The Great Escape (3 page)

The next night there was a great din from a midnight party in one of the huts in the compound, and while the guards pondered on the merriment from behind their machine guns, Byrne dug out the last couple of feet of the tunnel and seventeen shadows emerged at the far end and snaked off into the woods under cover of the party noise.

Getting out of a camp is only half the battle; they learned this bitterly. They were all caught — most of them on the following day. The Dodger was snared trying to cross a bridge where there happened to be a guard. Wings Day stayed out three days till a couple of woodmen bailed him up with a shotgun. He had roughly tried to convert his uniform to look like civilian clothes, but you want a dark night to get away with that sort of thing.

Roger had crushing luck. He got away to the Swiss border and was within thirty yards of the frontier in a little village at night when a border guard stopped him. Roger pretended he was a slightly drunken ski instructor going home after arranging a skiing match in the village. The guard was friendly and believed him but said he’d better come along to the station for formal check. Knowing what that would mean, Roger charmingly agreed and suddenly bolted around a corner and was away with a couple of bullets chasing him. He thought he was completely clear when he found he’d run into a cul-de-sac with high walls all around it, and back he was brought to punitive solitary confinement in a Frankfurt jail and then to Dulag.

Still, it had been valuable experience and the prisoners had tasted blood.

It was a good lesson for the Germans, too. They “purged” Roger and the Dodger and all the others who had escaped to a new camp at Barth, up by the shores of the Baltic. Within the next year, forty-eight tunnels were started there; but water lay only about four feet under the surface so the tunnels had to be very shallow, and the Germans used to collapse them all by driving heavy wagons around the compound.

Apart from the normal fervent wish to get out of prison and back home to the war, there was plenty of other motive for escaping. The Geneva Convention lays it down that captured troops are to be properly fed. The German idea of proper feeding wasn’t much more than a formality; they fed us on about ½
d
. a week. If you’ve ever known hunger — not gnawing appetite, but real hunger — you’ll understand part of the reason for P.O.W. reluctance to endure German hospitality. In his first year in the bag, Roger lost nearly forty pounds.

After a few months there, he and some others were herded into cattle trucks for transfer to another camp. Roger and some others levered up the floor boards in their truck, and bodies began to slip through into the night. One man went under the wheels, had both legs cut off, and died immediately.

At night, in a siding near Hanover, Roger and a Czech officer in the R.A.F., Jack Zafouk, slipped out, reached cover, and set off for the Czech border, where Zafouk’s brother lived. Jumping a couple of goods trains, they reached the brother, who gave them money and the address of a friend in Prague, who took them in and sheltered them.

For a week they both had to keep inside the friend’s flat. Zafouk didn’t dare to go out because old friends might see him, and Roger had to stay in because he couldn’t speak Czech. The host contacted the underground and arranged for their escape through Yugoslavia, but just as they were setting out the Gestapo broke the escape chain and executed the members.

Still shut in, Roger and Zafouk waited weeks till another underground chain arranged to pass them along to Turkey. They got to the Czech border when the Gestapo broke this chain too, and they narrowly escaped back to Prague. Czech patriots shot the Gestapo chief Heydrich about that time, and hell broke loose in Czechoslovakia. There were many executions and tortures besides Lidice.

And many spiteful betrayals. One morning the bell of the flat rang sharply. The Czech host, his son, and daughter were all out. Roger and Zafouk kept quiet and didn’t answer the bell, but the door was burst open, five Germans pushed in, and in a few moments they were off to the Gestapo cells.

Zafouk was interrogated for a week and then sent to another camp. Roger was taken to Berlin, to a Gestapo cell. The Czech family was shot.

Meanwhile, other escapes were going on; that is, escapes from prison camps. No one yet had succeeded in getting back to England. At Barth, a primitive escape committee was organized to co-ordinate escape work. Wings Day nominated Jimmy Buckley as first chief. A genuine cloak-and-dagger atmosphere was creeping in. They called it the “X organization” for security reasons, and Jimmy Buckley was officially labeled “Big X.”

The Germans became escape-conscious too, and “ferrets” appeared in the compound — German security guards dressed in overalls and armed with torches and steel spikes to probe for tunnels. Then they dug sound detectors into the ground around the barbed wire to pick up sounds of tunneling, and like clockwork they found tunnel after tunnel.

But there were still other ways of escape. One man dressed himself as a ferret and walked openly out of the gate at night. Others hid in trucks that brought food into the compounds. A Swiss commission (the Protecting Power) came to inspect the camp, and while they were in the compound a team dressed in makeshift civilian clothes walked out in their place. Pat Leeson dressed himself as a sweep with a dirty face and a cardboard topper like the German sweeps wear and walked out of the gate while the real sweep was in the compound. Another reluctant captive was Douglas Bader, that phenomenal man who’d lost both his legs in an aircraft crash in the early thirties and went flying with tin legs to get a string of victories, wing commander’s rank, a D.S.O. and Bar and D.F.C. and Bar. He’d collided with a German fighter in a scrap over France and had a leg trapped immovably in his damaged cockpit. So he took his leg off (the only time he ever appreciated losing his real ones) and baled out. The R.A.F. dropped a new tin leg for him and, mobile again, Bader was so intractable that the Germans took him out of the camp and put him into a prison hospital.

A few days later, Bader sneaked into a working party of British soldier prisoners being taken to a near-by airfield for labor. He stayed four days with them there looking for a chance to jump into a plane and take off for home, but before he could make it the working party was paraded one morning and a German security N.C.O. who knew Bader appeared and put the finger on him. They packed him off to Kolditz Strafelager, the punishment camp for the naughty boys.

In England, the R.A.F. air offensive was getting into full swing and a lot of good men were being shot down. Mostly they died, but some landed alive and were captured, and the number of prisoners was growing. To cope with them, the Germans built a new camp at Sagan, a town of about 25,000 in Germany’s dust-bowl, Silesia, about halfway between Berlin and Breslau. It was up toward the Polish border and a long, long way from any friendly or neutral territory. The Germans called it Stalag Luft III, and by that name now it is notorious. We called it Goering’s luxury camp, but that was sardonic. In the spring of 1942, a couple of hundred prisoners were purged to Stalag Luft III from Barth and other camps.

Among them was a fellow with the D.F.C., a persistent escape fiend. While crates containing equipment were being loaded on the train at Barth, a German interpreter said archly to the prisoners doing the loading, “Be careful of those crates. Maybe an escaper is nailed up in one.”

The boys all dutifully said, “Ha ha, how funny that would be,” knowing very well it
was
funny because the D.F.C. man
was
nailed up in one of them. He broke out on the journey and got away for a day or so but was caught and sent to Kolditz Strafelager.

When the others reached Sagan they found it about as grim as they’d expected — six low drab wooden barrack huts in a patch of sand surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence nine feet high. Spaced about a hundred yards apart just outside the barbed wire, the “goon-boxes” stood up on their stilts about fifteen feet high so that from the little huts on top the sentries behind their searchlights and machine guns could look down into the compound with clear vision and an unrestricted field of fire. (They were called goon-boxes because every prisoner of the Third Reich referred to the Germans as Goons.)

About thirty feet inside the barbed wire ran the warning wire on its little posts about eighteen inches high. It was there to keep prisoners away from the fence, and it certainly did. If you put a foot over it, you could be reasonably sure of several bullets from the nearest trigger-happy sentry.

The night the first party arrived at Sagan, Wings Day and two others dressed up in R.A.F. uniforms they had converted to look like German Luftwaffe uniforms (all the guards were Luftwaffe) and tried to bluff their way through the gate. The guard wasn’t fooled, and they were marched off by a reproachful Kommandant for fourteen days’ solitary in the cooler. The cooler, like Grannie’s castor oil, was the German universal remedy for intransigent P.O.W. behavior and, like Grannie’s castor oil again, solitary is not funny. Even the Germans, incidentally, called it the “cooler,” an expression they picked up from us.

There were many more reluctant guests in the new camp. Jimmy Buckley had been purged there too, and he started up the “X organization” again. Before long there were several tunnel syndicates worming out under various huts and a variety of other schemes too.

Bravest of them was a brilliant idea of Ken Toft and “Nick” Nichols. Nichols was a good-looking Californian with a crew cut; a cool, composed and deliberate individualist if ever I saw one. He’d been in the American Eagle Squadron, with the R.A.F., and been shot down early in 1942. Nick didn’t seem to have any nerves, which was just as well for the kind of job that he and Toft pulled. They had a theory that halfway between the goon-boxes there should be a blind spot hidden from the sentries by the long line of thick, coiled wire. If they could get to that spot across the lethal area from the warning wire, they could cut their way through in safety (?). If the theory was right they had a slim chance of getting through the wire (probably to be caught soon after). If they were wrong, a probable bullet each.

Four goon-boxes had a view of the warning wire at the chosen spot, so Jimmy Buckley laid on four elaborate diversions. At a given signal, a prisoner yelled to the sentry in one box to ring up for an interview with the Kommandant. In front of the next, two men staged a spectacular (sham) fight and one of them was knocked out while the sentry gaped at them. Another prisoner hailed the sentry in the third box and asked permission to get a ball that had been tossed over the warning wire. By the fourth, a man was doused with a bucket of water while the sentry looked on and laughed.

And in the vital five seconds Toft and Nichols crossed to the fence and crouched down by it. A hundred men held their breath (including Toft and Nichols), but the theory worked. They weren’t seen. Nichols had a pair of crude wire-clippers made from a couple of hunks of metal. Strand by strand they worked their way through the wire till they were through. At another signal, four more diversions were repeated in front of the sentries, and Toft and Nichols ran the few yards into the cover of the woods. It would be nice to report that they got back to England, but they were caught soon after and slung into the cooler for the punitive solitary.

The tunnelers in the new compound were soon running into complications. The Germans had built the huts in the middle of the compound and cleared the ground on the far side of the wire so there was well over a hundred yards to tunnel to get to cover outside the wire. The soil was sandy and collapsed easily, and one by one the tunnels were found. One was very shallow and a horse pulling a ration wagon stuck his hoof through it, to the grief of the diggers, the joy of the Germans, and the surprise of the horse.

“Piglet” Lamond, a slight, toothy little New Zealander, won fame with his brilliant “mole” idea which greatly shortened the distance necessary to tunnel. We had been digging a sump by the ablutions hut, only about five yards from the wire, and it was Lamond’s idea to tunnel from the sump. When it was about seven feet deep he tunneled a hole in the side toward the wire, covering the entrance by hanging a coat over it. After a few days he had a little tunnel about twenty feet long, and one evening he and two others crawled into it. We buried them there alive, filling up the pit with rocks and gravel. Lamond’s idea was to tunnel the remaining few yards in the one night and surface just outside the wire before dawn.

They were all stark naked, carrying their clothes in bundles, and there was just room for them to lie one behind the other, with a few feet to spare behind.

Lamond in front did the tunneling; the other two shoved the sand back, filling up the tunnel behind them. They were only about four feet down and stuck pointed sticks up through the surface for breathing holes. It was pitch-dark down there and stiflingly foul. No one had done this sort of thing before, and it was just a theory that they could get enough air to keep them alive. For all they knew they might gradually lose consciousness and suffocate.

Prisoners watching from the nearest hut saw steam rising out of the air holes and prayed that the hundfuehrer and his Alsatian dog who patrolled the compound at night wouldn’t notice. The “moles” lost track of time after a while. Their watches stopped because of the sand, and in any case the air was too foul for a match to light. They were thinking they might be far enough to dig up and away when Lamond saw light filtering down through an air hole. It was day.

They lay sweating in the foulness all day. The tunnel was just as wide as their shoulders, and they could hardly twitch a muscle. When no more light came down the air hole they still waited a few more hours for wandering Germans to go to bed, and then they tunneled up the few feet and found themselves just outside the wire.