After night fell on this 8 June we were taken down to the beach together with groups of other prisoners and put aboard a landing craft for the trip across the Channel. When we landed in England the wounded were separated from the rest and taken by train to a military hospital in Preston, Lancashire. It was here that I was operated upon; that is, the broken bones were put back into place and an adhesive dressing was applied to my left arm and shoulder.
The treatment and medical attention that I received was excellent, although the chloroform that was the standard anaesthetic in those days meant that one came to again after the operation feeling perfectly lousy. It affected different people in different ways. While still dozy and not yet fully conscious, the grizzled old soldier in the bed next to mine kept yelling over and over again at the top of his voice, “Chérie, you absolutely stink of Calvados!”–so clearly his time in Normandy hadn’t been entirely wasted.
The one thing I couldn’t stand was the English idea of breakfast consisting of tea with milk, and porridge served with pappy white bread; especially as I had always loathed porridge, even as a boy. But all in all our captors stuck to the rules of the Geneva Convention, and there was nothing really to complain about. The day after my operation I was allowed out for a walk in the hospital grounds with a few of the other prisoners.
A wire fence divided us from the parade ground of the neighbouring barracks. Naturally curious to see how things were done ‘on the other side’ we strolled across. We were deeply impressed by the British drill sergeant–bullet-headed, chiselled chin you could sharpen a flint on–who was screaming orders at a bunch of obviously raw recruits in a voice that would have made any German kapo green with envy. Of course, he knew full well who was watching him through the wire and was probably laying it on a bit thick just for our benefit.
After about a fortnight an elderly captain, jovial and more than a little portly, came to collect me. He seemed quite friendly and so I asked him, more by gestures than in words, where we were going. He murmured something or other in reply and I caught a word that sounded like ‘sanatorium’, but I didn’t believe this for a moment. Although of German stock himself, I’m sure that His Majesty King George VI’s hospitality didn’t extend as far as convalescent leave for prisoners of war.
But I had heard somewhere that the English had a camp something along the lines of the Luftwaffe’s own reception and interrogation centre for shot-down allied flyers at Oberursel, in the Taunus hills outside Frankfurt. I could therefore make a fairly good guess as to where we were actually heading. While waiting for the train at Preston station the captain treated me to a coffee, which we drank standing at the buffet counter. The other passengers were watching me with patently mixed feelings, although none was openly hostile.
I was given to understand that our rail journey was to last about four hours and would take us somewhere to the west of London. After two hours or so the captain unpacked a couple of ham and lettuce sandwiches, one of which he gave to me. Thus fortified, he started to nod off. But he kept jerking into wakefulness again, eyeing me somewhat distrustfully each time he did so. I had made myself comfortable in a window seat and was gazing with interest at the passing landscape, while he, for obvious reasons, sat diagonally across from me next to the door leading out into the corridor.
Finally, his tiredness got the better of him. “Dammit, let’s get some sleep”, he grunted, forsaking all military and patriotic responsibilities in favour of a quick nap. I dutifully closed my eyes until he had dropped off. I had given up all thoughts of an escape attempt from the speeding train anyway.
He awoke as the carriage rattled over the points outside one of London’s main railway stations, and was clearly relieved to see me still sitting obediently in my corner by the window. It was another two hours before he was finally able to deliver me to the ‘convalescent home’. First I was formally and rather brusquely assigned a room, and then had to change out of my flying overalls into a set of British battledress tunic and trousers that had been dyed black and had the letters POW–for prisoner-of-war–painted across the back.
The following morning my interrogation began. It was conducted by a British colonel, who introduced himself to me as Oberst ‘King’ (although I subsequently discovered that this was not his real name). He spoke flawless German. According to the rules, all I was obliged to tell him was my rank, name and home address–plus, at most, any inconsequential personal details I might care to impart.
At first he stuck to this format, no doubt in an attempt to gain my confidence and get me to reveal things that could be of interest to him. When I mentioned to him that I played the cello, he feigned astonishment, saying that from my appearance (at that time I had a full head of dark hair and a brown suntanned face) he had me pegged more for a gypsy than a typical German–let alone an officer in the armed forces. It was then my turn to be astonished. How could a man in his position subscribe to such views? Did he really believe in that sort of racial propaganda, or was this just another of his ploys to make me start talking?
At my next interrogation, for which I was woken in the middle of the night, he came straight to the point. First of all he wanted to know which airfield I had taken off from on my last flight, to which unit I belonged, and how many operational aircraft we had. When I refused categorically to answer these questions, he tried threatening me, because for one, I was not carrying my ‘Frontflugausweis’–my front-line flying pass, which admittedly I had forgotten to put in my pocket–but was simply wearing an identity tag that could quite easily be false, and another, there were no badges of rank on my flying overalls (these latter were newly issued and I had not yet had the time to sew my Leutnant’s wing and bar insignia on the sleeves).
In the light of the above, he warned me, he was fully entitled to classify me as ‘illegal’–in other words, as a partisan–which gave him the right to have me put up against a wall and shot. This sounded decidedly unhealthy. But my continued refusal to answer had little to do with any great display of courage on my part. Based on the given facts, his hypothesis was simply too ridiculous. Just how did he suppose I engaged in partisan activity while flying on operations? Besides, he didn’t seem to be taking the matter too seriously himself. He soon let it drop, for in the meantime he had found other ways of gathering information about me.
On the fourth day of my questioning he placed a copy of the weekly magazine Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in front of me. It was the issue dated 20 April 1944 (coincidentally the Führer’s birthday) containing a double-spread illustrated feature on an unidentified ‘Jagdgeschwader in the West’. He had folded the paper so that all I could see of it was a picture of my Gruppenkommandeur, Major Hohagen. Oberst King told me that I need say no more. He now knew all there was to be known about me. I was a member of 3. Staffel of the ‘renowned’ Jagdgeschwader Richthofen. I had been with the unit since March 1944, and this was a picture of my commanding officer. He also identified the airfield I had taken off from; namely Cormeilles.
This last snippet gave me a great deal of satisfaction, for we had vacated Cormeilles some three weeks before my last mission. So the information provided to the British by the French resistance, or perhaps even by French workers employed by our own supply services, was at least that long out of date, if not more. Our recent frequent moves from one landing ground to another suddenly began to make more sense.
Having thus established my background in his own mind, Oberst King went off on another tack. He now wanted to know something about our tactics in the air. He tried to provoke some sort of reaction out of me by implying that we German fighter pilots were not all that skilled and weren’t achieving very much. I’m afraid I rose to the bait by describing the encounters we had had on 25 May and the evening of 6 June, both of which had ended very much in our favour. I could tell from the expression on his face that he thought I was shooting a line. But after rooting around in some files he seemed to have a change of mind, and this subject too was quietly shelved.
Then, of course, there came the question of what exactly had I been fighting for and why was I prepared to lay down my life for Hitler. Here I was on safer ground. I explained that, as a boy growing up in the Germany of the ‘twenties and’ thirties, I could not help but be influenced by the mood of the times; the desire to right the wrongs of the hated Versailles Treaty and to see Germany emerge as an equal among her European neighbours as set out in the constitution of the Weimar Republic. These were the principles for which I was willing to lay down my life–not for the person of Hitler.
I warmed to my subject, describing the historical developments in Germany prior to World War One and even going back as far as the events of 1848. This resulted in my being visited the following day by another German-speaking officer. He was carrying a thick book under his arm. This was an historical tome, written in German, which he presented to me as reading material for the rest of my stay. In the course of a long stroll through the extensive grounds surrounding the camp, he encouraged me to expound further on the causes and reasons for Hitler’s rise to power. I noticed that he voiced no opinions of his own during our discussion and assumed–as the war was still on–that the Geneva Convention prohibited him from influencing me politically in any way.
I never did get to read his book, however, for on the very next day, after about a week of my sojourn, I was taken along with several others to a camp near Derby in central England. This turned out to be a transit camp where we joined some fifty other German officers who were undergoing medical examination before transfer elsewhere. And the fact that we had to parade in front of an American general left us in little doubt where that was to be. We were in for a trip across the big pond to a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States.
After just two days at Derby we left for Liverpool, where we were put aboard a large troop transport. Our accommodation was somewhat unusual. We didn’t particularly mind being herded together ten or twenty to a cabin, but the fact that the doors were reinforced by steel grilles and laced with barbed wire, with an armed GI standing guard in front of each one, did strike us as a trifle excessive. Apparently–and this I only discovered later–it was honestly believed that we Germans were capable of the most dastardly acts. Many feared, for example, that we might somehow overpower the ship’s crew and sail it ourselves to a German-held port!
In complete contrast to life in our cabins below, when we were escorted up to the officers’ mess for dinner on the first evening we were welcomed as ‘guests of the US Navy’ by the captain, who also wished us bon appetit before we sat down to eat. I must admit to finding the whole situation somehow schizophrenic, but there was nonetheless a definite undercurrent of mutual respect between the two sides on board the ship. At around noon each day we were allowed up on deck for about half an hour to get a breath of fresh air. As an absolute landlubber, it was my first taste of the delights to be had from an ocean cruise–even if it was one being undertaken in rather exceptional circumstances.
We discovered that our ship was just one of a large convoy. All around us other freighters and transports were butting their way through the enormous waves (enormous to someone like me, that is, who was more accustomed to the ripples on a Bavarian lake). The vessels were spaced so far apart, and over such a wide area of ocean, that the outer edges of the convoy could not be seen. Now and again we would catch a glimpse of the sleek form of a destroyer out on the horizon, one of the flotilla of escort vessels that were chivvying us along like so many sheepdogs guarding their precious flock.
On a couple of occasions during the crossing the U-boat alarm was actually sounded. We then had to muster on deck wearing our life jackets. As may be imagined, our feelings were decidedly mixed. While wishing our U-boat boys every success, our sense of patriotism did not stretch quite so far as to relish the idea of being sent to the bottom ourselves.
After a good week at sea we were ordered up on deck again, but this time we were instructed to take all our personal belongings with us. It was around noon on 12 July 1944, as I can remember quite vividly, and in a few hours’ time we would be docking in New York harbour, where we were to be immediately transferred on to a train that would be waiting to take us on the next stage of our journey. The famous skyline of Manhattan–that symbol of ‘capitalist decadence’ as we had been brought up to believe–was already beginning to loom up over the horizon.
As we slowly made our way up the East River in the shadow of the huge skyscrapers, a ‘150 per center’ among our ranks suggested that we all deliberately turn our backs and look in the other direction in order to display our complete indifference and not to give the Amis–as we referred to the Americans–the satisfaction of witnessing our sense of wonder and admiration.
Speaking personally, my feelings weren’t those of wonder and admiration. Confronted by this solid mass of architecture towering into the sky, the mighty assemblage of shipping in the river, the endless expanse of docks and wharves with their forests of cranes, what I felt could be more accurately described as total disbelief and shock. As a European I simply couldn’t take in the vast scale of everything I was seeing.
The transfer from ship to train, the latter also unlike anything I had ever experienced in Germany or France, went without a hitch. It wasn’t long before we were all securely inside the compartments to which we had been assigned. An armed GI again stood guard at either end of the carriage to make sure that we didn’t leave our seats. The only time we were permitted to do so was when we had to go to the toilet. This involved a ritual that reminded me strongly of my first year at school: finger held up in the air to attract the teacher’s–sorry, the guard’s–attention, await his affirmative nod, and then straight to the toilet and back with no talking.
Whenever we stopped at a station the windows would have to be closed and the blinds pulled down–and again no talking. You couldn’t be too careful. After all, these ‘damned Krauts’ might have been hatching a plot to jump out of the windows and take the local townspeople hostage; maybe even force the train driver to head for the Mexican border (even if Mexico had declared war on Germany more than two years earlier). In fact, all the signs were that the train actually was heading southwards.
On the second day of the journey we stopped, if I remember rightly, at Nashville, Tennessee, a name that didn’t mean anything to me at that time. As on the day before, we were escorted under guard into the station restaurant, where we were allowed to seat ourselves at the neatly laid tables. After a little while two black waitresses poked their heads round the kitchen door and stared at us, their eyes wide with fright. When they saw that several armed GIs were standing guard over us, they ventured hesitantly into the room and started to serve us.
Their curiosity soon got the better of their fear and before long they were inspecting us from head to foot. It all seemed very strange. Eventually, one of our number who spoke English asked them why they had been so frightened of us at first. When he translated their reply we were all dumbstruck. Apparently they had been terrified when told that they were going to have to serve lunch to a crowd of German prisoners-of-war. According to what they had heard, Germans were ‘some kind of devils with horns and cloven hooves!’ Further comment is superfluous.
That afternoon we passed through Memphis. We were all impressed by the awesome size of the River Mississippi. Was everything bigger in this country? But for me, despite the majesty of its powerful slow-moving current, the mighty Mississippi could not compare with the tumbling crystal waters of the much smaller River Inn of my boyhood. It was not long after leaving Memphis that our train pulled into the provincial township of Como, Mississippi. This was our destination, and from here we were taken by road to our new home, Camp Como, several kilometres out in the country. What little we could see of the landscape on the way was not very encouraging: a flat, almost barren plain baked dry and dusty by the summer sun blazing down out of a milky-white sky.
Knots of prisoners were standing at the camp gates eagerly scanning the faces of us newcomers hoping to spot a friend or acquaintance from earlier shared ‘days of glory’. The camp itself consisted of about sixty large wooden barracks huts standing on concrete pillars nearly a metre high (presumably to discourage tunnelling). Each hut was divided into four separate compartments, which shared a long communal veranda running along the front of the building.
This rustic style gave the place something of a homely, almost cosy feel. In the centre of the camp, high above everything else, was a large wooden water tower of the sort familiar from countless Wild West films. Thin rivulets of water trickled constantly from the leaky metal tank atop the wooden structure. When the heat became too unbearable these provided blessed relief to anyone standing beneath them.
At the four corners of the camp, each side of which was about 200 metres long, stood a watchtower. These were equipped with searchlights and manned twenty-four hours a day by armed guards, whose job was to make sure that nobody made a break for it–they, the guards, were not always successful, I might add. Between the towers stretched a double fence, some three metres in height, the top of which was angled inwards and covered in barbed wire. Immediately outside the camp were the living quarters of the guard personnel and a hospital that served both the camp staff and prisoners alike.
After first dumping our things in the huts, we went outside to get to know the establishment’s occupants. There were about 200 men already in the camp. They were all ex-Afrika Korps, the vast majority of them taken prisoner after the fall of Tunisia in the spring of 1943. Although they had arrived at Como only a few weeks before us, they had been in allied captivity for well over a year and were thus able to pass on all sorts of handy tips and useful advice.
Further batches of prisoners would continue to arrive over the course of the coming weeks so that, by the end of September, the camp contained its full complement of close on 1,000 men. To my pleasant surprise I bumped into an old friend and comrade from my training days with LKS 4 at Fürstenfeldbruck who, like me, had also gone on to serve with JG 2 in France.
The compartments mentioned above each comprised a kind of anteroom, or lobby, with two bedrooms adjoining. With two prisoners sharing a bedroom, this meant that we lived together in groups of four. The rooms were, on the whole, quite comfortable, although they had looked a bit bleak and forlorn when we first arrived. They had previously been occupied by Italians–also apparently captured in North Africa–who seemed to have set little store on gracious living. The only decorations were a few faded pin-ups still adorning the walls. But after we had added a few personal touches they became much more homely.
With traditional German thoroughness and ingenuity we set about producing picture frames for our family photos, as well as hand-painted lampshades, bookcases and the like. We even hung curtains at the windows and made elaborate nameplates for the front doors. These latter usually reflected the occupants’ home towns or states. As I lived with a group hailing mostly from Lower Saxony, our door was decorated with that province’s rearing white horse with the name ‘Ems’, the region’s largest river, carved beneath it.
According to military law a so-called ‘camp elder’ had to be appointed. His task would be to liaise with the American commandant of the camp, a Captain Henkle (of German descent), and ensure that any orders or instructions given were properly carried out. He would, in effect, be responsible for the internal running of the camp and the maintenance of military discipline among the prisoners.
The job fell to the highest-ranking officer among us, an infantry Oberst by the name of Seiderer, who came from Freising, a town not far to the north of Munich. He was, thank the Lord, neither a stickler for the minutiae of military regulations, nor a political 150 per center, but a solid and down-to-earth frontline soldier. He performed his duties fairly and conscientiously and soon won the trust and respect of the Americans. A small advisory staff helped him manage the everyday affairs of the camp and look after our best interests.
Our official duties within the camp were not exactly onerous. We were required to parade in ranks of three at 07.00hrs every morning to be counted, we were expected to mess together at lunch and dinner–and that was about it. After dinner each evening a spokesman for the camp leaders would make one or two administrative announcements. More importantly, he would also read out that day’s Wehrmacht communiqué broadcast from Germany. This was received via a long-wave radio that one of the signals officers had been able to put together from components he had gathered from somewhere or other. It was a precious link with home that was kept successfully hidden from the Amis until the end of the war.
With little of an official nature to keep us occupied, we turned our attention to our surroundings. The Italians had been just as neglectful of the camp’s open spaces as they had been of their living quarters. When we arrived the huts stood on a barren and dusty expanse of ground broken only here and there by a few tufts of coarse grass. We were determined to improve this depressing vista. We had the necessary money; for in accordance with the rules of the Hague Convention, prisoners of-war of commissioned rank were entitled to receive pay to allow them to buy personal items from the camp canteen (we were even permitted to purchase one bottle of beer per day).
As a Leutnant I got the equivalent of forty US dollars a month in camp currency. Higher ranks received correspondingly more. Every one of us contributed a percentage of his money to a central fund and a considerable sum quickly accrued. This was then paid over to the camp authorities, who arranged for the supply of small garden tools, grass and flower seeds, and suchlike. Full of enthusiasm, we were soon hard at work. Alongside the steps up to the verandas and around the verandas themselves we planted fast-growing climbers. Water was in plentiful supply and so, with the heat of the sun, it was not long before green shoots started to appear all over the camp and the first creepers began climbing up the posts and railings outside the huts.
But the most important task, which every prisoner had to confront and tackle on his own, was to find something that would occupy his mind and keep the dreaded ‘camp twitches’ at bay. We were particularly fortunate in the unusually high level of education and learning among the 1,000 or so officers at Como. In addition to the regular soldiers, many had been academics in civilian life, which offered possibilities for a wide range of activities.
Among us there were college professors and schoolteachers versed in all kinds of subjects: mathematics, physics, languages, philosophy and astronomy. We had sports instructors, artists and professional musicians, including an orchestral conductor. From the world of theatre there was a director, several actors and a make-up man (the last was to play an important part, not only in our drama productions, but also in our future escape plans).
With such a wealth of talent to hand, it was decided to organize the camp along the lines of a university. There would be two terms in the year: the summer term devoted to sports, and the winter term to studies. Our academics were more than happy to offer their services as lecturers and teachers, for this was also an ideal way for them to break up the monotony of life in the camp.
As it was by now August and the ‘summer term’ was already upon us, sports equipment was ordered (again to be paid for from the common fund) and work was started on the necessary facilities. Two tennis courts were laid out–minus the high wire fencing, of course–and covered with a surface layer of fine red ash. We also made a 400-metre running track, dug a long-jump pit, and constructed horizontal and parallel bars for the gymnasts.
To help in the levelling of the cinder running track, the camp authorities kindly made available an ancient cast-iron roller. It took the strength of four men to move this museum piece, which, it was said, dated back to the War of Independence, when its motive power was provided by negro slaves.
It still gives me a certain pang of guilt, even after all these years, to have to admit that we marked out the white lines of the tennis courts with fine white flour! At a time when our nearest and dearest at home were under strict rationing and having to tighten their belts, this could only be described as criminal waste. But we had been supplied with an abundance of flour and were simply observing that old soldiers’ dictum: never return unused rations to stores–you’ll only be issued with less next time.
Our cultural needs were also well catered for. The theatre director had gathered together a talented group of players. With the assistance of the make-up artist they even ventured to stage Gotthold Lessing’s 18th-century comedy ‘Minna von Barnhelm’, with the unmistakably masculine Minna receiving by far the loudest round of applause. The undisputed success of the season, however, was ‘The Green Light’, a thriller with no female roles, which was specially written by an Oberleutnant in the camp who had been a lawyer in Vienna in civilian life.
But our main cultural fare was music. A symphony orchestra of almost professional standards was assembled under the leadership of our conductor. The larger instruments such as the piano, double-bass, drums and brass were again acquired through the camp’s central funds, while the smaller violins, violas, cellos and woodwind instruments were purchased individually by those able to play them. For example, I clubbed together with a comrade to pay sixty dollars for a cello, which we then took turns to play. Several classical string quartets, sometimes enlarged to quintets, were also formed from among the members of the orchestra. One of these I enriched with my own modest musical talents.
The orchestra gave one concert a month, always on a Sunday. The performances were invariably very well received as our quality of playing, even if I do say so myself, was not at all bad. Our repertoire included such pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss and, of course, Dvorák’s New World Symphony. A number of the American officers on the camp staff made a point of attending our concerts whenever their duties permitted, and this latter item always went down well with them.
Our string quartet also tackled one or two more difficult compositions, among them Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. This required a certain amount of expertise and a whole lot of practice. But time to practise was one thing we were not short of at Como.
Theatrical and musical activities were not restricted to either the summer or winter term, but went on all year round. There was one comical incident when the camp announcer made a Freudian slip. He was reading out various items of information to do with our everyday life in camp and had just come to the end of a long litany of announcements, including the names of those who had mail to collect, when he turned to the subject of the following Sunday’s orchestral programme. He had simply jotted down ‘5th Symphony by L. Beethoven’ on his piece of paper, but–with the lengthy list of names and ranks he had just ploughed through probably still in his mind–he unthinkingly read it out as: “5th Symphony by Leutnant Beethoven”. There was such a storm of laughter in the room that the walls shook and a couple of guards came rushing in with weapons drawn thinking that they had a riot on their hands.
During the winter term of 1944/45 I decided it was high time that I started to learn English, and so put my name down for an interpreter’s course. I successfully managed to complete it, thereby qualifying as an assistant interpreter. The details of everybody who enrolled in, and passed, any of the many and varied courses on offer to us were documented in special prisoner-of-war certificate books, and all qualifications thus gained and attested to were officially recognized by the German authorities after our return to the homeland.
For as long as the war lasted we were very well off in material terms. Each side was conscious of its own prisoners in enemy hands, and so the rules of the Geneva Convention were strictly observed. Among other things, this meant that we were entitled to the same level of rations and medical care as American troops in the Zone of the Interior. After a few initial difficulties the mail system also got into its stride and we regularly began to receive (via neutral Switzerland) letters and parcels from our families at home. All correspondence was, of course, subject to censorship, as became apparent from the occasional offending passage in our letters that had been carefully blacked out.
Such minor irritations aside, we really had little to complain about. The absolute fairness with which we were treated by our captors–and the truly international nature of the world of science–was demonstrated by an incident involving our professor of astronomy. Apparently, in 1945 a comet was expected to enter our solar system. Not knowing what havoc it might cause, it was publicly announced in the press that a prize would be awarded to the person, or persons, who could calculate its likely course. Our astronomer read about this competition in the newspaper and applied to enter. It caused a minor sensation in the camp when he was later declared to be the joint winner together with an American observatory.
Despite all these extra-curricular activities, the fact could not be ignored that we were still, first and foremost, prisoners-of war–which brings us to the subject of escape attempts. My lack of proper English ruled me out as an escaper, but just to know that they were going on, just to be able to help–in however small a way–filled one with a certain excitement, tension and, above all, a real sense of satisfaction.
None of the successful escapees from Como ever got all the way back to Germany, it must be said. But geography was overwhelmingly in our captors’ favour. The only ray of hope was the port of New Orleans, some 600 kilometres away near the mouth of the Mississippi. From here it might just have been possible to get aboard a ship bound for one of the neutral countries of Central or South America. But the odds against this were so high as to be almost non-existent.
To stand even the remotest chance of success an escapee had to have four things: sufficient money, the right clothes, excellent English (spoken with an American accent) and the ability to act and behave like an American. Just one of the camp’s 1,000 inmates possessed all four of these attributes. They even got him as far as New Orleans, but there his big mouth let him down. He climbed on a streetcar, not noticing that this was reserved for blacks only. When this was pointed out to him in no uncertain fashion, he reacted violently and a massive free-for-all broke out.
The upshot was that he was returned to us after a four-week absence, still looking somewhat the worse for wear, and promptly sentenced to another four weeks in solitary. This might well have been construed as a contravention of the Hague Convention. But the Americans had a ready answer. The four weeks were not a punishment. They were a term of quarantine imposed to prevent the possible spread among us POWs of any contagious disease he may have picked up on his travels. A likely story, there had been no mention on the radio or in the press of any epidemic in the area.
Another group of escapees managed to make it to the banks of the Mississippi which, at its nearest point, was only about thirty kilometres away from the camp. Here they assembled a couple of kayaks out of the wooden frames and sheets cut from rubberised waterproof raincoats that they had prepared earlier and carted with them to the river. They set off southwards for the delta, travelling only by night and hiding up during the hours of daylight. They didn’t make it very far before being spotted, however, and they too were all brought back to Como to face the music.
Two others pulled off an even more daring escape–one almost worthy of a film–by dressing up as a pair of Ami officers. Wearing their bogus uniforms, some of the items ‘organized’, other bits skilfully hand-made, they marched boldly out of the front gate shortly after the guards had been changed. Strolling casually over to the motor pool, they purloined a jeep and disappeared in the direction of New Orleans. Attempting perhaps to be too clever, they stopped in a patch of woodland, where they set about trying to disguise the vehicle’s military markings. But they were being watched by a ranger, who brought their excursion to an abrupt and inglorious end.
This episode had an unforeseen sequel, for the pair were hauled up in front of a military tribunal. Their temporary ‘borrowing’ of the jeep was looked upon as auto theft, a crime seemingly comparable to horse stealing in the bad old days of the West. And although they might not end up hanging from the nearest tree, it could mean a lengthy term in jail. Luckily, the judges did not lack a spirit of sportsmanship. They handed down a sentence that ultimately allowed the two to be returned home at about the same time as the rest of us.
Incidentally, we regarded our escape attempts in something of a sporting light too, even if each did require planning with an almost general staff-like precision. It was always good to put one over on the Amis. The first thing that had to be done was to find the necessary amount of ‘real’ US dollars, our camp currency being useless outside the wire.
This was not all that difficult, as the GIs were very keen on anything hand-made by German POWs. Some of our more gifted comrades did a roaring trade in such things as violins–made either of wood, which could be easily procured, or out of thousands of matchsticks–wooden ornaments or sculptures of all kinds (the female form was always a hot favourite), decorated lampshades and paintings. These items were all paid for in cash, twenty-five per cent of which had to go to the camp committee, who administered it as a secret ‘escape fund’.
Any clothing, either civilian or military, that was required for a planned escape attempt would be made by the tailors of the Betriebskompanie, or ‘servicing company’. This was modelled along the lines of the Luftwaffe’s airfield servicing companies. It was composed of a group of about thirty NCOs and other ranks, all craftsmen or artisans skilled in a wide variety of trades and professions, who looked after the camp’s internal maintenance and day-to-day needs. We had our own bakers, for example, who ensured that we were supplied with German-style bread. And on a more clandestine level there were metalworkers who could provide authentic-looking American badges and insignia–at least up to the rank of captain–simply by fashioning them out of empty tin cans.
Once a group of would-be escapees–usually numbering between two and six–had formulated a plan it had to be submitted to the escape committee. If it was given the go-ahead, the requisite funds were allocated and the date, time and exact spot for the attempt would be fixed. Most attempts were made during the hours of darkness, of course, preferably during a new moon period, or half moon at the very most. Once these details were settled, the following arrangements had to be put in place for the actual execution of the breakout:
- Depending upon the direction of the wind on the night, the occupants of the huts nearest to the spot in the wire where the escape was to be made had to bank up their stoves in order to produce as much covering smoke as possible. Time: H-hour minus twenty minutes.
- H-hour minus five minutes: two men had to crawl across to the wire, cut a hole of just under a metre square in both the inner and outer fences, and then remain in place flat on the ground under cover of the wire. (These two would be armed with a pair of wire-cutters that someone had once ‘liberated’. They were the camp’s prized possession, second perhaps only to the secret radio, and were guarded like the crown jewels.)
- H-hour: the escape group, together with whatever luggage or equipment that needed to be taken, to exit through the wire.
- Immediately thereafter, the ‘cutting party’ were to repair the hole in the wire and return to their hut.
As far as I am aware, the guards never once caught a group while it was in the act of escaping through the wire. The next and far more difficult problem arose on the morning following the escape when we were paraded to be counted–how to hide the fact that several of our number were missing? We came up with an ingenious solution.
Like every army in the world the Americans had a strict system of drill, which we were able to turn to our advantage. On parade we always had to fall in in three ranks, one behind the other. Our senior officer would then give the command: ‘Attention!’, and we would stand there like stuffed dummies while he reported the number of POWs present and correct on parade to the American camp commandant. This was checked by the duty sergeant, who strode along the front rank counting off the files and then multiplying their number by three to arrive at the final total.
But all was not as it seemed. Our theatre make-up artist had made six extremely life-like but very different dummy heads (I recall one having an unshaven appearance and another with a large sticking plaster on its cheek). These could be mounted on simple frames, which were then dressed in POW clothing. On the morning after an escape each of the dummies–their exact number determined by how many men had got away–would be carried out on to the parade ground by two ‘minders’. This trio was surrounded by a close knot of other prisoners who masked their movements until all three, the two men with the dummy between them, had taken their place in the rear rank.
With the rest of us brought to attention and also standing ramrod straight and stock still, the subterfuge was complete and practically impossible to detect. (In fact, the Amis didn’t realize what had been happening until the end of the war, when we finally confessed to what we had been up to–and then even they saw the funny side of it.)
That wasn’t quite all, however. We couldn’t keep up the pretence forever. It was therefore decided that we would use the trick with the dummies for just three days, which should give the escapees more than ample time to get well away from the immediate area of the camp. On the fourth morning after the escape our senior officer, who was quite a few ranks higher than the American camp commandant, would officially announce the news of the escape.
This was always followed by the same ritual. Firstly the commandant would give vent to his feelings by loudly cussing us ‘damned Krauts’. Then he would get the guards down from the watchtowers and have them locked up (unfortunately, they were invariably the wrong ones). Next he would order the entire camp to be thoroughly searched, for there was always the possibility that the crafty Fritzes had simply gone into hiding and were waiting to escape at their leisure some time later. While all this was going on we were kept out on the parade ground, usually for the remainder of the morning.
Such was our small contribution to the continuing war against the Western allies. But the nearer we got to 1945, the worse the news of the actual war became–and with it the deeper our mood of depression. Our many comrades with families and loved ones still living in Germany’s larger towns and cities suffered particularly badly whenever we heard reports of the almost nightly raids by hundreds of British bombers. I was slightly better off in this respect, for our house in Rosenheim was a long way away from the firing line, and none of my close relatives was fighting at the front.
Christmas 1944 in Camp Como was a muted and sombre affair. In the succeeding days our mood was not helped by the realization that the Ardennes counter-offensive was not about to bring the hoped-for change in Germany’s fortunes. Even our leaders’ long promised and much vaunted ‘Wunderwaffen’–first the V1 flying bombs that I had witnessed in England, and now the V2 rocket–were delivering only sporadic pinpricks. Little wonder that our last hopes, pinned on the so-called ‘Superwaffe’, now began to fade. And when, at the end of January 1945, the Red Army stormed across Germany’s eastern borders, an air of fatalism descended over the whole camp.
At last we were being forced to swallow the bitter pill of reality. We knew now that the allies were certain to achieve their stated aim of reducing Germany to total impotence; a nation without power and without a future.
The French were demanding that Germany be split up and divided amongst its neighbours (on the grounds of European hegemony). The Americans and the British advocated implementation of the 1944 Morgenthau Plan, which would reduce Germany to a purely agrarian state (for economic reasons). The Poles, with the support of the Russians (motivated by a mixture of revenge, hatred and expansionism) intended to annex Germany’s eastern territories and drive out their ethnic populations.
And over it all hung the allies’ insistence on simultaneous unconditional surrender on all fronts.