‘There is something very deeply ingrained in me that can’t resist a good escape.’
BILL ASH
MARCH 1942. AN American pilot, flying for the Canadians, fighting for the British against the Germans, is in trouble over occupied France.
Big trouble.
His name is Bill Ash. He’s flying his Spitfire, with other members of his section, home to Hornchurch in Essex after a sortie that has taken him as far as Comines in Belgium. An urgent call comes over the radio:
‘Break formation. Break formation!’
Ash pulls an immediate 180-degree turn, just in time to see a German Focke-Wulf 190 easing away below him. The Focke-Wulf is, at this time, the Germans’ most effective combat aircraft. But that doesn’t worry Bill Ash. He’s about to give this pilot something to think about. He catches up with the plane, opens fire and watches with satisfaction as the 190 spirals down to earth, billowing smoke.
Then he sees another member of his section being tailed by a Messerschmitt.
He alters his trajectory and releases a flurry of rounds into the Messerschmitt’s fuselage. But, as he fires, he hears an ominous, thumping sound from his guns.
He’s been hit.
The Spitfire’s engine starts to judder. His speed suddenly drops. He glances around the surrounding airspace. A group of Messerschmitts are flying towards him from several directions. They circle, like wild cats around a wounded beast, and prepare to finish him off.
Bill Ash doesn’t intend to give them that satisfaction.
Here’s the thing about bravery: you have to call on it when times are toughest. Ash knows that there is no point trying to outrun his enemy. In a situation like this, he has only one option.
Fly directly towards the Messerschmitts.
Head on, he will be a smaller target to hit. And, crucially, he will force his enemy to concentrate on not crashing into him.
Unfortunately, it also means he has to watch the incoming rounds pummel his Spitfire as he makes the most important decision of his young life to date.
Parachute out? Or crash land?
Parachuting would be safer, but it will give the Germans on the ground plenty of time to find him. So he goes for the riskier option. He picks out a flat field next to a small French village, and prepares to bring the juddering Spitfire back down to earth, the fast way.
The plane cartwheels as it hits the ground. One wing rips away from the fuselage. The fuselage itself tears in two just behind the pilot’s seat.
Amazingly, the pilot himself is still alive.
One thing, however, is certain. Here, far behind enemy lines, German ground forces will be closing in on him any moment.
He needs to escape – and fast.
Bill Ash doesn’t know it yet, but escape is something for which he has a definite flair.
*
A local French villager got to him before the Germans. She gave him some civilian clothes, but after that he was on his own.
And on the run.
Not knowing if the Germans had dogs, he waded deeper and deeper along what he thought was a canal, to hide his scent.
He soon realized that it wasn’t a canal. It was a foul-smelling open sewer.
When he heard someone following him, he went under – head and all. He emerged a stinking mess, which wasn’t helped when, the following day, he had to hide in a manure heap.
Smelling good, Bill. But not captured. Yet.
He wandered through northern France for three days, before falling in with members of the French Resistance. They smuggled him first to Lille, then to Paris where, for some weeks, he stayed with a French family and walked the streets of the capital, brushing shoulders with the Nazis. He hoped to remain ‘hidden in plain sight’.
Plucky, but unsuccessful. In early June, Nazi soldiers broke into the apartment where he was staying. At gunpoint, they demanded his papers.
He had none, of course. His first escape was at an end.
The Nazis beat him viciously in the face with the butt of a rifle. Then they escorted him to one of the most terrifying buildings not just in Paris, but the world. The last place on earth a downed Allied pilot wanted to find himself.
Gestapo HQ was situated in a road that members of the Resistance dubbed the ‘Street of Horrors’. If you ended up there, you were much more likely to be tortured then executed, rather than be set free. Bill was dragged into a small cell in the basement for a couple of hours, then taken up to be interrogated by a neat, grey-haired man in civilian clothes. Ash declared himself a prisoner of war, and requested to be treated as such under the terms of the Geneva Convention. His interrogator laughed.
‘You are a spy,’ he said. And everyone knew what the Gestapo did to spies. It was never pretty.
The Gestapo officer declared that he would only believe that he was a POW if he revealed the names and whereabouts of every French person who had helped him since he crash landed.
Of course, Ash knew exactly what would happen to anyone he shopped to the Nazis. With a twinkle in his eye, he apologized that he was simply terrible with names.
The Germans didn’t see the funny side of Bill’s disdain for the Nazis.
His guards went to work on him. One of them grabbed his arms and yanked them behind his back. The other smacked him viciously and repeatedly in the face, followed by even more brutal blows to the pit of his stomach and between his ribs. The guard paused for a moment, making Ash wonder if he’d had a sudden change of heart. He hadn’t. He was just taking a moment to wrap a rag round his fist so he could continue raining blows down on every part of his body until his face and shirt were soaked in blood.
Then his interrogator returned. He was holding a piece of paper. It was an execution warrant. If Ash failed to cooperate, he would be shot the following day as a spy.
*
The terror of captivity is hard to describe – that feeling of being utterly powerless – knowing that either torture or death awaits you at dawn.
The feeling in the pit of your stomach as you hear those terrifying footsteps approach your cell door must be horrific to endure.
The following morning didn’t bring death, however, but more interrogation.
Ash was shaking with fear by now. When his interrogator once more demanded some French names, the pilot gave him one. Monsieur Josef.
The Gestapo man’s eyes lit up with triumph. Who was this Monsieur Josef? he demanded.
Bill Ash gave him a weak smile. ‘My French teacher back in Texas,’ he revealed.
Once again, the Germans’ sense of humour was lacking. The beating that followed was even more brutal than the first one, culminating in repeated and agonizing blows to the kidneys that beat almost every drop of air and life out of his limp body. Unable to walk, he was dragged to his cell, where he lay bleeding – with the promise that tomorrow, he really would be executed.
Still the execution didn’t come. Just a week-long orgy of violent beatings, blood and excruciating suffering as the Gestapo tried to coerce some names out of him. But despite the wretched pain and humiliation inflicted upon him, Bill Ash didn’t give in.
The Gestapo rarely got bored of inflicting violence for no reward. If information wasn’t forthcoming then they just intensified the torture. And they would have no doubts about having him shot in the end. But his salvation, such as it was, came from an unexpected source.
One morning he heard a voice outside his cell arguing with his Gestapo interrogator. When the door opened, a Luftwaffe officer stood there. He explained that Bill was now a Luftwaffe prisoner. He would be taken to a camp and treated as a POW.
Bill was taken to Dulag Luft near Frankfurt, and from there to the infamous Stalag Luft III. The camp commandant tried to explain that the war was now over for Bill Ash. But the commandant was wrong.
For Bill Ash, the war was only just beginning.
For a Spitfire pilot under attack by a Messerschmitt, the standard operating procedure was to fly straight at it so the enemy had something to think about other than firing his guns. For a POW of Bill Ash’s make-up, the standard operating procedure was similar: to try to escape, because then you’d be diverting the enemy’s attention from other matters of war.
But escaping was difficult, and dangerous. Get caught, and you risked a bullet in the head from the Gestapo. That didn’t bother Bill. He set his mind to it the moment he became a prisoner of the Luftwaffe.
Food at Stalag Luft III was scarce. Ash knew that to be a successful escapologist, he needed a bit more meat on his bones. There were two foodstuffs that were so disgusting nobody would eat them: one was a foul, sloppy, green cheese; the other was klip-fish – fish innards that had been dried out years before, which needed rehydrating into a revolting paste that smelled and tasted like wet dog hair. Ash guzzled it down, and once he had a bit more weight on, he started exercising hard to get himself fit.
What is most remarkable about Bill Ash’s escape attempts from the many POW camps in which he found himself is not the volume of them. It’s not even their audacity. It’s his sheer, bloody-minded persistence. He felt honour-bound to disrupt the enemy in any way he could. And he was certainly successful in that, even if he was unsuccessful in remaining on the run for more than a few weeks.
His first attempt to escape from Stalag Luft III was concocted with the help of another downed Spitfire pilot called Paddy Barthropp. Together they presented their first escape plan to the camp’s escape committee.
Beneath some of the prisoners’ showers, where the water ran off to the drains, was a small compartment for the mains taps. If they could hide there for long enough, the prison guards might assume that they had genuinely escaped and give up looking for them within the camp. This would make a real escape attempt easier.
Nice idea. Unfortunately they didn’t count on the sniffer dogs.
When their absence was noted, the camp’s Alsatians and their handlers burst into the showers and located the sodden hideaways. Their reward: several days in solitary confinement – the ‘cooler’. But that failed to dampen Ash’s determination to escape.
Between his capture and the end of the war, Bill Ash made thirteen escape attempts from camps all across Europe. And he clocked up more weeks in the cooler than he could even count.
Ash was then moved to a new POW camp in Poland. He first tried to stroll out of the camp while the guards were looking the other way. Unfortunately they saw him and overtook him on their bicycles! The guards beat him horribly on that occasion, but were so preoccupied with violence that they failed to search him properly. He had a small file taped to his leg, which he used to cut the bars of his cell. He might have got away with it if the guards hadn’t randomly moved him to another cell, by which time his file had grown blunt …
Ash made many escape attempts from that camp, including one that involved digging a tunnel 17 feet below the ground. The entrance to the tunnel was situated in the putrid-smelling latrines – the escapologists reasoned that their German guards wouldn’t really fancy nosing around them much.
While one man sat on the toilet to keep guard, a dozen other men started digging a chamber right next to the stinking bowl of the latrine itself. In order to enter the tunnel and continue digging, Ash and his comrades had to battle a foul lake of human excrement. But the closeness of the latrine was also an advantage – it gave them somewhere to stash the earth they dug away as that treacherous, narrow tunnel moved slowly but surely toward the edge of the camp.
Picture it. No light. Cold clay and excrement pressing in on you. Barely enough room to move – the tunnel was only two feet wide by two feet high. The tunnellers kept the roof up by using slats from prison beds, but still showers of filth would fall on them, and there was the ever-present risk of collapse.
At the open end of the tunnel a prisoner would use a makeshift bellows to pump air down to the workers, but still: oxygen was scarce. And, of course, the latrines would overflow, and they’d find themselves crouched on a dribbling stream of rotting effluent.
But still they dug.
Thirty-three men escaped through that tunnel. But they were all captured. Ash himself managed six days on the run, before being found by a bunch of German farmers armed with pitchforks. Yet the escape attempt was by no means a failure. The German army had to divert massive resources to finding the escapees. These audacious attempts were a veritable part of their own private war effort.
And so Bill Ash kept them coming.
*
In the autumn of 1943 Ash found himself in a Lithuanian camp. This time, the tunnel he helped dig was more than 150 feet long. Ash escaped, along with fifty others, into the Lithuanian countryside. But for escape and evasion, you need to be fit. The months of physical labour involved in making the tunnels, not to mention the terrible lack of food and his long stretches in the cooler, meant Bill was anything but in shape by this stage.
Ash would later describe his journey through the unknown Lithuanian countryside as like being in a daze. A nightmare, more like. In his weakened state he had to cross fast-flowing rivers, before sleeping in cold, damp clothes that froze his joints and sapped any remaining strength from him.
Night-time brought strange, terrifying hallucinations that startled him from his much-needed sleep. He suffered severe dizziness and lack of breath. As he stumbled through treacherous marshland, he had to follow the paths made by wandering goats in order to avoid being sucked down by quicksand.
When he could finally go no further, he collapsed in a farm outbuilding. But when he woke, he was being stabbed at with a pitchfork by a crowd of Lithuanian peasants, demanding to know if he was Russian or German.
If they thought he was either, they would no doubt have done to him what the Gestapo had refrained from doing. Despite his exhaustion, Ash persuaded them that he was neither German, nor Russian, nor British, nor American. He was a Texan! The peasants had never heard of Texas, but decided he was a friend and let him stay with them for several days. Then they set him on his way to the Baltic Sea, where he hoped that perhaps he could steal a small boat and continue his escape.
He made it to the coast. He even found a boat. But then he made the mistake of asking another bunch of Lithuanian peasants digging their garden to help him launch it. He was an escaped American pilot, he explained, being chased by the hated Germans.
The peasants looked at each other. Then they gave him the bad news. They weren’t Lithuanians at all. They were German soldiers, and the escaped American pilot was standing on their vegetable patch.
Next stop for Bill Ash: the local Gestapo.
*
The Gestapo sent Ash, with a massive – and no doubt rather flattering – armed escort, to Berlin. Nazi heartland. He can’t have expected to survive very long there.
The Gestapo certainly wanted to put him to death. Unusually, given the countless millions they had already exterminated, they wanted to do so ‘legally’. So they put Bill Ash, serial escapologist, on trial. Happily for him, things were going badly for the Axis powers. In the winter of 1943, nearly 2,000 tons of ordnance were dropped on Berlin in a single day. The Nazis simply didn’t have the resources to continue the trial. And so, with another impressive armed escort, the Cooler King returned to a hero’s welcome at Stalag Luft III, before being slammed straight in the cooler once more.
And in a weird kind of way, his stretches in solitary confinement saved his life. Bill Ash was alone in the cooler when the sirens of Stalag Luft III blared to announce another breakout. This was the Great Escape, of which a fanciful Hollywood version would later hit the screens. (Bill Ash would later comment, wryly, that in all his escape attempts there never seemed to be a lone motorbike around when you needed one!)
Fifty men made it under the wire that day. Fifty men were captured. And fifty executed. But fortune was smiling on William Ash, alone in the cooler and not part of that escape attempt.
Despite his persistent attempts to escape, and his relentless beatings at the hands of his Luftwaffe and Gestapo enemies – any one of whom could have shot him with impunity – Ash made it through the war. He lived to tell his tale.
And it’s a tale worth telling, because it teaches us something profound.
In our day-to-day lives, we all meet bullies and tyrants. Hitler and his Nazis were extreme versions of just that. And sometimes it is hard to stand up to the bullies. But the story of William Ash is a reminder of the value of persistence, ingenuity and good, old-fashioned pluck in the face of those who think they can get away with keeping you in the gutter.
He is a reminder that you can’t keep a good man down for long and that good will eventually win through – if you get lucky.