The Great Escape (12 page)

Eventually we formed up by blocks in the usual hollow square and stood there seven hours. Pieber counted us twice, and it didn’t check so he counted again and then started the business of the individual photograph check.

Army and Navy officer prisoners of the rank of colonel or above, and every British and American pilot, no matter what their rank, was classified as “important prisoner,” and the Germans filed their photographs and fingerprints. One by one a ferret called us by name an checked our faces with our photographs. It wasn’t easy. Not many looked as they were when they were shot down. Everyone was thinner and many had beards or shaven heads.

It had been hot when we went on appell, and most of us had only shorts on. About four o’clock a thunderstorm broke and the rain bucketed down for an hour. None of the Germans had topcoats. Von Lindeiner looked as though he wasn’t even aware it was raining. He stood by the photographs, implacable and still, and soaking wet. You had to hand it to him. As darkness closed in about nine-thirty, it was all over, and we were allowed, shivering but satisfied, to go back to the huts.

None of the twenty-six made it back to England. Within three days they were all caught but three, Morison, Welch, and Stower.

In the bundles they carried out of the gate Morison and Welch had fake German uniforms they’d made for themselves. They donned them in the woods and got to a near-by airfield where they sneaked into an old Junkers training plane. They were just starting the engine to fly to Sweden when a German pilot came along — quite unsuspectingly — to fly the plane. He thought Morison and Welch were ground crew. They couldn’t speak a word of German but saluted madly, wound the starting handle for him and the German took off, leaving them on the ground grinding their teeth. They crawled into another plane, found it didn’t have a starting handle, so they marched boldly into a hangar, took a starting handle from the locker of another plane there and were just starting up their chosen aircraft when a German sergeant stormed up and asked them what the hell they were doing.

“Well,” said Morison casually in English, knowing the game was up, “we thought we’d borrow this, actually, and go home for the week-end.” The sergeant looked faint, but soon recovered. The Germans wanted to try them for sabotage and kept them in jail for weeks, but finally purged them to Kolditz Strafelager.

Tough little black-haired Johnny Stower was nearly caught in the first half-hour of the escape. A guard questioned him a mile from the compound, but Stower had a forged pass from Walenn showing that he was a Spanish worker. He bluffed his way past and walked sixty miles to the Czech border, across fields and through woods, keeping away from the roads.

In a border town he made friends with a Czech innkeeper who gave him civilian clothes and money, and Stower went on by train to a spot near the Swiss border. He set out at night to walk across and actually walked into a narrow salient of Swiss territory, but not knowing just where he was he walked out the other side back into Germany and was caught by a frontier guard. After a few grim weeks in a Gestapo prison, he came back to us. It was tragic luck. Later, we realized how tragic.

Conk Canton had had bad luck too. He got into a train at Sagan Station, and as the train started a German officer got into the same compartment. Canton recognized him as a German doctor from the kommandantur and quickly hid his face behind a paper. He stayed that way for several minutes wondering how he could get to another compartment without being recognized when he felt an insistent tap on the knee. It was impossible to ignore it. He had to look over the top of the paper inquiringly, and there was the German doctor looking at him tolerantly.

“I’m sorry, Canton,” he said. “You’ll have to come back with me.”

Around dusk, at lock-up time a few days after the delouser, three men in German uniforms and with rifles over their shoulders marched out through the compound gate, after perfunctorily showing their passes. There was nothing wrong with the passes. They all had the new mark on the back, and the three men vanished into the night.

Unfortunately two of them ran into Glemnitz on their way to Sagan Station, and the shocked and enraged Glemnitz recognized them as prisoners and arrested them. The third man, Cochran, was picked up on a train a few hours later. It was bad luck, but at least Travis’ dummy rifles hadn’t been completely wasted.

By the time the tunnels were about twenty feet long, Muller, Travis, and McIntosh had the underground railways ready. Gone were the days when a man hacked away a basinful of sand at the working face and inched his way a hundred feet backward with it to the shaft to empty it, and then crawled up to the face again.

The trolleys had to stand up to a lot of work, so Travis used the beechwood bedboards to make the chassis. He had a trolley for each tunnel, and each one carried two detachable wooden boxes for the sand. Each wheel was three disks of beechwood screwed tightly together (the inside disks being larger to make the flange that held and guided the trolley on the rails). He screwed strips of metal from old food tins around the rims for tires and used metal rods off the stoves for axles. They turned in wooden bearings greased with margarine.

For the rails, Willy Williams went around the blocks tearing off the beading battens that lined the walls and ceilings of every room. The carpenters split them lengthwise to make strips about an inch wide, half an inch thick, and a few feet long, and nailed them to the floors of the tunnels about a foot apart. The trolleys ran very smoothly on them, pulled each way by ropes made of plaited string tied to both ends.

Tunneling now was falling into a smooth routine. Each tunnel had about twelve permanent diggers on its staff, divided into shifts of four. Immediately after morning appell, Block X looked under the hut and in the ceiling to make sure no ferrets had hidden themselves away during appell, and when everything was clear the stooges kept guard while the trapfuehrer opened up and the shift of four went below. He shut the top, dismissed all except one of the stooges, and everything was safe on top till reopening time just before afternoon appell.

Down below, one of the shift squatted in front of the pump and started the rhythmic rowing action. Two men whipped off their clothes and changed into filthy long woolen underclothes. One of them lay on his belly on the trolley and wheeled himself up to the working face with a dog-paddle motion of his hands. The other hauled the trolley back by the rope and paddled himself up to the face. The fourth man back at the base of the shaft hauled the trolley back, clipped the sand boxes on, and the rear man in the tunnel hauled it back up to the face.

There was no room to turn around in the tunnel or lie side by side. Digger No. 1 lay full length and dug into the face, and as the sand piled up by his head, he pushed it down past his hips until Digger No. 2 (lying facing the other way — toward the shaft) could scrape it toward him and load it into the boxes on the trolley. When the boxes were full, he tugged on the rope and the man in the base of the shaft hauled it back, whipped the boxes off, and emptied them into kit bags stacked in the dispersal chamber. He put the boxes back on the trolley, tugged the rope, and Digger No. 2 hauled it back to the face.

The man in the shaft spent most of his time finishing off the slots and tongues cut by the carpenters in the ends of the bedboards stored in the workshop chamber. When a new shoring frame or piece of air pipe or fresh fat lamp was needed, Digger No. 2 sent a note back on the trolley, and back came what he wanted.

They worked without a break below till evening appell. If they wanted any lunch, they took it down with them. Mostly they didn’t. Lunch was usually a slice of black bread and a couple of potatoes; at its best it still tasted like black bread and potatoes, and seasoned with sand it was even worse.

Now and then they switched jobs to ease the muscles and the tedium. Digging was the worst. You had a fat lamp by your head, you sniffed the fumes all day, and when you came back up again you did nothing but spit black. The pumps relieved this a lot. At the end of the air line there was a transferable nozzle which led up over the shoulder of the digger, gave him plenty of fresh air, and kept sand out of the air pipe itself. When another section of pipe was being fitted, the nozzle was taken off, the new pipe laid under the floor, and the nozzle put back.

Lightly-built diggers changed places by one lying flat and the other crawling over him, but with hefty characters like Tom Kirby-Green they had to wheel themselves back to the shaft to change over. It was surprisingly warm below, and the diggers were in a constant sweat.

Sometimes a ferret wandered near the trap, and then the alarm tin in the shaft gave a soft rattle. Everyone froze where he was because sometimes muffled sounds of work below could be heard on top. They lay there without moving until the tin rattled again as the ferret moved away and they carried on.

The warning tin hung from the roof of the dispersal chamber. There were a couple of little pebbles in it and a string from it led up the shaft through the hut floor not far from the trap. It needed just a gentle tug from the stooge above whenever a ferret was approaching to rattle the pebbles.

About four-thirty the tunnelers changed into their ordinary clothes below and tried to comb the sand out of their hair. Above, the stooges drifted along to keep guard, and a German speaker stood by to lure away any ferret hanging about the trap areas. When they got the all clear the trapfuehrers opened up, the tunnelers came out, and the traps were shut. The tunnelers washed off any telltale sand in their huts and went on appell with everyone else.

After appell Block X’s searched their huts again, the duty stooges kept watch, the traps were opened, and the second shift went below. They laid new rails, replaced any shoring frames that needed it, swept surplus sand out of the tunnels, and checked the fat lamps and the pump.

Travis had made two spirit levels, and every evening they carefully checked the levels of the tunnel floors to see that they really were on the level. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d risen slightly (though not too much). They certainly didn’t want them to go any deeper. The evening shift also checked for direction. Through the tame Germans the organization had two little prismatic compasses of the Wehrmacht infantry type. They only gave rough checks. The close checks were done by holding a fat lamp by the wall of the tunnel at the face and sighting along the same wall from the base of the shaft.

Then the tricky part started. If everything was clear, the traps were kept open and the kit bags of sand excavated during the day were hauled to the top by a rope sling. One by one the penguins stopped by, collected their sand, and wandered off. As soon as the last bag of sand had been emptied the underground men came up and the traps were shut for the night.

In the morning the third shift took over for the day’s tunneling, and so they went in rotation, each shift working two days out of every three.

You needed stamina and steady nerves to be a digger. It was a heavy strain to lie for hours on one elbow carving away at the sand face with an outstretched arm, and you had to carve carefully if you didn’t want a hundredweight of sand collapsing in your face. There were minor falls every day and sometimes bigger ones.

A mixed lot, the diggers. They came from nearly every British country, from America and France, Poland, Norway, the Argentine, and Czechoslovakia.

From Wales, there was Shag Rees, the little man with thick black hair and a nose that had been broken so often it was getting to be a habit. His friend, “Red” Noble, was a redheaded Canadian, built like a navvy with a slow, gentle drawl and nearly always a half-grin on his face. He and Shag used to like baiting Rubberneck, and so they weren’t always available because they spent a lot of time in the cooler.