Chapter Four

The Urge to Escape

After taking the train to Germany, Ash got on a truck that took him to Dulag Luft, an interrogation camp near Frankfurt, Germany. All captured Allied air force pilots and crew were taken there once they reached Germany, before being sent on to other prison camps. It was now early June—more than two months since Ash crashed in France.

Ash faced more questioning at Dulag Luft, but at least this time nobody beat him. And here, he could talk with other captured pilots. Some of the officers helped the newcomers adjust to life as prisoners. But Ash didn’t want to adjust. He wanted to escape and fly again.

Not long after arriving at the POW camp Ash met Paddy Barthropp. He was as eager to escape as Ash was. Together, they learned the routines of prison life. They shared cramped rooms with other prisoners in four wooden buildings called barracks. Through the window, they could see farms and a river, and most of the guards treated them well. The Germans hoped that this treatment might make the prisoners willing to share information the Nazis would find useful. Ash, though, did not offer any information.

The prisoners went out several times a day for roll call, entering a large open area surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Each day, they ate lousy food. One common meal was some kind of fish that smelled like wet dog hair. Somehow, Ash forced it down.

A rare bright spot in POW life was the arrival of packages from the Red Cross, although the prisoners never knew when they might show up. Ash looked forward to the chocolate, canned meat, and other food he usually found inside the package.

After a short stay at Dulag Luft, the Germans herded Ash, Barthropp, and other prisoners into a truck and drove them to Stalag Luft III. Waiting when they got there was the camp commandant, Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm Von Lindeiner. The prisoners stood in rows as the colonel walked up and down past them. “For you, the war is over,” the colonel said. “But we will try to make your stay a pleasant one. That way, you will have no reason to try to escape. For as you will discover, escaping is impossible.”

Ash leaned over to Barthropp and whispered, “There’s always a first time.”

It didn’t take long for Ash to meet the men at the camp who were most eager to escape. One of them was Douglas Bader. Like most RAF pilots, Ash knew all about him. Bader had lost both his legs in a plane crash before the war. The RAF said he would never fly for it again.

But using artificial legs, Bader did fly when World War II began, and he was one of Britain’s best fighter pilots. At Stalag Luft III, Ash was inspired by Bader’s desire to continue fighting the Germans in whatever ways possible. He encouraged other prisoners to rebel too.

One day soon after Ash arrived, the entire camp was called out for a roll call.

“What’s going on?” Ash asked Bader.

“Some chaps tried to escape last night,” Bader said. “Now the goons are trying to figure out how many got out. But I think we can throw them off a bit.”

Bader told Ash, Barthropp, and some other men who had not yet been counted to mix in with the prisoners who had been counted.

“My pleasure!” Ash said, eager to follow Bader’s order. Letting out a whoop, Ash led the men across the camp. But his excitement quickly faded as a couple of guards grabbed him and Barthropp and led them at gunpoint outside the camp.

After tramping a few hundred feet, the guards ordered them to stop and forced them to their knees. The soldiers stood behind them, and Ash could picture a rifle pointing at his head. Go ahead, he thought, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. Seconds passed, but the soldiers did not fire. Instead, they brought Ash and Barthropp back to the camp, where each was given two weeks in what the prisoners called “the cooler,” a concrete cell where a prisoner would be held alone, in solitary confinement. They just wanted to scare us, Ash thought. Well, it didn’t work.

The guards led Barthropp to one cooler and Ash to another. Ash looked around the tiny cell, just ten feet long and four feet wide, with only one small barred window high above the floor. It had a bed, a table, and a stool. For the first few days, Ash had only bread and water to eat and drink. The Germans would not let him bring in a book, so he tried to remember poems and stories he had read in school.

At times, he jumped up and grabbed the bars on the tiny window. He thought, I just need a quick look at the world outside this place. Each night, a guard came and took away his shoes. “So you can’t escape,” the guard said with a laugh. He knew, just as Ash did, that there was no way out of the cooler.

As his days in the cooler passed, the Germans gave him a little more food, but hunger still burned in his stomach. He missed talking to the other men. Finally, after two weeks, his time in the cooler ended. Ash and Barthropp rejoined the other prisoners. They saw Bader, who smiled.

“You two did all right,” he said. “Make sure you keep making things hard for the goons.”

“What about you?” Ash asked.

“Colonel Von Lindeiner has had enough of me,” Bader said, smiling again. “They’re sending me to another camp.”

Many of the prisoners came out to watch as forty soldiers led Bader out of the camp on his artificial legs. With Bader gone, Ash was more determined than ever to escape. He remembered what Bader had once said: “We might not be able to fly anymore, but we can still fight.” Trying to escape was part of that fight.

Soon, Ash and Barthropp came up with their plan to hide out in the space beneath the showers before making their break for freedom.

Most escape attempts relied on digging tunnels, but the ferrets had already found some shallow ones at the camp. Digging a much deeper tunnel would take months and plenty of men. Ash didn’t want to wait that long.

He and Barthropp went to see the officers that formed the escape committee, and Ash described his plan to hide out in the shower building and make a break from there. When he finished, committee leader Jimmy Buckley told them to wait outside the barracks. A few minutes later, Buckley called them back inside.

“We like it,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to make it work.”

But as Ash and Barthropp later learned, every plan has its risks. When the guards found him hiding under the showers, Ash remembered how sure he had been that he could escape. He went to the cooler for the second time, where he had plenty of opportunity to think about escaping again. When he got out two weeks later, a guard was waiting for him. He told Ash to join a group of about ninety prisoners in the center of the camp.

“What’s happening?” Ash asked Jimmy Buckley.

“You’re on the ‘list.’ Barthropp too. They’re sending us to a camp in Poland. They say it’s getting too crowded here.”

But Ash couldn’t help but notice that many of the men going to Poland were the same men intent on escaping. Maybe the Germans thought the new camp would crush their desire. Ash thought, These Nazis just don’t understand us. We’ll try again—wherever they put us.