Chapter 8

V2 ROCKET TESTING AT PEENEMÜNDE

A very talented drama society was formed in the camp and it provided popular entertainment by staging many of the successful West End plays. There were a few budding Kriegie actors even before the air force obtained their services, Donald Pleasance and Peter Butterworth being but two who improved their thespian skills by entertaining fellow Kriegies, and would play to a much wider audience in the postwar years.

The theatre stood alone in the Lager used for sport and parades. When a show was running, the final curtain was run down to enable appell to be completed and everybody was locked in the barrack blocks before dark. As with the boxing contests, the goons were always in attendance and occupied the front seats, tending to patronize the shows rather than to pop into Barth town during their leisure hours. Barth was reputed to have the highest incidence of venereal disease in the Third Reich, and Kriegies applauded the prostitutes and brothel keepers in our neighbouring town for their wonderful contribution to the war effort and trusted they would keep up the good work.

One morning following a show, Hauptmann von Miller addressed the parade to tell it that two foolish Kriegies had been caught trying to escape during the night. That they had not been shot in the attempt was an act of providence and as a punishment they would serve a long period of solitary confinement in the cooler. Even as von Miller was speaking, the two Kriegies concerned, ‘Butch’ Reynolds and his combine partner, ‘Burglar’ Bill, could be seen in the Vorlager waving and yelling to us from their cell windows. We gave them a loud cheer as the goon officer was trying to make the point that anyone attempting to escape in the future took the risk of being shot on sight.

‘Burglar’ was yet another soldier who had at sometime or other changed identities, but was now trying to get out of a cage when he could have dodged away from an outside working party. He was from the East End of London, and insisted that he was a burglar by profession in civvie street and this was not his first time in prison. One had only to look at ‘Burglar’ to know he was telling the truth.

When they were released from the cooler, ‘Butch’ gave the following account of the incident. During the stage show the intrepid pair managed to conceal themselves in drums of lime in the theatre storeroom. The drums were large and were almost empty of the lime used as a disinfectant in the camp latrines. They waited until the theatre emptied and the parade had been counted and dismissed before they emerged from their hiding places. It got dark and the camp settled down. There was a logical explanation as to why the drums were not checked by the goons. They must have considered that no one but a madman would hide in a drum of caustic powder and they were probably right in this instance.

Plucking up their courage, ‘Butch’ and ‘Burglar’ left the comparative safety of the theatre and, crawling redskin style, made for the perimeter fence. Hugging the ground while prying searchlight beams swept the Lager, and waiting for the goon patrols to pass out of earshot, was an unnerving and slow business. ‘Butch’ was the first to negotiate the tripwire and reach the fence, leaving ‘Burglar’ who was in two minds whether to press on or scrub the whole caper and scuttle back to the safety of his lime drum, some yards behind.

‘Butch’ was about to start cutting his way through the tangle of barbed wire, when he became aware of a huge Alsatian inquisitively sniffing his ear, before sitting down comfortably to supervise the current bid to escape from Stalag-Luft I. He was quietly, but urgently, shush-shushing Rin Tin Tin away from the scene of operations, when the dog’s handler walked up and pointed a Mauser L98 rifle at his head. ‘Butch’, realizing that the game was up, proceeded to entrance the goon with an Oscar winning performance on how to win friends and stay alive. It was doubtful whether he would have remained alive if he had been spotted by one of the goons in the Posten towers. He was standing in forbidden territory beyond the trip wire, the only excuse required by the goons to open up with their machine guns with murderous intent.

The pantomime at the fence had been observed by ‘Burglar’ who, having lost interest in what was now a farce, began backtracking to the sanctuary of the theatre for all he was worth. He was soon discovered by the Abwehr goons.

However comical ‘Butch’s’ account of the incident may seem, it was to their credit that they had thought up an ingenious plan to break out of one of the Luftwaffe’s maximum security camps.

‘Butch’ eventually appeared before a visiting International Medical Commission, the Repatriation Board, pleading insanity, and was successful in being recommended for repatriation. The ‘Repat’ Board comprised of two Swiss and three German doctors, and their recommendations were final. Allied prisoners who were recommended for repatriation were usually swapped for an equal number of Axis prisoners at a neutral port, like Gothenburg in Sweden. Oberst Scherer was probably only too pleased to see the back of Sergeant Reynolds.

A cobbled road led past the perimeter fence to the north of the camp. Looking west, a short distance along this road was one of the Luftwaffe’s largest flak training schools. Beyond this building could be seen the spire of Barth church.

The training courses at the school were attended in the main, by Luftwaffe personnel to learn the theory and practice of blasting Allied aircraft out of the sky. The occasional course for Italian Regia Aeronautica was fitted into the training programme. Whether the students were German or Italian, the sight of a prison camp almost filled to capacity with Allied air force POWs must have encouraged them to feel that their training produced results.

To the east of the prison camp and just visible a few hundred yards along the road there was an airfield. It was rarely used for air traffic, but a battery of flak guns and two radar dishes could be seen close to one of the hangars. Except during the air raid on Peenemünde during the night of the 17–18 August, I never heard the 88mm flak guns open fire. However, one could be sure that the trainees would be taught to load the guns until they were proficient enough to dispatch shells at the rate of eighteen to twenty per minute.

Practical instruction for the trainees took place each weekday, the dummy target being an obsolescent Dornier Do 17 which droned back and forth incessantly all day long at a height of approximately 10,000 feet.

The Luftwaffe personnel would march smartly past the camp each morning lustily bellowing out their marching songs to return at lunchtime and at the end of the working day, still singing but with slightly less enthusiasm. We learned their songs by heart and competed with our hit songs proclaiming that Britannia rules the waves, and that we intended ‘Hanging our Washing on the Siegfried Line’ – if it was still there. The solemn rendering of ‘Lili Marlene’ was invariably a joint effort.

The Italians were a most undisciplined rabble, who delighted in provoking an interchange of barrack room language as they ambled past the camp. Their hosts deserved them, and all the Italians were short of were their hurdy-gurdies, monkeys and ice-cream carts. While the German trainees seemed to be able to track the Dornier with some precision, the Italians drove their instructors wild with their unbelievable antics with equipment on the airfield. The aircraft would be cruising in the west, while the guns and radar scanners would be pointing in every other direction, and this was no exaggeration. The instructors could be heard bawling impatiently at the trainees they were trying to teach to make war some of the time, rather than love all the time.

A Lager next to ours had just been completed in September when Italy capitulated, and the course of Italians at the flak school were marched straight into it. They were welcomed into captivity with a roar of delight.

One lovely summer’s day we were startled by the ominous sound of machine-gun fire from one of the Posten boxes. In broad daylight and in full view of many of his room mates who were walking the circuit, a Kriegie, who must have gone completely round the bend, deliberately stepped over the trip wire and calmly walked to the fence and then, as though competing in an obstacle race, he began to scale the barbed wire. It was obvious to all that the man was sick and there was no intent to escape, and yet without any compunction, the goon in the Posten box snuffed out the life of the wretched soul. There was a near riot in the camp, but we respected the one-sided firepower of the goons.

The Abwehroffizier gave the usual talk on appell, reiterating his warnings about the foolishness of ignoring the trip wire notices. The death of the unfortunate prisoner should act as a deterrent to others. Like hell it did!

While pounding the circuit, Kriegies would often spot female labour working in the fields near the camp. When this occurred they would line the trip wire to get as close a look at the woman as possible, even though they were a few hundred yards away and appeared intent on what they were doing. The air would fill with cat-calls and wolf-whistles, accompanied by all manner of lewd suggestions on how they could better fill their time – in spite of the fact that closer inspection of the females revealed countenances not unlike Godzilla or the Wicked Witch. The condition of the goods would have made little difference to those Kriegies who had not been with a woman for years, if they could only have been let out.

Sprog Kriegies coming into the camp informed us of the repeated raids on the port of Hamburg by Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force which took place over a continuous period of nine days. The operation, code name ‘Gomorrah’, created a terrible firestorm which roasted people alive and incinerated buildings. The casualties exceeded those caused by the Luftwaffe during the whole of its blitz on London in 1940–41. The raids cost Bomber Command eighty-seven aircraft, and another 400 of its aircrews perished.

Following the Hamburg raids which resulted in an appalling loss of civilian lives, we became aware of a hardening of an already hostile attitude towards us by the German guards.

Infuriated by having his cities devastated by the Allied air forces, Adolf Hitler vowed that he would retaliate in due time by unleashing his secret V-weapons on London. Since the mid-1930s, Germany had been experimenting with a few ‘unorthodox’ weapons, including a jet-propelled flying bomb and a rocket. These Vergeltungswaffen, reprisal weapons, were being developed at an experimental establishment near Peenemünde a small fishing village on the isle of Usedom in the Baltic. Usedom was one of a number of small islands in the estuary of the River Oder and was only fifty miles to the east of Barth. Hitler decreed that those heading the V-weapon projects, Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, should spare no effort to perfect them and have them in full production by midsummer 1944.

The V-1 Flying Bombs, or Doodlebugs as they became known, and the V-2 Rocket Bombs, were intended to be launched from ramps sited in France and Holland within range of London. The V-1 was twenty-five feet long and had a sixteen feet wingspan, and it could carry a one ton warhead 150 miles at approximately 400 mph. The first one to be targeted on London was in June 1944, to be followed by 13,000 more before the launching sites were destroyed or overrun by the Allies. The V-2 was first successfully launched at Peenemünde in October 1942. It was forty-six feet long and also carried a one ton warhead. It could reach the speed of sound in thirty seconds, and climb to a height of between fifty and sixty miles before curving down to drop on an unsuspecting target about the area of London. Its speed on impact was estimated at 3,500 feet per second, and the first one zeroed in on Chiswick, West London, in September 1944. Five thousand more were aimed at London, Antwerp and Liege before the sites were destroyed or overrun. Unlike the V-1 Flying Bomb which could be heard jetting across the sky at a height of not more than a few thousand feet, the V-2, travelling at a speed much faster than sound, could not be heard coming, it was audible only when it exploded as it hit some real estate.

Lazing in the Lager on a warm summer day, we often noticed a distant white smoke trail climbing vertically in the sky to disappear into space. Although we assumed it was a rocket of some sort we did not realize that we were witnessing the final test flights of the V-2 before it was mass-produced and neither did we realize that these successful tests were heralding the dawn of space travel. In 1945 von Braun and his team surrendered to the Americans rather than the Russians, and they subsequently made an enormous contribution, not only towards the development of inter-continental ballistic missiles, but also to developing the necessary technology resulting in the American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, landing on the moon in 1969.

In October, six months after I had been taken prisoner, I was delighted to receive my first letters from my parents and Joyce. My parents waited for as long as three months before William Joyce, or Lord Haw Haw, announced my name with a list of other POWs during one of his propaganda broadcasts from Germany. Joyce had been corresponding with my parents and they let her know I was safe. It was a wonderful tonic to know that Joyce was still in love with me and that she was prepared to wait until I was eventually set free, and yet, I was very much aware that I was expecting a beautiful young woman to wait for an interminable period of time for someone in whose company she had spent less than twenty-four hours in total. There were also too many eligible young servicemen frequenting Darlington. It was a worry!

One afternoon the inmates of the camp were treated to a skilful flying display by the pilots of twelve yellow-nosed Messerschmitt Me 109 fighters belonging to the crack Hermann Göring Geschwader (Group). They circled the camp and airfield several times and then, after making some low passes followed by tight rolls, in line astern formation they landed at Barth airfield. After an overnight stay, they took off in the morning to engage the US 8th Air Force bomber stream of Fortresses and Liberators leaving their telltale contrails in the blue summer sky as they headed inland to their target.

Not long after this incident, Bomber Command sent a force of nearly 600 aircraft to destroy the V-weapon experimental establishment at Peenemünde. Most of us were asleep when the air raid sirens sounded in Barth and the flak school, followed by the camp lights being doused. Soon the sound of flak was accompanied by the drone of many aircraft passing overhead. Even the flak school opened up with its guns on the airfield and the noise was deafening. The tranquillity of Barth Bird Sanctuary was disturbed for about an hour while the raiding force clobbered Peenemünde. Peering from slits in the window shutters we managed to see some of the action, a few searchlights over Barth and bursts of flak high in the sky. We heard the howl of a stricken aircraft diving out of the bomber stream and then two parachutists were coned in the searchlights. Assuming they were our lads, we cheered.

On appell in the morning, the camp commandant praised us for being such sports and cheering the lucky escape by two of the crew of a Luftwaffe nightfighter that ‘developed a fault’. We did not enlighten him.

The target at Peenemünde received extensive damage, and a number of civilian personnel were killed. A nearby garrison of soldiers was also hit resulting in heavy casualties. The raid cost Bomber Command thirty-eight aircraft, almost 200 aircrew would die, the rest would become POWs and we would get first-hand accounts of the action.

In view of the fact that the guns at the flak school were used in anger, albeit in a defensive role, during the Peenemünde raid, our Camp Leader, Sergeant Barnes, made a strong protest to the Red Cross representative when he next made a visit to the camp. Barnes argued that the camp should now be classified as being in a war zone and either it or the flak school should be moved forthwith. In accordance with the Geneva Convention prisoners should be afforded protection from the warring parties. The Abwehr, and much less the German High Command took scant notice of the Red Cross or the ramblings of an RAF sergeant, despite the fact that he represented over a thousand Kriegies, and no relocation took place. We were quite content to stay where we were.

As other members of my squadron were shot down and turned up at the camp, I was kept fairly well up to date with the news. The heart-throb film star, Clark Gable, took time off from being a rear-gunner in the US 8th Air Force to visit the squadron and present it with the MGM logo pins at the official ‘adoption’ ceremony. The pins were not worn on operations, however; not that the Germans were anxious to own MGM badges, but rather the pins identified the squadron.

When the squadron transferred from Croft to Leeming, Croft became the base for two Halifax squadrons namely 431 (Iroquois) and 434 (Bluenose) Squadrons. The inhabitants of Croft and Dalton-on-Tees had to endure a lot more noise with the increased activity on the airfield, but there was an upturn in annual profits at the Croft Spa Hotel and the Chequers public house – and at Mary Pearson’s sandwich takeaway.

Those of us who were the last to fly Wellington aircraft in Bomber Command, would have been privileged to have operated in Halifaxes or Lancasters. They had a much longer range, were faster and could carry twice the bombload of a Wellington but were just as vulnerable at the receiving end of a flak or cannon shell.

Work on the tunnel progressed slowly through the summer months and many of us had only five bed boards left to support us in slumber. There were many accidents caused by flying bedboards and tempers flared. Many of us felt that in view of the discomfort we had to endure because of the tunnel project, we qualified for a place at the end of the queue when the breakout eventually took place. It was of no concern to a number of Kriegies who were reluctant to leave the ‘sanctuary’ of a prison camp and would ‘sweat it out’ until the end of the war. It was a question of personal choice. If given the opportunity I would have plucked up enough courage to crawl through a dank, sandy-walled tunnel to freedom. However, it was not to be.

One day the tunnel lookouts were puzzled to see a small mechanically propelled road roller trundle into the Vorlager and pull up outside the Abwehr office. A short time afterwards, it was started up again and driven into our Lager and then began to circle the barrack blocks. Its presence then became clear, and the tunnellers were evacuated just before the roof caved in. The roller had found a weak spot and the ground had subsided beneath the weight of the roller. My heart went out to the tunnellers who had spent months underground – it was back to the drawing board, although nobody managed to escape by a tunnel during my stay at Stalag-Luft I.

It was announced on appell that we were leaving Barth in a few days’ time and heading for East Prussia to Stalag-Luft VI at Heydekrug. Stalag-Luft I was to hold American air force officers after our departure. Our quality of life was going to deteriorate drastically as the months went by. The ‘good’ life was over.

The fact that the tunnel project had ‘fallen through’ was only a temporary setback for a Kriegie named George Grimson. George was shot down in a Wellington aircraft of 37 Squadron, based at RAF Feltwell, during the night of 14-15 July 1940 while targeting Hamburg. His was the only aircraft to be lost by Bomber Command that night and he was one of two survivors of the crew of five, although ninety-seven aircraft were dispatched to bomb industrial targets and lay mines. He was an escape artist of extraordinary talent, daring and determination, whose aim was to cause the Germans as much inconvenience as possible. He soon became fluent in the German language and it is said that his first escape was achieved simply by giving his German escort’s behind an almighty kick and making a run for it. Soon to be recaptured. George learned to avoid this vexation of the spirit for longer periods outside the wire. A natural loner, both inside and outside the wire, he still managed to escape with another Kriegie from Stalag-Luft III before it became an officers only camp and all NCOs moved to Stalag-Luft I, Barth. George remained at large for some weeks before being recaptured and once more spent time in the cooler. It was at Barth that I got to know this most exceptional character, although only by sight because he was not in the compound for long.

The day before we moved out of Stalag-Luft I at Barth, George stepped over the tripwire dressed as a goon maintenance worker and carrying a homemade ladder. In fluent German he passed the time of day with the goon in the Posten tower and was about to check for an electrical fault in the floodlighting circuit. George then calmly propped the ladder against the fence and climbed it. He then bridged the gap between the two fences with the ladder, which he rested against the outer fence. After going through the motions of fixing a lamp and trying not to electrocute himself in the process, he descended the ladder to stand outside the camp. Then shouldering the ladder and waving cheerio to the goon, he sauntered off to freedom. It was an audacious escape that infuriated Abwehroffizier Hauptmann von Miller, and considerably lessened the promotion prospects of the goon in the Posten tower when details came to light upon George’s subsequent recapture some weeks later.