The Dangerous Book of Heroes (53 page)

By that time, there were sixty British in Colditz. One of the best known, RAF fighter pilot Douglas Bader, arrived during 1942. Morale was dropping with the number of failed attempts and so few successes. Two officers went insane and had to be restrained from committing suicide. Another feigned madness in an attempt to get himself sent to Switzerland. Bader's presence helped morale no end. For a man with artificial legs, he was irrepressible and announced that he was ready to join an escape over the roof of the castle.

Squadron leader Brian Paddon was removed from Colditz around this time to be court-martialed at another prison camp. He escaped his guards and was the second Briton to reach England. Other attempts were less successful, but they went on continuously. Pat Reid planned an escape through the commandant's own office, with the help of a Dutch watchmaker who could get through the more complex locks. Reid began a tunnel under the commandant's desk, working at night. When the time came, eight men assembled in the office and six broke through to a storeroom, leaving Reid and Lieutenant Derek Gill to hide the route. They were all dressed as German soldiers, and their “sergeant” was saluted by the guards as they walked out the following morning. Of the six, four were recaptured, but two made it to Switzerland by September 1942.

Pat Reid's final escape plan came when Dick Howe took over as escape officer and he could make a try for himself. Reid joined Ronnie Littledale, William Stephens, and Hank Wardle in a run over the roofs. Split-second timing was the key as they had only instants to cross a courtyard when the patrolling guard turned. The noise of their run was covered by an orchestra practice, which Douglas Bader conducted. Bader could see the vital sentry, and the plan was for him to stop the music whenever it was safe to run. However, the Germans became suspicious and stopped the practice halfway through. The
escapers reached the outer buildings safely but were then unable to go farther when a prepared key failed to open a vital lock. Reid found an unused basement with a very narrow, barred chimney to the outside. To get up it, they had to strip naked, then pass up their kits and re-dress on the other side. They crossed the moat, barbed wire, and outer wall with sheet ropes, then set off in pairs. Reid and Wardle covered the four hundred miles in four days of train journeys and walking. All four made it to Switzerland safely.

In the four years of Colditz's use as a prison camp, more than three hundred escape plans were attempted, and of those, thirty-one ended in a “home run.” The German habit of returning escapers to the same place meant that as often as they lost a potential route out, they learned from the experience of those who made it farthest. Vitally, the repeated attempts also tied up German soldiers and resources that would otherwise have been used fighting the Allies.

 

After fierce fighting, the castle was liberated by American soldiers on April 15, 1945. One of the last British plans was revealed behind a false wall in the attic—a working wooden glider with a wing span of thirty-three feet.

Recommended

The Colditz Story
and
The Latter Days at Colditz
by P. R. Reid

Reach for the Sky
by Paul Brickhill

They Have Their Exits
by Airey Neave

I
t is evening on the western front. The year, 1916; halfway through the mud and carnage that is the Great War. An army padre serving in France returns to his billet.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

“I came back from the line at dusk. We had just laid to rest the mortal remains of a comrade. I went to a billet in front of Erkingham, near Armentières. At the back of the billet was a small garden, and in the garden, only six paces from the house, there was a grave. At the head of the grave there stood a rough cross of white wood. On the cross was written, in deep black-penciled letters ‘An Unknown British Soldier' and in brackets underneath ‘of the Black Watch.' It was dusk and no-one was near except some officers of the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting. How that grave caused me to think.”

The Reverend David Railton wrote to the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig. He proposed that the body of a soldier be removed from the western front to Britain for burial: one soldier to represent all the dead of the British Empire and Commonwealth, to help “ease the pain of father, mother, brother, sister, sweetheart, wife and friend.” Understandably, in the middle of a four-year war, there was no reply, but the concept of the Unknown Warrior had begun.

Railton survived the war and in 1919 was appointed vicar of
Saint John the Baptist in Margate, Kent. He left the army with the Military Cross and the memory of that evening in France. He'd thought further that such an unknown soldier should be buried only inside Westminster Abbey, because that great abbey—first dedicated in 1065—was the “Parish Church of the Empire,” of a third of the world. In August 1920 he resubmitted the idea to the dean of Westminster, Dr. Herbert Ryle. He in turn approached the king, the prime minister, and the British army, writing: “There are thousands of graves…of ‘Tommies' who fell at the front—names not known. My idea is that one such body (name not known) should be exhumed and interred in Westminster Abbey, in the nave.”

King George V was at first doubtful, suggesting that almost two years after the end of the war such a funeral “now might be regarded as belated.” However, he was persuaded that the idea would work, and on October 18, the dean received a letter informing him of His Majesty's approval and of the suggestion that the burial indeed take place on the next Armistice Day, November 11, 1920. From that day BBC radio and newspapers throughout the empire, commonwealth, and the world carried regular reports of the project.

How was the Unknown Warrior to be selected from the more than one and a half million dead British and empire soldiers, sailors, and airmen? How would he reach Westminster Abbey?

The desperately sad process of locating, identifying, transporting to war cemeteries, and reburying the British and empire dead along all battlefronts is carried out by the Imperial War Graves Commission, then under the command of Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt. He gave orders that on November 7, 1920, the bodies of four servicemen be exhumed from the four great British battlefields of the western front; one from the Somme, one from Ypres, one from Arras, and one from the Aisne. Each must be from a grave marked
UNKNOWN BRITISH SOLDIER
, each must be wearing a British uniform, and all must be placed in identical bags.

Four unknown servicemen were brought that evening by field ambulances to the Saint-Pol headquarters and there taken into the cha
pel. Each of the ambulance parties left immediately and returned to their base. At midnight Brigadier General Wyatt and Colonel Gell entered the dim, lamp-lit chapel. Wyatt wrote later:

Thus the soldier or sailor or airman was selected at random. The name of the man, his age, his regiment, his rank, where he died—all were and shall remain forever unknown.

In Britain, meanwhile, a special coffin was commissioned. It was made of oak from a tree on the grounds of Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace. Around the coffin were forged wrought-iron bands, and secured to the lid was the sword of a knight of the Crusades, selected by the king from the Tower of London. Carved into the lid was the inscription:

 

A BRITISH WARRIOR WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 1914–18
FOR KING AND COUNTRY

 

In Westminster Abbey the nave was prepared. Flagstones were raised and a grave dug in the center of the aisle, in pride of place, directly inside the Great West Door.

A quiet service was held in the Saint-Pol chapel by chaplains from the Church of England, the Nonconformist churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. On November 9, the coffin shell of pine was carried by field ambulance and escort to the Chapelle Ardente in Boulogne, where it was placed inside the oaken coffin brought from
Britain. There the Unknown Warrior rested overnight with an honor guard of British and Dominion soldiers. Brigadier General Wyatt also sent six barrels of earth from the western front with which to cover the coffin in its Westminster grave, so that the Unknown Warrior “should rest in the soil on which so many of our troops gave up their lives.”

On the morning of the tenth the coffin was carried to HMS
Verdun,
berthed at Gambetta Quay, for the channel crossing. Lieutenant General Sir George Macdonogh represented the king; Marshal Foch represented the French government.

The procession following the coffin was more than a mile long, made up of French infantry, cavalry, disabled soldiers, and children. More people lined the roadsides to the quay. The destroyer
Verdun,
launched in 1917, was chosen because she was named after the battle of Verdun of 1916.

Halfway across the English Channel, as the
Verdun
entered British waters, six Royal Navy destroyers met and escorted her into Dover. Unbidden, gathering slowly during the day and waiting in silence, thousands of people lined the quaysides of the ancient port. A nineteen-gun salute was fired—a field marshal's salute, the highest military honor—and a band played. The coffin was transferred into the same railway carriage that in 1919 had carried home the body of Edith Cavell, and borne to London.

During the war some 25 million wounded soldiers, sailors, and airmen had passed that way, but the passage of that serviceman was particularly poignant. The
Daily Mail
wrote of the journey through Kent:

This serviceman returning might just be their missing serviceman—their brother, father, son, or friend.

The bridges over the line were also packed with silent watchers, the steam and smoke from the engine shrouding them as the marked carriage passed beneath. When the train drew into Victoria Station, more people thronged the platforms and concourses. There the Unknown Warrior remained overnight with an honor guard of the King's Company, Grenadier Guards.

On the morning of November 11, 1920, at 0915, the Unknown Warrior was carried to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. Draped over his coffin was a very special Union Jack on which were placed a British helmet and sidearms. The flag was the property of the Reverend Railton, and it, too, had seen action. It was the flag that Railton had used as an altar cloth for makeshift services and for the celebration of Holy Communion along the western front.

From Hyde Park, the Royal Artillery fired a nineteen-gun salute. Twelve of the highest-ranking officers—led by Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig—attended as pallbearers. Following the carriage were the mourners, including four hundred ex-servicemen of all ranks. All that had been arranged.

What had not been arranged—like the men and women on the quayside at Dover and the silent watchers along the railway line—were the thousands and thousands of silent people standing along the curbsides and pavements of London. From Victoria Station up to and along the Mall, through Admiralty Arch and down Whitehall, the mourners watched and paid tribute. One unknown soldier, sailor, or airman returning home at last to represent the million and a half still lying in Belgium, France, Germany, the Middle East, Africa, the
Pacific Islands, in all the seas, and especially the hundreds of thousands with no known grave.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

At the newly erected cenotaph—created in the same vein of remembrance as the Unknown Warrior, and meaning literally “empty tomb”—King George V stepped forward and laid his own wreath of roses and bay leaves on the coffin. His handwritten card read: “In proud memory of those warriors who died unknown in the Great War. Unknown and yet well known, as dying and behold they lived. George RI.”

There followed a hymn, a simple prayer, and then from Westminster the deep chimes of Big Ben proclaimed 1100 hours; the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the moment the Armistice was effective in 1918 to end World War I. On the eleventh chime, the king released the two U.K. flags covering the cenotaph and the tomb was unveiled for the first time. There was a two-minute silence in Whitehall and all across the kingdom—from London to Belfast, Cardiff to Edinburgh, Land's End to John O'Groats. A lone bugler played the forlorn notes of “the Last Post,” “calling to them from sad shires.”

The procession resumed along the crowded, silent streets of the capital, the king and the Prince of Wales walking behind the Unknown Warrior in his final journey through London and into Westminster Abbey. The congregation of that parish church that day was one thousand widows and mothers of men killed in the war, the nave lined by ninety-six holders of the Victoria Cross. The oaken coffin entered the abbey by the North Door. It was carried by the pallbearers through the quire, along the length of the nave, to the grave immediately inside the Great West Door. The choir sang, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.” Dean Ryle conducted a simple service.

To the soft singing of the traditional “Lead, Kindly Light” the Unknown Warrior was lowered into his grave, there to lie forever amidst the kings and queens, princes and poets, writers and composers, and other saviors and preservers of freedom.

King George stepped to the grave. From a silver shell he scattered earth from the Flanders battlefields onto the coffin: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.” The service was completed by the Reveille: the Union Jack from the western front was draped over the pall.

By the time the abbey closed its doors at eleven that night more than forty thousand people had paid their respects to the Unknown Warrior, leaving wreaths, flowers, and single poppies around him and around the four servicemen standing honor guard. Tens of thousands more visited the cenotaph. There, silent lines of men, women, and children wound throughout the misty November night, leaving a sea of wreaths. Two wounded soldiers walked sixty miles to lay wreaths to their comrades. On the morning of the twelfth—unrehearsed—the silent pilgrimage to the warrior in the abbey resumed.

It had been thought to close the grave after three days, but that had to be delayed. A chorister at the service, Reginald Wright, wrote: “A feature that lives vividly in my mind was that, after the service was over, thousands upon thousands of people streamed into the Abbey hour after hour, day after day, and when they got to the grave they cast their red poppies onto it. Gradually, the area became a mass of red poppies.”