THREE

The picture of Allied POW camps that has come down to us from books and films has tended to obscure the fact that only a minority of prisoners were ever interested in escaping. Bill Ash wrote that ‘as a result of their experiences of crash and capture, most… were understandably not overly keen on pushing the odds even further by escaping in the heart of Germany.’ Though every kriegie might dream of escape, and most were willing to help others to get away, ‘the chances were so slim of making it home and the dangers of being shot before you were out of the camp perimeter were so great, that most decided to wait it out.’¹

The proportion of would-be escapers to those who accepted their fate is difficult to establish with precision. The RAF’s history of Stalag Luft III lists 138 men who had some involvement in escape activities in East Compound during the thirty-four months of its existence.² Many of them were engaged in ancillary roles such as acting as lookouts or forging documents, rather than digging tunnels. The document records that about 1,850 prisoners passed through the compound in that time. That means that more than 90 per cent of kriegies were content to wait out the war to its end. The RAF’s internal history of Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug, a camp for NCOs, estimates the proportion of escape-minded prisoners at only 5 per cent.³

Bill Ash put the figure somewhat higher, but pointed out the significant variations in the degree of commitment. ‘There cannot have been a single POW who did not think about escaping,’ he wrote. ‘Yet… maybe only a third in an average camp would have been actively involved in escaping-related activities. Most of the other two-thirds would assist if possible behind the scenes and undergo some hardships to help.’ The majority of pro-escapers did a vital job ‘keeping an eye on the guards over long, dull shifts… or helping to prepare anything from documents to clothes and maps or digging implements’. But he reckoned ‘maybe only 5 per cent were committed to getting outside the wire at all costs.’ And of those, one attempt was usually enough. For the 1 or 2 per cent who remained, ‘escaping became a way of life.’⁴

At the other end of the spectrum were those whose experiences had ‘so scarred them that keeping their heads down and surviving the war was all they could manage’. The reluctance of men who had already cheated death to dice with it once again is understandable. At the beginning at least, inertia was strong and the attractions of camp life powerful. Inside the wire you were out of the firing line for good. Your captors sheltered and fed you. The German rations might be meagre, but if Red Cross parcel deliveries were running smoothly, you enjoyed chocolate and other luxuries that were denied to the guards. The daily life of the camp was monotonous and filled with remorseless tedium. There were, though, ways of escaping it. There were many opportunities for self-improvement which could fill some of the vast acreage of spare time. The camp was full of men with peacetime expertise to pass on. Kriegies could learn a language, study Shakespeare or painting, get involved in the camp theatre or, via the Red Cross, take a correspondence course to gain a qualification that would serve them well in post-war life.

What is harder to explain is the attitude of what Bill Ash called ‘the escapologists’. It was sometimes stated in prison-camp stories written after the war that prisoners had a duty to escape. If so, any such imperative was implied, rather than stated. In 1936 the Air Council issued a document titled ‘The Responsibilities of a Prisoner of War: Instructions and Guidance for All Ranks in the Event of Capture by the Enemy’.⁵ The text is largely taken up with how a prisoner should conduct himself under interrogation. It explains that, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, prisoners were required to give only their name, rank and number and to ‘maintain a rigid silence thereafter avoiding even the answers “yes” or “no”’. They were to ‘avoid all fraternization and refuse all favours’, and the airman was to ‘establish at the outset that he is a type from whom nothing can be learned’.

There is a presumption that the prisoner will be interested in escape, for example in the instruction to ‘keep your eyes and ears open after capture – you may learn much which may be of use both to your country and yourself if you succeed in escaping.’ There is nothing, though, that says that once in enemy hands you were compelled to try to break free.

The pressure on prisoners to escape then was largely self-created. The impulses that animated the escapologists were both military and personal. The escapers felt the need to provide sound practical arguments to justify their activities. They were summed up by Aidan Crawley. After the war he was invited to write the official history of escape attempts by RAF airmen. ‘From the first moment of captivity… there began in every prisoners’ mind a conflict which lasted often until the day of liberation,’ he wrote. ‘Should he, or should he not, try to escape? Ought he to spend his time in what would almost certainly be fruitless endeavour, or should he use it to equip himself to be a better citizen later on?’⁶

Crawley judged that ‘no one could blame those who decided escape was not worthwhile.’ But he believed ‘the arguments in favour of trying to escape were overwhelming.’ Crawley was one of those who felt an obligation was involved. He said it was ‘laid down that, should a prisoner see a reasonable chance of escape, it was his duty to take it’. But he accepted that ‘the question turned upon what a man considered a reasonable chance and it was left to each individual to decide.’ However it was not merely a matter of form. Escape, he wrote, ‘was a duty because the return of a prisoner had considerable military value’.

In wartime, every able-bodied man – especially an airman who had received a long and expensive training – was an asset. The mathematics were clear. For every four men immobilized behind the wire, only one German was immobilized looking after them. By escaping, a prisoner reversed the ratio. Even an unsuccessful bid could disrupt the German war-effort. The Germans took breakouts very seriously. Any escape by more than a handful of men was automatically reported to the high command. Thousands of men were turned out of barracks to comb the countryside for the escapers, diverting them from other tasks. If a man succeeded in making it home, he would not only return to fill a place in the ranks. He would also be able to provide valuable intelligence on areas he had passed through that was unavailable from photographic reconnaissance, as well as information on the outlook and morale of the enemy.

These arguments did not carry much weight with some of the kriegies. ‘There were those who just wanted a quiet life,’ wrote Bill Ash, ‘people for whom any of us escapers were at best a necessary evil.’⁷ The objection was that the activities of the few could make life worse for the many. Though the Geneva Convention forbade collective punishment, the camp history reported that ‘mass reprisals were instituted against the whole compound when escape attempts or escape activities tried the patience of the German authorities too much.’⁸ The penalties were not very harsh. They included closing the theatre, forbidding visits of theatre shows from other compounds, and stopping inter-compound games. In response to an escape bid in 1942 there was an attempt to stop the issuing of Red Cross parcels. The ban ceased after a complaint was made to the International Committee in Geneva, which intervened with Berlin. The result was a flood of goodies in time for Christmas.

Whether military considerations were foremost in the minds of many determined escapers is open to question. Bill Ash would never describe the impulse that drove him in such utilitarian terms. His motives were complicated. They mixed the personal and the political. At times he would describe it as something beyond his control. ‘Escaping is quite addictive,’ he wrote, ‘and, like all addictive drugs, extremely dangerous.’⁹

It was something he had felt ever since arriving at Dulag Luft, the doorway through which airmen passed on their way to a permanent camp. The processing began with a long interrogation. The Luftwaffe’s intention was to extract what information they could from their enemies, but despite the dire warnings about the subtlety and skill of the interrogators issued in the official instructions, their techniques seem to have been often quite amateurish. The man who questioned Ash claimed to be a Red Cross official and had insignia to prove it. Unfortunately the effect was spoiled by the jackboots sticking out from under his coat.

Bill confined himself to name, rank and number, but the questioning nonetheless went on for some time. In between sessions, the prisoners were held in solitary confinement. It was not the first time he had been placed in a cell on his own, but on this occasion the experience shook him profoundly. Later he would describe how he was swept by a feeling of ‘utter depression’. He felt a sense of shame at being taken captive. The word ‘caitiff’ kept swimming into his head. It was an archaic term for ‘captive’, but it also meant ‘base and cowardly’.¹⁰ In his frustration he slammed his fist into the cell wall, bruising his knuckles and drawing blood. He was disgusted at himself for letting himself be shot down before he could inflict any real damage on his enemy. Most of all he felt guilty for failing the many French civilians who, risking imprisonment, torture and death, had helped him after he was shot down.

Of the several motives that drove Bill Ash to attempt escape over and over again, the feeling that he was in some way fulfilling a duty to his French saviours was a strong one. The story of the weeks between crash-landing and capture make it clear why he felt this sense of obligation so powerfully.

He had been shot down on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24 March 1942, on his way back from a mission escorting six Boston bombers tasked with attacking the power station at Comines, in the Pas-de-Calais on the border with Belgium. After the war Bill would give several accounts of his subsequent wanderings. The first occasion was when he, like all returning prisoners of war, was questioned by an officer of IS9, the British intelligence service charged with maintaining contact with the POW camps. The details are very sparse and it is essentially a list of names of French civilians who helped him – some of whom did not appear in his subsequent memoirs. The full story of what happened after the crash-landing emerges from various sources. As we have seen, he was helped by a woman who gave him a jacket and trousers. Her name, although he did not know it at the time, was Pauline Le Cam, and she would pay a high price for her bravery.

After he left her house, and after the incident with the open sewer, he spent several days living rough, then he knocked on the door of a small bar and restaurant in the hamlet of Neuville, about fifteen miles south-west of where he crashed. It was run by the Boulanger family, who hid him in their cellar. This act put them at great personal risk. The place was sometimes visited by Germans, and once a staff car stopped outside and a party of officers came in for a meal. He was looked after by the owners’ daughter Marthe Boulanger, a clever and practical 16-year-old. They tried to teach each other English and French and he entertained her with stories about the bright lights of London and his Texas upbringing.

One night word arrived that the Germans were coming to search the village. Marthe and her brother Julien led him across the dark fields to the home of a local flour-mill owner called Emile Rocourt, a few miles away near Alquines. Rocourt appeared to have a good relationship with the German occupiers. But in fact he and his brother Gaston were kingpins of the local resistance network, and he looked after Bill until the danger passed. At the end of April Bill was taken again to the Rocourt house, where a man was waiting for him. He was small and dark and quiet, and gave his name only as ‘Jean’. Ash would learn later that he was Jean de la Olla, an Algerian-born 37-year-old, who worked for the ‘Pat Line’. This was the escape network set up by Albert Guerisse, a Belgian military doctor whose alias was ‘Pat O’Leary’. The organization had successfully passed Allied prisoners to the south of France for onward passage to Gibraltar and Spain. It had almost been destroyed by the treachery of a British soldier and conman called Harry Coles, who had gone over to the Germans. La Olla had been sent north by Guerisse to revive the network and this was one of his first missions.

He escorted Bill to Lille and left him with a single woman whose name Ash never learned. There were visits from a young woman and her brother, an easygoing young man who played the latest hits such as Rina Ketty’s ‘J’Attendrai’ on his guitar. Bill was shocked to learn that he was on a Nazi death-list, liable to be arrested and shot in reprisal if the resistance mounted an operation in the area. Bill tried to persuade him to come with him when they moved on. The boy explained that there was no point. If he escaped, his sister would take his place on the Germans’ list.

After a week, Jean reappeared. He took Bill to Paris and left him with a young married couple, Joseph and Giselle Gillet, who lived in an apartment on the Avenue du Général-Laperrine near the Porte Dorée on the eastern side of the city. Joseph had been a fighter pilot until the French defeat. They put Bill up in a bedroom, where he was to stay until a courier arrived to take him on the next leg of his journey to Angoulême in south-west France, a step nearer the Pyrenees. Despite the risk, Bill was soon slipping out to explore Paris. He went for walks in the Bois de Vincennes opposite the flat, and swimming at an indoor pool near Denfert-Rochereau. Sometimes Joseph and Giselle went with him to the cinema or the zoo. Early one morning in the middle of May the flat was raided. After the war, when questioned about his experiences by IS9, he told his debriefer that ‘a Frenchman living in the same block of flats informed the Germans of my presence’.¹¹ He was dragged out of bed and driven away to a headquarters building near the Opéra. Joseph and Giselle were taken off separately and he never saw the couple again.

He was taken into a basement and locked into a room. After an hour, two soldiers took him upstairs to an office. A grey-haired man in civilian clothes, who he assumed to be a Gestapo officer, sat behind a desk. The man motioned for him to sit down on a small chair in front of him while the guards withdrew to the door. Speaking in halting French he told his story, making no mention of those who had helped him along the way and doing his best to shield Joseph and Giselle. He explained that they were simply Good Samaritans who had found him destitute on the street and taken him in.

The Gestapo man behind the desk told him to speak English. He seemed businesslike and, at first, reasonably polite. He suggested he stop worrying about the couple and start trying to convince him that he was who he said he was. Ash repeated the date and place where he was shot down. Surely they would have a record of a smashed-up plane being found at Vieille-Église with no one in it? The man replied that this did not prove that he was the pilot. He had been picked up in Paris and in civilian clothes. He might equally be a spy who had been dropped in subsequently. Bill could not help pointing out that, with his poor French and non-existent German, he was hardly spy material. The interrogator produced a pen and paper. The only way he could prove his identity, he said, was to write down the name of every person he had been in contact with since he left his aircraft. Ash made a brave joke, claiming with some justification that he had always been terrible remembering names. The fake civility evaporated. The man rose and left him to the guards. One jerked him to his feet and pinned his arms while the other punched him in the face. The next blow drove the breath from his lungs, leaving him sick and gagging for breath. The soldier paused to wrap a handkerchief round his knuckles, then resumed punching him in the face.

He began to lose consciousness. Then a hand grabbed his hair and wrenched his head back. The grey-haired man was back. Bill described what happened next in an account published thirty-six years later:

He placed an official-looking form on the desk and invited me to have a look at it. One of my eyes was almost completely closed and I could not focus very well on the paper which was in German anyway, so I asked him what it said. ‘It’s from the Kommandantur and it says that if the person calling himself William Ash fails to provide satisfactory proof of his identity he is to be executed by firing squad at 6 a.m. on June 4th.’

‘What’s today?’

‘June 3rd.’¹²

The interrogation continued. They wanted to know whether he had ever met someone called Monsieur Jean. They seemed to know all about la Olla’s activities, but Bill denied any knowledge of him. Eventually they took him back to his cell. It was still morning. They left him alone for the next eighteen hours. His mood swung between despair and defiance. He tried to convince himself that they were bluffing. If they were not, he could save his life by offering up a name or two. Even as he thought this, he knew he could not betray people who had risked their life for him. He remembered that Dostoevsky, a hero of his, had been sentenced to death by the Tsar. He had always wanted to be a writer. Only now he would not be able to make use of his experiences. He tried to imagine the firing squad, ‘thinking that I must steel myself to be very steady and self-controlled when it happened, and then I remember thinking why in hell should I? Who was ever going to know whether I had died well or not and it certainly was not going to make the slightest difference to me how I had gone.’¹³

In the morning the hours passed and no one came. His hopes began to rise. Convention had it that you were shot at dawn. Yet the day was well on and he was still alive. About noon a guard appeared with black bread and sauerkraut soup. Surely they would not waste food on him if they were about to shoot him?

Later the guards returned and led him back upstairs. The grey-haired Gestapo man was waiting and this time he seemed relaxed, almost playful. He began talking about time he had spent in London, before the war. He remembered the steaks at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. Had Ash ever eaten there?

There seemed no reason not to play along. No, he hadn’t, he replied. But he was fond of Lyon’s Corner House, just off Piccadilly Circus, where at the salad-bowl counter you could eat all you could manage for five shillings.

The man smiled and pushed a box of cigarettes across the table towards him. Bill didn’t really smoke but something made him take one.

Then suddenly his manner changed and he shouted at me. ‘You’ll never see London again! They’ll see it.’ He pointed at the two soldiers. ‘They’ll be in England living off the fat of the land, and do you know where you’ll be?’

I did not like to say.

‘Dead. You’ll be dead unless you give us some names.’¹⁴

The Gestapo man nodded at one of the guards, who slapped Bill across the face, knocking the cigarette from his mouth in a shower of sparks. So it went on. A sort of rhythm was established. Blows, then questions and entreaties to see reason. They had already picked up most of the people who had helped him. Why not just confirm their names and corroborate his own story in the process? Through the pain, he heard himself replying logically. Surely if they had really arrested his helpers, then they would have told the Germans all about him? They stopped when he was almost unconscious and dragged him back downstairs.

The next day was the same, and the day after. Later he could never work out how long it went on. Initially he thought a week, later ten days or even a fortnight. Then one evening he heard shouting outside his cell door. He had become something of a connoisseur of German bellowing and felt that this display ‘had the quality of equals screaming at each other rather than one of the Herrenvolk bawling out an Untermensch’.¹⁵

Soon after, the door was opened and he was led out. A man in Luftwaffe uniform was arguing with the Gestapo man. ‘What it turned out to be was an emissary from the Luftwaffe dressing down my interrogator for not informing them of the capture of someone claiming to be RAF and insisting on questioning the prisoner himself.’¹⁶ He was the subject of a demarcation dispute. As far as the Luftwaffe was concerned, any shot-down Allied airman belonged to them, to be pumped about dispositions, equipment, anything that would add to their intelligence picture. There was a further consideration. There were hundreds of Luftwaffe aircrew in British prisoner-of-war camps. If it was learned that Allied fliers were being tortured and beaten, the assumption was that reprisals would follow. The Luftwaffe won the argument. That night, under guard, Bill was taken to the Gare de l’Est and put on a train to Germany.

He was very lucky to be alive. He knew that Giselle and Joseph were perhaps not so fortunate. In his post-war intelligence debrief he told the IS9 officer that they had been ‘sentenced to be shot by [the] Gestapo’ but that their ‘actual fate was unknown’. By then he also knew that Pauline Le Cam from Vieille-Église had ‘served three years in a concentration camp for assisting me’.¹⁷ The encounter with the Gestapo had dispelled any inclination he might have had to empathize with his enemy, who he had ‘come to hate with a passionate intensity’.¹⁸ He could feel satisfaction that he had not betrayed any of those who had risked so much to help him. As he left France behind he had learned enough about the Germans to fear the worst if his helpers were discovered. He had to find a way to damage the enemy. It seemed the only means at his disposal was to try and escape.