The Great Escape (5 page)

The conference lasted two hours with all of them shooting out ideas, some wild, some good. When it broke up they had the basic points decided — three tunnels thirty feet deep with underground railways and workshops, mass forging of passes, a tailor shop, mass-produced compasses and maps, and a huge intelligence and security organization. A year ago it would have seemed impossible, but they had been learning the hard way for a long time and now they knew what they could do.

Roger took the details to Massey, the senior British officer, and the group captain, resting his game leg on his bunk and drawing on a pipe, listened with satisfaction but made a disturbing suggestion.

“Look, Bushell,” he said. “You’ve been out twice now and nearly made it. The Gestapo think you’re a saboteur and would be happy to get something more on you. Lie low for a while and leave it to the others. I don’t want you getting a bullet in the back of the head.”

“I won’t, Sir,” said Bushell. “This is going to be a long job, and if we get out they’ll have forgotten about me. I’ll worry about that when the time comes if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll be worrying before then if they think you’re working on tunnels. You’ll be off to Kolditz,” Massey said.

“They’re not catching me this time.” Roger was quite confident. “We’re flat out for security, and I don’t think there’ll be any slips.”

Massey looked at him doubtfully and then said, “Well for God’s sake be careful. I think you’d better keep in the background as much as you can and try and look like a reformed character. Stick to the brains part of it, and as far as the actual work is concerned I’ll see you have the whole camp behind you. Let me know of anything or anyone you want, and I’ll make it an order.”

He said it a little wistfully, resigned to the fact that he had no chance of escaping himself. He’d won his M.C. flying in the first war, but had smashed his foot when he’d been shot down then. The same foot had been damaged again when he got his D.S.O. in Palestine in the thirties, and he’d bent it a third time when he bailed out over the Ruhr in this war. He shouldn’t have been flying really, but he wanted to make one last trip before they made him an Air Commodore. Now, when he could move, he hobbled with a stick, his foot swaddled in an old flying boot.

Roger collected his specialists, and one by one he walked them miles around the circuit while he told them what he wanted. The circuit was a beaten track around the compound just inside the warning wire. You could walk there for hours till you were numb and didn’t worry about home or the war or even the more important things like sex or liquor. You could also talk there without being overheard. The ferrets had a habit of hiding under the huts or in the roofs or outside the walls at night with ears agape.

Pounding the circuit Roger told Tim Walenn he wanted two hundred forged passes, and Tim, who never swore and was the politest man I ever met, pulled on his great long mustache and said, “Jesus!”

“Maybe He’ll help you,” said Roger ruthlessly. Walenn said earnestly he didn’t really think it could be done, as all the printing on every pass had to be hand-lettered, but Roger said flatly he wanted them and wouldn’t argue.

He told Tommy Guest they would need eventually two hundred full outfits of civilian clothes, and Guest, appalled, said it was impossible. Apart from the materials and manufacturing, there would be nowhere to hide them till a tunnel was ready.

“Make your own materials,” Roger said. “Most of the boys who get out will have to convert their own duds to civvies. I want you to co-ordinate the thing; make some yourself and show the rest how.”

“And how do we hide all this stuff?” Guest asked, resisting to the last.

“We’ll fix that when the time comes,” Roger said.

Al Hake, phlegmatic Australian, lifted his thick black eyebrows when Roger told him he wanted two hundred compasses. He said he’d see if he could get a mass production line going.

Roger told Des Plunkett he wanted a thousand maps, and Plunket said he’d be quietly confident if he could get some jellies to make a mimeograph.

Travis nearly had a fit when Bushell described all the railways, air pumps, pipe lines, and underground workshops he had in mind. He said he’d start tooling up.

Roger had another conference with Massey, and Massey went to the Kommandant and suggested a few P.O.W. working parties might go over and help in the new compound. A good co-operative spirit, thought the Kommandant, and benignly agreed. So the working parties were marched over, and with them, in the guise of innocence, marched Roger, Floody, Crump, and “Hornblower” Fanshawe. They mapped the layout of the new camp, tramped out distances, measured angles and more distances by rough trig, and surveyed the area outside the wire. Back in their own compound they put it all together and worked out where to dig the tunnels and how long they would have to be.

One of them showed such interest that a kind German surveyor showed him most of the plans, and the prisoner limped back to the old camp stiff-legged and thoughtful. Down the leg of his pants he had a stolen copy of the underground sewage system. They looked it over back in the compound, and there were two beautiful, tailor-made tunnels leading out to near-by drainage areas. If only the pipes were big enough, it looked like happy days. Roger didn’t take anything for granted, and the tunnel chiefs carried on their planning.

Wally Valenta was training men who spoke German for the intelligence branch. Day after day, “Junior” Clark, George Harsh and Tom Kirby-Green padded around the circuit devising security on a scale they’d never tried before. Security was going to be one of the keys to the whole thing. Clark was chief of security and known as “Big S.”

On the face of it, proper security looked impossible. There were going to be half a dozen Germans in the compound all the time wandering around with torches and probes. We had to hide the proposed forgery and map factories, compass and clothing factories, metalwork and carpentry shops, the sand we dug out and the tunnel traps…. We even had to hide the security stooges themselves because nothing stuck out to the ferrets’ eyes more than some character self-consciously sitting around in the same spot every day and all day trying to watch, give signs of approching ferrets, and look innocent all at the same time.

Junior Clark and George Harsh were both Yanks of totally different types. The Yanks were just getting going in Europe, and a lot of them were being chopped down as they experimented with the dangerous business of daylight bombing. The ones who didn’t die were being trundled dolorously behind the wire to join us, and there were about a hundred of them with us at that time. Clark was a gangling redheaded youngster in his twenties and already a lieutenant colonel. George Harsh was well into his thirties and as gray as a badger. He looked like a Kentucky colonel and was a wild, wild man with a rambunctious soul. He’d join the R.A.F. a couple of years earlier and had been shot down as a rear gunner over Berlin. Tom Kerby-Green was a big, black-haired Englishman who looked like an overgrown Spaniard.

Roger controlled every phase of the growing organization, holding daily conferences with the departmental chiefs, presiding over them as charmingly incisive but slightly sinister chairman. He had a mind like a filing cabinet, and that was one of the reasons he was so brilliant at organization. Once he’d chosen his man for a job, he never roughly interfered with him. He listened to his problems, made suggestions, and when they’d thrashed it out and a decision had been made, he gave the man concerned full brief to carry it out. With that twisted eye taking everything in, he was a potent influence enveloping every detail of the planning. He wandered around in a battered old R.A.F. tunic, scarf around his neck and hands in pockets, a tall, brooding figure, with that steady and disconcerting gaze. Every day he went to Massey, and they talked over the master plan.

By the end of March, the new compound was ready. So was the X organization.

We moved on April Fool’s Day, a straggling line of seven hundred scruffy prisoners carrying all our worldly possessions. Most of us wore all our clothes, festooned ourselves with cooking pots, plates and mugs, and the gadgets made out of old tins, and carried cardboard Red Cross boxes with what food we had and a few beloved personal things like photographs and nails and bits of string. Mother wouldn’t have known us. There weren’t enough razor blades to shave every day so some of us were shaven, some had felonious stubbles, and a few had beards ranging from the farcical to the flamboyant. Here and there a bottom beeped pale and unashamed out of obsolete pants, and the air was blue to the noise of happy cursing. A change, as Roger had observed, was as good as a holiday.

Henceforth the old home was known as East Compound and the new one was North Compound. First the Germans searched us, but no more efficiently than usual. People clustered around and harried them, passed articles from one to another, and the result was mildly chaotic. No one lost anything of importance. Roger, amazingly enough, got his gray suit through. Travis brought all his tools, and Walenn had no trouble with his forging pens and inks. Then the screen of tommy-gunners ranged up on each side and escorted us the four hundred yards to the new home.

North Compound was as innocent of luxury as we’d expected. There were fifteen bare wooden huts in three rows in the northern half, and the rest was a patch of stump-studded, loose gray dirt for recreation and appell.

The compound was about three hundred yards square and right around it ran two fences about nine feet high and five feet apart, each strung with about twenty close strands of rusting barbed wire. In between them great coils of barbed wire had been laid, so thickly in parts that you could hardly see through it. Some thirty feet inside the main fence ran the warning wire. Just outside the northern wire lay the
Vorlager,
containing the sick quarters and the long, gray concrete cooler with its barred windows. Another double fence of spiked wire sealed off the other side of the vorlager. The entrance to the compound was on the north side, so there had to be a gate in each fence and each was guarded.

Every 150 yards behind the fences the “goon-boxes” stood up with their watchful sentries, and at night more sentries patrolled the fences and another hundfuehrer prowled inside the camp with his dog trained to go for a man’s throat if necessary.

Woods completely encircled the compound; not pleasant green woods but gaunt pines with skinny, naked trunks, packed close together in the dry, gray earth. They were everywhere you looked, monotonous barriers that shut out the world and increased the sense of Godforsaken isolation. Just outside the wire the Germans had cut the trees back for about thirty yards so there would be no cover for escapers and so that any tunnels would have to reach a hundred feet beyond the wire.

The huts were divided into eighteen rooms about fifteen feet square, each to be bedroom, dining room, and living room for eight people, and three little rooms for two, reserved for those who could pull enough rank to deserve them. Furniture was elementary — double-decker bunks, a deal table, stools, lockers, and a stove in one corner on a tiled base. The bunks consisted of four corner posts with planks screwed along the sides and across the ends at two levels. Short, flat boards rested across the side planks, and on these one laid one’s paillasse — a bag of woven paper that looked like hessian, and stuffed with wood shavings.

These flat bedboards were about thirty inches long and six inches wide. If they’d been specially designed for shoring tunnels they’d have been just that shape and size!

Each block had a washroom with a concrete floor, a lavatory, and a tiny kitchen with a coal stove that had two burners on top and a little oven. There were to be over a hundred men in the block, and they had to do all their cooking on that little stove. Actually there was a kitchen block in the compound, but that could just cope with boiling water for the brews and sometimes boiling potatoes (if there were any) or making soup.

We got by with cooking on the little block stove because there wasn’t much to cook. German rations allowed a
very
thin slice of bread, margarine, an ersatz jam for breakfast, a couple of slices for lunch, and a couple for dinner, probably with neither margarine nor jam. Usually there were a few potatoes and once every three weeks a little minced horsemeat. Occasionally there were some vegetables or barley or sauerkraut. If Red Cross parcels were coming in (thank God they mostly did after the first couple of years), there would be an evening meal of bully beef or Spam and extra luxuries like chocolate, coffee, cheese, and jam.

There was a mad rush for rooms, and as there weren’t enough prisoners to fill the huts yet, there was a wonderful lot of space, almost enough to swing a stunted cat. That day and the next three days were chaos — on the German side too — while everyone was getting organized, and the X organization took advantage of it. Escape fever hit the camp.