The Great Escape (22 page)

The timing was uncanny. A score of guards marched in for a snap appell in the early afternoon a couple of days later. If the fools had done it properly they might have trapped the day shift underground, but with boneheaded Teutonic thoroughness they had to go through the usual bullshine routine of falling in by the gate, numbering off from left to right, and then dismissing to clear the prisoners out of the huts. Harsh saw them from 104, and Langford went through the new drill. He had the trap up in a moment and called down the shaft the one word, “Ferrets!”

At the bottom, the shaft man flashed a torch up the tunnel and the diggers dropped what they were doing and trolleyed back hell for leather, Langford just had the trap in position again as the jackboots sounded in the corridor and the voice was bellowing, “
Raus! Raus! Alle rausgehen!
”

Early in March, S.S. General Mueller, Berlin Gestapo chief, issued the “Kugel Order.” It was an extension of the “Stufe Roemisch” order. Kugel means bullet, and the new order said that recaptured escapee officers, other than British and Americans, were to be taken in chains to Mauthausen Concentration Camp.

Mauthausen was instructed that prisoners transferred to them under the “Kugel Order” were not be be entered on to camp books but taken to the underground cells and either gassed or shot, whichever was convenient.

About that time security police visited Sagan and had a conference with Von Lindeiner about counter-escape measures. They hinted to Von Lindeiner that prisoners who escaped in future might suffer very harsh penalties. One of them suggested that reprisals might even consist of shooting people in the camp. (To one of his officers, Von Lindeiner later remarked that if he was ordered to shoot prisoners, he would take his own life.)

Von Lindeiner sent for the senior officers, doctors, and chaplains in all the compounds and asked them to put a stop to all escape activity.

“It is not worth it, gentlemen,” he said. “The public temper outside is running very high, particularly against the Allied Air Forces, and escapers may suffer harsh consequences. The war may be over in a year or two…it is not worth taking unnecessary risks now.”

It was a pity he could not have been more explicit. A captive officer cannot give up the idea of escape just because the enemy asks him not to.

Walter, the bookfuehrer, told Valenta that Rubberneck was going on fourteen days’ leave on March 1. That was in three days. The committee could hardly believe their luck.

“We can finish it before he’s back,” Floody said exultantly. “I’m bloody sure we can if we really get down to it. Then we can seal up and wait for the weather.”

He reckoned there was just over a hundred feet to go and then they could dig straight up under the trees.

Floody’s joy was premature. Rubberneck struck the day before he was to go on leave. We were on morning appell when thirty extra guards marched on to the square. Broili and Rubberneck were with them, and Broili went from squad to squad calling out names. One by one the men he called walked suspiciously out of the ranks, and the guards closed around them. Floody was one of them. So was George Harsh (still in pajamas). Fanshawe was another. There were nineteen of them, including Bob Tuck, a couple of diggers, and Jim Tyrie, the man with the beard who had kept Adolf out of the way for the past vital fortnight.

Broili marched them down to 104, giving Floody, Harsh, and Fanshawe some nasty moments wondering if they had located “Harry”. They hadn’t, but they spent two hours searching them, and then, without giving any of them a chance to go to their rooms to get their few belongings, they marched them out of the gate to a compound at Belaria five miles away.

It was a stunning parting pick from Rubberneck. Three key men lost without warning at the critical moment! No one knew how they’d chosen the nineteen. Some of them were completely harmless types who had nothing to do with “X,” and about a third of them were fairly important workers. It was a wonder they didn’t take Bushell, but apparently his outside activities had really convinced Rubberneck that he was a reformed character. (Walter later revealed that the ferrets had gone through all the identification photographs and picked out those they suspected might be on escape work. Why they suspected them we never did find out.)

Floody, Harsh, and Fanshawe were seething when they were taken away. They’d been slogging on the tunnel for nearly a year; they would all have been certainties to get out, and now this…right on the point of success.

Later they felt rather differently!

Crump took over the next day as chief tunnel engineer, and with Rubberneck away they dug like furies. There were eight men down the tunnel on every shift now; two at the face, two in Leicester Square, two in Piccadilly and the frame cutter and pumper in the shaft. The sharp-eared Shag Rees got a shock when there was a sudden rumble right overhead, and he cringed back expecting the whole roof to come crashing down. The rumble passed and he realized it was a heavy cart above. They were under the road.

There were almost no falls over the last stretch. With Rubberneck away everything seemed to go smoothly, and there was still plenty of room for dispersal under the theater. In nine days they dug nearly a hundred feet. Rubberneck was due back in five days. On the tenth day they built the whole of the last halfway house, ten feet long. Crump trolleyed backward and forward trailing a long piece of string, checking the measurements. “Harry,” from shaft to face, stretched for 348 feet.

The surveyors had said it was 335 feet to the edge of the wood. Crump crawled out of the trap that night feeling that the whole thing was unreal. It didn’t seem possible that they were really inside the trees as they had planned nearly a year ago.

“The ground falls away outside the fence,” he said to Roger. “If the mathematical marks are right, we’ve only got about twenty-two feet to go up. Barring the unforeseen, I’ll guarantee it before Rubberneck gets back.”

He already had the framing for the outlet shaft stored below. Travis had been working on the sections for a week. It was to be solid box-framing around four bedposts.

Digging up was tricky and dangerous. The sand kept clumping down, and as Crump fitted the sections of the framing he roofed over half the top to minimize the falls and scraped the sand down on the open side. Then he changed the roof to the other side. They fixed the ladder in sections as they burrowed up and stood on it to dig. It was backbreaking work.

Just before appell on the fourteenth, Crump came to pine roots and gathered he had only three feet to go. His idea was to stop about two feet from the surface and roof it firmly. With two feet of earth it wouldn’t sound hollow if anyone walked on it above. To break out they could remove the roof and hack the two feet of soil away in a couple of minutes. It could drop to the bottom of the shaft, and they could leave it there.

He came up for appell and told Johnny Bull, who was doing the evening shift:

“Test it to see how far you can go. I think you ought to be able to put in two more frames and leave it at that.”

Bull vanished up the tunnel after appell. He was back twenty minutes later shaking with excitement.

“There’s only six inches of dirt there,” he said. “By Christ it’s lucky I tested it first. I’d have broken right through.”

He’d stuck a metal rod up into the sand, and after six inches’ penetration there was no more resistance. He went back and roofed it strongly, packing the sand above the roof as tightly as possible so it would be solid above if anyone trod on it.

At a quarter to ten they were all crawling out of the trap; still with that feeling of unreality, unable to believe it was the last shift and “Harry” was finished. They brought up all the unused bedboards and pipe-line tins, the dispersal bags, the tools, and spare shovels, even the sand boxes off the trolleys, and either burned them or stored them down “Dick.” They weren’t going to need them any more. It was hard to believe that too. Langford stuffed the muffle blankets very carefully under the trap and lowered it.

“Well that’s it, you old bastard,” he said, sounding deeply satisfied. “Next time you come up you’ll be useful.” He added soberly to Crump, “It’s none too soon, you know,” and pressed a foot gently on one corner. It made a little knocking noise as it rocked.

“Warped as bloody Hitler,” Langford said. “It won’t matter so much now.” He spent the next half hour cementing it down around the edges, completely sealing it as he had done twice before. Then before he went to bed be scrubbed the floor. (He scrubbed the floor every day after that, sloshing water all over it. It wasn’t fanatical cleanliness. The water made the boards swell, and they filled in the last vestige of crack around the edges of the trap.)

Crump went over to tell Roger it was all done. Roger was staying away from the trap area as much as possible now, not because he wanted to, but because of the time Rubberneck had searched him. He knew he was probably still suspect, and Massey and Wings were insisting he didn’t take any chances. He’d been rehearsing as Professor Higgins that night. He and Crump sat quietly for a few minutes, not talking much but conscious of a feeling of elation, and Crump drifted off to sleep still trying to convince himself it was fact, not fiction.

Rubberneck was back in the compound in the morning. He didn’t waste much time. Just after lunch a squad of ferrets and guards ran in the gate and headed at a fast trot for 104. Rubberneck loped down the corridor throwing the doors open so he could see anything that might be going on before they had a chance to cover up. He cleared everyone out, and the ferrets went through it for four hours. It was the worst four hours we had known and oh, the blessed relief when Rubberneck walked out again as solemn as ever.

“There’s nothing to be smug about,” Roger warned that evening in the library room. “Rubberneck’s obviously got it into his head there’s something in 104, and we probably won’t get away with it next time. I don’t see that we can risk a next time.”

“Well, we can’t break it now,” someone said. “Not in this snow.”

“We damnwell can if we have to” — Bushell was speaking roughly at that meeting.

“Doesn’t give the hardarsers much chance,” said Marshall.

“Johnny, they haven’t got much chance anyway,” Roger said. “You know as well as I do they’ll nearly all be caught. We can’t lose ‘Harry’ just because conditions are tough. It isn’t only to get people home, it’s to muck the Goons about too and get them to divert troops to look for us.”

Roger had thought of just about everything. There were, he said, four factors he wanted for the night of the break: (1) no moon, (2) a wind to cover up noises, (3) reasonable weather, and (4) no Rudy in 104. He had three days in mind — the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth of March. They were the three most moonless nights for the next five weeks. Almost immediately he ruled the twenty-fifth out.

“It’s a Saturday night,” he said, “and that means Sunday timetables for most of the train traveling.”

They talked it over for two hours and didn’t reach any hard and fast decision. Crump and Langford sided with Roger in breaking out as soon as possible. They didn’t think the trap would stand up to another search.

“We’ll work toward the twenty-third or twenty-fourth,” Roger said, “and see how the weather turns out.”

He had worked it out that at the most about 220 people might be able to get through the tunnel on the night of the break. That meant “no joy” for most of the “X” workers. There were about 600 of us who had taken part in the project in the various departments.

Roger and the committee picked 70 names from among those who had put in the most work and those, particularly the German speakers, who had most chance of getting home. They put the rest of the names in a hat and drew out another 130, and then Roger approved another 20 names of deserving people who hadn’t drawn a place. They were all to go in the order they were drawn.

The lucky ones were told to get ready, and the committee appointed marshals to help them. Each marshal was allotted ten men, and it was his job to see they had everything they needed. For a start they concentrated on seeing that each man had a fake name and a fake personal background so he could answer questions if he was picked up and interrogated. The marshals carried out mock interrogations on them, firing questions about their home life, where they were going and why, and then doubling back on questions to see if they gave the same answers. They found out what each man wanted in the way of ausweises, money, civilian clothes, compasses, food, and maps.

The marshals held mannequin parades of all the men in their charge, the could be-escapers dressed in their escape kit parading up and down while the marshals ran their critical eyes over them to correct anything that looked unnatural. A ferret passing a window nearly stumbled across one of these parades — and would have if the strutting models hadn’t dived under bunks and into corners to get out of his field vision. Roger was furious when he heard about it and threatened unseemly forms of mutilation against any marshal or stooge who gave the game away.