Bill had listened to lectures on escape and evasion during his training. One thing he was told was that the sooner you tried to get away, the better were your chances of success. The journey into captivity offered many opportunities. It usually involved travelling by public transport accompanied by guards who needed to eat, sleep and use the toilet. But to take advantage, you needed to be alert, fit and optimistic. Bill was weak and bruised from constant beatings. His normally buoyant spirits were flat. ‘For me this was one of the lowest periods of the war,’ he wrote later.1 At Dulag Luft his feelings of frustration and guilt had deepened. But his natural joie de vivre and his tendency towards action over melancholy reflection soon asserted themselves. His revival owed something to having met Paddy Barthropp.
Paddy was one of The Few, but there were few like Paddy. He had seen a lot in his twenty-one years. His mother died giving birth to him in Dublin on 9 November 1920. His father, he wrote, ‘was totally grief stricken and resented my very existence almost up to the time of his own death in 1953’.2 It was typical of Paddy to add: ‘I never blamed him.’ Elton Peter Maxwell D’Arley Barthropp was a successful racehorse-trainer whose patrons included the Duke of Westminster and the Aga Khan. He was also a compulsive gambler. After his bankruptcy forced Paddy’s departure from Ampleforth College, a Catholic private school run by Benedictine monks in the wilds of Yorkshire, he pulled strings to get his son an engineering apprenticeship at the Rover works in Coventry. Like most young men of his generation Paddy was fascinated by aeroplanes. After a visit to the annual air display at Hendon in London, he decided to apply for one of the short-service commissions the RAF was offering. After one failed attempt he was in, and flying a Spitfire in time to take part in the Battle of Britain. Paddy liked girls and parties and resented authority, yet he retained a curious innocence and felt a strong sympathy for the underdog. These were attributes that he shared with Bill Ash.
He managed to get into trouble as soon as he got to Dulag Luft. His interrogator was a Major Binder, who had been a well-known racing-car driver before the war. Binder was charged with pumping Paddy for information about the new carburettor recently fitted to some Spitfires to overcome the loss of power they suffered when rolling out at the top of a climb. ‘It didn’t take me long to convince him that I hadn’t a clue,’ Paddy recalled.3 The major seemed relieved. He suggested that the two of them go off for lunch at a tavern in the woods beyond the camp. All Paddy had to do was give his parole that he would not try and escape. Ignoring all the RAF’s stern warnings against fraternizing with the enemy, he accepted.
Lunch was a great success and went on a long time and they both ended up in the German-officers’ mess for supper. When a senior British officer at the camp heard about this he gave Paddy a rocket. Paddy didn’t mind. All in all ‘it was well worth it’.
Their time at Dulag Luft was brief. The regime was relaxed, controlled by a ‘permanent staff’ of British officers who worked with the Germans. Their job was to explain the system to the new arrivals, issue them with clothes and prepare them for their onward journey. Over time they had assumed status and privileges. They messed separately from the transients and ate better food. Some of the newcomers, most of whom had just come from grappling with the Germans in the skies over occupied Europe, found their willingness to cooperate with the system surprising, even sinister. In time they would learn that this was a misjudgement.
Some of the staff gave off an air of weary superiority. They knew the way the system operated, what was possible and what was not, and were not gentle in puncturing naive illusions. It seemed to Bill that, having resolved to escape, he should try and do so as soon as possible. When he approached a senior officer and asked him how he should proceed he got a cool response. ‘Not from here, old boy,’ he was told. ‘Wait till you get to the main prison camp… It’s all properly organized there.’4
Paddy shared Bill’s determination. His motives for wanting to escape were unclear, perhaps even to himself. His complete lack of pomposity prevented him from attempting any deep analysis in the brief, hilarious memoir he left behind. The crushing tedium provided a spur, as did concern at how things would end if the war turned bad for the Germans. It was, he wrote, ‘a time of boredom, a deep sense of homesickness, constant hunger and the nagging thought that in the end we would probably be disposed of’. But it was also a question of character. A spirit as free and anarchic as his could not submit to incarceration without a struggle.
From their neighbouring bunks in Barrack 64 they plotted their escape. They lived to the rhythm of fixed routines, and one day bled indistinguishably into another. They woke at eight and mustered outside with the other kriegies for morning Appell. Then they drifted back to breakfast before deciding how to fill the time before lunch. ‘In our small room, stuffed cheek-by-jowl with normally hyperactive but now frustrated and often short-tempered young men of different interests and outlooks and nationalities, time dragged by leadenly,’ Paddy remembered. ‘Every hour was another sixty minutes to kill.’5 Bill found it quite easy to keep himself occupied. Until now he had always been too busy to fulfil his hopes of being a writer. Here there was all the time in the world. He lay on his bunk, filling page after page of his first novel.
Sometimes they wandered over to the dusty sports areas behind the latrines in the south-east corner to join in whatever game was in progress. The players came from several different sporting traditions. The Brits were rugby men, the Australians played ‘Aussie rules’, while Bill had been brought up on American football. ‘As the game progressed, the players and ball were passed, thumped, bounced and tackled in every way possible, with heated disputes about whether a goal was a try or a try was a touchdown,’ Bill remembered.6 The game was too strenuous for some of the players weakened by the poor food or the trauma of being shot down. Once, while charging down the wing, he threw the ball to a teammate who caught the pass then keeled over in a faint.
The prisoners relied on Red Cross parcels to supplement the meagre German rations. When deliveries were running smoothly, they ate reasonably well. In the summer of 1942, though, the supply was badly disrupted. Food had never mattered much back home where there was plenty of it. Even during the war the airmen had been used to three meals a day – good, bad or indifferent, depending on which station they were based in – which arrived on the table without them having to think about it. In the camp, food came to matter a great deal. It was the source of more fantasies than sex. Men savoured the memory of meals past and dreamed of feasts to come.
At this time they lived with growling bellies, never quite silenced by the meagre rations. The Geneva Convention stated that prisoners should be given the same food as was issued to depot troops. Instead, wrote Aidan Crawley, the rations were closer to ‘the lowest civilian grade designed for those who were too old to work.’7 Whether this was due to shortages or to a belief that those supplies that were available were wasted on prisoners is not clear. It meant a dismal diet of black bread, margarine, jam and tea for breakfast, lunch of soup or sauerkraut, and a supper of sausage and bread or a potato. Swedes and pumpkins featured prominently. Very occasionally the carcase of an old horse or cow would arrive. To stay healthy, a man living a prison-camp life needed 3,000 calories a day. The German rations averaged about 1,600 calories, which was only adequate if the prisoner took no exercise and slept often. Sometimes the energy value of the food dipped as low as 1,100 calories. Tobacco did something to relieve hunger pangs.
Much better, though, were the Red Cross parcels, the presence or absence of which could change the mood of the camp. The Red Cross parcel scheme dated back to the previous war, when British prisoners wrote home saying they were starving and desperate for warm clothing. It was revived when the new war came, supported by voluntary subscriptions. The aim was that, every week, a British prisoner would receive a cardboard box filled with food and comforts to supplement his rations, sent via the Red Cross in Switzerland. A typical box weighed 11 lb. and contained some – or, if they were lucky, all – of the following items: a small packet of tea, a tin of cocoa, a bar of milk chocolate, tins of pudding, beef loaf or chopped ham, condensed milk, margarine, processed cheese, sardines, jam, sugar, vegetables, dried eggs, oatmeal and biscuits. They also came with a small 2.5-ounce cake of soap. Tins of fifty cigarettes or pipe tobacco were sent separately. These were addressed to the Senior Officer of the camp and distributed equally among the prisoners.
Without the supplementary calories, the prisoners were on the edge of starvation.
The food the Germans dished up provoked constant moaning. The only person who didn’t seem to mind it was Bill Ash. He ate everything, including the strange items which appeared intermittently on the menu. There was runny green cheese which turned everyone else’s stomach. And there was klipfish. No one quite knew what klipfish was. It seemed to be some kind of dehydrated whitebait, which rumour claimed had been lying in a military warehouse since the last war. It looked like wood shavings and after being soaked in water for several days acquired the consistency and smell of wet dog hair. The normal method of cooking was to chop it into squares and fry it. Most of the kriegies could not manage more than a mouthful. Bill wolfed it down, happily cruising the camp asking others if he could have their leftovers. It was hard to explain to British men, who assumed that a Texan must have been brought up on steak three times a day, that he had gone hungry in his early days. ‘The food is terrible,’ he agreed. ‘But think how cheap it is.’8
Boredom and hunger fuelled frustration and anger. Normally peaceable men picked fights and looked for slights. Bill and Paddy shared an inclination to try and treat the humiliations and privations of camp life as a joke. It was only at night that the mask of humour dropped. Then every man was as close to solitude as the confined space they lived in allowed. They lay in their private spaces, staring at the ceiling or the mattress above their heads, and let the ghosts of home and the past fill their minds. Some nights there was music on the air. It streamed from a wind-up gramophone belonging to a prisoner called Bill Stapleton, who had been shot down in his Spitfire over Dunkirk in June 1940. He had somehow acquired a small collection of classical discs. It was, wrote Bill Ash, ‘some of the most beautiful music ever composed. It would waft out from Bill’s gramophone, across the camp, making us feel just a little bit more free and a little less forgotten.’9 Ash knew most of the melodies well. He had loved classical music since first hearing it during his days at the university, an epoch that now seemed to belong to another century. The sounds from Stapleton’s gramophone brought comfort and also inspiration. They were a link to the world he had left behind and to which he was determined to return as soon as possible. He dreamed of freedom. ‘I do not suppose there was one night in those three years when I did not soar over the wire by merely flapping my arms or mole underneath it like a mite in cheese, take off in a ’plane made of bed boards or catapult myself over the machine-gun posts by a huge rubber band.’10
With dawn, reality intruded again. How were they going to realize their dreams of escape? He and Paddy spent many hours examining all possibilities, no matter how hare-brained and implausible. Most were rejected after a few minutes. There was no point wasting time on any plan that did not bear examination from all angles. To get support for any project meant winning the approval of the escape committee. They sat in council to examine the plans put before them, ruthlessly rejecting any proposal that had not been meticulously thought through.
The chairman, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Buckley, who flew from the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious before being shot down over Dunkirk, was a small, crinkly haired, humorous man with a theatrical streak, which came out in the sketches he wrote and acted in to entertain his fellow kriegies. He also had a gift for administration and a cool, rational mind, qualities that Harry Day had spotted when he made him his deputy at Dulag Luft.
No one approached Buckley and the committee without a sense of trepidation. ‘Compared to selling this hard-nosed bunch your escape plans, getting past the guards was thought to be relatively easy,’ remembered Bill. ‘Almost any scheme, even one that sounds brilliant at its time of invention, starts to sound faintly demented when you pitch it to an audience who look as if they are trying you for your life.’11
At last Bill and Paddy came up with a proposal that they felt might pass muster with the committee. Once a week the prisoners were led in groups through the gate to the north of the huts and into the Vorlager for a shower. The guards counted them on the way in and then on the way out again. According to Paddy, ‘the Goons would normally turn on the hot water for a couple of minutes so we could lather up with ersatz soap and later turn them on a second time for us to rinse off.’12 On one of these excursions the pair had noticed a manhole cover set into the floor of the shower room. On lifting it they discovered it led down into a small space which housed the pipes for the mains water supply and the cocks which controlled it. There was just enough room in there for two men. If they managed to slip through the hole unobserved they could wait until dark, then sneak out into the Vorlager which was not patrolled at night. Then they could cut through the wire and be on their way. For the scheme to succeed the count in and out of the Vorlager would have to be fixed. By now the kriegies had worked out ways of fooling the guards, distracting them at a vital moment to manipulate the numbers as required.
The day came when their plan was put before the committee. They waited outside Barrack 69 where the members met, protected by a network of lookouts who stood unobtrusively at key points ready to signal the arrival of any ferrets. Then Bill and Paddy were called in and given the chance to sell their proposal. Although they did not know it, the committee was in a receptive mood. With so many tunnels being discovered they had decided to concentrate on just one project, a well-engineered, deep-lying shaft which had its entrance under one of the barracks. They were inclined to look favourably on any scheme that did not require digging.
The committee listened in silence and asked a few questions. Then the pair were dismissed and the deliberations began. A little while later they were called back and told the plan had been approved. Bill and Paddy felt a mixture of satisfaction and apprehension. Something that had been theoretical was now real. Freedom had just inched a little bit closer. But so too had the prospect of a fusillade of bullets in the back.
The support of the committee meant they now had access to the resources of the escape organization. They were kitted out with a compass, a hand-drawn map of the area using information gathered from previous escapers and – very importantly – sustenance. If they could feed themselves during their first days on the run they would reduce the risk of discovery due to being forced to buy – or steal – food from local people. Prison camps were full of men who had acquired specialist knowledge of many subjects before they were drawn into the war. Much of this expertise could be usefully applied to escape activities. Among the committee members was a leading nutritionist. David Lubbock was married to the daughter of a prominent scientist, Sir John Boyd Orr. Together they had produced a study called Feeding the People in Wartime, which formed the basis for the government’s rationing programme. Lubbock joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and flew in Albacore biplanes off aircraft carriers. In late 1941 he was shot down during a raid on Kirkenes in Northern Norway and was captured by the Germans while attempting to walk to Russia.
Lubbock applied his expertise to devising as balanced a diet as possible for the prisoners with whatever was to hand. He also invented a high-energy food bar – ‘the Mixture’ – to sustain escapers, as used by Goldfinch, Best and Lamond on their blitz-tunnel bid. He persuaded prisoners to donate to a food pool to provide the ingredients for the bars. They were made out of a fudge comprised of sugar, oatmeal, chocolate or cocoa, butter or margarine, dried milk or flour, Ovaltine or Bemax and raisins. The ingredients were boiled up then dried and cut into flat cakes. Compared with the fare the prisoners were used to it tasted delicious. The bars were stored to await issue to any prisoner or prisoners whose plan had been approved by the escape committee. Bill and Paddy were now eligible, and the food problem was solved.
But what about clothing? When on the run they would need to look nondescript. Once in the camp prisoners were issued with RAF uniform. Bulk deliveries of underwear, socks, shirts, razors, ties, tunics, trousers and greatcoats arrived from London via the Red Cross in Switzerland. In the Germans’ reckoning, uniforms were a deterrent to escape, making the wearer conspicuous if they ever made it beyond the wire. This was not quite true. Half the male population was in military dress of one sort or another and the variety was so great that it took an expert to know which was which. Civilian clothing was obviously less risky though, and before long the camp tailors had learned how to transform any bit of service kit into something that would pass muster in a land swarming with foreign workers wearing often wildly ill-assorted combinations of clothes.
Bill and Paddy would not require much of a disguise. They were escaping during a hot continental summer, and a pair of trousers and a shirt were all they needed in order to blend in. With the issue of a pair of homemade shears to cut through the barbed wire of the Vorlager fence, they were ready to go.
The morning dawned when their turn came to use the showers. The shower party was mustered outside the huts and marched through the gate that connected East Compound to the Vorlager. One of the guards counted them off as they trooped through. The idea was that once inside the shower room they would lever up the manhole and drop through to hide among the pipes and stopcocks. When the session was over the remaining prisoners would march out again. The guards would then check them off again as they departed. Success depended on them being fooled into believing that the same number was walking out as had walked in.
By now many ruses had been devised to confuse roll calls. Appells were held morning and evening to count everyone in the compound. They took place on the sports field except in bad weather when they took place in the corridors of the barracks. Sick prisoners in possession of a chit from the medical officer were allowed to remain in their rooms where their numbers were verified. When parading outdoors, each barrack lined up in files of five and were counted by the guards, who checked them off against the list of able-bodied prisoners and absentees held by the SBO’s adjutant. It all sounded very orderly, but as the camp history related, ‘in practice the parade was a complete farce, purposely made so by the prisoners. They never formed up properly, but kept moving around and creating disturbances. The sick prisoners slipped from one room or barrack to another and were counted twice.’ The Germans soon despaired. They ‘carried out a superficial count as well as they could under the impossible circumstances, but rarely attempted to take a second count, usually accepting the count falsified by the adjutant or falsifying their own account.’13
When a small group of men was involved, deception was much harder. The best hope was to fake a disturbance at the time the count was being taken and hope that the escapees’ absence would not be noted in the confusion. When the time came, Bill and Paddy would have to endure a long damp day among the pipes before making their way out at nightfall to cut through the wire.
Initially things went well. The prisoners lined up under the shower heads. A guard turned on the water and they began to lather up. As the place filled with steam, singing and boisterous shouting, Bill and Paddy lifted the manhole cover and slipped into their hideout. Crouched among the plumbing they listened hard. Soon they heard an angry voice. One of the prisoners was abusing one of the guards. The disturbance had clearly started, but it had gone off earlier than planned. They heard someone yelling insults about Adolf Hitler, followed by a torrent of angry German. Then the hiss of water died away. There was more shouting and the slap of naked feet. The normal routine was for the taps to be turned on twice – once to soap up, once to rinse off. It looked like there would be no second blast of water today. As a punishment for the insults to the Führer, the prisoners were going back to the compound covered in soap.
They lined up outside the shower block to be escorted back to the compound. A few ferrets joined them. At the Vorlager gate one of the guards stood waiting to count them off. The prisoners began to mill around trying to confuse him into miscounting. The Germans were in no mood for further provocations. ‘Their efforts at distracting or enraging were met by prods from a rifle to keep quiet,’ wrote Bill.14 The guard finished his count. A look of suspicion crossed his face and he began again. By the end of the third count he was in no doubt. He yelled a warning and the camp burst into life.
Squatting in their hiding place Bill and Paddy heard the air fill with ‘the noise of running jackboots. Whistles blew, sirens blared and guard dogs barked themselves into a frenzy.’ A few minutes later the door in the shower room slammed open. They clung to the hope that somehow the searchers would overlook the manhole. But then they heard the whining and snuffling of Alsatians and knew the end had come. ‘Paddy and I looked at each other,’ Bill remembered. ‘We could shred the map to stop the searchers finding out what we knew, but our pockets were crammed with the Mixture. With minutes to go before we were caught we adjusted our plans. The best we could manage was not to let the Mixture fall into enemy hands.’15 When the Germans finally lifted the manhole cover their torches flickered over two pale faces, smeared with chocolate, chewing with stolid determination. They emerged with their hands up. Bill dropped the last of the Mixture for the Alsatians to eat, hoping, he joked later, that they might remember this good deed if he met them on some future escape attempt. The bid for freedom had ended in farce. There was little satisfaction to be salvaged from the episode as they were led off to another spell in the cooler.