SIX

By the autumn of 1942 the system could no longer cope with the number of Allied airmen prisoners. Stalag Luft III was supposed to hold them all but it was already bursting at the seams. As well as the officer prisoners there was now a large number of NCOs, who were held separately in Centre Compound. With the Allied air war gathering pace, it was clear that there would be many more to come and new accommodation was needed. Plans were made to add another compound on the north side of the camp. While the work was going on it made sense to move some prisoners to other locations. In the process, the authorities would be able to get rid of some of their more difficult customers.¹

Once again, the Germans were finding that airmen captives caused them more trouble than soldiers or sailors. In theory, escape held the same appeal for everyone. It offered the chance to return home to your loved ones. It brought an end to a situation that offered only the indefinite prospect of boredom, frustration and privation, possibly culminating in violent death. For the most dutiful, worried that they were not doing their bit for the war effort, escape provided the only means available of continuing the struggle against the Germans.

The peacetime air force demanded an advanced level of education, dedication and aptitude from candidates, and the weeding process was rigorous. Those who got through tended to be smart, ambitious and resourceful. Even in wartime, high standards were maintained, and all aircrew roles required a significant level of skill. The result was that airmen tended to be better educated than their equivalents in the other services. Most of them had chosen to join the air force rather than been sent to it as conscripts. The RAF’s Bomber Command was manned entirely by volunteers. As the youngest service, the air force was eager to assert its worth and prove its mettle. In the eyes of military traditionalists, this could translate into a certain brashness, even aggression. Airmen were thus likely to be educated, self-confident and bold.

The tedium of prison life was consequently all the harder to bear. Air force men were used to operating in small groups or alone, and using their initiative, far from the control of higher authority. Added together, as one historian wrote, ‘the airman then was almost the ideal escaper. Well educated, aggressive, used to working in solitude and activated by all the normal impulses that make a human seek freedom, he brought an impressive arsenal of escape skills to the prison camp in which he was incarcerated.’² As we have seen, not every prisoner was bent on breaking out, and those who were not viewed those who were with a variety of feelings.

The ‘escapologists’, though, were strongly represented among the group scheduled to be moved from Sagan to another camp, Oflag XXIB, which lay 150 miles to the north-east in Poland. They included Tommy Calnan, who had been shot down when flying a Spitfire with the RAF’s photo-reconnaissance unit, and who was recovering from the disappointment of a failed mole-tunnel bid. Before leaving Stalag Luft III he had managed to steal and copy the key to the padlock on the gate between the compound and the Vorlager. He had it with him now, in the hope that German locks might be of standard issue and it could come in useful in Poland.

There was the escape committee stalwart Aidan Crawley, a loud, confident Englishmen, educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, a county class cricketer who in peacetime worked as a journalist and flew with other gentlemen pilots in the Auxiliary Air Force. He had been shot down over Tobruk in July 1941 and taken prisoner. Since then he had been directing all his talents and energies to escape activities. Also in the company were charming daredevils like the French Canadian Eddie Asselin, and brooding intellectuals like Robert Kee, who had joined Bomber Command from Oxford University, trained as a pilot and been shot down over the Dutch coast the year before.

They were going to Schubin, Szubin in Polish, a small market town about 150 miles west of Warsaw, where Oflag XXIB had been created out of a large school for girls, requisitioned by the Germans when they marched in. They travelled in third-class carriages pulled by a wheezing train, under the gimlet eye of the chief ferret, Feldwebel Glemnitz. It stopped and started, speeded up and slowed down, according to no discernible pattern. To one of the kriegies aboard the opportunity seemed too good to miss. Even among such eclectic company, John Bigelow Dodge was an unusual character. He had been born in New York in 1894 into a well-connected family and was related by marriage to Winston Churchill. He joined the British Army shortly after the start of the First World War, took British citizenship, fought at Gallipoli and was wounded twice on the Western Front, where he ended the war as a lieutenant colonel commanding an infantry battalion. He was recalled to the colours at the outbreak of the next war and had been captured at Dunkirk. It was never clear how he came to be incarcerated in an air-force prison. He was one of the camp personalities, known as ‘the Dodger’, and although old enough to be father of most of the prisoners he retained a strong streak of recklessness.

The train journey to Schubin took all day. The guards were vigilant and hostile. The prisoners were forced to remain seated at all times and guns were brandished if anybody got to his feet. They had already been told to remove their boots, which most prisoners felt ruled out any possibility of making a run for it. ‘But it did not stop the Dodger,’ wrote Tommy Calnan. ‘In broad daylight, in full view of half a dozen guards, he leapt from the fast-moving train and disappeared into the woods amid a hail of bullets. He was recaptured quite unharmed a short time later, but his effort revived our flagging spirits and stopped the train for over an hour.’³ Bill Ash remembered him turning to one of his guards as he was led back and remarking: ‘No harm in trying!’⁴

The journey ended at Schubin station. The prisoners were marched down the main street of the village on the two-mile journey to the gates of the camp. The guards seemed strangely reluctant to let them in. The prisoners soon learned the reason for the delay. Unlike the previous camps they had stayed in, Oflag XXIB was run not by the Luftwaffe but by the Wehrmacht – the German army. As the kriegies were learning, relations between the services were far from comradely. When Glemnitz tried to escort them in and sought an audience with the camp commandant to brief him on the wiles of his new charges, he was refused entry. The prisoners were not his responsibility any more and according to Bill he was sent ‘back to Stalag Luft III with a Wehrmacht flea in his ear’. As Glemnitz was saying farewell to some of the prisoners, ‘he confided the whole sorry exchange, complimenting us by saying that if he was a gambling man he would be laying bets on a mass breakout within a month, and it would serve the army blockheads right for not listening to him.’ He did ‘everything but wish us luck, and we assured him that we would do our best to make his dreams come true.’⁵

Once inside the camp, the prisoners were pleasantly surprised at their new home, which after Sagan looked like an English country estate. At its centre stood the school, a handsome, classically proportioned three-storey building faced with white stucco. There was a chapel, a modern sanatorium, a small brick bungalow, a bathhouse and a stable block, all set in spacious grounds, which included playing fields and vegetable gardens. A long drive lined with chestnut trees led up the hill behind the main building, which was known as the White House. This was where the camp administration had its offices and later rooms were made available for the senior British officer and his team. The prisoners were to be housed in four main barracks built on the terraced slopes behind the school buildings. The usual barbed-wire double fencing and watchtowers surrounded the school and the barracks. But in general, as Aidan Crawley noted, the overall effect ‘created a feeling almost of homeliness. Beyond the wire instead of a monotonous vista of pine trees, fields stretched away into the distance and all the business of farming could be watched every day.’⁶

After the encouraging first impressions the quality of the accommodation came as a disappointment. Two of the barracks were dilapidated and would not be used at first. The other two were single-storey buildings with pitched roofs and concrete floors. ‘The accommodation, if you can call it that, consisted of lice-infested brick buildings with no ceilings and only raftered roofs to keep out the elements,’ remembered Paddy Barthropp.⁷ There were no partitions but each pair of prisoners was given a double-decker bunk bed and a cupboard, and two benches and a table were provided for every twelve men. They arranged the furniture so as to create private spaces down each side of the barrack, making it a little more homely. Bill dragged a few lockers to barricade off a corner of Hut 6 and bunked up with Paddy, Aidan Crawley, Eddy Asselin and a few others.

In the large space, talk echoed off the bare walls and floor, creating such a din that you had to shout to make yourself heard, and the partition gave them a quiet corner for private discussions. Each barrack had a night latrine, and a washhouse attached with boilers where food and water could be heated, which doubled as the kitchen and laundry. When the prisoners arrived the sun was still shining, but it was clear that once the Polish winter set in, the two brick-and-tile stoves at the end of the building would offer little protection from the cold. Nonetheless, noted Crawley, morale among the prisoners was ‘extremely high’. The reason was simple. Even to the most inexperienced eye it was clear that Oflag XXIB offered numerous opportunities for escape. Paddy Barthropp maintained that whoever had designed the camp ‘must have had a touch of British blood in him’.

The compound was small. Some of the barracks were only seventy feet from the perimeter fence, much nearer than at Stalag Luft III, and the soil was well drained and easy to work, so that tunnels could be dug at any level. ‘From a point of view of escape the camp was almost ideal,’ said Crawley. ‘It had not been designed for any military purpose and not only were many of the buildings so placed that they created blind spots which were hidden completely from the guards in the sentry towers but the many large trees and steep banks also proved excellent cover.’⁸ Tommy Calnan was even more enthusiastic: it was ‘an escapers’ paradise’.⁹

The Wehrmacht administration also made a favourable impression. The guards seemed anxious for a quiet life. Among their ranks were semi-invalids who had been wounded on the Eastern front, men who looked too old to be in uniform and unsoldierly types who seemed happy to be engaged in safe duties that kept them far from the fighting. Although the camp had been open since 1940, the previous inmates had been French prisoners who believed they were due to be sent back home under the armistice signed after France’s defeat, and had little incentive to escape. As a result, according to the official RAF history of the camp, the guards ‘continued to exercise only lax discipline until they realized that the new prisoners of war required much closer watching.’ The camp commandant, Oberstleutnant von Bodecker, who had lost a leg on the Western Front and wore a monocle, ‘left the administration of prisoner-of-war affairs to the Senior British Officer, except in connection with roll calls and searches.’¹⁰ Nor did the camp security officer, who had been a Professor of English at a German university before the war, seem to take his duties particularly seriously. According to Crawley, he was ‘an attractive character with a large red face and a deep husky voice. He treated the whole business of war as an absurd episode in which the one thing that mattered was to preserve a sense of humour.’¹¹

Some of his colleagues took a less relaxed view. The camp adjutant was a Czech renegade, a former grocer called Simms, who showed all the zeal of the convert in his treatment of the prisoners. He was ‘irascible, anti-British and vindictive’, wrote Crawley. Within hours of arrival the prisoners were introduced to him at the first Appell. Simms was affronted by the prisoners’ shabby appearance and began haranguing them. He was unpleasantly surprised when the kreigies screamed and shouted back. Simms’s posturing could not disguise the fact that he was barely competent. ‘Had Simms thought a little less of inflicting discomfort on the prisoners and a little more of his duties the story of Schubin might have been different.’ As it was, his odious personality ‘added spice to every attempt to defeat the enemy’.

There was another factor which played in the prisoners’ favour. The bucolic surroundings of the camp were misleading. The area had recently seen some terrible events. It had been part of Germany until 1920 when, under the Versailles treaty, it was granted to Poland. It was home to a large minority of ethnic Germans. In September 1939, about 250 of them were killed in the town of Bromberg – Bydgoszcz in Polish – about twenty miles to the north of the camp. The circumstances would be endlessly disputed, but it was clear that some had been victims of massacres. The SS, Wehrmacht and local German Selbstschutz (‘self-defence’) units responded with a series of atrocities, killing hundreds of Polish hostages before going on to murder up to 3,000 Jews and Poles deemed to be members of the intelligentsia. The terror unleashed by the Germans had failed to cow the Poles. ‘That meant,’ wrote Bill, ‘that if we got out and managed to knock on a door we were just as likely to be helped as not.’ This was ‘in stark comparison to Luft III in the heart of Germany, where every Nazi boy scout was on the lookout for escaped flyers and every blonde-haired apple-cheeked lass would sooner stick a… dagger in your ribs than help you.’¹²

This assessment turned out to be largely true. There was inevitably much contact between the camp and the local population. Some of the guards were Polish. Local people came in every day to maintain the infrastructure, carry out repairs, wash, cook and clean. Through them the escape organization could establish links with families who were prepared to shelter escapers and with the local underground.

Any Pole caught offering even the slightest assistance to a prisoner faced certain death for himself and possibly his family. Yet in Crawley’s experience, ‘of the dozens of Poles with whom the prisoners at Schubin came into contact only one proved unreliable. All the others, including many women, helped in every way they could.’¹³ The prisoners knew that beyond the wire were friends. It was a further boost to their spirits.

The Stalag Luft III arrivals were joining another contingent of about two hundred RAF officers who had been transferred to Schubin from Oflag VIB at Warburg in north-western Germany. Added to the numbers were about eighty-five Army NCOs who had been in Warburg but had volunteered to move. Ostensibly they were going to serve as orderlies to the officers. Their real motive was that they believed the new camp would offer a better chance of escape. Another fifteen NCOs arrived with the Sagan party.

As it was, it was the orderlies who achieved the first successes. They were housed in the stable block which had been converted into a barracks. Under the Geneva Convention, officers were not required to work. NCOs could be used as labour by the ‘detaining power’. Fatigue parties were regularly sent out of the camp under escort to deliver swill to the pigsties on the estate or collect fuel. Larger groups were taken into Schubin to collect bread and Red Cross parcels from the railway station. At the end of October an army corporal and an RAF warrant officer both managed to get away from work parties, but both were soon recaptured. Six weeks later Sergeant Philip Wareing of the RAF made another attempt. His story gives an idea of the fortitude, stamina and copious good luck that was needed to bring off a ‘home run’.

Wareing was a Spitfire pilot with 616 Squadron and had been shot down over Calais in August 1940. On the afternoon of 16 December he was sent with other prisoners by lorry to Schubin station to collect a delivery of bread from a wagon in the sidings. As they loaded the truck, someone dropped a loaf on the line. Wareing went to pick it up, then ducked under a railway wagon and ran off. It was about 5.30 and in the darkness no one saw him go. Wareing had always intended to slip away if the chance presented itself. He was dressed in a pair of dirty and faded army trousers, an RAF tunic with all the badges removed and which could pass for a civilian garment, and a cloth cap, an outfit that would not stand out in shabby wartime Poland. By the following afternoon he had covered the twenty miles to Bromberg, where he stole a rickety bicycle and pedalled and walked to Graudenz (Gruziadz), a town on the Vistula river. Gossip in the camp suggested that some British soldiers had managed to board ships at Graudenz bound for Sweden, but when Wareing reached the river there were no big ships to be seen. He would have to press on to Danzig (Gdansk), seventy miles away. He did not dare try and take a train. Instead he stole a new-looking bicycle and set off northwards. To get there he would have to cross the Vistula. There was a checkpoint on the bridge but Wareing blithely rode round it while the guards were checking the credentials of two soldiers.

He arrived in Danzig on 19 December and spent all day dodging policemen and trying in vain to get into the docks. Early the following morning he finally wheeled the bike into the port area. He saw three or four ships were flying the Swedish flag and two flying the Blue Peter, the latter a signal that they were preparing to sail. Sentries were posted on the quayside beside the ships so he hid himself and the bike between some stacks of timber. He waited there until he saw the guard being changed and walked to the last ship on the dock. It was taking on a cargo of coal but there was a lull in the loading. He ran up a gangplank and dropped into the hold. There he stayed for the next twenty-four hours. Once a work party of Russians escorted by German guards appeared to trim the coal. One of the Russians saw him, hiding behind a pillar. He whispered ‘Angliski pilot’ and the man kept quiet. He slept that night in a hole he had dug in the coal. The following morning the Germans searched the ship and one shone a flashlight into the hold, but Wareing was well concealed. At 9 a.m. on 21 December he heard the anchor chain rattle and then the shuddering of the engine, and the ship moved away from the pier. For the next two and a half days he stayed in hiding, eating nothing and coming out at night to warm himself against a boiler pipe. Half-starved and black with coal-dust he left his hiding place in the early hours of 23 December and was spotted by a member of the crew. When the ship reached Halmstad early that afternoon he was handed over to the Swedish police and taken a few days later to the British legation in Sweden. A short time later he was back in Blighty, where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his pluck.

The black farce of the shower-room escapade had only sharpened Bill Ash’s determination to get away. The casual set-up at Schubin seemed to promise every chance of success, and he was ‘intoxicated by the opportunities’.¹⁴

The camp arrangements, so much less constricted than at Stalag Luft III, opened up possibilities for the quick-witted which required none of the tedium and effort of tunnelling. The access which the NCO fatigue parties had to the town seemed particularly promising. Of Bill’s numerous escape attempts, his next one was more a caprice than a serious effort, carried out with little planning and no preparation. The chances of success were small. The prime purpose seems to have been to satisfy his nagging urge to break free, which he admitted amounted almost to a mania. It came about when Bill persuaded an army private to allow him to take his place in a group that was being sent to Schubin station to unload a goods train.¹⁵ He got to work, biding his time and awaiting his chance. It came when the guards were looking the other way. ‘I managed to roll myself under the train,’ he wrote. ‘Looking up at the sooty, oil-smeared wheels I prayed that the train wouldn’t move and rolled as quickly as I could to the other side of the line.’¹⁶

He looked up. In front stretched about half a mile of open ground, devoid of cover, but beyond it lay a wood. He hesitated for a moment. There was a great deal of open terrain in which even a bad shot could pick off a fleeing prisoner. But ‘the woods were calling me. It was too tempting and I set off like a greyhound.’ A few seconds later he heard shouting behind him, and what he hoped were warning shots whistled over his head. The German officer in charge of the work detail calculated Bill’s chances of reaching the distant woods and decided to take pity on him and ordered some soldiers mounted on pushbikes to head him off. ‘There are few experiences more depressing than racing as fast as you can for an unattainable target while your enemies overtake you in a leisurely manner and are waiting for you, guns at the ready, just in front of your objective,’ he remembered. If they had expected him to come quietly they were mistaken. Having come this far he ‘decided [he] might as well really go for it’, He tried to charge through them as if he was ‘an American footballer, determined to score the winning touchdown’, He was brought down with a rifle butt to the face. The guards then punished his defiance by administering a severe beating.

Back in the camp he was taken off for his first spell in the Schubin cooler. Bill seems to have known his attempt would end in failure. One preparation he had made was to tape a small metal file to the inside of his leg before setting off. Following the beating, the guards had not troubled to search him too closely.

Over the next few days, he sawed away at the three thick iron bars set in the small window. He disguised the marks with a paste made from his bread and water rations, mixed with dust from the cell walls. ‘Each day I was able to cover up my handiwork with Reich bread putty and, when the coast was clear, continue with my sawing,’ he wrote. After a week he had cut through one bar. It seemed unlikely that he would finish before his sentence was ended. It turned out to have been wasted effort. For no apparent reason he was moved to a new cell. While cleaning out the old one, a guard noticed his efforts on the bars. He was searched and the file, so blunt by now as to be almost useless, was taken from him. He was then sentenced to another two weeks in the cooler.

He was released one lunchtime. Two friends of his, Mike Wood and Bill Palmer, had prepared a feast for him from their Red Cross parcels to make up for all the bread and water. Both belonged to the fraternity of escapologists with several failed attempts behind them. As Bill ate, they explained that they were making another bid that night, and outlined their plan. At the end they asked him if he would care to join them. ‘I really could have done with a rest,’ he recalled. ‘But the one thing time in the cooler does for you is to make your priorities very clear, and mine was escape.’¹⁷ His mind was soon made up: ‘“Well,” I thought. “What the hell.”’¹⁸

As soon as it was dark they slipped out of the hut and sheltered in a dip in the ground which Wood and Palmer had identified as being out of sight of the watchtowers and shielded from the searchlight and arc lamps that lit up the camp at night. Then they wriggled through a vegetable patch, one of several cultivated by the kriegies, towards the wire. ‘I found myself trying to huddle under a potato plant that was about six inches tall, and I began to wonder why I kept on doing such stupid things, reasoning that I would probably have another month in the cooler to figure it out,’ he wrote. Then Bill Palmer clamped a pair of homemade shears around the first line of barbed-wire fencing and pressed hard. The wire was ‘stretched so tight that it went off like a gunshot… whipped around and nearly caught us. An incredibly loud twang, like the first note of a crazed bluegrass banjo solo, filled the air.’ The three scuttled away in different directions as sirens sounded and guards ran towards the noise. Wood and Palmer were soon discovered, but for once Bill’s luck held. He lay in the cover of the vegetable patch a few feet from the boots of the guards. Satisfied that there had been only two escapers they eventually departed and Bill ‘crawled very slowly back to our hut and fell into a long sleep’.¹⁹

The wealth of opportunities brought a profusion of attempts. Within a fortnight of arriving, Tommy Calnan had devised a shallow ‘blitz’ tunnel by which they would burrow out in a single burst of digging. The prisoners’ vegetable patches around the inside of the rail that defined no-man’s land provided a good place to start digging. ‘In September the asparagus ferns grew tall and bushy and were covered with pretty red berries,’ he wrote. ‘My plan was to dig a short vertical shaft behind an asparagus bush and then to mole out.’ He would carry out the operation ‘in broad daylight, right under the nose of the sentry’.²⁰

He recruited Ian Cross and Robert Kee to join him. The two were unlikely best friends. Cross, a squadron leader with 103 Squadron was ‘built like a small bull, compact and muscled’, as if he had been genetically designed for tunnelling. While normally good natured and extrovert he had a hair-trigger temper. Kee was ‘studious, vague and entirely non-athletic’. He was known as the most argumentative man in the camp and in Calnan’s opinion treated escape as a form of recreation from more serious occupations such as studying Russian.

One morning the trio arrived in the vegetable garden armed with crude homemade tools and began hoeing between the long rows of asparagus, raking the sandy earth into ridges. The guard outside the fence barely gave them a second look, even when they neared the fence. Calnan could barely believe their luck. They would never have got away with it in Stalag Luft III.

He started to dig the vertical shaft from behind a sheltering asparagus bush about twenty feet from the wire, while the others hoed and kept watch. After three days it was four feet deep. They now began to burrow horizontally towards the wire. As they were working mostly in full sight of the guards, progress was slow. Eventually they had cleared fifteen feet of tunnel. A little further and they would be able to seal themselves in and ‘mole’ out in one night.

Then the run of good fortune ran out. Calnan was digging at the face with Cross behind him, pushing soil out to Kee who scattered it around the vegetable patch whenever the guards were not looking. His hand closed around a large piece of paper buried in the dirt. As he groped his way forward he began to suspect the tunnel was passing under an old rubbish dump. This was bad news. It meant the earth over his head would be unstable. Sensibly, he inched his way back. Then ‘an enormous weight hit me everywhere at once and I was completely unable to move my head, arms or body,’ he wrote. ‘As I drew my first terrified breath I inhaled so much sand that I almost choked.’ He tried to twist free but he was crushed by the weight of the earth. Only his legs remained loose and he kicked them violently to attract Cross’s attention. He felt hands grasp his feet and start hauling but it was no good. He was stuck fast under tons of sandy soil, fighting a losing battle to control his breathing, which was now coming in panicky gasps. Soon he was ‘panting like an exhausted dog and taking in more and more sand with each breath’. A terrible thought struck him: ‘I realized that I could survive for very few minutes and that they were going to be long, painful minutes.’

It was the second time in his life that he had contemplated his own imminent death. The first had been on a clear winter’s day, 30 December 1941, when his aircraft had been hit by flak over the Normandy coast and with burning aviation spirit spraying his face he had tipped his Spitfire over and tumbled out into the air at 29,000 feet, only to realize that he was miles out to sea and certain to drown. An onshore wind had saved him then. Could anything rescue him now? His mind was surprisingly clear. He felt only ‘sad because of all the things I had not yet done, sad because it seemed so futile and meaningless that my life should end under a rubbish dump in an asparagus bed in Poland.’

Then he heard the sound of spades hitting the ground above. Cross had scrambled out of the tunnel and alerted a kriegie rescue squad. It could not arrive soon enough, for Calnan was reaching the end of his endurance. ‘I was now snorting sand in and out of my nostrils at an incredible rate,’ he remembered. ‘It was an entirely involuntary reflex action induced by breathing carbon dioxide.’ A spade hit him in the middle of the back and hands grabbed his legs. With a ‘one, two, three, heave!’ his rescuers hauled him free. He lay gasping in the asparagus bed surrounded by German guards. He had turned a dull blue colour and for the next three days coughed up blood and sand. But in a week he was completely fit and ready to try again.

The Germans were learning that they could never afford to relax. In December a van arrived at the camp carrying equipment to put on a film show. The van had a sagging canvas roof which attracted the attention of one enterprising British officer. While others distracted the guards he hopped onto the hood. It was dark when the film show ended and he was driven out through the gates to freedom. It did not last long. He was caught loitering round a nearby airfield, trying to steal an aeroplane, and sent back to Schubin.

These attempts were good for morale and kept the Germans busy, but they were essentially individual efforts, lacking in resources and organization and therefore all the more likely to fail. The 450 air-force prisoners from Warburg, who had arrived at Schubin a few days before the first Sagan contingent, had their own escape organization and way of doing things. The camp history notes that initially ‘there was a certain amount of disagreement’ between the two groups about how to approach breaking out.²¹ It came to an end in November 1942 when a second group of about a hundred officers was transferred from Stalag Luft III to Schubin. Among them were Harry Day and Jimmy Buckley, who as senior British officer and head of the escape committee respectively had supervised the escape effort at Sagan. With their arrival came a more systematic and long-term approach. It started with the establishment of a new escape committee, along the lines of the set-up at Sagan. The members would vet proposals and accept or reject them. They would maximize the skills available among the camp personnel to provide technical expertise, food, clothing and documentation to those whose plans were given official backing.

Somewhat to his surprise, Bill Ash was selected for membership of the committee.

His fellow members included Charles Marshall, who had been forced to bale out over Essen in April that year, his friend Bill Palmer, Aidan Crawley and Eddie Asselin.

Bill felt uncomfortable being in a position of authority, standing in judgement on other people’s dreams of escape. He justified his acceptance of the role to himself on the grounds that he planned to get away as soon as possible and would not feel the weight of responsibility for long. With Day’s arrival, though, it became clear that opportunistic attempts, cheering though they might be, would not get official encouragement. Day and Buckley favoured well-planned, large-scale projects aimed at freeing the maximum number of prisoners. And these would take time.

The balmy autumn turned into a savage winter and the shortcomings of the barracks were laid bare. ‘We were assailed by a novel version of the biblical plagues,’ Bill remembered. ‘The main ones being famine, pestilence and ice.’²² Food – its presence or absence – was one of the great determinants of the mood of the camp. Schubin was a long way from anywhere and Allied bombing sometimes disrupted the flow of Red Cross parcel deliveries, causing supplies to halt for weeks or even months, so that contents had to be rationed.²³

On a parcel-less day a prisoner might breakfast on a single slice of black bread smeared thinly with margarine and jam, washed down with weak tea. For lunch there would be watery cabbage soup. Supper frequently amounted to no more than bread and a few potatoes. There was no fresh milk and other vegetables came from the prisoners’ gardens.

Prisoners were naturally prone to any infection going. Jaundice was rife and to add to their tribulations the huts were infested with lice and bedbugs. Above all it was cold. The wind whipping in from the Baltic sliced through the walls and ceilings of the blocks, turning them into iceboxes. The ground froze and the football pitch now served as an ice rink for the kriegies, who glided around on skates which arrived in a Red Cross consignment. Tommy Calnan remembered the winter as ‘the coldest I have ever experienced. Instead of undressing to go to bed, one dressed. Double and triple layers of underwear, all one’s sweaters, two or three pairs of socks, covered by all the blankets and greatcoats one possessed.’²⁴

The barrack stoves failed to make a dent in the all-pervading chill. Before long everything that could be burned had been. The prisoners’ made themselves as comfortable as they could. As the Germans began to adopt countermeasures to thwart escapes, the prisoners sometimes found themselves turned out of their barracks and forced to move to one of the empty ones for long periods while their quarters were searched for signs of suspicious activity.²⁵

Day used all his considerable authority and powers of persuasion to try and improve the kriegies’ lot. Lindeiner-Wildau at Stalag Luft III could be relied on to give him a sympathetic hearing. Oberstleutnant von Bodecker, the camp commandant at Schubin, was less obliging. Their first encounter had not been a success. According to Crawley, Bodecker ‘tried to make Day stand at attention while in his presence, barked at him in German, and told him not to speak unless he was spoken to.’ Finally, during one encounter, ‘Day, without losing his temper, told the Kommandant that they were of the same rank in their respective forces, that he had served his king and country for twenty-five years and was only doing his duty by making complaints about the camp, which was no better than a pigsty.’ He then saluted and walked out. He arrived back in the compound ‘shaking with rage’, just as the prisoners were being dismissed from a roll call. He halted them and told them of the commandant’s rudeness. ‘He hopes to retire as a general,’ he declared. ‘But he won’t. We’ll break him.’ Thus began a protracted battle of wills between the RAF and the Wehrmacht.²⁶

The German military mindset, the prisoners had discovered, was complicated. By now the Wehrmacht had carried out its share of the routine atrocities that accompanied the campaign in the East, and if this had caused individuals concern from time to time it did not seriously affect operations. Soldiers mainly hesitated if there was doubt whether their actions were covered by an order or official pronouncement. What mattered was not what they did so much as whether they were authorized to do it. The commandant felt constrained by the Geneva Convention and, under pressure from Day, would grudgingly respond to his demands. One day the prisoners were offered some moth-eaten greatcoats, apparently taken off the Polish cavalry. On another there was a consignment of clogs from France, similar to the ones Bill had foolishly chosen as part of his peasant disguise after he was shot down. The kriegies found it impossible to walk in them, but they burned splendidly in the block stoves.

The prisoners’ spirits sank with the dwindling sun. They clung to the hope provided by odd bits of cheering news that they heard on the camp’s clandestine radio or gleaned from the German newspapers that circulated in the camp. The radio was assembled by Flight Lieutenant L. B. Barry, who arrived in Schubin in October. He managed to obtain two radio valves and some wiring from a Polish worker. Ingenuity provided the rest. He and his helpers made capacity condensers from tinfoil and margarine-soaked paper, solder out of molten silver paper, flux from resin, and the sensitive parts of the headset from old Gillette razor blades. The set was hidden under the stove in the medical officer’s room in the camp sick quarters. By November they were able to listen in to the BBC. The news was improving. A month earlier, Montgomery and the Eighth Army had smashed Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The bulletins were taken down in shorthand and transcribed for circulation. ‘The dissemination of news every day was of very great value in keeping the standard of morale high,’ the official history records.²⁷

Letters from home could be the greatest tonic, a physical link with the world the kriegies had left behind and a reaffirmation that love and familiar joys were waiting if they could only hang on. They could also bring sickening news. One of the hardest things for a prisoner was to be told that someone he loved and relied on no longer loved him. As the war progressed and absence grew longer such letters became increasingly frequent. They were known as ‘mespots’, a hangover from the First World War when extended service in Mesopotamia had ruptured many an engagement and marriage.

It was impossible to keep the news secret. In Stalag Luft III some decided the best thing was to give it maximum publicity, pinning up their mespots to the camp notice board. ‘The effect was oddly therapeutic,’ wrote Richard Passmore. ‘All your friends understood and sympathized – at times they even found cause for laughter and this… wryly infected the victim.’²⁸

The content of some of the letters, no doubt embellished in the retelling, entered kriegie legend. One allegedly ran: ‘When you were reported missing I went round to see your widowed dad and we got on very well. Now I have to tell you that last week he and I were married. I hope you don’t take it too hard. Yours truly, Mum.’ Another announced: ‘I am sorry to tell you that I have been living with a soldier. He doesn’t get paid very much so I wonder whether you could see your way to increasing the allowance.’²⁹

For anyone in a fragile frame of mind, the weight of camp life was heavy, sometimes unbearably so. Among them was Flight Lieutenant Robert Edwards, who had been traumatized by the crash that preceded his capture. Bill Ash watched his deterioration with concern. As the weeks passed in Schubin he became ‘less and less stable… his unhinged arguments and nervous tics could be irritating to men already cooped up and spoiling for a squabble, but he was harmless and most of us did our best to look after him.’³⁰

No one took much notice when on 26 September 1942 he announced that he was ‘fed up with this place’. Shortly after, he strolled over to the warning wire, which as at Sagan stretched inside the perimeter fence, and stepped over it. He walked calmly to the barbed wire and in broad daylight began to climb. It would have been easy enough to pull him down and drag him off to solitary. Instead the guard called a single warning. The incident was witnessed by Bill Ash. Edwards ‘climbed on feebly, not getting very far up the wire. The nervous guard aimed low but shot him in the groin and he dangled briefly on the wire like a broken doll before being taken down.’ He was taken immediately to the camp doctor but died of his wounds.

The incident brought a crowd of angry kriegies to the edge of the forbidden zone. ‘One particularly vicious guard known as the Blonde Beast was all in favour of mowing us down too,’ Bill remembered. ‘But some of the more moderate guards cooled the situation and we were spared.’ Instead he was grabbed and marched off to the cooler for shouting and raising his fist at a guard.

Years later, when watching the film The Great Escape, he sat up when on the screen appeared what he describes as ‘a similar tragic moment in which an officer is shot down on the wire and a protesting American is led away to the cooler’. There is no record of such an incident happening at Stalag Luft III where the film is set, ‘but the real life tragedy at Schubin was burned into the minds of anyone who saw it.’

One of his jailers was the ‘Blond Beast’, who made a point of taking Bill’s shoes away each night to further reduce the already non-existent chances of escape. The first time he came to collect them he asked Bill who he thought was winning the war. He replied ‘we are’ and was rewarded with a backhander to the face. The next night he repeated the question and this time Bill diplomatically gave what he thought was the right answer – the Germans. It made no difference: the Blond Beast struck him again. The routine went on night after night.

The cell had a window set high in the wall, and to relieve the boredom he sometimes hauled himself up for a glimpse of life outside. It looked out on the main road that ran in front of the camp. One day he heard unusual noises drifting through the window. It reminded him of something from his Texas childhood: the sound of cattle being herded. When he looked out he saw not cows but a crowd of about two hundred young women. German soldiers and members of the Selbstschutz local militia were driving them along with sticks and whips towards the railway station. Whether they were Jews or young Poles being deported to forced brothels on the Eastern Front he never learned. The sight brought back all the anger and revulsion he had felt when watching cinema newsreels of storm troopers beating Jews and Communists. ‘Something inside me snapped,’ he wrote. ‘The year of abuse, captivity, beatings and a thousand tiny humiliations boiled up into one overwhelming desire to fight back and defend these poor women.’³¹

Through the barred window he ‘screamed at the fascists herding the women, shouted and cursed, throwing every vile word I could at them’. Some of the women looked up and he liked to think later that his outburst had somehow brought them a little comfort. His shouts soon brought the guards running, and they tried to pull him down from the window. ‘I was so enraged that I hardly felt the blows raining down on me and the gun butts smashing my hands until I finally let go of the bars and fell to the floor, where the kicking continued,’ he wrote. Before they left him they nailed boards over the window. He lay in the darkness on the cold concrete floor. His face ached and his back and stomach throbbed. But he was glad for what he had done.