The Great Escapers

Tom, Dick and Harry

By now the Luftwaffe had decided that Stalag Luft III would be an officer-only prison camp. As a result, that spring the NCOs were moved out to their own camp. Colonel von Lindeiner believed that if he made the new North Compound as comfortable as possible, the prisoners would be quite content to sit out the war in peace. Consequently, he indulged them in a manner that his superiors in Berlin found irritating but many of the Allies appreciated. Indeed, the opening of the North Compound was later referred to by some as the beginning of ‘the Golden Era’ of Stalag Luft III’s history. There was more space, more food, more recreational and athletic activity than ever before. Against the advice of his security staff, von Lindeiner allowed some trees to remain in the space separating the compound and the Kommandantur and he gave the prisoners permission to build their own theatre – which they did, using excess timber donated by the Germans and old Red Cross boxes. Over the forthcoming year the theatre was to stage everything from Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Importance of Being Earnest and The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Besides von Lindeiner’s natural decency, one reason for his generosity was that he had been lulled into a feeling that the prisoners were giving up on their attempts to escape. This was in part due to Roger Bushell taking Wings Day’s advice and toning down escape activity for the last few months of 1942 and early 1943. So convinced of the prisoners’ goodwill was the Kommandant that he allowed them to go over to the nascent compound in the months before it was built. The result was that the prisoners had plenty of time to make sure their various escape materials could be transferred to the new compound. They had time to plan and execute the dismantling of the radio which they had constructed out of stolen valves, wire and batteries. And they had time to plan the next new escape. Prisoners began trickling over to the new compound in late March. Von Lindeiner may not have realised that he chose an ominous date for the main move of the prisoners into the North Compound: 1 April.

Even before they moved in, the prisoners were hatching plans for a mass break-out of the North Compound. Before Jimmy Buckley had been transferred to Szubin, and Wings Day with him, the then SBO appointed Roger Bushell ‘Big X’, the chairman of the Escape Committee. It was not entirely true, as some have claimed, that Roger Bushell was entirely indifferent to the Gestapo’s threats. ‘He thought very carefully about it,’ recalls Bub Clark, who messed with Bushell for a while. ‘It was only after a great deal of consideration that he agreed to take on escape duties once more.’ But it is true to say that Bushell was hellbent on causing the Germans as much aggravation as possible. ‘He had some very radical ideas about escape. His dream was a massive escape. Whether they all got home or not, he didn’t care. The idea was to cause as much disruption to the German war effort as possible.’

Bushell’s appointment marked a new beginning for the X-Organisation. Gone would be the amateurish attempts of the past and the foolish risks of the gentleman escapers; from now on the business of escape would be treated as a professional undertaking that evaluated every plan carefully and executed each one with meticulous attention to detail. From now on the Escape Committee would be dominated by ‘the big four’ overseeing the key aspects of escaping. Bushell was in overall command of planning and strategy. Peter Fanshawe was responsible for the onerous task of dispersing hundreds of tons of sand. Wally Floody was in charge of tunnelling. And Bub Clark was ‘Big S’ – responsible for creating a watertight security operation that would keep all these activities a secret from the goons.

Under Bushell’s leadership, the Escape Committee quickly came to three important decisions that were to govern future break-outs. First, every escape would be conducted under the auspices of the committee. In the past the committee had merely approved and authorised various escape plans, making sure they didn’t clash with others and offering the escapers any help or advice they could. From now on there would be no more ‘freelance’ operations. The committee would approve, authorise and control each escape.

Second, it was decided that the main emphasis of escape activity would be on tunnels and the tunnels would be as large and sophisticated as possible. In the past there had been too many tunnels compromised by shoddy workmanship, or given away through lack of security. One barrack block had actually sunk into its foundations because there were so many tunnels running underneath it. From now on the security operation would be watertight and X-Organisation would be run with military efficiency. Sand dispersal, which in the past had so often given away tunnel activity and led to blanket searches by the goons, would now be a carefully controlled operation.

The escape organisation would start building three tunnels that would be minor feats of engineering genius. The plan was for the tunnels to be sunk 25 feet down to evade the ring of seismographs the ferrets had constructed around the compound. They would be built to the standards of industrial mining shafts with ventilation pipes, air pumps, trolleys and electricity diverted from the compound supply. Bushell was not worried if one of the tunnels was to be found. The Germans would be so impressed by what they found they wouldn’t believe it was possible similar structures could simultaneously exist.

Finally, the direction of each tunnel was decided in advance. In this respect the prisoners had very little choice. The Kommandantur was situated directly to the east of the North Compound (behind the thicket of trees von Lindeiner had kindly agreed to keep) and beyond that were the Centre and East compounds. It would be far too dangerous going underneath the Germans. And the distance before the tunnel reached the cover of the woods was too great. A similar problem existed to the south. The South Compound had yet to be built, but there already existed a sports field and, again, the woods were many hundreds of yards beyond that. The tunnels would have to go west and north. The Escape Committee decided on both directions. Two tunnels would go west, the most direct route out of the camp. One would start in Block 123 close to the wire. Another from Block 122 next to 123 and a little nearer the centre of the North Compound. The last tunnel would go north directly under the parcel store and cooler from Block 104. So that no mention of the word ‘tunnel’ would alert the Germans, each was given a name: Tom, Dick and Harry, respectively. If Colonel von Lindeiner did not realise that 1 April was April Fools’ Day in Britain, it was unlikely he understood the waspish connotations of ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ either.

Ironically, von Lindeiner’s concern for the comfort of his charges produced the circumstances that allowed the prisoners to hide the entrances to their tunnels. The new compound was indeed luxurious compared to the old one. In the East Compound the prisoners had to walk in fair weather or foul to the communal washroom and latrine blocks. In the North Compound each block boasted its own toilets, washing and basic cooking facilities. As in the old compound, each barrack block was raised off the ground on stilts. But the new blocks had at least a small section of solid brick and concrete work beneath the new domestic facilities. The ferrets and their dogs could look under the blocks as much as they liked, but they would never be able to see what was going on inside the concrete and cement. The Germans presumably thought that it would be impossible to conceal a tunnel entrance in the smooth concrete base of the showers and beneath the stoves. They were wrong.

The trap entrances to each tunnel were ingenious. They had to be because in one respect the Germans were right: it is difficult to hide a hole in a smooth concrete surface. The task of concealing the entrances was given to a group of Polish RAF officers who were skilled engineers. They were equipped with the best tools that had been scavenged and pilfered over the previous months and they were blessed with the easy availability of cement, which was in ample supply thanks to the numerous repair and construction jobs that needed to be done almost every day. The contribution of these Polish officers to the tunnel operation cannot be underestimated. Without their skill and ingenuity it is unlikely the tunnels would ever have got beyond the drawing board.

The tunnel entrance in Tom was situated in a passageway in the Polish officers’ barracks near the kitchen. It was probably the most audacious of all the entrances, because it was situated in an area that the German guards would walk over regularly. It had to be constructed with such precision that no hollow sounds or cracks betrayed its existence there in front of the eyes of anyone who cared to look. It consisted of an 18-inch square hole in the concrete floor, just wide enough for a man to descend into. The hole was disguised by a square slab of concrete in a wooden frame constructed to be the same size as the hole to within a fraction of an inch. The wooden frame allowed two wire handles to be attached either side. These handles would lie beneath the surface, but could be lifted up by the insertion of a specially designed knife into the minute crack surrounding the concrete slab. The crack was disguised by being pasted up with cement and having floor dust sprinkled around it. The Polish officers had completed their task with such precision that even they sometimes had difficulty locating the edges of the trap-door.

The tunnel entrance of Dick in Block 122 was also through a concrete base, but it was of an entirely different design to Tom’s. It was constructed in the washroom, which had two washbasins on either side. The used water from these basins drained into two sides of a drainage sump in the middle of the room. The sump was eighteen inches square and about two feet deep. On its third side ran the waste-water pipe. The sump was usually half-full of waste water, offering a perfect disguise. The prisoners emptied the sump, and removed the fourth side that had no pipes attached to it. They replaced this with a concrete slab that could be moved up or down and was the entrance to the tunnel. When it was in place, a mixture of clay and cement rendered it watertight. The waste water that was thrown back in the sump rendered it virtually invisible to the enquiring eye.

The trap-door in Harry was beneath one of the stoves that was in the corner of every room. The cast-iron stoves stood on a tiled surface about four feet square. The tiles were laid on a flat cement surface that was part of a sturdy brick-and-concrete pile that descended into the sandy ground beneath Block 104. The engineers constructed the trap-door by removing the tiles one by one and replacing them on an identically sized concrete surface of their own construction. This concrete slab was designed like the one in Tom: surrounded by a sturdy wooden frame with wire handles that could be lifted out of the cracks either side with a knife and used to pull up the trap-door. It was hinged at the back and could be lifted into a vertical position. Before this could be done, of course, the heavy cast-iron stove had to be removed from the tiled surface. This was achieved using bed boards that had been crafted into lifting handles. The final precaution of the prisoners concerned the chimney pipe that led from the stove into a brick chimney on the wall. In the course of removing the stove the diggers would inevitably interrupt the flow of smoke. Hence a removable extension chimney pipe was built at an angle to the chimney so that smoke would continue to flow.

One of the biggest problems that needed to be overcome in constructing these entrances was disguising the noise of the cement being chipped away. The solution was provided in the form of Johnny Dodge, who held choir-singing practice whenever noisy work was under way (a role immortalised in the film of the Great Escape by the fictional Cavendish).

The constructions of these three trap-doors were minor feats of engineering in themselves. But what was equally impressive was the way the Polish engineers overcame the onerous conditions under which they had to build them. And while each trap was being engineered the prisoners ran the greatest risk of detection. However, once the trap-doors had been manufactured, a major obstacle had been overcome.

The next hurdle was to dig three shafts down 25 feet deep into the sandy soil beneath each block, cutting through, first, up to two feet of solid concrete and brickwork. There were three tunnelling teams. Wally Floody, as tunnel engineer in chief, was responsible for Harry; Ker-Ramsay and Harry Marshall took charge of Dick and Tom respectively.

The first priority was to create a shaft in each case that would have at its base three distinct chambers: one for a ventilation pump; one to house a workshop; and one to temporarily store the sand excavated. This last point was important because if the sand had to be taken out of the tunnels as the digging progressed, the entrances would have to be kept open, increasing the risk of detection. The diggers excavated at the rate of five feet a go. The tunnels were a uniform two feet square with on one side a cavity about six inches square that would accommodate the ventilation tube. When five feet of digging had been completed the walls were securely shored up with four wooden bunk-bedposts in each corner, attached to one another with cross pieces. Once they had been secured, the walls were lined with wooden bed boards, the last side being completed after the ventilation tube had been added. The ventilation tube was constructed by attaching used tin food cans to one another, with their tops and bottoms cut out. A ladder was also constructed on one side of each shaft. Each shaft had five of these segments, making them all 25 feet deep.

The three chambers at the base of the shafts were testimony to how serious Bushell was about these tunnels. The ventilation chamber consisted of two different-sized boxes. One of two feet square housed the pump – one of the most important innovations of Stalag Luft III. The men who designed the pumps were Bob Nelson, a Yorkshireman captured in North Africa in September 1942, and the Norwegian RAF flier Jens Muller. Their creation consisted of a simple rectangular structure made out of Red Cross boxes. Fitting snugly inside the box were the tubular bellows made from kitbags sewn together and reinforced with wire. These bellows could be pushed in and out with a large handle. Leather flaps acted as valves, drawing air in at one end and expelling it at the other. The intake pipe (made of Klim cans) snaked its way up the entry shaft through the ground above where it was camouflaged behind a ventilation brick. The exhaust pipe was attached to the ventilation ducts made of Klim cans along the tunnel. The prisoners had experimented with primitive kinds of ventilation pumps before, but Nelson and Muller’s invention marked a new departure as far as reliability and capacity went. The machines were easy to use and install, and easy to repair. It meant that the diggers could now guarantee far longer working hours down the tunnel, in far more pleasant conditions.

Adjacent to the main chamber for the ventilation pump was another about four feet by four which gave the pump operator sufficient space to move backwards and forwards when he was operating the machine. The other two chambers had their sizes dictated by the dimensions of the double bunk beds on which they depended for their frames. They were both 5 ft 6 in. high, and 2 ft 9 in. wide. The storage room was a full six feet long and the workshop was three feet long. The dimensions of the storage room were enough to store the excavated sand from about 20 feet of tunnel.

While the digging was going on underground a much bigger operation was going on above. Construction and digging on this massive scale created all sorts of supply problems. The timber was acquired from Red Cross boxes and pilfering any supplies the prisoners could get their hands on in the compound. But the most consistent supply came from the boards underneath bunk beds. A ‘levy’ was raised on all the 2,000 beds in the compound, gradually increasing as the tunnelling progressed.

Peter Fanshawe quickly solved the problem of disposing of the enormous amount of sandy soil. Fanshawe devised an ingenious new system of what became known as ‘penguins’. Inside their own trousers, the penguins would carry bags made out of sewn-up trouser-legs full of small amounts of sand. A string that led from their pockets to the bag pulled a pin that released the sand. The penguins simply ambled about the compound scuffing the sand into the surface.

At the same time, hundreds of prisoners were working in ‘factories’ all over the camp producing the myriad of escape material necessary once the men had got out. There was a tailoring department set up under Tommy Guest and Ivo Tonder, mainly manned by Czech and Polish RAF officers. The tailors produced civilian suits and German uniforms from the officers’ own uniforms but also from new material acquired from tame goons, or simply stolen.

Tim Walenn was put in charge of the forgery department. Flight Lieutenant Gilbert William ‘Tim’ Walenn was a quiet but waggish young man who sported a bushy, ginger handlebar moustache that belied a sharp mind and uncompromising nature. He was barely 26 when he found himself in Sagan after falling into German hands when his RAF plane crashed near Rotterdam in the early hours of 10 September 1941. In civilian life Walenn had been a banker but fortunately for the escapers of Stalag Luft III he had started out as a graphic artist designing wallpapers and fabric for his uncle’s design studio in London. Up until now, very few RAF escapers had embarked on their adventures with anything remotely resembling good forgeries of passbooks, railway tickets and so forth. But from now on the X-Organisation decided accurately produced forged documents were essential accoutrements to the escaper’s survival kit. Walenn’s graphic skills would prove to be extraordinarily useful in reproducing a panoply of forged papers that were required for passage around the Nazi heartland. They called the forgery department ‘Dean & Dawson’, after a well-known London travel agency. And over the following months Dean & Dawson would employ scores of prisoners producing intricately copied government passes and typewritten paperwork indistinguishable from the originals.

The task was an important one because of the Germans’ obsession with documentation of all sorts. The ubiquitous Ausweise and vorläufiger Ausweise were passes and temporary passes respectively that had to be carried by every civilian, and it was almost impossible to get around Germany without one or the other. The light grey Kennkarte was another form of identity card. A carte d’identité would suffice for France. A Soldbuch was the pay book without which no German soldier could survive. A polizeiliche Bescheinigung was a police permit for foreign workers, of which there were some 6,000,000 in the Reich at the height of the war. An Urlaubsschein was also a pass for foreign workers: a temporary pass permitting leave. The Rückkehrschein was the pass a foreign worker needed to release him to return to his country, and a Dienstausweis was a brown card that granted a foreign worker permission to be on Wehrmacht property. This is just a handful of the dozens of passes and identity cards required as an everyday part of life in Hitler’s Germany.

Some of these documents were complex affairs, often with intricate patterns woven into the paper and sometimes with ornate Gothic script. Others were more basic but most of them required patience and diligence to re-create and the best part of a month’s work to produce for each individual item. These documents were reserved for the prisoners who had a very real chance of escaping, but Dean & Dawson also created other types of documents. Some were entirely fictitious passes, letters and forms that might nevertheless be impressive enough to convince some of the more dimwitted Reich officials. Simple, typewritten documents were little more than that. Typically, they might be letters on headed notepaper from important firms, like Siemens for instance, asking that an employee be granted passage while more permanent documentation was prepared. Or letters from girlfriends, wives or parents, intended to convince any enquiring minds that the escapers were who they said they were.

Dean & Dawson also accumulated a treasure trove of real documents on which to base their forgeries. These were acquired by theft, bribery and blackmail by prisoners in the camp and those who escaped and returned.

‘There were always some German soldiers who for some American cigarettes or some honest-to-goodness soap would take considerable risks on our behalf,’ recalls Bub Clark. ‘We had people in the X-Organisation whose sole function was to obtain this kind of material and information. Some of them became very skilled. I often wondered what kind of jobs they went into after the war!’ One officer commented that there was more extortion going on in Stalag Luft III than an entire small American town.

Sydney Dowse had a contact who worked in the censor department in the Vorlager. Corporal Hesse was a veritable fount of many authentic documents as was the Hundführer, the German in charge of the camp’s guard dogs. One of the most effective Allied officers was Marcel Zillessen, nicknamed ‘the scrounger’, who had tamed Keen Type and was reliably thought to be able to get his hands on anything that was asked for. The raw materials with which to make the forgeries also sometimes came from friendly guards who were prepared to supply paper, card, ink, pen-nibs and other drawing implements. Bob van der Stok managed to create a waterproof black ink after acquiring from a Polish worker in the hospital some glycerine, ether and oil that he mixed with soot. But these raw materials were also foraged from the hundreds of books and Red Cross parcels that were sent to the prisoners. Book bindings could sometimes be refined into hard pass covers. If suitably thick the end papers might make adequate pages for passbooks. They could always be stained to the correct colour in the time immemorial method of soaking them in coffee or tea. The prisoners were allowed much drawing material anyway, such as paintbrushes, for what von Lindeiner presumed were legitimate artistic pursuits.

There were only a handful forgers, partly because the job was so demanding that few could do it properly, and partly for security reasons: the forgers all needed to have access to light, which meant working by the windows and sometimes under the prying eyes of ferrets. The forgery department made use of every conceivable material available in the camp. Official stamps were crafted out of the rubber from the soles of boots. Toilet tissue and wafer-thin flyleaves from books were used as tracing paper. There was a department for duplicating maps, which used gelatine from food parcels.

Bub Clark recalls that the forgery department brought out hitherto unknown talents in people. ‘My favourite story is about one of the most wonderful forgers we had in the camp. He could take a quick look at a passport and do a wonderful job imitating it. He retired as president of a bank in Blacksburg, Virginia. Very fine man!’

The manufacturing operation went far beyond Tommy Guest’s tailoring department and Tim Walenn’s forgers. An Australian Kriegie, Al Hake, was in charge of the compass factory. Hake, unusually, was a non-commissioned officer who had joined the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve in 1941. He was flying a Spitfire on an escort mission over France when he was shot down by a pack of Focke-Wulf 190s. Hake baled out and was sent to hospital to have minor burns treated. Because his insignia had been burnt off his uniform, the Germans had no idea of his rank but presumed he must have been an officer to be flying a Spitfire. Hake did nothing to disabuse them and shortly afterwards he found himself in Stalag Luft III. Once in the POW camp the Escape Committee was able to draw on Hake’s talent, fostered at school, for technical drawing and metalwork. As a boy he had always enjoyed making gadgets and to make the compasses Hake had acquired a large magnet from one of his German contacts and collected as many of the prisoners’ razor blades as they would allow him to lay his hands on. A team of prisoners then went about magnetising the blades by painstakingly stroking the razors over the magnet in the same direction. The process took the best part of a day but by the end of it the result was a perfectly magnetised razor blade.

The blade was then secured in a vice – in fact a hinge from the shutters that barred the barrack-block windows – and snapped into narrow slithers producing several perfect magnetic needles. The compass case was made from the melted Bakelite plastic of phonographic records moulded into a case. The compass card was made from thin discs of cardboard. Hake made a thin paintbrush out of his own hair and meticulously painted the compass points on the cardboard in white paint. The luminous compass points were made from the hands of the Kommandant’s alarm clock, which had been stolen from his office. The razor blade was balanced on a needle made from the phonograph needle. At the end of the process, Hake stamped every compass with the inscription: Made in Stalag Luft III. Patent Pending. By March 1944 more than 500 of these compasses had been made.

It was Bub Clark’s job to keep all this activity away from the prying eyes of the goons. To do so, Clark developed a security system that depended upon an elaborate system of watchers (called stooges), a complex semaphore system, security officers in charge of each barrack called ‘Little Ss’ and, finally, officers responsible for controlling each tunnel trap (jokingly dubbed ‘Trapführers’). (Each barrack also had its own ‘Little X’, whose job mirrored that of Big X, Roger Bushell, on a lower level.) The compound was divided down the middle from north to south. The eastern section of this division was known as the safe, or ‘S’, zone because it was the furthest away from the tunnels. The western section was the danger, or ‘D’, zone. The rule was that digging and other covert activity could continue as long as there were no ferrets in the ‘D’ zone, but the moment a ferret walked over the line, everything was closed down.

Keeping an eye on the ferrets were scores of prisoners positioned all over the compound. The stooges would all be engaged in innocent activity – reading books, jogging, sunbathing or digging vegetable patches – but their eyes would be following every movement of the ferrets both inside the compound and outside. And at the gate of the compound a stooge, called a ‘duty pilot’, was on guard. It was the duty pilot’s job to count the ferrets and guards who went in and out of the compound, keeping a tab of how many, and which, German staff were inside the compound at any one time.

It was the job of the Little Ss to make sure that their individual barracks were always empty of ferrets – either hiding in the lofts or underneath the block. Finally, the duty pilot, stooges, Little Ss and Trapführers, all communicated with one another, either by word, or by a semaphore system developed by Clark’s deputies, George Harsh and George McGill. The system depended sometimes on standard semaphore hand signals but also on surreptitious signals – such as a man reading a book. If he closed it or opened it and how he did so could send a variety of different messages.

The system was by no means perfect. Given his prominent position, it was not always possible for the duty pilot to remain inconspicuous. Glemnitz and Rubberneck often took great delight in reminding Allied officers to put their names down in the book when entering or leaving the compound. Nor were the Germans quite so foolish as to think their movements were not being watched. The stooges often missed a trick and the goons often managed to evade them. Sometimes the goons would break into a run, catching the stooges by surprise. Often the only response the prisoners could muster was to ‘accidentally’ stumble into them, or stage a mock fight that blocked their way. It was a game of cat and mouse and there were plenty of incidents when a goon nearly walked right into one or other of the tunnelling, forging or tailoring operations.

Much of X-Organisation’s escape material was obtained from the Germans by bribery or coercion. With their Red Cross parcels the prisoners were in possession of a valuable commodity to their hapless guards. After years of surviving on the ubiquitous ersatz creations of the German catering corps, real chocolate, cigarettes and coffee were tempting luxuries. Some of them even developed a taste for tinned British bully-beef. Some of the bribery, though, came in the form of cash and it did not take a great deal to persuade the Germans to part with valuable goods such as wire cutters, pliers or magnifying glasses; equally valuable was information in the form of railway timetables and so on.

It was a ruthless business. The officers were well aware of the fact that they were using their ‘privileged’ position to manipulate ordinary German soldiers who were labouring under a brutal regime and faced terrible penalties if they were caught, but many members of the German staff of Stalag Luft III were far from reluctant to help the prisoners, regardless of the risks, especially as the tide of the war began to turn. Some helped in ways that went far beyond casual assistance. They tipped off Kriegies when barrack blocks were to be searched. They provided the airmen with copies of the signatures that appeared on various documents. Hauptmann Pieber lent the prisoners his Leica camera and developed and printed their photographs for them. Ostensibly they were to send to their relatives back home; in reality they were being used on fake passes – as Pieber well knew. One of the Germans was actually given an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris by the Escape Committee, and in return provided it with details of documents escapers would require in the French capital and methods of contacting the resistance movement. This sort of illicit trade is almost impossible to prevent between captives and captors in any situation. In Germany, as the war turned against the Germans, it expanded exponentially.

The prisoners were reluctant to bribe the goons with cash because they were building up a stash for themselves, to be used when the break-out came. But some of the cash that was used to bribe the Germans came from a communal ‘escape fund’ that was managed by some of the Canadian officers in the camp. The fund was built from profits from a system called ‘Foodacco’ brought in by the RAF officers from Warburg. It was a form of Exchange and Mart, whereby food and tobacco were exchanged on a system of points, the unit of which was the cigarette. All the profits, which turned out to be considerable over the months, went to the escape fund.

Last but not least was the Escape Committee’s intelligence section, which came under the auspices of Wally Valenta. The value of this section was incalculable in devising escape routes for the escapers to follow and providing all the various manufacturing plants – Tim Walenn’s forgery department, Des Plunkett’s maps department, Tommy Guest’s tailors – with the correct information they needed to produce suitably convincing bogus material. The intelligence department was divided into different zones. Wally was the expert on Czechoslovakia, of course; van der Stok was in charge of accumulating intelligence on the Low Countries; Bushell on Germany; and Tom Kirby-Green on Spain. Arnold Christensen and Halldor Espelid covered Scandinavia. René Marcinkus, a Lithuanian member of the RAF, was a general authority on occupied territory, but had particular responsibility for the Baltic ports, which would be vital to many of the escapers’ plans.

The intelligence-gathering side of the X-Organisation touches upon a thorny issue regarding the prisoners of war because, despite their later denials to the contrary, there is no doubt they were involved in espionage activity, in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention. The intelligence sections did not just accumulate information that would be helpful to their escape plans, they also gathered anything that could be remotely useful to their governments in London and Washington DC. The sort of information they were able to provide ranged from descriptions of Luftwaffe flight movements that they could see from the ground, to details of military movements and emplacements that they could observe outside the camp either on parole walks or whenever a prisoner escaped. General knowledge about German morale picked up from tame goons was useful enough, but the prisoners also discovered secret military information from their contacts, like Sydney Dowse’s Corporal Hesse, who passed it on, sometimes wittingly, sometimes otherwise.

The men communicated this information home via a variety of clandestine ways. One method was through their letters home deploying a simple code that a British bomber pilot had created to communicate with his wife in the event of being shot down. It proved such an easy code that it was adopted by the intelligence sections. Groups of officers were given the responsibility of sending intelligence home in their letters to their families; they in turn passed this information on to the intelligence services. But contact could also be made verbally by the prisoners’ links with the underground movement, either facilitated via tame goons or whenever a prisoner escaped. The underground movement all over occupied Europe was in constant touch with Britain’s MI9, the secret escape-and-evasion service that was set up at the beginning of the war to get pilots home. After the fall of France and the complete collapse of MI6’s European espionage network, MI9 assumed much of its intelligence-gathering role.

It is important that the prisoners’ extensive involvement in spying should be recorded, because each and every one of them was aware that what they were doing was in breach of the Geneva Convention. As spies, they could be shot.

After starting the initial work on the traps on 11 April, it took the best part of the following six weeks to construct the three vertical shafts. The work was not without its incidents, which often were hair-raising. On several occasions the diggers had narrowly escaped falls. Having to re-excavate the affected sections proved frustrating, but nobody was hurt. The fumes from the fat lamps were a major problem. Men were coming down all the time with respiratory illnesses and some got conjunctivitis. However, in one new arrival to the camp, the tunnellers found a tireless worker who seemed to be immune to any sort of illness. Porokoru Patapu Pohe was a Maori of the RNZAF who was better known as ‘Johnny’. Pohe was flying a Halifax bomber of 51 Squadron when it was hit by flak over Germany in September 1943. Pohe, a very skilled pilot, almost managed to get the machine back to Britain but in the end he had to perform the lesser feat of crash-landing it in the Channel. The three crew that were left were floating in a dinghy for two days before the Germans picked them up. After Dulag Luft, Pohe was sent first to Stalag Luft VI before arriving at Sagan. Born in Wanganui, New Zealand, Pohe grew up in a big family on his father's farm. At school he was more interested in sport than academic work, mainly rugby, tennis, cricket and golf. Before joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force, he served for two years in the Manawatu Mounted Rifles. When Pohe, then aged 26, embarked for England via Canada, a prominent thought in his mind was his sisters and baby brother Kawana, almost 20 years his junior. He wrote back to his family that the thought of little Kawana often brought tears to his eyes at night. From England he carried out 22 operational flights over enemy territory as part of 51 Squadron, including dropping paratroopers in the legendary Bruneval commando raid attacking the German radar facility. It was on a bombing raid over Hanover that Pohe was finally brought down. However, the Germans may have thought his war was over, but to Pohe it never ended and he brought his cheerful and indomitable personality to the tunnellers of Sagan.

By the end of May all three shafts and their base chambers were finished and much of both Tom and Dick’s horizontal tunnel was under way. The excavation teams began to move forward at a steady pace, shoring up the roof as they went along and adding a railway line every 20 feet they progressed. The railway, or trolley, line was one of the innovations that made each tunnel such a work of engineering genius. Each tunnel was only two feet square and as a result it was a physically exhausting and often painful business for the digger to crawl along. The addition of the trolleys meant that men as well as about 200 pounds of sand could be transported back and forth from the digging face. The trolleys, which were two and a half feet long and a foot wide, were made from stools and benches from the barrack blocks. Their wheels were made to normal railway design with hard wood rimmed by tin plating. The axles were made from the guard rails from the cooking stoves in every officers’ room. They supported a removable box on top that was used to transport the sand.

Digging was not quite the dangerous business that might be imagined. The risks of a collapse were real, but so long as the shored-up sections were sound, the diggers were only in danger in the sections that they were actively excavating. Since these were rarely longer than four or five feet, even if the worst came to the worst, it would only be a matter of seconds before they would be dragged out. A frightening experience no doubt, but nobody lost their lives in the tunnels. It was, however, a gruelling business. The men usually dug naked. Those that were a little prudish wore long johns. But any sort of clothing merely increased the amount of washing to be done afterwards. The fabric also dragged along the sand. The process was laborious. The digger at the face lay with a trowel and scraped the sand past his body to a second man, who loaded the sand onto the trolley. Once the trolley was full, that man gave a tug on the rope and the man behind him at the haulage point would drag the trolley back. The sand would be stored in the storage chamber and the trolley sent back loaded with further supplies of shoring panels, milk cans for the ventilation pipe and so on. At the end of the day, the sand was painstakingly poured into large metal water jugs and pulled up to the top of the shaft where it became the responsibility of Fanshawe’s penguins.

In the meantime, other escape activity was not neglected. In early June the prisoners were to stage their first mass escape attempt. It would be Bob van der Stok’s third effort and it came tantalisingly close to success. It was a far more sophisticated and risky ploy than he had attempted in the past. A regular feature of camp life was delousing parties. The Germans feared any outbreak of lice, quite rightly, because the creatures could spark a typhus epidemic. The prisoners rather looked forward to an outbreak, especially if the weather was good, because it meant a few precious moments of freedom on the brief walk outside the wire to visit the delousing block in the hospital compound. The routine was for groups of prisoners to be escorted out of the North Compound under watchful guard. Once they were out of the gates, they turned right and marched along the road for a few hundred yards to the East Compound, where the hospital block was situated. The wire was on their right. On their left was the opening before the tree-line and beyond that beckoned at least the possibility of freedom in the form of the railway tracks and eventually Sagan station.

When an outbreak of lice was discovered in early June 1943 the Germans ordered parties of prisoners to be taken to the East Compound Vorlager for delousing. The Escape Committee had already forged a plan to take advantage of such a situation. They would send a bogus party to follow the real delousing parties. This would consist of 24 prisoners guarded by two fake German Unteroffiziere (junior non-commissioned officers) guards. The ‘guards’ were actually Belgian officers who spoke fluent German and were dressed in passable imitations of German uniforms created by Tommy Guest. Bob van der Stok had blackmailed a guard by stuffing his pockets with Red Cross food and threatening to report him as a thief unless he cooperated. The guard supplied Stok with Luftwaffe buttons, a field cap and some embroidered shoulder patches. The other badges and belt buckles were crafted by Jens Muller, who made the eagles for the lapels out of melted silver foil, using soap moulds to gain an impression. The guns were fashioned out of blocks of wood by another Belgian officer, Henri Picard, who took painstaking measurements of the goons’ carbines. Muller and another officer also spent a week making fake rifles, the most difficult prop to create. One of the ‘guards’ carried a real gate pass supplied by Sydney Dowse’s contact Hesse. (Tim Walenn used it to create several imitation passes.)

The idea was that after a genuine delousing party had gone through the gates at 12.30 p.m., the Allied officers would reach a verbal agreement with the German adjutants that no other parties would go through until 2.30 p.m. By making the agreement verbal, it was hoped no written note as such would be left at the guardroom. The guard changed at 2 p.m. The Escape Committee planned to send the bogus delousing party out shortly afterwards. They would have civilian disguises beneath their uniforms, and carried with them maps, Reichsmarks and packets of concentrated food. As many as possible would be provided with passes and travel documents provided by the forgery department. Once out of the gate they would march a respectable distance before running across the road and melting into the woods.

There was one additional element to the plan. If the bogus party was to have any chance of getting away without being seen, the watchtower and perimeter guards needed to be distracted. Hence Bushell arranged a further bogus party to follow the first. This would consist of six senior officers including the Americans Bub Clark and Colonel Goodrich; and Wing Commander Bob Tuck, guarded by a bogus goon, in this instance Bob van der Stok. Again, van der Stok had the full disguise and papers of a German corporal. The party would argue with the gate guard that they had an emergency meeting with the camp Kommandant, von Lindeiner. This would soon be proved not to be true. But it was calculated that during the hiatus that would ensue, the guards’ attention would be diverted long enough for the escapers to abscond.

The escapers’ plans were thrown into confusion when it emerged that the German guards who escorted prisoners out of camp were no longer issued with rifles. Instead they carried holster pistols. It took some time for Tommy Guest’s department to come up with some passable leather imitations. Other than that the plan went remarkably well. The first delousing party with the genuine pass was waved through both gates without difficulty. The party reeled right and began its march outside the wire towards the East Compound. In the meantime all eyes were on the following party of senior Allied officers. The guard at the first gate inspected van der Stok’s fake pass and waved him through. But then they came to the guards at the second gate. This time the guard scrutinised the documentation a little more closely. Bushell was watching the scene unfold from inside the compound. He could tell all was not well – the goon had smelled a rat. The party was held up while the guard telephoned the officers’ mess to check whether this party of senior Allied officers really was expected. When Bushell saw van der Stok raise his hands in surrender, he knew the game was up, but by then 26 prisoners of the first party were running as fast as they could through the woods. How many of them would catch their trains before the Germans realised what had happened?

In fact, it had not yet dawned upon the Germans what had happened. For a few minutes there was some good-humoured banter between the would-be escapers held up at the gate and the Germans, who felt reassured that their security precautions had proved impregnable.

Major Broili, the Security Officer, was delighted. ‘You cannot fool our guards, you know?’ he joshed. Only after a guard called the East Compound and discovered that the first party had not yet arrived did the full horror of what had happened occur to Broili. Immediately the alert was sounded. Goons were dispatched into the woods, whistles blowing and dogs barking fiercely. Sagan railway station was warned to keep a look out for the escapers. That afternoon the prisoners were stood on parade for hours as the Germans conducted a photographic identity count.

Unsurprisingly, none of the escapers made it home. Most were caught within a few hours, either at the station or in the woods. A few managed to stay at large for a couple of days. Two were British officers who found a nearby aerodrome and attempted to crank up a small trainer aircraft with the intention of flying it to Sweden. No doubt their audacious attempt was inspiration for the episode in The Great Escape, where two officers do actually succeed in such a bid, only to crash-land when the gas runs out. In real life they didn’t even get it off the ground – they were arrested by the Luftwaffe and sent to Colditz Castle. One of the escapers, Ian McIntosh, actually made it to Switzerland after two weeks’ hiking across land and making contact with the Czech underground movement. His only misfortune was that he didn’t realise he had crossed the Swiss frontier, which was marked by a dry river bed. McIntosh walked directly across a loop in the river and back into enemy territory. It was not long before he walked right into the path of a German border patrol.

There were many attempts to escape by impersonating German staff. Offizier Karl Pfelz, known as ‘Charlie’ to the prisoners, was one of the ferrets with a distinctive tall bearing. One RAF officer had observed him carefully, altered his RAF uniform and set off to walk out of the camp. His audacious escape attempt failed only when he had the misfortune to walk straight into Charlie on his way to the gate. A similar stunt almost succeeded when a prisoner imitating an officer called Hohendole, and also carrying a bogus identity card, managed to get out past the guard on the gate. His ruse was only discovered when the real Offizier Hohendole arrived at the gate a few minutes later. The escapee was captured shortly afterwards. These attempts prompted von Lindeiner to warn that Allied officers who made future escape attempts disguised as German officers faced execution. In any case, von Lindeiner’s stricture did not discourage Per Bergsland. In 1943 he walked out of the gates having altered his RAF uniform to look like a Luftwaffe one. His fake identification didn’t even have a photograph. But fortunately, of course, he spoke perfect German and he was able to convince the guard that he was awaiting a photograph. His escape was only foiled a few minutes later when he walked past Glemnitz, who recognised him.