The Grand Escape

by Neal Bascomb

  Gray suggested they march as far north that night as possible, believing that the search area would concentrate on the forests west of the Weser. Blain and Kennard agreed. At first, they followed the road beside the river. Although it ran a serpentine course, Gray figured the extra distance on the road would be covered far faster than tramping a more direct line north through forests and muck-mired fields. Gray and Blain both carried heavy rucksacks containing their food stores and other key supplies. Kennard carried only their spare kit with extra clothing, tobacco, and chocolate in it. If they encountered any Germans, he would have to ditch it quickly before they saw. A madman on the run would not be expected to have prepared a bag.

  They shed their pajamas outside the town of Heinsen and hid them in some reeds. The filthy clothes had done their job of keeping their outfits underneath clean. The small villages of Polle and Brevörde were empty as they walked down the main streets. A dog barked at their presence, but otherwise they passed through unnoticed. Dawn approaching, they walked a little farther before veering off the road into some thick woods to hide during the daylight hours. They were roughly nine miles from Holzminden, and nine miles would have to be enough.

  They ate a light meal—a tin of ham and some black bread—and smoked cigarettes. Blain got a good chuckle out of the other two when he told them about how they and their fellow officers looked like a “huge crocodile” streaming out of the tunnel. He volunteered to take the first watch. Exhausted, Gray and Kennard agreed and went quickly to sleep. Blain stared out into the surrounding darkness of the woods and wondered how his fellow breakout artists were faring.

  There was trouble in the tunnel. Lieutenant Edgar Garland, a pilot from New Zealand, was halfway through when the man in front of him stopped moving. Garland rattled his boot, but the officer did not react. Perhaps he had fainted. Garland had a flashlight, but its narrow beam did not penetrate far in the twisting burrow. “What’s the idea?” he shouted. “Having a rest?” “The tunnel has fallen in, and they are trying to clear it,” the man in front called back. “It will only take a few minutes.”

  Garland rested his head down in the dirt and tried to calm his breathing. The air was bad from all the men down in the hole. If there was a block, it was sure to get worse. Moments later, he felt someone jamming up against his feet. The chain of officers behind had caught up. “What’s wrong?” a voice at his feet gasped. Garland explained, confident that the block would loosen and that he would still make his home run to Holland. He was too confident.

  The sap had caved in completely, several feet shy of the exit. Twenty-nine officers had made it through, including Jack Morrogh, but now dirt and stone had cascaded down the slope and rendered it impassable. Major Marcus Hartigan, a 38-year-old veteran of the Boer War and next in line to break out, only just managed to scramble backward before being buried alive. Try as he did to reopen the face of the hole with his hands, there was too much earth blocking his path. If they were to survive, then the men behind him—a dozen in all—needed to abandon their escape and crawl back out of the tunnel before the oxygen ran out.

  Back at the sap’s midway point, Garland waited. Fifteen minutes. Then half an hour. Nobody was moving, and, from the gurgling sound echoing through the sap, the men were starving for oxygen. With his own arms weakening, he was sure he was in the same boat. Now and again he flicked on his flashlight for some relief from the inky darkness. Thoughts of dying came to him. He had almost lost hope when the officer behind him said that he was headed back. Garland followed, hauling his rucksack behind him. Time and again, the retreat halted. The men were sapped of strength, and their coats and kits kept snagging on rocks. At last, Garland reached the slope that ran back up to the tunnel entrance. He might as well have tried to climb a cliff backward. Then someone grabbed his legs and pulled him out.

  Alerted to the cave-in, Durnford and Grieve had organized a chain of men to haul out bodies. Their first concern was to get everybody out alive. Their second was to do so before 6 A.M., an hour fast approaching, when a guard would unlock the doors and send the orderlies out on their duties. If they failed to clear the sap, and if men were still moving about the orderly quarters, they risked the breakout being discovered long before the morning roll call at 9 a.m. Those three hours could prove the difference between escape or recapture for those who had made it out.

  Some in the ruck had fainted or were too weak to evacuate the tunnel on their own. Garland volunteered to help drag them out. With great effort and at risk of falling victim to another collapse, he crawled deep into the tunnel again and managed to muscle one officer after another back through the hole. Shortly before 6 a.m., he had helped out all but Major Hartigan and the officer behind him. He remained in the chamber with a few others while the orderlies and officers sneaked back to their rooms and removed any signs of their nighttime activity.

  Durnford watched from the windows for any hint that the breakout had been discovered, but the guards continued to walk their normal rounds. They might yet make it to the first roll call without any alarm. A half hour later, they had succeeded in extracting Hartigan and the other officer. Neither was in great shape, but they were still breathing. While they recovered, Garland and the others crept back up the stairwell, across the eaves, and into their own quarters.

  Soon after, Hartigan and the other officer came straight out of the orderly door to Block B. They should have returned to their rooms through the attic, as the others had done, but they were too addled and oxygen-starved to think clearly. As they crossed to the cookhouse, they were seized by guards. Officers were not allowed onto the parade ground before 7 A.M., and certainly not officers exiting the orderly quarters in muddy clothes. Minutes later, Niemeyer stormed up and demanded to know what they were doing—clearly not having yet divined the reason. Neither answered. The standoff was interrupted by someone hammering on the eastern gate. A red-faced and clearly incensed farmer explained that a parade of men had stamped about his fields, ruining his crops. Niemeyer and his guards followed the farmer out of the gate and found the hole between the rows of beans.

  “So, a tunnel!” Niemeyer exclaimed. He turned to one of his lieutenants, a man called Mandelbrat, and ordered him to find out how many had escaped. While Mandelbrat headed for the barracks, Niemeyer ordered another guard to climb down into the tunnel. The guard eyed the gaping hole, then his commandant, then shook his head. There might still be officers in the sap, he said. Next Niemeyer tried to send down his dog, but the animal balked at the order too. Niemeyer strode off to the Kommandantur. He rang the local police, the town’s garrison commander, and, finally, General Hänisch in Hanover. A manhunt needed to be launched. No effort to be spared.

  Mandelbrat had never cared much for Commandant Niemeyer and his constant derision, and, as he went about the corridors counting the men, he could barely suppress a thin smile as silence met his calling out the name of one officer after another. Murmurs of excitement followed him around the barracks. “The tunnel has gone, boys,” one officer crowed to his roommates. A grand escape had indeed come off, and the only question was how many had managed to get away. Mandelbrat finished his count and went to join Niemeyer in the Spielplatz. “Neun und zwanzig, Herr Captain.”

  German guards discovering the tunnel.

  Durnford watched from the window for a reaction to the number he already knew. He described the moment: “Niemeyer’s jaw dropped, his moustachios for a brief instant lost their twirl, his solid stomach swelled less impressively against his overcoat. Just for a moment he became grey and looked very old. But only for a moment.” Then the commandant went beet red. He cursed and kicked the ground and shook his fists at the officers watching him from the windows, ordering his guards to shoot at anyone who appeared at the glass. Several shots were fired, but, used to Niemeyer’s rages, the officers in the crosshairs had already dived to the floor. Throughout the barracks, the officers repeated the number like it had some kind of hallowed meaning. “Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine!” I
t was the greatest breakout of the war—the greatest, perhaps, in the history of warfare.

  Hunkered in corn stalks, Jim Bennett listened to the distant voices from a search party and the barking of their dogs as they scoured the woods a quarter mile away. Now and again, they drew closer to the field where he hid with Campbell-Martin. A couple of horse-drawn carts carrying soldiers also passed on the nearby road.

  The escaped officers did not dare move during daylight hours. The hunt was intensifying, and, from previous experience, they knew that the German army would have informed the surrounding villages about the escape so civilians could join in the search with the police and military. Unless they put many miles between them and Holzminden, and soon, the net would only tighten. Still they remained in the fields, nervous and unable to sleep.

  Only when it was well after dark did they continue, moving through the forest as quietly as they could. It was a starless night, and they had trouble maintaining their compass course. They soon found themselves lost in a gully, forced to backtrack through the dark woods until they found the right path again. Just then, they spotted what they thought was a German soldier. They were trying to creep around him when he called out in English. It was Philip “Murphy” Smith, a 22-year-old Irish cavalry officer and member of the ruck. They greeted each other and continued on together.

  The small group started to head for Hummersen, down a road bordered by thick forests, when two men suddenly emerged from the trees in front of them: RNAS pilots Frederick Mardock and Colin Laurence. They informed them that Major Morrogh was a short distance away as well. When he caught up with them, they numbered seven. The area was clearly alive with escaped prisoners. The men sat down together in the woods to take a break. Morrogh regaled them with some of his adventures of the past few hours, including accidentally setting his entire tin of matches on fire, almost being found by a woman and her two children who were foraging in the woods where he lay naked while his clothes dried, and sleepwalking. He had woken up in the middle of the afternoon standing in a clearing, in “full view of anyone who might be there.” His fellow officers laughed at these stories and had their own to tell too. Their voices and laughter grew louder and louder, and billows of cigarette smoke rose up from their huddle. Concerned, Morrogh put an end to the gathering. It was too dangerous to travel in such a large pack, they decided, so the men split off from one another. They needed to put as much distance between themselves and Holzminden as possible.

  Kit bags over their shoulders, Gray, Kennard, and Blain threaded their way through the dark, dense forest. They kept to single file, ears keen for any sound other than the call of night birds or the skitter of a squirrel through the underbrush. In his many years in the military, Gray had become a skilled orienteer, and his steady compass bearings saved them from the many misdirections and lost time suffered by their fellow fugitives.

  The three had started that day’s march before dusk, balancing the risk of being seen against the benefits of getting beyond the 10-mile radius where they expected Niemeyer to concentrate his manhunt during its first 24 hours. They followed the roads where they could, but these tended not to be straight—and often led them toward hamlets or towns that they needed to avoid. Shortly after midnight, they reached Gellersen, roughly 15 miles from Holzminden.

  On the outskirts of the village, a farmer spotted the trio, too late for them to turn back, hurry into a field, or find cover. They continued, hoping that Gellersen’s main street would be abandoned at that hour, as the other villages they had passed that night had been. To their surprise, they found the opposite was true: Oil lamps flickered in many of the windows, and huddles of villagers stood outside their cottages, clearly disturbed. The three British airmen were sure that news of the Holzminden escape had reached Gellersen and that the villagers were stirred by the potential of the enemy loose in their area. It was time to see if Gray’s scheme would fool anyone. Before reaching the first house, Kennard slipped his kit bag to Blain. Then Blain and Gray bookended Kennard, each putting a hand on his arm like they would if he were actually an asylum patient who might bolt off at any second. Occasionally Kennard tried to pull away from their grasp, and his two minders wrenched him back in line.

  Gray did not slow his pace or hesitate as they advanced down the street. Unless they were stopped, he did not intend to explain their presence. He was on official business, with the papers to back him up. Conversations halted, and they felt every eye on them as they passed. Whispers followed in their wake, and a parade of villagers trailed after them. There would be a confrontation for sure, but the closer they were to the far side of town, the better it would be for them if they had to make a run for it. All the time, Kennard struggled against the grip on his arms, occasionally rolling his eyes for good measure.

  When they reached the last cottage, a few villagers crossed over into their path and blocked their way. They stopped, and Gray drew his papers out from his pocket: his identity card, in the name of Franz Vogel, and the letter stating his duties as chief guard at the Vechta insane asylum. He told them in fluent German how the madman Kurt Grau had recently absconded from the asylum. Tilting his head in the direction of his increasingly agitated charge, he added that he recommended they give them a wide berth. This had some effect on the villagers, but not enough for Gray. His charge was prone to convulsions, he said, and it looked and sounded like one was coming on. He requested some water, so that they could give him “a quietening drug,” to calm him down. On cue, Kennard tried to break loose, a low growl rising from his throat. Blain grabbed his arm and knocked him roughly on the side of the head. Gasps of shock rose from the villagers, and one ran off to fetch some water. Feeding on the reaction, Kennard whimpered and shook like he had no control of his limbs. Seemingly immune to his antics, Gray informed anyone listening that they could only travel by night since encounters such as these only set the lunatic off.

  When a villager brought a glass of water, Blain put his hand out, stopping him. He leaned over to Gray and whispered. “No glass,” Gray explained. Grau might break it and use the shards as a weapon. With that, they had the villagers completely fooled. A pewter mug of water was found while Kennard thrashed about like his tunic was on fire. They managed to wrestle him to the street, pinning him down by his arms and legs. He only fought harder until a pill was forced between his lips and washed down with the water. Sparing no drama, he writhed about. With every passing moment, he grew weaker, his twitches more spasmodic. At last he grew still.

  The villagers were in a state of shock, but Gray promised them that the patient would awaken in a short while, no worse off than he was before. During the wait, he and Blain enjoyed some wine, bread, and cheese donated by an elderly farmer, who clearly had taken seriously the request in the letter from Vechta’s chief of police to give them “all possible help.” They also gained some valuable intelligence: A manhunt was under way for some escaped POWs, and a company of soldiers was in the area. They were searching the countryside and guarding the road and railway line due north of Gellersen. When Kennard fluttered his eyelids awake, Gray and Blain helped him up off the street, then they led their groggy patient away from the town. Once clear, they celebrated their success, although Kennard lightheartedly bemoaned the clobbering he had received when they were forcing him down onto the ground. He was especially disappointed that his minders had not saved him so much as a crumb of the fresh bread.

  By the morning of July 25, nobody from the breakout had been caught, and Niemeyer took out his anger on those who remained behind. He was furious when it was revealed that the tunnel entrance—the location of which was only discovered by digging up the entire length of the sap—had been right under the noses of his guards for months. His rage festered when crowds of Holzminden residents came up to the camp to see the great tunnel and to wonder aloud how it could have gone unnoticed. A photographer even appeared to take pictures of the scar of upturned earth that led from the field to the eastern entrance of Block B.

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sp; Niemeyer was obsessed with recapturing all 29 of the escapees. Such a mass escape would not only be an embarrassment to Germany, but no doubt more important to Niemeyer, ruinous to his career. As part of his campaign to find them, he even posted notices in local and national newspapers to ask for cooperation: “We urgently request help to get hold of all escaped officers in the interest of the defense of our country. We particularly call on the country populations, berry pickers, hay collectors, youth military groups, hikers, and hunters to look out for anything suspicious. We know from experience that fugitives tend to hide in forests. At night one should watch out for any noise and especially the barking of dogs in villages. A high reward is promised for assistance.” The reward offered was 5,000 marks—a substantial sum in war-torn Germany—for any information that led to the capture of a Holzminden prisoner, dead or alive.

  The exit of the tunnel out into the field, after being excavated by the Germans.

  On the afternoon of July 26, Rathborne arrived in Göttingen, a university town set on the river Leine. On his way into the town center, where he expected to find the train station, he came across a tavern. Although he did want to try out his disguise, his decision to enter was more on account of his parched throat. He figured that as long as he kept any conversation brief, nobody would realize that German was not his mother tongue. The tavern owner was an old woman who looked as much part of the place as the scuffed bar. When she slid him a bottle of beer without remarking on his accent or appearance, Rathborne was reassured that he could successfully pass himself off as German. He had drunk fine-quality drafts of beer in the past, in Berlin and in Munich, but no beer in his lifetime ever tasted better than the one that afternoon.