By noon thousands of soldiers, German militiamen and Hitler Youth were combing the countryside around the camp, prodding haystacks and searching barns in the hope of flushing out an Allied flier. All bridges and crossroads were guarded and motor and foot patrols roamed the roads. Police swarmed over the railway stations and train passengers were subjected to multiple identity checks. Frontier guards as far away as Belgium and Switzerland were warned to be extra vigilant and the Baltic ports were put on high alert. The wires hummed as images of the fugitives were transmitted to police stations and border posts.
Those who had chosen to escape on foot were finding that geography was against them. Warsaw, where most of the ‘hard-arses’ were heading, lay 180 miles to the south-east. The most direct road was on the far side of the Vistula, the bridges across which were heavily guarded. The alternative route meant zigzagging along country lanes and trekking across fields. They had already learned how difficult it was to make progress that way. The chances of getting lost were high, and of detection even higher.
Bill and Eddie spent most of their first day of freedom hiding in a wood. As night fell they became aware of the hue and cry that had been raised by their departure. Beyond the cover of the trees, the area was crawling with Germans. The pair were forced to ‘sit perfectly still as what seemed like half of Germany passed within a few feet of us, shouting and beating bushes, waving flashlights. When they had passed by we moved quietly on.’1
Despite the dangers the taste of liberty was intoxicating. ‘The feeling you get from being free after so many months when the barbed wire at the edge of the camp represents the limits of your horizons is like no other freedom,’ he wrote. ‘Never before have I felt so alive.’ There was also some satisfaction to be had from the sheer scale of the German effort to recapture them. Every soldier who was employed looking for fugitive airmen had been diverted from more useful war work, and there were thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – now engaged in the hunt. It made men who had been languishing impotently behind barbed wire feel that they were once again engaged in the battle against Hitler. Nonetheless the going was tough. Spring came late this far east and their improvised civilian clothing was little protection against the rain, wind and cold. That night they took shelter in a large barn, hoping that if they were discovered the owners would not turn them in. They did not have to worry. Over the next days they had several encounters with farmers and their families, who shared what food they had with men who they regarded as their allies in humanity. Bill and Eddie never knew the names of their saviours. They did not want to know. Bill understood what it was to undergo a Gestapo interrogation. If you knew nothing, there was nothing to give up if the blows and threats became too much. The truth was that the risk the escapers were taking did not compare with that embraced by any Polish civilian who took the decision to help them. Unless a POW was shot while making a run for it, he was unlikely at this stage to face anything worse than a spell in the cooler. For the Poles it meant interrogation, torture and the firing squad.
One night trek brought them to a wide river, a tributary of the Vistula. To get to Warsaw they would have to cross it. They followed the bank until they came to a road leading to a bridge that spanned the river. They knew the bridge would be guarded and for a while considered continuing along the bank on the chance of finding a quieter place to cross. It was a vain hope.
Neither of them could bear the thought of swimming across. They would have to take their chances on the bridge. There was one sentry posted at each end but they seemed to prefer the shelter of their sentry boxes, only occasionally emerging to march up and down in the cold.
They waited until both were back inside their boxes then scuttled to the parapet of the bridge, dropped to the ground and started to crawl. The night was silent. It seemed to them as they inched their way forward that their laboured breathing and the scrape of toecaps on tarmac must surely alert the sentries. But all remained quiet. As they approached the guard post on the far side, a bulky figure emerged. He walked over to the parapet and leant over. They both froze, struggling to control their breathing. He was no more than twenty feet away. It seemed impossible that he would not see them. The guard, though, seemed sunk in his own thoughts. After several minutes staring into the dark waters he turned away and disappeared back into his shelter. Bill and Eddie wriggled past and were swallowed up in the shadows on the far bank.
Since setting off, Paddy and Wilf had been having their own share of dramas. After an uncomfortable night in the quarry they stretched their stiff limbs and started out once again. They had given up on travelling in darkness and by the end of the day had abandoned the idea of walking altogether. On the afternoon of 7 March, after two clear days of travel, they reached the town which the Germans called Hohensalza and the Poles Inowrocław. It was only twenty-five miles south-east of Schubin. At this rate they would never make it to Warsaw. They began to think again. A main railway line ran through the town, going east to Warsaw and west to Posen (Poznań). They crept into the sidings and hid, looking for a goods train that was going in the direction of Warsaw. A locomotive was shunting a line of wagons with ‘Kutno’ chalked on the side. Their map told them that Kutno was about sixty miles to the south-east and well on the way to Warsaw. The train stopped and started, going back and forth as additional wagons were coupled up. They darted closer, waiting for the engine to stop long enough for them to climb aboard. The train kept moving off just as they approached, forcing them to dive back into cover. Eventually they were able to wrench open the doors of a wagon and scramble in. They sat back to enjoy the journey to Kutno.
Tommy Calnan and Robert Kee had bickered all the way to Bromberg. When they arrived at the station they were bickering still. Calnan had urged Kee to make sure he was wearing decent footwear when they made their escape. Kee had neglected the advice and as they entered the town, the sole of his boot had come unstuck and the pair attracted many curious looks as he flapped along. When they reached the station the booking hall was crowded. They felt less conspicuous now. Many of the passengers were as badly dressed as themselves. Calnan went to buy two tickets to Schneidemühl, seventy-five miles to the west, where, according to his study of the timetables, they could get an onward connection. The transaction went off easily.
There were several hours to wait before the train was due. They had no idea whether or not the alarm had yet been raised in Schubin, but it was best to be on the safe side. They decided to hide in the lavatories. They locked themselves into adjoining cubicles. A few minutes later Kee was startled to see a sheet of lavatory paper appear under the partition wall with a biscuit and a slice of cheese and a scrawled note: ‘For the morale’. He accepted it gratefully and pushed a note back: ‘Thanks’. Then he ate the biscuit and stared at the pornographic drawings on the wall. He was dog tired and fatigue made him gloomy. A phrase his grandmother was fond of kept echoing through his head: ‘Where will it all end, my dear, where will it all end?’2
He ‘began to be frightened in a new way, a way that was no longer either amusing or exciting… Perhaps it was because we were quite trapped if anything should go wrong… now I began to understand the full strength of our enemy. It was no longer just a matter of a few guards to be outwitted. A whole society was against us and for practical purposes that meant all society, the whole world.’
The main door of the lavatory swung open. They both heard the swish of a mop. Calnan was still munching his escape rations when the door of his cubicle rattled violently. Then it flew open. He ‘stared aghast at a fat, dirty woman who stood there with a bucket and mop. She gave me a contemptuous look and slammed the door shut again.’3 He felt more embarrassed being caught with his trousers up than down. It seemed a highly suspicious way to be occupying a public lavatory. Next it was Kee’s turn. As the charlady shook the door he rustled the lavatory paper, hoping she would leave him alone, but the cleaner was having none of it. She stopped rattling the door and began kicking it. Kee and Calnan exited with as much dignity as they could muster and headed for the relative safety of the platform.
They sat down on a bench, willing the hands on the station clock to move faster. Kee read a newspaper. Calnan covertly observed the other passengers. One in particular caught his eye. He was ‘wearing a neat blue-grey raincoat, carrying an attaché case and had a folded newspaper tucked under his arm. He looked like a superior bank clerk.’ Calnan felt that there was ‘something vaguely familiar about him’. It was only when he passed right by that he recognized him. It was Tony Barber.
Barber recognized him too but rapidly turned away. Some irrational impulse took hold of Calnan. ‘I could not resist getting up to greet him. His look of panic when he saw me coming should have discouraged me, but I was enjoying the moment too much. I gave him a nicely casual Nazi salute and greeted him.
‘“Heil Hitler,” I said.’
Barber was forced to snap a salute in response. Calnan then shook his hand and told him how delighted he was to see him. He got a brusque response. ‘“Go to hell,” said Tony. He was shaking with anger. “And stay away from me. You look like a tramp.”’ Then, smiling and bowing, he retreated down the platform to make sure he was as far away as possible from Calnan and Kee. The Schneidemühl train arrived and they all got aboard.
Aidan Crawley’s good luck was holding. He was still confident that he had taken the right decision in going it alone. On the afternoon of his first day of freedom he arrived at the house of the Polish family who he had been told were prepared to give him sanctuary. There were three of them. Pete Kowalski was a former cavalry officer who was active in the resistance. His wife Tanja was ‘a loyal and delightful woman’, who kept the farm going during his frequent absences. The couple had an 18-year-old daughter, Kate.4 His hosts seemed unperturbed by the fact that German soldiers were billeted less than a mile away. They were heart-warmingly hospitable, feeding him and taking away his clothes to dry them. He spent the night in their barn and the next morning was directed to a bus stop from where he could get a bus to the town of Nakel (in Polish Nakło nad Notecia) sixteen miles from Bromberg. He spent the morning in the park while waiting for a train to take him to Schneidemühl. His papers identified him as a Sudeten German schoolteacher who was being transferred to Berlin. They were checked twice on the journey but the quality of the forgery and Crawley’s excellent German were enough to satisfy the guard. It was clear that the alarm had been raised. As the train rocked along placidly he could see lines of soldiers moving methodically through fields at the side of the track like beaters at a pheasant shoot, scouring the land for escaped prisoners.
There was another wait at Schneidemühl for the next train westwards. Again he went off to the local park to kill time. It was full of people taking the air, including some German officers and their wives. He was wearing his RAF officer’s greatcoat, suitably civilianized by the camp’s tailors. ‘My word that is a smart overcoat,’ he heard one women say to her husband as they passed.5 It was a light moment in an experience that was getting steadily darker for all the fugitives.
After four days living rough, Bill Ash and Eddie Asselin were exhausted, dirty and starving. Their escape rations had long gone. Occasionally they managed to beg food from farmhouses. They learned to avoid the more prosperous looking ones, knowing that the likelihood was that they were occupied by ethnic German families who had been settled in the area for centuries and would be delighted to turn them in. They were making very slow progress. They had stuck to the routine of lying up by day and walking by night, relying on their compass and maps to point them in the right direction. They followed deserted country roads when they could, taking to the fields to skirt villages. On the evening of Tuesday, 9 March they set off as usual and had been walking for five hours when they came to a railway crossing. It was very dark and quiet and there seemed to be no one around. They were about to follow the track when they heard footsteps behind them. They swung round to see a man pointing a rifle at them. He commanded them in German to stop. There was no chance of making a run for it. They raised their hands and prepared to trot out their rehearsed story. The man was a member of the local home guard. He had been posted at the railway crossing with specific orders to look out for escaped prisoners. Bill and Eddie explained in their best camp German that they were French workmen employed in the railway yards at Kraków. Somehow they had lost their way. They produced their forged papers identifying them as foreign workers. The story sounded lame even as they recited it. Kraków was about 250 miles to the south. The guard was apologetic but firm. He had orders to hand over anyone who seemed remotely suspicious to the Gestapo. The nearest headquarters was Hohensalza. The guard summoned reinforcements and they set off. By now the ethnic German population was in a ferment of excitement over the manhunt. At one stage on the journey they were confronted by a crowd of farm workers brandishing pitchforks. A woman among them seemed keen for the guards to shoot the captives on the spot, and when they refused tried to wrestle a rifle off one of them to carry out the execution herself.
Before they reached Hohensalza they managed to get rid of compass, maps and forged identity papers, anything that would reveal to the Germans the sophistication of the escape organization. Their time with the Gestapo was mercifully short. Once they had established who their captives were, they passed them over to the police, who locked them up in the local jail. It was already full up with pimps, thieves and black-marketeers as well as deserters from the Germany army. It was an ignominious end to the great adventure. Eddie felt the failure acutely. The latrine tunnel had been his life for the past few months. With Bill he had planned the project, promoted it and done much of the digging. All this effort had ended in bathos, and he was a prisoner once again, locked up in a cell only twenty-seven miles from where he had broken out. As he lay on his bunk bed he told Bill that the experience had turned him against further attempts. He would not be joining the ranks of obsessive ‘escapologists’ like Bill and the Dodger. When they returned to camp he would use his considerable energies in other ways – ones that made it more likely that he would live to see the end of the war. ‘I did not press him,’ wrote Bill. ‘Each man had to decide for himself what was right in terms of the balance between suffering and defiance, between risk and foolhardiness.’6
For Bill their recapture was merely a setback. It would do nothing to deter him from trying again and again. ‘For me the issue was simple,’ he declared. ‘I had joined the war to resist and I would keep resisting with every breath until I escaped or until the enemy helped me to get away on a more permanent basis, six feet underground.’ It was not really a matter of choice, he explained, for ‘my escaping gene was just as much a part of me as my instinct to keep breathing.’ They went back to Schubin by way of several other prisons. On their return they were subjected to repeated interrogations before being sentenced to a fortnight each in the cooler.
Paddy and Wilf’s adventure had also come to an end in Hohensalza. Their joy at having apparently hitched a ride on a goods train was short-lived. A few minutes after apparently setting off down the track towards Warsaw it stopped without even leaving the goods yard. They passed the night in the wagon, hoping that their luck would change. But next morning they heard the sound of barking dogs and peered out to see a line of soldiers searching the train. They jumped down onto the tracks without being seen and made it out of the yard, only to be spotted by a local official who summoned a patrol, and they were hauled off to the police station. Before being transferred to Gestapo headquarters they managed to get rid of their false ID cards, but not the rest of the escape kit. Paddy’s carefully maintained insouciance crumbled on arrival, as they underwent ‘an extremely frightening and unpleasant experience’.
‘Here were two filthy, smelly, unshaven individuals with no identification documents claiming to be British,’ he wrote. ‘From time to time I could hear screams coming from the other inmates and I really thought my luck had finally run out.’7
The pair were subjected to a thorough body-search but the expected beating never came. Instead they were taken out and paraded in front of a gathering of troops and Hitler Youth. By now the RAF night-bombing campaign in Germany was taking a terrible toll on German cities. What would become known as the Battle of the Ruhr had just begun and in the days since the break-out, Bomber Command had mounted mass raids on Essen and Nuremburg. In Essen nearly five hundred people had been killed, matching or perhaps exceeding the number who died in the ‘thousand-bomber raid’ against Cologne ten months before. The Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, had branded the bomber crews Terrorfliegen. The opportunity to put two captured terror-fliers on show was too good to miss. As the Germans stood and stared, one of the Hitler Youth said in English: ‘Hitler is a good man and Churchill is a very bad man.’ Paddy could not hold his tongue. ‘My answer was somewhat unflattering to the Führer whereupon the boy spat at me. This gave his friends a good excuse to follow suit and I ended up looking like a slimy creature out of a Hammer horror movie.’8
They were taken back to their cells and spent a fearful few days before deliverance came in the form of a Luftwaffe major, who prised them from the Gestapo. After another night in Hohensalza they were sent back to Schubin, arriving on 13 March. They were sentenced to ten days in the cooler. It was only what they expected and seemed much preferable to captivity Gestapo-style.
Since boarding the train at Bromberg, Tommy Calnan and Robert Kee had made good progress. While waiting at Schneidemühl for the train to take them further west to Küstrin (Polish, Kostrzyn nad Odra) they had been stopped by two plainclothes policemen. Calnan had feared that their forged letters supporting their claims to be Krupp technicians would not bear close scrutiny. Thanks to Kee’s excellent German and impressive self-assurance, however, they had been sent on their way, with the policemen’s best wishes and a telephone number to call should they need any assistance en route.
From Küstrin they caught a train to Berlin, arriving at the Schlesischer Bahnhof in the east of the city. They spent the day walking the streets, to avoid the feeling of anxiety that overwhelmed them if they remained stationary for too long. Initially they had been excited by the idea of penetrating the enemy citadel, but they were so exhausted by now that they barely noticed their surroundings. Early that evening they took a local train from the Zoo station to Stendal, eighty miles west, where they were to change for Hanover. It was packed with civilians taking refuge in the suburbs for fear of further raids on the city, which had been bombed heavily just over a week previously. At Hanover they took the midnight express for Cologne, which was due to arrive at five in the morning. Calnan’s research had told him that there was a workman’s train that left for the border town of Aachen shortly afterwards. From there it was only a short tram ride to Eupen in Belgium, where they could begin to try and make contact with the underground.
They were travelling second class and as soon as he settled onto the upholstered seat Calnan fell into a deep sleep. He was shaken awake by Kee. A policeman was standing over them and wanted to see their identity cards. They produced them and the policeman and his colleagues glanced at them and departed, apparently satisfied. The train stopped for a long time after passing through Hamm, whose railway junction was a favourite target of Bomber Command. By the time they crossed the long bridge over the Rhine on the approach to Cologne the sun was already above the horizon. It was then that the police returned. Kee began to repeat their story but they were in no mood to listen. They demanded to see their papers again and then left the compartment, taking the identity cards with them. It was obvious the game was almost up. They made a quick decision. They would jump out and make a run for it, but when they got to the door a soldier was standing guard.
At Cologne they were led away to a police station. They trotted out their story once more but by now the police seemed to be enjoying themselves, confident that they had their men. A search produced a quantity of ‘mixture’ food bars, a collection of maps and a supply of Player’s cigarettes. ‘We know all about you,’ declared the sergeant in charge. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble. Every policeman in the country has been looking for you. We did not expect you to come so far.’9 The following day they were taken to Gestapo headquarters. Their interrogator spoke good English and pressed them for information about how the escape was engineered. For a while they baited him, giving ridiculous answers until he lost patience with their impertinence. Calnan recalled how his ‘voice dropped to a whisper’ as he told them that he could ‘shoot you where you stand and never have to answer for it. Do you think the Geneva Convention means anything to us?’ It was a good question. In the world the prisoners had escaped from, rules had some meaning. The Gestapo operated under no restraints. For the first time, Calnan was scared. ‘There was a menace in that whispering voice which I recognized as real,’ he recalled. ‘That man had immense power and could have carried out his threat with complete impunity.’
It was, Kee realized, the other side of Germany, the one that until now they had seen remarkably little of. There was ‘the Wehrmacht Germany which saluted when it passed you in the camp and allowed you to write home three times a month’, and the other, ‘which beat you in the stomach with lengths of hosepipe and shot you in the early morning’.10 When later that evening he and Kee were put on a train at Wuppertal bound for the east and Schubin, they were careful to humour their Gestapo escorts, accepting their beer and sharing their cigarettes with them.
Aidan Crawley had made excellent progress since leaving Schneidemühl. He arrived in Berlin via Posen at the same time as Calnan and Kee. He was heading to Switzerland via Munich so took the underground to the Südbahnhof, where the southbound trains left from. Departures were disrupted because of air raids and he learned he might have to wait several days for a service. He knew that civilians could stay for up to three nights in a hotel without questions being asked, so he checked in to a small place in the centre. For the next two days of waiting he wandered unmolested around the city, eating in restaurants and visiting the cinema. So far the raids on Berlin had done little to alter the look of the city. It sprawled over eighty square miles and the townscape was interspersed with parks and lakes. The RAF was still acquiring the technologies and perfecting the techniques of concentrated bombing. But they were learning fast and the ‘Big City’, as the bomber crews called it, would be the main focus for their efforts later in the year.
On the second day he learned a train was due to leave for Munich the next morning. He slept on the floor of the station waiting room and arrived at his destination late in the evening. An air raid was in progress and the passengers were hustled to an underground shelter. Crawley had never been in one before, but the atmosphere was how he imagined it would be in Britain. People talked constantly and handed around food and wine. One woman had been in Cologne, subject of a thousand-bomber raid. She teased the more frightened inhabitants, telling them: ‘You don’t know what air raids are like. When we were in Cologne we had buildings crashing all around us.’11
Next morning, 8 March, only two days after breaking out, he took a train to Innsbruck, intending to carry on westwards to Landeck in the Austrian Tyrol, where he planned to leave the train and continue on foot to the Swiss border, only twelve miles to the south. Not long after leaving Munich, border guards who were aboard the train asked for his papers. Crawley handed them over with confidence. By now they had passed inspection with ease on about twenty occasions. When the guards left the carriage telling him they would return his papers he failed to smell danger, missing the chance to jump from the train, which was moving slowly at the time. When they returned he was led off to a police officer on the train. The policeman who had checked his papers had spotted a defect on the stamp on his Ausweise. He was arrested and put off the train at Kufstein in the Austrian Alps, where he was taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. ‘I maintained my story of being a French worker for a time, but I realized that to continue to do so would be useless,’ he told an intelligence debriefer after the war.12 After a roundabout journey, including a day in Berlin accompanied by an SS officer who took him on a sightseeing tour, he was back in Schubin on 12 March.
By then almost all the other escapers had been rounded up. Tony Barber got as far as Belgard (in Polish, Białogard), only about seventeen miles from Kolberg, where he planned to take a boat to Denmark. He was strolling around town killing time before his train when he was stopped by two elderly storm troopers who asked him what he was doing. He said he was going to visit his sick brother, picking out an address at random in the street on which they were standing. They insisted on going with him. The woman who came to the door denied all knowledge of him and he was carted off to the Gestapo.
After two days Harry Day and Dudley Craig were starving. They made the mistake of asking a boy who they thought was Polish for food. He turned out to be a member of the Hitler Youth, who summoned help. They were captured after a short chase.
The countryside was full of trigger-happy troops, eager to play a role in the manhunt. When a senior officer in the Posen police failed to respond to a sentry’s challenge at a roadblock he himself had thrown up, he was promptly shot dead.
Charles Marshall and Flight Lieutenant Webster, travelling on foot, were caught after forty-eight hours, trying to bluff their way across a bridge over the Vistula. Bill Palmer and Flight Lieutenant J. W. Wood hopped a series of goods trains, which took them to Falkenburg (Polish, Złocieniec). Unfortunately it was in the opposite direction to Danzig, their intended destination. They too were nabbed by a member of the home guard.
In the end everyone who took part in the tunnel escape was recaptured. Most were caught within a few days. It was months, though, before the Germans caught up with Josef Bryks. The Polish contractor who smuggled Squadron Leader Morris and Ricks out in the honeywagon hid them in his house on the outskirts of Schubin, then took them to a German state farm where the workforce was all Polish, who fed and looked after them. They were joined by Flight Lieutenant Otakar Černý, another Czech serving with the RAF, who had arranged to meet with Bryks after escaping through the tunnel. After five days hiding in a barn they split up. Morris set off under cover of darkness for Danzig but was soon captured trying to cross a bridge. Bryks and Černý walked for three weeks, moving on by night and hiding by day, until they reached Warsaw, where they made contact with the Polish underground. They were arrested on 2 June when the house they were staying in was raided. The Gestapo accused them of being Russian spies and threatened to have them shot. They were saved when they produced their prisoner-of-war identity discs.13
The exercise confirmed the truth that getting out of the camp was the easy part. The German apparatus of repression was remarkably effective. It was honed to new levels of efficiency due to the belief that an RAF fifth column was abroad, seeking to open up a new front behind the German lines. The scale of the manhunt made it clear that this was more than simply a matter of rounding up absconding prisoners of war. The captives were subjected to exhaustive questioning, with particular attention focused on what aid they had received from the local population. Day’s Gestapo interrogators seemed convinced that he was working with the Polish underground.14
Two of the escapees would never be coming back. Jimmy Buckley, the cheerful, dauntless overseer of the operation, had been travelling with the young Dane Jørgen Thalbitzer, posing as Danish sailors. They made it all the way to Thalbitzer’s home in Copenhagen for a joyful reunion with his family. The local underground provided them with a two-man canoe for the short voyage to Sweden. They departed on a calm sea late on the evening of 28 March. Thalbitzer’s body was washed ashore some months later. Buckley was never found.