far more stable than at Schwarmstedt or Ströhen. Third, the tunnel had a much shorter distance to run than its predecessors. Fourth, if they emerged unseen from its exit at night, they would have sufficient time to gain distance from the camp before they were reported missing at morning roll call. They would need this kind of head start to cross the Weser before daylight. As Gray knew too well, breaking out was only part of the battle.

  Before getting too far ahead of themselves, they needed to determine that a trapdoor could be made in the wooden panel. If such a hatch or the mechanism to open it was in the slightest way visible, the Germans were sure to find it. Holzminden’s guards were on high alert for the next escape attempt.

  At Gütersloh, Crefeld, and Schwarmstedt, Rogers and Mossy had made an art of building sliding steps and hinged walls. In comparison to some of those projects, this new tunnel entrance would be a breeze. First they would need wood-working tools, and for these they would need a carpenter. Since their imprisonment, the men involved in the scheme had become practiced thieves. They smashed in a door in Block B, where they were housed, making sure to knock it off its frame and mangle the lock—something only an experienced tradesman could fix. A carpenter arrived later that day, his box of tools at his side. A guard accompanied him to watch over his work repairing what the Holzminden staff thought amounted to a random act of destruction.

  Next, the diversion. Colquhoun and his coconspirators, including Gray, started an argument with the guard—some minor disgruntlement. There was a lot of shouting, and a few of the officers staged a scuffle. While the carpenter stopped work to observe the fray, one of the officers slipped behind him and nicked several tools from his satchel, including a fine-toothed, thin-bladed saw, ideal for precisely cutting wood.

  After the melee, the men waited to see if there would be a search for the missing tools. What they suspected, and hoped, was that the carpenter, and the guard responsible for him, would not admit to having been duped by the officers. Their suspicion proved well founded.

  The next day, disguised in borrowed yellow-banded tunics, Mossy and Rogers ventured through the eastern entrance of Block B, accompanied by an orderly who had agreed to keep lookout. A quick examination of the walled partition showed that the best place to create a door was near the bottom of the steps. There the planks were longest. At the top of the last plank, there was a small opening from some badly fitting boards where a slide bolt could be hidden. Reaching it would be a tight fit for even the most slender of fingers, but possible.

  Mossy and Rogers were quick to the task. To better see what they were doing, they unscrewed the whole V-shaped panel from its placement. An inspection of the chamber behind confirmed exactly what Colquhoun had hoped: it was a space with access to the floor as well as the main, load-bearing walls on the eastern and southern sides of the building, and it was almost tall enough for a man to stand up in. Measuring five yards long and four yards wide, it was also big enough to pack the excavated soil and rubble for a fifteen-yard tunnel. This eliminated the need to smuggle the material out for dumping.

  They cut a three-plank door out of the partition wall and then reattached it with two hinges on the back. Such was their precision that there was almost no visible seam between the eighteen-inch-wide door and the wall. They also mounted a bolt on the door, its latch just within reach behind the wall. After sweeping the sawdust into their secret chamber, they replaced the whole panel and secured the bolt. So snug was the fit, they could barely spot the door themselves. Tools hidden under their
tunics, they walked back up the steps and out into the Spielplatz.

  With a secure entryway in place, the tunnelers wasted no time, launching immediately into the digging. Colquhoun and Ellis had the honor of going first. Hacking at the concrete cellar floor was fruitless—and they had no idea how deep the concrete had been laid. The main walls, though thick, were at least a known quantity. They started on the southern wall, just a few feet under the landing. First, they removed the bricks. Then they dug into the concrete with a chisel. After a few inches, they hit some reinforced iron rods. Even the sharpest of hacksaws would be challenged by the iron.

  They took the obstacle in their stride. What they needed was sulfuric acid to burn through the iron like a flame into paper. However, they could not exactly buy a vial of sulfuric acid in the canteen, and obtaining some via a coded message to friends or family in England would take too long—even if they managed to avoid its interception. They knew they needed outside help.

  They wanted to keep their cabal small, twelve officers at most, to ensure the tunnel stayed secret as well as to limit the number of individuals going in and out of the building—the better to avoid detection. The success of their plan relied on orderlies, who were able to move around the camp unrestricted and obtain any items the officers needed. Willing accomplices were found, among them Ernest Collinson, George McAlister, G. E. Razey, F. E. Sidwell, E. G. Harrison, L. W. Saunders, and Dick Cash. Of not being part of the actual escape, an orderly joked, “It’s a case of women and kids first, sir.”

  One of the orderlies just so happened to know a civilian workman at Holzminden who had access to sulfuric acid. A bribe of fifty marks was enough to secure the workman’s assistance.

  Like the other orderlies at Holzminden, roughly 130 in number, Private Dick Cash of the 19th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, had no plans to escape. If he did make a run for it and was caught, the best he could hope for was to be sent to the hell of a POW labor camp. Holzminden was far from a pleasure palace, but his chances of starving or being worked to death there were slim compared with the salt mines or the like, where he’d surely end up, given his rank.

  When an officer was caught in the act of escape, he was typically returned to camp and thrown into solitary. Both custom and international conventions governed the treatment of officers, who fared better as POWs than members of the rank-and-file.

  The British-born Cash might have avoided service on the Western Front altogether. When war had broken out, he was thirty-seven years old, a father of three, and owner of a small grocery store and photography business in Thirlmere, Australia, a railway town southwest of Sydney, where his family had emigrated many years before. Just a bit over five feet, two inches tall, he was thickset, with startling blue eyes and light-brown hair. He had first tried to sign up to fight in September 1914, wanting to do his bit, but the Australian Imperial Force refused him because of his age and small stature. The war was far from being over that Christmas, as many had predicted it would be, and eighteen months after his first attempt, Cash put in another application. Standards for enlistment having been lowered by this time, he was accepted. After training and the long voyage to Europe, he arrived on the front in March 1917.

  His battalion saw its share of heavy fighting. On May 3, the men made an early-morning assault on the strategic German stronghold at Bullecourt. The Australians faced withering heavy-machine-gun fire in their approach to the enemy lines. During the attack, Cash was shot in the chest. The bullet punctured his left lung, but he continued ahead. A series of mortars threw him first skyward, then sideways. Shrapnel pierced his back, and many of his teeth were knocked out before he landed in a shell hole, boots first. The ongoing barrage then filled up the hole around him until all but his head was underground. There he remained for almost thirty hours, trying to squirm his way free, before he was taken prisoner. Field surgery and a torturous three-hundred-mile ride into Germany had followed.

  Cash managed to survive the maggot-infested squalor and rough attention accorded many wounded Allied prisoners and spent the next few months bedridden at a hospital in Hamelin, a town within the 10th Army District. He wrote numerous letters to the Red Cross and his family, not sure if any were reaching their addressee. “I have no money and no clothes and nothing to smoke,” he expressed in one note. “But—with a little help, I should be able to get my strength back.” By September, he had recovered enough to be sent to Schwarmstedt to work as an orderly, then he was moved to Holzminden.

  Cash had begun to receive a steady stream of care parcels and letters from home, but the news that came with them brought only heartache: his baby daughter Myrtle had died, as had his mother and one of his brothers. His wife, Cissy, struggled to care for the family and keep their businesses afloat. Compared with the horrors he had faced on the front and in hospital, Cash knew that he could abide the lesser evil of Holzminden for as long as he had to in order to get back to her.

  He lived with the other orderlies, many of whom were also recovering wounded, in a barricaded-off section of Block B, farthest from the main gate. Twenty men sleeping in double-deck bunks inhabited the same size room that fit twelve officers. They crawled out of their cold beds before the officers awakened and dressed in gray-blue tunics, trousers, and caps sewn with bands of yellow cloth down the sides. Their prison number was stamped in red on the front of their shirts and the large letters KG (Kriegsgefangener—prisoner of war) on the back.

  At 7:00 a.m., Cash began his day serving as the “nanny” or “batman” for five officers. While most of them were still asleep in their beds, he steeped a pot of tea and set out their teacups. He collected their uniforms, caps, and boots, and polished and cleaned them before the wake-up call. Then he ate his own breakfast and showed up for morning roll call. After that, he returned to his officers’ rooms to make their beds, empty their ashtrays, and tidy up their quarters. Then he and a band of other orderlies swept the corridors and staircases. Twice weekly, they changed the bedsheets and beat the dust out of rugs.

  Once lunch was over, the Germans typically assigned the orderlies to some menial task around the camp, such as bundling up paper or hauling firewood. Then they went back to straighten their “orphan” officers’ rooms, make afternoon tea, and help serve meals.

  Most of the work was fairly light, albeit monotonous, and they rotated rooms so they did not have to suffer any particularly needy officer for long. As one orderly wrote, “Taking the officers by and large, they were a pleasant and easy going crowd, perhaps inclined to be a little thoughtless.” For those “tartars,” Cash and the others could always exact a trivial retribution—a broken teacup, undercooked food—to signal that they would only be pushed so far.

  None of this service seemed odd to Cash, his fellow common-rank soldiers, or the officers they served. Although they were all prisoners, so traditional was the separation between them that not even Niemeyer, who abused them all at every opportunity, ventured to make the officers fend entirely for themselves. European society had a rigid class system in its own right, and the military was another beast altogether. As one historian noted, “There was a wide, indeed gaping distinction between officers and men, emphasized not merely by separate quarters and messes and different uniforms and weapons but by different accents and dictions and syntaxes and allusions. In London an officer was forbidden to carry a parcel or ride a bus, and even in mufti—dark suit, white collar, bowler, stock—he looked identifiably different from the men. When a ten minute signal was called on the march, officers invariably fell out to the left side of the road, Other Ranks to the right.”

  However, they knew that they were all in this war together. They all faced the cruelties and whims of the camp commandant, the dreary repetition of days, the interminable lines, the thefts, the meager amounts of food, and most important of all, the absence of freedom.

  A number of orderlies who had been transferred to Holzminden had helped officers at other camps escape, providing them with uniforms or acting as
lookouts. They would do the same now with the tunnel plan. Cash, with his toothless smile, made clear to the officers his willingness to help.

  On November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, Jim Bennett came out into the frozen Spielplatz for evening roll call to find Douglas Lyall Grant, Holzminden’s best-fed officer, practicing the goose step right in front of Commandant Niemeyer. Arms swinging, knees high, chin stuck out like he was awaiting a punch, Grant gave it his all. For his comic show of protest, he was led off for three days in solitary detention. Something was afoot at Holzminden, and clearly Grant did not like it. That morning, without explanation or forewarning, several of the most senior and outspoken prisoners had been sent away, including Major Wyndham, Lieutenant Colonel Rathborne, and Captain Gray.

  Throughout the day, and into the next, Holzminden received what one prisoner labeled an “eye-wash.” Officers and orderlies alike were instructed to straighten their rooms and barracks. Whitewash came out by the barrel. The bathhouse was opened for use, burned-out electrical bulbs were replaced, windows were opened, and fuel was supplied to heat their rooms. The next day, they discovered the reason: a “surprise” visit from Dr. Römer, the Dutch inspector. Some of the prisoners had met Römer before, at Ströhen and Schwarmstedt, and despite their complaints nothing had changed for the better. By the generous welcome Commandant Niemeyer offered Römer on his arrival, they guessed that he was on the take and would deliver only a glowing report on the camp to his superiors, which would be passed on to Berlin and London.

  The men tried to air their grievances over the unjust treatment they’d received at the camp, even in the presence of the camp commandant, but Niemeyer was always ready with an explanation or justification. On the poor quality of the food: this was simply a matter of “taste”; the men had their “private supplies,” anyway. On charging for boiling water: the men were not “compelled to pay this sum.” On the exorbitant prices at the canteen: “Most of the articles were sold at a loss.” On the excessive stays in solitary, including those suffered by Kennard and others who had escaped from the attic hatch: the accused needed to be secured before their court-martial, only after that did the new fourteen-day punishment limit come into effect. On the lack of recreation space: the men were free to use their sleeping quarters for this purpose. On the long lines to obtain parcels or food tins: the prisoners simply showed a “lack of enterprise.” On the absence of parole walks: the prisoners had chosen to tear up their cards rather than adhere to the rules.