The escapers consoled themselves with the thought that though they were back in captivity they had at least created a great deal of trouble for the Germans. They had also succeeded in revealing the fundamental incompetence of the camp authorities. In the process they lived an adventure; arduous, uncomfortable and nerve-wracking, but also exhilarating. The consequences of their defiance were surprisingly slight. Everyone got a spell in the cooler, with Day as the most senior culprit drawing the longest sentence of fourteen days. Once the cell door clanged behind them, though, there was plenty of time for longer reflection. Bill Ash was not the only one to weigh the effort against the results. He ‘stared at the concrete walls and bars and wondered if it was all worth it’.1
When they emerged from solitary they learned there had been big changes at Schubin. Simms and his team had gone, sacked and court-martialled for their failure to control their charges. Some of the old guard remained, but control was now in the hands of the Gestapo. The prisoners’ satisfaction at their old adversary’s humiliation was tempered by the fact that the devil they knew had been replaced with a much more venomous and unpredictable regime.
Dickie Edge and his team had been preparing their own tunnel when the breakout happened. They were determined to continue, despite the change in regime. The intense searching that followed the escape had left the tunnel undisturbed. From its starting point in the barrack night latrine on the western side of the camp it now stretched for 110 feet, which put it sixty feet beyond the perimeter fence. Undaunted by the failure of any of the earlier escapers to score a ‘home run’, Edge was now proposing to send an even larger number under the wire. On 26 March the last section of tunnel was dug out, leaving only a few feet to go. The night latrine was a urinal only, so there was no pit in which to dump the spoil. Dispersal was tricky and the team had to scatter it where they could, protected by a network of lookouts. On this day the system failed. A guard saw someone pouring sand out of a barrack window onto the slope behind and raised the alarm. Russian prisoners were set to work with shovels and picks and eventually discovered the entrance. Before they did, two prisoners managed to get into the tunnel, wriggle down it and break out. They were picked up a few hours later.
It was one of the last dramas in the Schubin story. The kriegies had known for some time, via the warning from IS9 in London, that they might soon be on the move. In April the rumour was confirmed. The expansion work at Sagan was now completed. They were leaving the escapers’ paradise of Oflag XXIB and returning to their old abode – Stalag Luft III.
As they trudged through the gates once more they saw that the camp had been transformed. There was a whole new compound on the northern side and another was being built for US air-force prisoners in the south. Centre Compound was already full of American airmen. ‘It was good to glimpse so many Americans, if only through two layers of barbed wire,’ Bill Ash remembered.2 The camp now had many of the facilities of a small town. There was a flourishing theatre and the public rooms were booked solid by clubs and societies. Much of the ground was under cultivation by newly enthusiastic gardeners supplementing their rations with fresh vegetables. The food situation had improved considerably. The Red Cross parcels were arriving regularly now and there were frequent surpluses of some items, so that a flourishing commodities market had grown up, operated by camp entrepreneurs who to Bill’s honest eyes seemed little more than spivs. Nor did he approve of the long-running poker schools in which wily operators fleeced the gullible of years of back-pay.
The camp had an air of permanence. It was not just the size of the place, which had doubled in the intervening months. It was noticeable in the attitudes of the inhabitants. There were now about 8,000 of them, and most seemed content to sit out the war, spending their days as best they could.
As the months passed and the seasons turned, it became easier to accept and harder to rebel. Time no longer hung quite so heavily on the prisoners’ hands. There were plenty of uses to which it could be put. By the middle of 1943 a regime had evolved in which a kriegie could exercise his brain studying Shakespeare and his body playing football or doing gymnastics. The camp was full of experts, eager to impart their skills. He could learn a musical instrument, study a language, play chess, bridge or poker, or take part in the increasingly sophisticated productions being staged in the camp theatre. The mail functioned efficiently enough for kriegies to be able to take correspondence courses in the law, accountancy or some other subject that would help set them off on a career after the war was over.
The signs were that the end was not so far away. Try as they might, the Germans could not keep the progress of the war a secret. Each compound had its clandestine radio, built and maintained by the bomber wireless operators whose numbers had increased as the Allied bombing campaign rolled over Germany. The details were taken down in shorthand and disseminated by word of mouth. The Germans offered their own version of events through bulletins broadcast over the camp loudspeakers. By now, though, even the guards seemed to doubt their veracity.
In June 1943 it was clear the war was not going Hitler’s way. The catastrophe at Stalingrad had ended the great surge forward. It was Germany’s turn to be on the defensive. A landing in Western Europe was inevitable. The only question was when and where it would fall. Bill detected a new attitude among the camp staff. While no longer sure of victory, they were by no means convinced that the war was lost. The most likely scenario the Germans now believed was a truce in the west followed by a joint campaign against the Communist menace in the east.
This view was not entirely unrealistic. Since the summit meeting in Casablanca in January that year, the Allies were supposedly committed to accepting no terms short of unconditional surrender from Germany. The policy had been insisted on by President Roosevelt, but there were some highly placed figures in Britain and America who believed that it would be abandoned if Hitler was overthrown. Bill was convinced that turning on the Soviet Union was unthinkable for another reason. The ordinary people who had gone to war against Hitler regarded the Russians as friends and allies. An attack on their partners would receive no support.
Despite the petty persecutions, the camp authorities often strove to treat the kriegies with something approaching respect. Their motives were mixed. They regarded the British as equals, worthy opponents who should be handled in as civilized a manner as the circumstances allowed. At the same time, as the war progressed and the outcome became increasingly uncertain, the prisoners became an appreciating asset. An individual guard might decide that if Germany lost, a good report from the prisoners might be helpful in allowing him to adjust to the new conditions. A more sinister calculation was that the kriegies might come in very useful as hostages, whose lives could be used as bargaining chips by officials seeking to escape punishment for their crimes.
The Germans were therefore anxious to convey their essential decency. At times, the prisoners were prepared to accept that their enemies were not so different to themselves in their values and their outlook. ‘Towards us the Germans behaved themselves with a disciplined formality and correctness,’ wrote Tommy Calnan. ‘They liked us to think they were gentlemen and we were often stupid enough to think this way.’3 There was much evidence in and around the camp to undermine that assessment. It was there in the shape of the forty or so Russian prisoners who lived on starvation rations in the Vorlager and were used, as long as their diminishing strength lasted, as slave labour.
Calnan looked on them and felt a shudder of pity. ‘These men were being deliberately destroyed by a long drawn-out and carefully phased programme of cruelty,’ he wrote. ‘To our comfortable British consciences, they were a nasty embarrassment. It was easier to pretend they were not there, rather as one crossed the street to avoid a passing beggar.’
The growing evidence of a programme of mass extermination of the Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich had not reached the kriegies. But beyond the wire there were occasional glimpses of the nightmarish world the Germans were building in the conquered lands. Calnan glimpsed ‘one single horrifying sight of reality’ from the window of a truck which was taking him from the camp to Sagan for a trip to the dentist. ‘At a level crossing I saw ten or a dozen figures, herded in a group and surrounded by SS guards. They were not human figures, just angular skeletal forms clad in pyjamas with yellow and grey vertical stripes. There was no substance to them and no personality.’ They disappeared from sight as the truck turned a corner. He was ‘left with a strong sensation of evil and an unexpectedly powerful fear of something unknown’. Some instinct prevented him from asking questions of the guards.4
Bill had already seen a similar sight from the window of the Schubin cooler when he witnessed the party of women being herded along the road. His theoretical hatred of the Germans had hardened into a practical one. He was also driven by convictions and sentiments that few of the other kriegies shared. When he looked at the starving Russians he felt not just pity but comradely solidarity. He and they were more than temporary allies. They were profoundly and ideologically on the same side.
Ever since childhood he had been angered by injustice. He had seen how white Americans treated black Americans and it sickened him. An episode he witnessed while at a boys’ summer camp in Texas stayed with him all his life. A black youth was employed to do the cooking. While returning to the camp at night-time after an excursion into town, the young man was confronted by two of the camp counsellors dressed in sheets daubed with luminous paint. ‘Not unnaturally the youth took off across the fields with the two figures in close pursuit emitting eerie wails,’ he wrote. ‘There was a loosely strung barbed-wire fence at the edge of the ploughed area and he ran into it full tilt, becoming enmeshed in the strands whose vicious barbs punctured him in a dozen places.’ Bill remembered ‘looking at him, trussed up on the ground, eyes rolling, and I recall the anger I felt – not just because they had hurt him but more because they had made their humiliating little contribution to the racist myth that black people are ignorant and superstitious.’5 He felt a profound hatred for ‘those who degrade other human beings to make them into menials and then despise them for their degradation’. His experiences of Nazi Germany would provide plenty of material for the hatred to feed on.
His upbringing had also given him first-hand exposure to the inequities of raw capitalism. He had watched the indignities suffered by his father as he struggled to make a living. Bill himself had slaved to put himself through university only to find when he got his degree that there was no proper job waiting. He had been forced to hop freight trains, live rough and go hungry in his search of work that barely kept him alive.
There were millions like him in 1930s America, but most survived the experience with their faith in capitalism undented. Bill was different. From the outset he was drawn to socialism, a creed with few followers in 1930s Texas. He watched the struggle of the Spanish Republicans against the Nationalist rebels and their Nazi and Fascist backers and boiled with frustration that he was too young to join the fight. When the next war came he went eagerly. He would not be fighting for Canada or Britain or America but in the great cause of anti-Fascism. The pathetic Russian starvelings being worked to death by the Germans were as much his brothers-in-arms as his comrades in the RCAF and RAF.
These convictions fed his determination to keep on trying to escape. There were enough like him to ensure that, once back in Stalag Luft III, the business began anew.
All the returnees from Schubin were put into East Compound, their old stamping ground. Meanwhile a large proportion of the camp’s population was occupying the new North Compound, which was half a mile away and out of sight. Between the two lay the Centre Compound and the Kommandantur administrative area and German quarters. The Schubin escape committee reconvened, but with Jimmy Buckley’s disappearance Harry Day took over as chairman. They gave the go-ahead for several new tunnels, but as they soon discovered the ferrets had grown more cunning during their absence. Inspection tunnels had been dug beneath each barrack to check for signs of excavated soil. If a tunnel was discovered, the German security team was inclined to let it be, leaving the would-be escapers to toil away for weeks or months until they neared the wire before moving in to shut it down and cart the diggers off to the cooler.
Those involved in the Schubin latrine tunnel found their ability to participate constrained. As notorious escapologists they were under closer surveillance than the other kriegies and, despite their expertise, their assistance on an escape project actively increased the chances of detection. Bill had time on his hands. He read voraciously and for a time he kept up a correspondence with a girl who worked in the Red Cross department in Geneva, which despatched books to the prisoners. It ended when she took to regaling him with steamy details of amorous weekends spent with her boyfriend, in the mistaken belief that it would be good for Bill’s morale.
He consoled himself in other ways. Since first hearing classical music drifting from a church hall one night in Texas he had been enchanted by it. In London he had attended lunchtime concerts, laid on by the authorities, which brought beauty to the drabness. There were fewer opportunities in the messes and anterooms of the fighter stations where the squadron was based. When they were at Digby someone had made the mistake of giving Bill some mess funds to go into York and buy some records. To the disgust of his colleagues he returned bearing not the latest discs by Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters but the works of Bach and Beethoven. As far as his fellow pilots were concerned he was welcome to them and he whiled away many hours listening in solitary rapture.
There was no such possibility in Stalag Luft III. The few gramophones were monopolized by the non-classically minded majority and the radio was far too precious to risk it being discovered while broadcasting a symphony. Kriegie life taught you that there was always a way round a problem, and Bill found one.
‘In every camp there was only one place where classical music was sure to be played,’ he wrote, ‘and that was on the gramophone or radio in the German officers’ quarters.’ He was prepared to risk ‘a long spell in the cooler, or even being shot, by slipping out of my hut after curfew and crawling and running between the huts until I reached an internal fence that separated us from a hut full of off-duty German officers.’ He ‘crouched by the wire, spellbound as the music drifted across, an unwitting gift from my captors’.6 That a culture that could produce and love such music was capable of such gigantic cruelty was an enduring mystery.
Bill’s reading had led him to the conclusion that the Allied treatment of Germany after the First World War had created the conditions that encouraged the rise of Hitler. He also believed that Western capitalism had at first regarded Hitler with favour, as a bulwark against the Bolshevik menace in the east. None of this reduced his hostility to the Nazis. Now, it seemed, the battle against the Fascists had reached a turning point. He itched to be a part of it. His obsessive urge to break out was practical not symbolic. This was not merely a pastime or a gesture of defiance to embarrass his captors and expose their inadequacies. It was a warlike exercise, designed to get him back in action at the controls of his Spitfire as soon as possible.
The chances of making it out of Stalag Luft III seemed severely limited. What he needed was a change of circumstances that would allow his skills and experience to be put to their best use. One day the camp rumour-mill produced an interesting item. The sergeant pilots in Centre Compound were being moved. They were to be shipped out in batches of two hundred to Stalag Luft VI, a new camp built amid flat, swampy terrain near the small town of Heydekrug, nearly two hundred miles away to the north-east, in the wilds of Lithuania. The first party was due to leave in June.
Bill immediately saw an opportunity. ‘If I could get to a different camp, I could use the period of chaos [that exists] at the founding of any camp as a happy hunting ground for future escapes with untrained guards and fresh routes for new tunnels.’7 The problem was that he was not an NCO.
That difficulty was soon resolved. Bill had made friends with a young New Zealander in Centre Compound called Donald Fair. He managed to persuade him that the two should swap identities. Fair would avoid being sent off to the wastes of Lithuania, and he became a Flight Lieutenant (Bill had been promoted in absentia). The main problem was how to change places. East Compound and Centre Compound were separated by a ten-foot-high double fence, which was within sight of the perimeter fence watchtowers.
To get across would require speed, agility and a major diversion to distract the guards. Bill enlisted the services of Paddy Barthropp and other friends. At the agreed time, Bill took up his position on his side of the divide while Don Fair loitered innocently on the other. Paddy and his accomplices began to play a noisy game of football. The guards’ eyes wandered towards the group of shouting, jostling kriegies, scuffling in the summer dust. Their interest mounted as the game became more boisterous, then degenerated into a minor brawl. Bill and Don took their chance. They skipped over the warning wire on their respective sides of the fence – beyond which they were liable to be shot –and scrambled over the wire, dropping into the gap between the two fences. There they crouched down, shook hands and swapped their identity papers and discs.
Then they were off again for another heart-stopping assault on the wire to the other compound. Behind them the shouts of the fight subsided. The guards’ gaze turned away. If they glanced towards the boundary between East and Centre compounds all they saw were two insignificant figures strolling harmlessly back towards the huts.
Bill never saw Don Fair again. In order to maintain their false identity they had to keep up the imposture in their letters home, which were read by the camp censors.