Chapter Six
Harry
The news of the success of the wooden horse escape reached Stalag Luft III shortly after the three men had arrived back in England. When their safe arrival home was announced at morning Appell, a huge cheer went up. The escape of Williams, Codner and Philpot proved to be a huge psychological boost after the devastation wrought by Tom’s discovery. The prisoners’ morale was raised further by news of the Allies’ incursion into southern Italy. The arrival of a contingent of Allied officers who had been involved in the Italian campaign, and had escaped from POW camps in Italy, also cheered them up. For the hungry and weary men of Sagan, the sudden appearance of the comrades-in-arms with tanned faces and tales of victories against the Nazis came as a welcome change. They listened, thrilled at their stories of enjoying weeks of freedom in the Alps hoping to get to Switzerland. Hitler’s hated Third Reich, which had held the world in its thrall at the beginning of the war, now appeared to be a less formidable beast. ‘Fortress Europe’ was quickly crumbling. The once-feared Nazi war machine was on the retreat at sea, in the air and on land. German cities were falling under a relentless Allied bombing campaign. Often the prisoners were treated to the sight of American Flying Fortresses or Liberators high in the sky returning from their sorties. A ripple of applause and cheering would break out across the camp, much to the irritation of the goons. At night it comforted the inmates to hear the soft, distant boom of British air raiders. After Berlin had been subjected to a particularly heavy pounding, an angry Glemnitz marched up to Bub Clark in the South Compound. The two men normally had a cordial relationship, but on this occasion Glemnitz poked his finger at Clark’s face and hissed: ‘When this war is over, you will rebuild this country, Colonel Clark.’ The American officer couldn’t help but sympathise with the German, whom he liked and would continue to see after the war. But at that stage of hostilities Clark had seen enough of the Nazis’ barbarity not to be too concerned about the methods used to bring it to an end.
The escape season was now effectively over. The winters in Central Europe were so cold that few prisoners wanted to endure the hardship of life outside the wire. Most of them battened down the hatches to enjoy a quiet Christmas, dreaming of their escape plans that would begin once more in the spring, or simply settling down to reading or attending classes and staging theatrical and musical productions. German classes were the most popular, with so many officers preparing themselves for escape. It was generally agreed that October’s Macbeth was one of the theatre’s most accomplished productions. Welcome arrivals around this time were British and American feature films shown at the cinema, among the favourites being the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire classic Shall We Dance? The atmosphere in Stalag Luft III was rather like that of a private boarding school, albeit a rather austere one at that.
The Germans also relaxed their guard and there were few altercations between captives and captors. There was one amusing incident when the stooge system seemed to have broken down and Glemnitz walked in on Ivo Tonder making a civilian suit. Glemnitz marched out of the compound holding the suit triumphantly. There were one or two absurd escape attempts that harked back to the amateurish efforts of previous times and were authorised by the Escape Committee in a bid to lull the Germans into a false sense of security. Bushell hoped to convince the Germans that the discovery of Tom really had broken the prisoners’ will to escape. Bushell himself had put it around that he was no longer interested in escape. He threw himself instead into the world of the camp’s theatrical community and was billed to play the role of Professor Higgins in the forthcoming production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
Much of the innocent camp activity, of course, masked the clandestine preparations that were still going on to make an escape attempt through Harry in the New Year. In fact, Bushell was perpetually talking to Massey and Day about the break-out in 1944, constantly re-evaluating plans and fine-tuning their strategy. He was also working hard on improving his German and had started attending classes to learn Czech and Danish too. Jimmy James continued his Russian and German studies. Despite Glemnitz’s momentary victory, Tommy Guest and Ivo Tonder’s tailors carried on working on a whole range of civilian and some military disguises. In Block 103, Al Hake’s operation manufactured compasses with the assembly-line efficiency of Henry Ford’s car factory. Des Plunkett’s team of map-makers set about building up a portfolio of highly detailed maps showing potential escape routes tailored towards individual escapers’ plans. Tim Walenn’s forgery department, now operating from Block 110, continued to churn out an enormous panoply of false papers, passes and ID cards that would be needed by the escapers.
By the time of the break-out a few months later, there would be 250 compasses and 4,000 maps available to the escapers, as well as some 100 handmade suits indistinguishable from those lovingly made by the tailors of Hamburg or Dresden, and 12 German uniforms. That winter saw Dean & Dawson acquire two innovative devices that very much speeded up the forgery process. A tame ferret, who had not been intimidated by Rubberneck, gave the Escape Committee a typewriter and John Travis built a small printing press, which he operated from the bottom of Dick’s entry shaft. Dick was now beginning to look increasingly redundant as an escape outlet as it became obvious that the tunnel would have to be prolonged by perhaps as much as 600 feet under the rapidly growing West Compound. Consequently, the tunnel was used to store much of the clandestine material that would be required for the escape. Tommy Guest kept his suits and other completed clothing in the attic of the toilet block. The rest of the escape material – compasses, maps, high-energy food and so on – was hidden behind false walls, a ruse of the Allies that the Germans had still, remarkably, failed to cotton on to.
November brought the first fluttering of winter snow, but it was only in December that the first really heavy snowfall came. The prisoners were cheered up a little by the arrival of additional Red Cross parcels and the showing of the Hollywood film Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. On the night before Christmas the camp listened in total silence as a bugler played ‘Silent Night’. It was not a great consolation for men dreaming of being at home with their families by a warm coal fire, but having to live with the reality of the Silesian snow and bitter east winds that raked the camp. For some, like Wings Day, it was their fifth Christmas in captivity, and hardly an anniversary to celebrate. Most of the prisoners tried to create some sort of festive distraction, organising Christmas dinners and so forth. Most of the men had been saving up supplies to splurge out on Christmas Day. Jimmy James recalls that some of the men entertained themselves by offering 87 per cent proof brew to the German guards. One man, says James, collapsed in the snow after drinking his bottle and was dragged away by the two guard dogs in his charge. Another guard, this time in a goon box, was tossed a bottle of the illicit brew. Later that night he fell out of the watchtower. Despite the diversions, Christmas was not a happy occasion for most of the men. However, when on New Year’s Eve they toasted the arrival of 1944 with illicit whisky, the mood was a little more cheerful, because they all knew work on Harry was just around the corner.
By the New Year the Escape Committee had definitely ruled out Dick, thanks partly to the West Compound but also because it had become so cluttered with stored escape material and Travis’s printing press. Now it was decided that the carpentry department should be moved there too. All the Escape Committee’s efforts were going to be thrown into Harry, which already extended some 100 feet northwards underneath the Vorlager (and directly under the cooler). The Escape Committee calculated that it would only need to be extended a further 220 feet for it to emerge safely behind the tree line. And Bushell was hoping to catch the Germans by surprise by breaking out before the arrival of spring, when the ferrets would be at their most alert, which meant that the men would have to start digging soon.
It was with a feeling of renewed anticipation that work resumed on Harry on 10 January. The trap-door had been sealed so well it took two hours to reopen. Harry Marshall, Wally Floody and Crump Ker-Ramsay took turns to chip away at the cement in the tiled concrete block. Once it was open the men descended into Harry and subjected it to a meticulous examination. They were delighted to discover that the tunnel had weathered the winter much better than they had expected: only four shoring boards needed securing back in place, while the sacks on the ventilation pumps had rotted and needed minor attention. The most difficult repair work applied to the Klim milk tin ventilation pipes. The weight of the tunnel structure had cracked the ventilation line in parts and sand had seeped into many of them, clogging up the air passage. It was difficult to get to them and repair them because they were firmly pressed down by the upright shoring boards. In the event, it took only four days to remove individual sections of the flooring and replace the sections of pipe affected. The Escape Committee was not at all unhappy with this minor programme of renovation, which took only a few days. By 15 January, digging on Harry was resumed.
By the end of the month the tunnellers had constructed the first staging post (called, variously, haulage points or halfway houses) and had christened it Piccadilly Circus. They planned to call the next one Leicester Square and the thought of it spurred them on. Work progressed at the rate of about four to five feet a day. Wally Floody and Ker-Ramsay led the digging teams, which worked until the late afternoon. Inside the tunnel, at the workface, there were a couple of close calls. Wally Floody was buried in a collapse, to be hauled out half unconscious. Another tunneller was given a nasty crack on the head by a bed board that fell from the top to the bottom of the entry shaft, but it was remarkable how few injuries and accidents there were.
The thick blanket of snow that covered the compound presented Peter Fanshawe’s sand dispersal teams with a difficult problem. It was clear the sand could not be dispersed in the usual way. Ever resourceful, Fanshawe came up with a solution. The theatre with which von Lindeiner had so thoughtfully provided the camp had been built by the prisoners themselves. It featured tiers of 350 seats, each raised slightly above the other to give all the audience a view of the proscenium. There was nothing at all beneath this voluminous triangular structure, which had been sealed when construction of the theatre had been completed. It was probably capable of holding all the sand excavated from Harry. Creating a secret trap beneath one or more of the seats would not be a problem. Once more the Escape Committee was eternally grateful for Fanshawe’s apparently boundless ingenuity.
For his part, Fanshawe needed someone reliable and meticulous to be put in charge of organising the theatre dispersal – not as easy a job as may at first appear. It wasn’t just a case of pouring bags of sand down a hole. It was vital that the sand didn’t sprinkle out onto the snowy ground on its way to the theatre, leaving the Germans a nice neat trail to follow. The work also had to be completed in darkness, as the light in the winter went at 5 p.m. Shortly afterwards, Fanshawe bumped into Jimmy James as they were both doing their daily circuits around the compound. James had been one of the most enthusiastic diggers, but now Fanshawe wondered whether he might like a change. He asked him if he wanted a job.
‘Well, I am unemployed at the moment, as most of us are, and if I have to stick around this place much longer, I’ll be permanently unemployable,’ said James. ‘What’s cooking?’
Seat number 13 was chosen to conceal the trap-door. ‘Thirteen is supposed to be lucky in some countries,’ reflected James, ever the optimist. The seat swung backwards on hinges especially constructed by John Travis. Fanshawe thought they would need two dispersal teams of six men each to do the job every night between the hours of 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., when the Germans banged down the barracks. Jimmy James would be in charge of one; Squadron Leader Ian Cross the other. (Cross had recently attempted a more instinctive form of escape when he attached himself to a truck laden with pine trees and branches about to leave the compound. Unfortunately, Glemnitz saw him, stopped the truck and asked the driver if he would mind driving as fast as he could around the compound. After careering over the tree stumps and bumps of the compound, the truck returned to Glemnitz, who was standing ready to greet Cross, who emerged shaken but unharmed from his hiding place. ‘I hope you enjoyed your ride, Squadron Leader, and came to no harm,’ said Glemnitz before dispatching him to the cooler.)
Another 70 men were involved in the sand-dispersal operation. The sand was first of all loaded into kitbags at the bottom of the shaft and taken across to Block 109, where the carriers hid the bags under their greatcoats for the walk across to the theatre. Occasionally, if the ferrets could be distracted, it was taken directly to the theatre but usually it had to go by a more circuitous route to allay suspicion. Once in the theatre, the bags were dropped through seat 13 to the workers underneath while rehearsals continued on the stage above. Flight Lieutenant Bernard ‘Pop’ Green (so called because he was one of the oldest prisoners) soon discovered what a difficult job it was. He was walking across the compound one night with a load of sand when his greatcoat snagged on one of the many severed tree trunks that strewed the compound. The sand spilled out in an untidy mess in the snow.
A further problem with the excavated sand was that it gave off a distinctive odour. The ferrets rarely missed an opportunity to search the theatres and von Lindeiner and other German officers often attended theatrical productions. If they got one whiff of the unusual smell, the game would be up and they would undoubtedly close down the theatre. The theatre was, everybody acknowledged, one of the few genuinely morale-boosting facilities in Stalag Luft III. It would be an awful loss to the men, but under Wings Day’s new philosophy of bringing the battlefront to Sagan, the Escape Committee ruled that escape was the main priority, not morale. In the end, Jimmy James came up with an ingenious method of camouflaging the smell by distributing various scents, most notably tobacco, underneath the theatre seats in smouldering tins. Pipe and cigarette smokers were encouraged to patronise the theatre until a haze of smoke hung over the building.
With February came a shock for the escapers. Without warning a posse of Wehrmacht soldiers arrived at the main gate and within seconds they were sprinting towards barrack block 104, led by Rubberneck. By the time George Harsh shouted ‘ferrets!’ down the corridor, the Germans were in the building barging through every door into every room. Harsh wondered how many seconds it would take them to get to the stove which, presumably, at that very moment was shoved to the side to reveal the gaping hole of Harry’s entry shaft. But Harry’s Trapführer, Pat Langford, had set a record for concealment. In 20 seconds flat he had slammed the concrete down, swept the floor of dust and replaced the stove and its chimney. By the time Rubberneck stormed into the little canteen area Langford was smiling benignly and everything was in place. The ferrets turned 104 upside down, but didn’t find a thing. Alarmingly they paid a great deal of attention to the tiled concrete of Harry’s trap. In one sense the fact that they couldn’t detect a thing despite such close scrutiny was encouraging. But the episode was worrying all the same for the Escape Committee. The Germans obviously knew the tunnel was from 104. It could only be a matter of time before they found it.
The digging continued and the dispersal teams worked relentlessly – except for a few days in early February when the full moon cast such a dazzling light over the camp that there was no realistic way they could not be seen by the goon boxes. But by then the diggers were well on their way to the 200-feet mark. The dispersal teams were granted a stroke of luck one night when the ferret was distracted for two hours by his contact entertaining him with coffee and biscuits in his room. In two hours the dispersal team managed to get rid of an astonishing four tons of sand. At around about the same time the Escape Committee was delivered another stroke of fortune when von Lindeiner ordered the compound to be wired up to a public address system that would spread throughout the camp. While a German engineer toiled at the top of a pole trying to attach one loudspeaker, the Canadian officer Red Noble was passing by and couldn’t help but notice two large coils of electricity wire at the foot of the pole. An insouciant Noble picked them up and sauntered off as the hapless workman looked on in despair. As was often the case in such instances, the theft was never reported. The workman was, presumably, more concerned with his own well-being than whether the Kriegies got their hands on a bit of valuable escape material. And Noble’s loot was valuable – nearly 300 yards of waterproof electric cable. It meant the tunnellers could hook into the camp’s power supply and dispense with the fat-burning lamps for much of the time.
At the premiere of Treasure Island at the beginning of the month, the cast was delighted to observe that the German officers present did not smell a rat. The tunnel itself went almost without a hitch until one of the surveyors noticed what seemed to be a ‘clink’ in its course. On closer inspection it was discovered Harry had veered one foot out of line. It was impossible to reverse the error because the removal of shoring would risk a collapse and so the mistake had to be rectified over time and the result was that the tunnel veered four feet off course before it continued on a parallel course in the original direction. It was only a minor mishap but, perhaps, it should have rung alarm bells among the surveying team as a precursor of possible trouble to come. However, digging continued apace and by the middle of February the tunnel had reached some 200 feet in length and the diggers were ready to carve out the next staging post, Leicester Square.
While the men dug, the Escape Committee addressed the problem of who, exactly, was going to be allowed the privilege of escaping. Bushell had decided that 200 men were going to make the attempt. That meant that there were going to be a lot of disappointed people. More than 600 prisoners were directly involved with the construction of the tunnel. The contribution of those who had not been ‘at the coal face’ was just as crucial to the completion of the task: the stooges, the officers involved in laborious sand-dispersal operations, the forgers, map-makers and tailors. In addition to that, there were many other people on the camp administrative staff and involved with the theatre who would surely have helped on the tunnel if their duties had not prevented them from doing so. The Escape Committee decided to seek applications from those interested in escaping. They were not surprised to get 510 requests.
They then set about working out how to select the lucky 200 and in the end the 510 names were put in a hat for a draw to be held on 20 February. However, the Escape Committee decided on a priority system. The first 30 places in the tunnel must go to those who had the best chance of escaping. Almost all of these would have to be fluent in German or other foreign languages. The first 30 would be provided with the very best documentation and disguises that the forgery department and tailors could supply. They would all travel by train and it was vital that they got the chance to get to the railway station first, preferably before midnight, after which there were very few trains until the morning.
The following 20 places would be reserved for the prisoners who had done the most work on the tunnel itself. Again, their names would be drawn out of a hat. The next batch of 20 would be selected in the same way from the prisoners who had worked above ground as stooges and penguins, and in the forgery, tailoring and compass-making departments. The next 30 (who would make up the final group of the first 100) would also be drawn out of a hat, this time from the ranks of those who had failed to get a place in the earlier draws. Finally, the remaining 100 places were drawn from the remaining names on the list. After the names had been drawn out there was one final amendment to the list. Ker-Ramsay suggested that it made sense that every 20th escaper was an experienced tunneller. If anything went wrong at least there would be someone familiar with the workings of the tunnel close at hand and capable of keeping things moving.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly both above and below ground, but the Escape Committee was right to believe that von Lindeiner’s security staff were homing in on the tunnel. Despite the best efforts of Jimmy James and Ian Cross, it was impossible to prevent small quantities of sand falling on the ground, and there, in the morning, were the little give-away trails that indicated a tunnel was afoot. Rubberneck’s response was to have his ferrets descend on the compound in force and search it repeatedly and relentlessly. All the barracks in the North Compound were subject to spot checks and the blitz of 104 in early February was not the only one. On one occasion Roger Bushell and Wings Day were ordered out of their barracks and strip-searched on the spot. The prisoners, however, were not entirely unprepared for these blitz searches. They were still being helped by the fact that many of the ferrets ignored Rubberneck’s injunctions against fraternising with the enemy and they were tipped off in advance of many spot checks. Valenta had a very valuable contact in one of Pieber’s men, called Walter. He warned Valenta to expect a sudden check on Block 110 and sure enough the barrack building was searched. Keen Type kept his contact, Marcel Zillessen, informed. Of course, this sort of traffic was two-way. The Germans knew through their contacts with the airmen that they were up to something and something big. Some of the prisoners did not help their cause by being less than discreet in letters home to their families.
Von Lindeiner was concerned to hear the intelligence reports from his security staff. He knew that the problem of escaping Allied prisoners was beginning to aggravate the Nazi High Command, which was being compelled to divert more and more resources to tracking them down. Von Lindeiner tried always to respect the Geneva Convention but was aware that Berlin’s attitude towards escaping officers was becoming less sympathetic. There had been some ugly incidents in other camps. Dulag Luft was no longer the holiday camp of Theo Rumpel’s day. In one instance an SS officer had ordered two Luftwaffe guards to shoot an Allied airman in their care. When they refused he took out his gun and shot the man on the spot. The episode provoked the new Kommandant of Dulag Luft to travel to Berlin and protest to the German High Command – but his protest fell on deaf ears.
In early 1944 the authorities issued two orders that had ominous portents for future escapers. The first order, known as ‘Stufe Römisch III’, came from the OKW. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht was the supreme headquarters of all the regular armed forces. All the more surprising then that the order stated that future escapers who were recaptured, with the exception of the British and Americans, were to be handed over to the Gestapo rather than the appropriate German military authority. The British and Americans were to be held in military or police jails, while the authorities decided whether to hand them over to the Gestapo or not. The prisoners became aware of this order when an officer, Bill Jennens, found himself alone in the Kommandant’s office and to his surprise realised the safe was open. Curiosity getting the better of him, he discovered the order lying there for his inspection. Whether von Lindeiner deliberately staged this episode or not, we will never know. It would certainly be in keeping with his character.
The second order was even less subtle. The ‘Aktion Kugel’ (Bullet Decree) was a secret order issued by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. It decreed that all recaptured officers, except Britons and Americans, were to be taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and executed before their names were even entered on the camp register. They would simply disappear. The method was disgusting. They would be taken to the camp and ushered to a ‘measuring device’ supposedly to fit them out for a prison outfit. In fact it contained a hole through which the prisoner would be shot in the neck from behind. But it was not just the SS and Gestapo that concerned von Lindeiner. He was equally worried about the prisoners’ fate at the hands of the German public. The intensifying of the Allied air campaign against German cities was producing an ugly mood among civilians.
In the first four months of 1944 the saturation bombing was intensified. Among some people British and American fliers were no longer seen as bona fide military fighters but branded as ‘air terrorists’. The case against the Allied air forces had been reinforced by relentless Nazi propaganda that characterised them (as they did the Russians) as inferior beings who heartlessly attacked women and children. Around about that time the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, asked: ‘Who is in the right? The murderers who expect humane treatment after their cowardly attacks? Or the victims of those foul and cowardly attacks who seek their revenge? We owe it to our population, which is defending itself with so much honesty and courage, that it not be allowed to become human game to be hunted down by the enemy.’
As ever the situation was far more complicated than it appeared. Any equivalence between the Allied bombing campaign – launched in desperation, the only way of taking on Germany’s brutal might – and the wholesale and calculated slaughter of millions of Untermenschen (‘subhuman’ races) is an abomination. Bomber Command’s policy might have been mistaken and perhaps ruthless, but it was understandable. Also, as ever, the Nazi propaganda ministry was not being entirely honest. Goebbels was labouring under two enormous problems.
The first was the psychological blow that the air campaign had undoubtedly delivered. Under the onslaught from the air, ordinary Germans were beginning to question their government’s policies and there was a distinct possibility of some sort of popular rebellion. Second, Germans everywhere knew in their hearts that they were defeated. The Red Army had reversed German advances in the east and in the west the long-expected ‘Second Front’ was not far away. It might have been illegal to listen to the BBC, but many Germans did. The enormous build-up of American, British and French troops across the Channel was no secret to most Germans.
Nevertheless, there had been cases of downed aircrews being set upon by lynch mobs only to be saved at the last moment by the Home Guard or Hitler Youth that generally arrived on the scene as soon as a plane hit the ground. (This was slightly odd in itself, since Nazi propaganda actually encouraged people to believe that revenge against airmen was justified.) Von Lindeiner wondered what sort of reception escaped airmen from Stalag Luft III would receive if they were caught by angry Germans and there was nobody there to step in.
When the German Kommandant heard that the prisoners were planning a mass break-out he decided to summon senior officers from every compound to warn them of the dangers. Von Lindeiner said the war could not possibly go on for more than another year and it was folly to take such risks in the circumstances. He wasn’t the only one worried. Many of the German staff were genuinely fond of their Allied prisoners and passed on their concerns to them. It wasn’t through self-interest alone that Pieber privately warned the Allied officers to avoid a mass break-out. He told them the Gestapo were looking for any excuse to take matters into their own hands but most of the prisoners, in their isolated existence, knew nothing of the change in mood outside the camp. Even the German warnings of courts-martial the previous year had not been taken seriously, few Allied prisoners believed the Germans would shoot them in cold blood. Tim Walenn displayed a commendably gentlemanly view of the enemy when he insisted they would never be so ‘unsporting’. Some of the prisoners believed that the rumours they were hearing from the camp staff were part of an orchestrated campaign to dissuade them from staging an escape, which could only reflect badly on von Lindeiner.
The Luftwaffe, as von Lindeiner repeatedly warned the Allied officers, could only guarantee their safety and proper treatment while the prisoners were in its hands. Once outside the wire there was a bewildering array of different criminal and neo-military bodies into whose hands the airmen could fall. Few of them could be trusted to take as indulgent a view of Allied airmen as Hermann Göring did. The most feared organisation was Heinrich Himmler’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA or Reich Security Main Office). The RSHA’s responsibilities ranged from regular police traffic patrols to extermination in the concentration camps. There were many wings of the RSHA, including the Kripo (criminal police), headed by General Nebe, and the Gestapo (which the former was often confused with), headed by Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller. And there was one particular department concerned purely with preventing escapes from prisoner-of-war camps. The man from the department responsible for Stalag Luft III was an SS major called Erich Brunner.
In February of 1944, von Lindeiner asked Brunner to come to the camp. During a short meeting, von Lindeiner is believed to have expressed fears that a mass escape was imminent. Curiously, despite this explicit warning, Brunner failed to reinstall seismograph equipment that had been removed from the camp for maintenance work. (It was an oversight that led to speculation after the war that the Nazi authorities were hoping there would indeed be an escape and that they would use it as an opportunity to make an example of the escapers.) At the same time Sydney Dowse warned Roger Bushell that his contact, Corporal Hesse, had heard ugly rumours about what the Gestapo planned to do with Bushell if he escaped again. Dowse tried to persuade Bushell not to take part in the break-out, but the response was predictable. ‘I’ve worked too long on this,’ Bushell told him. ‘This time they’re not going to catch me.’ Bushell was not alone. Most of the potential escapers had thought carefully about the risks they faced.
Ian Cross had discussed the matter with Jimmy James. ‘The Geneva Convention makes it quite clear that it recognises an officer’s duty to escape, and that escaped prisoners of war are a protected species so long as they don’t break the law of the land they are in,’ said James. ‘If apprehended we should give up in a peaceful fashion and we will be conveyed back to our prisoner-of-war camp.’ Many of the prisoners agreed with Des Plunkett, who decided that the havoc they would cause the Germans was more than worth the possible bullet they’d receive in the back. Von Lindeiner’s warnings were not falling on deaf ears. They were being carefully weighed up by extremely experienced military men, some of whom had been driven to the verge of madness by incarceration and all of whom took their responsibilities as fighting men very seriously indeed.
It was with delight therefore, several days later, that the X-Organisation received some welcome news. Valenta’s tame ferret Walter told him that Rubberneck was going on two weeks’ leave from 1 March. Valenta immediately told Bushell, who knew that Corporal Griese’s endless searching of the compound was as unpopular with his own men as it was with the prisoners. They were bound to take the opportunity of his absence to enjoy a respite of their own. Shortly after the news, the draw for the 200 places was held. That evening there were 200 souls in Stalag Luft III for whom escape now seemed a very real prospect indeed. Their excitement, though, was tinged with a sense of fear at the dangers to come.
Jimmy James drew number 39. ‘I was delighted,’ he says, ‘and like all the others I was gripped by the mounting tension and excitement pervading the compound.’ Some prisoners couldn’t help but tell their families back home what was about to happen. ‘We are all expecting to be home in a few months,’ wrote a remarkably indiscreet Tim Walenn. Others were slightly more opaque, but it would be astonishing if the letters littered with nods and winks escaped the censor’s notice.
With Rubberneck’s absence imminent, the Escape Committee immediately made plans to intensify digging in Harry. Unfortunately, Rubberneck seems to have been all too well aware of the universal euphoria that his absence would create. On the last day of February he arrived in the compound with Major Broili and a list of 19 prisoners who were to be dispatched immediately to the satellite camp of Belaria, five miles away. They were all members of the X-Organisation and included Peter Fanshawe, Wally Floody, George Harsh and Bob Stanford-Tuck. Surprisingly, Roger Bushell’s name was not among the 19. Presumably, his efforts to dissociate himself from escape activities had paid off. After being marched off to their barrack blocks, the 19 luckless men were not even given an opportunity to return. Instead, their belongings were gathered for them and shortly thereafter they were transported out of Stalag Luft III for good.
Their loss was a profound blow to the escape plans, not least because the hiatus surrounding their announced departure wasted a whole day. Those who had lost escape partners were compelled to make last-minute changes of plans. But the diggers responded to this attempted blow to their morale by redoubling their efforts. Ker-Ramsay took over as chief engineer and over the next ten days the tunnel was to progress more rapidly than it had ever done before. In one day alone 14 feet of tunnel was excavated and shored up, the air pipes fully laid and the sand completely dispersed. In the space of nine days 112 feet had been dug and shored up. By 10 March the tunnel was 348 feet in length, comfortably beyond the 335 feet that they calculated marked the tree-line. The team had left four days in which to build the final staging post and the vertical escape shaft. Remarkably, they built the staging post ten feet long in a single day, leaving them three days to finish the twenty-five foot vertical shaft.
The construction of this vertical shaft was far more hazardous and complicated than the original entry shaft. Given that that had taken some two weeks to build it was extraordinary that the prisoners were contemplating finishing this in less than a quarter of that time. However, they were driven by a desperate desire to complete the job and they were helped by a stroke of luck when a four-foot section of the shaft ‘excavated’ itself by collapsing into the tunnel below. The task of burrowing upwards was made just a little easier but it was still an onerous and exhausting one. It was conducted by the digger holding above his head a square frame of three boards the size of the tunnel shaft that acted as both a shield and work implement. Each of the boards could be removed. The digger would remove the first and excavate a small amount of sand before replacing the board and removing the next. After the next section of sand had been excavated the third board would be removed and the practice repeated. Thus the digger moved slowly upwards. When a section of five feet had been completed, the walls were shored with the usual method. As the shaft progressed, the roof of the final staging post below was strengthened. At the end of the second day, unbelievably, the shaft had risen 19 feet. The men were probably just six feet away from breaking through the topsoil – give or take a foot or two.
That night Red Noble and Johnny Bull went down the tunnel to work out exactly how much leeway there was. It must have been a remarkable feeling to descend the entrance shaft and push along the tunnel past Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and finally to the exit shaft. It was a beautifully engineered construction. Bull had with him a length of old fencing foil with which he was to probe the soil above the shaft. When it met no resistance he would be able to mark exactly how deep the sand was. The rest of the engineering team waited in anticipation in Block 104. Bull and Noble returned within 20 minutes and were both clearly excited. There was less than nine inches between the tunnel and the open ground inside the woods. The entry shaft was 28 feet deep, yet the exit shaft was only 20 feet high. The discrepancy was due, possibly, to the lower level of the ground outside and, perhaps, the tunnel had risen one or two feet as it had progressed. In any case, the discovery had been yet another stroke of luck. Had the team continued digging that afternoon there would have been every chance of the tunnel breaking through prematurely. Noble pointed out that there was also every possibility that a patrolling goon would put his foot straight through the exit trap-door. Quickly, the diggers strengthened it with a far more sturdy timber construction wedged firmly into position.
It was 14 March. The men came out of the tunnel at 9.45 p.m. and sealed the trap-door. Harry would be opened again only on the day the Escape Committee decided they would break out. The next day Rubberneck arrived back in Stalag Luft III and promptly ordered the ferrets to blitz Block 104. For four hours his teams of ferrets turned the place upside down. It was freezing cold outside, but the atmosphere was nerve-wracking as the prisoners recalled the unhappy day last September when Tom was rumbled. Everybody was relieved when the ferrets finally emerged from 104 with no grins on their faces this time. Rubberneck looked in a blacker mood than they had ever seen him before. Harry was safe. For the time being. But it was obvious to everybody that the escape would have to happen sooner rather than later.
The Escape Committee was confronted with an urgent decision. It was madness to attempt to escape on anything other than a moonless night, but the next moonless period was only two weeks away on 23, 24 and 25 March. The arctic weather was unlikely to have improved by then. Many of the men planned to ‘hard-arse’ it across country – walking without specific plans or schedules, sometimes alone but mostly in pairs, in the hope of snatching any opportunity that presented itself on the way. They would take with them better rations than the rest to keep them going, and warmer clothing to keep the cold at bay. But some of the Escape Committee wondered whether the hard-arsers would really stand much chance in such freezing conditions. Ker-Ramsay and the other tunnel engineers, however, were adamant that Harry should not be left for another month. The warm weather would thaw the snow and who knew how that would affect the tunnel? Some of them had visions of the whole thing collapsing under flood water. Also, the longer they waited the greater the risk of a guard stumbling on the shaft, or even falling through it with its newly strengthened trap-door. Besides, there was the element of surprise. The reason the prisoners had rushed to complete the tunnel was to get out before the Germans increased their security measures at the start of the traditional spring escaping season.
Bushell agreed and it was decided that Friday night, 24 March, would be the provisional date of escape. The night before, Thursday, was not completely moonless. And Saturday night would leave the escapers who were catching trains at the mercy of Sunday’s unpredictable and skeleton railway schedules. Friday night was always a good time for travelling in wartime Germany (or anywhere in wartime for that matter). The trains were crammed with soldiers on weekend leave, their minds only on getting home to their families or sweethearts, not on the look out for escaped prisoners of war. Indeed, the experience of one or two of those who did eventually escape was that regular soldiers were all too keen to ignore any suspicions they might have entertained about their travelling companions. Railway traffic continued throughout the night. It would not be at all odd for large numbers of men to turn up at train stations in the very early hours.
The date was settled. However, it was agreed that the very final decision would not be made until 11.30 a.m. on 24 March, in the event that unforeseen circumstances arose to make the escape too hazardous. That left an extraordinary amount of organisation to be completed in very little time. Documents had to be finished, disguises finessed and cover stories perfected. Papers that required a date stamp would not be stamped until the final decision had been made after 11.30 on the Friday morning.
The plan had always been to get 200 men out, but there was never any realistic hope that this target would be achieved. On the moonless nights in question, dusk came at about 9 p.m., and the sun rose around 5.30 a.m. That gave the men eight and a half hours of darkness, or 510 minutes. Past experience had shown that a man could be got out of a tunnel every two to three minutes. That meant they could aim for between 170 and 255 – but that was under ideal circumstances.
The Escape Committee had to factor in unexpected delays and hitches. Many of the would-be escapers would never have been in a tunnel before. Some might be overcome by claustrophobia and panic. Many would be carrying suitcases and other elaborate baggage and were bound to take a little longer. There might be tunnel collapses that would take valuable time to shore up. If they accepted a realistic figure of one man every four or five minutes, between 102 and 128 men might stand a chance of getting out. Nevertheless, Bushell decided that 200 men must be prepared and ready to go, all of them with their disguises, documentation and extra supplies of rations. There was always the possibility that things might run far more smoothly than any of them had predicted.
As the prisoners prepared for the break-out a palpable sense of excitement filled the air and spread to the other compounds. Bub Clark remembered there was a ‘buzz’ about the camp for several days before the actual escape. It could surely not have escaped the Germans’ notice either. Of course it was the lucky 200 who were buzzing with excitement most. The escapers were going to make their way across Germany in a variety of disguises, ranging from smart lawyers, accountants and doctors in middle-class business suits, to scruffy foreign workers and seamen. As 24 March approached they each rehearsed their cover stories, studied maps and brushed up on their foreign languages. Some, perhaps, revised their plans.
‘There was a fever of excitement about the place,’ says Jimmy James. ‘None of the escapers seriously gave any thought to the consequences of recapture after a mass escape on this scale, in the same way that a pilot doesn’t think about whether he’s going to be shot down before he climbs into his cockpit.’ Perhaps that was a valid point of view for an English officer, but some of the other nationalities flying with the RAF had had many sleepless nights wondering what their fate might be if the Gestapo got their hands on them.
The escapers had been given dozens of talks about the various escape routes out of the camp, details of which were provided by those who had been out on parole, tame ferrets or prisoners who had escaped. They knew that there was some sort of heavily guarded lighted compound near the camp that it seemed preferable to avoid. There were several large and small towns near Sagan that would be best to steer clear of too. Towns meant Hitler Youth, Home Guard and security checks. They knew the Oder River was to the north of Sagan and the Berlin-to-Breslau Autobahn to the south. Anyone going to Switzerland was given a pep talk by Roger Bushell. Those escapers going south were taught by Wally Valenta to say in Czech, ‘I swear by the death of my mother that I am an English officer.’
Jimmy James was going in that direction, hoping to cross the giant Riesengebirge range of mountains that separated Czechoslovakia from Germany. James was going as one of a party of 12 foreign workers on leave from a local woodmill. His costume was his old RAF tunic, which he had been wearing when he was shot down. Long since bereft of insignia, he had attached civilian buttons in place of the military ones and added to his costume some scruffy Middle East khaki trousers and a hat provided by the tailors. His party would include Johnny Dodge, Johnny Bull and Pop Green, three Polish officers, two Australians, a Canadian and an English RAF man. The plan was for the men to catch an early morning train from Tschiebsdorf, a tiny rural hamlet of less than 700 inhabitants not far from Sagan, which nevertheless boasted a station. They were aiming to travel about 70 miles south to a little town called Boberöhrsdorf, near Hirschberg, on the Czechoslovakian frontier. Squadron Leader John Williams, an Australian, was going to lead the party through the woods as he had already been out on ‘parole’ walks with the Germans and knew the area better than the rest. Also, the group had been given details of the various paths through the forest by Marcel Zillessen’s contact, the ever-helpful ferret, Keen Type. Once at the railway station, a Polish officer called Jerzy Mondschein would take the lead. Mondschein spoke fluent German and he would buy the train tickets and see them through any sticky situations.
Mondschein was one of the Eastern European officers who had not been cheered up by the recent turns of events. German reversals in the east merely meant further encroachments of the Red Army, and it was difficult to know which regime was worse – Stalin’s or Hitler’s. For months Mondschein had suffered sleepless nights, but now he was faced with the possibility at least of doing something to soothe his flagging spirits. Jimmy James had originally planned to go it alone after Hirschberg, but it had been suggested he team up with a Greek Spitfire pilot called Sortiros ‘Nick’ Skanziklas, who could take him down the Danube valley to Greece and help him cross over to Turkey.
The Dutch airman Bob van der Stok was one of the few escapers judged to have a real chance of success. Not only was he a fluent German speaker, he had also lived under the Nazi Occupation and knew what conditions he was likely to encounter. There were many seemingly minor social protocols that could catch an escaped officer out. For instance, train passengers were allowed to sit in station waiting rooms only when they had already acquired a ticket. Those without were liable to be arrested. Identity cards were always required to be shown at certain railway checkpoints, but the checking was invariably perfunctory. Escapers with doubtful documentation who might be tempted to squeeze past the guard would be taking a much greater risk than if they simply held out their card and hoped for the best. Van der Stok was familiar with these protocols and not likely to fall unwittingly into any traps.
Van der Stok was going to go out disguised as Hendrik Beeldman, a Dutch draughtsman taking home-leave from the German electronics firm of Siemens. His disguise had been created by Tommy Guest’s men out of a dark-blue Royal Australian Air Force greatcoat, Dutch naval trousers and a beret. The Norwegian airmen Per Bergsland and Jens Muller were also judged to have more hope than most of making a home run. They too spoke perfect German and were familiar with life under the Nazis. Bergsland and Muller planned to head for Stettin posing as Norwegian foreign workers also employed by Siemens. Bergsland had been provided with false identification as a Norwegian engineer, Olaf Anderson, en route between Frankfurt an der Oder and Sagan. He was kitted out in a respectable business suit and given a suitcase stuffed with German and Norwegian soap and shaving cream. His bogus papers contained instructions to report to Stettin. Muller had a similar cover story.
Their disguises and documentation were as perfect as could possibly be. Both Muller and Bergsland’s tunics had been converted into reasonable imitations of civilian jackets. Muller wore a dyed-blue cap. Bergsland had a black tie. Both had highly polished civilian shoes. Both men were also acutely aware that their families faced terrible retribution if they were discovered and took care that their escape gear contained nothing that could possibly be incriminating.
Two of the other plucky Norwegian contingent, Halldor Espelid and Nils Fugelsang, were also aiming for Sweden, as were Cookie Long and Tony Bethell, a young Mustang pilot, who were hoping to travel on freight trains as French workers heading for the Baltic.
Roger Bushell was number 4, and was going out as a French businessman. Bushell spoke fluent French as well as German and so in that respect he stood a very good chance. But he was also the one escaper who knew for certain before he left the tunnel that he was a dead man if the Germans caught him. His disguise was the grey suit that he had smuggled into Stalag Luft III, a dark overcoat, and a trilby hat. He had originally been planning to go out with Bob Stanford-Tuck, who spoke fluent Russian. But since Stanford-Tuck had been sent to Belaria, Bushell’s partner was to be Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer of the Free French Air Force. Scheidhauer was only 18 when France fell in June 1940. It had always been his ambition to join the air force and he was desperately depressed by the situation his country now found itself in. Once he tried to escape via Spain. A second attempt with a group of young comrades on board a small fishing boat proved more successful. The boat put out from a quiet cove near Brest. After running into heavy weather it was eventually spotted by a British merchantman and the six French refugees were landed in Milford Haven. Scheidhauer first joined the Free French Navy but shortly afterwards was granted his ambition to fly. He won his wings in the summer of 1942 and joined Douglas Bader's old squadron, Number 242, flying Mark V Spitfires. (Bader by then had been a prisoner of war for nine months.) He soon after found himself with 131 Squadron flying sweeps over his native land, often straying over his parents' apartment in Brest waggling his wings in the hope that they realised it was him. Scheidhauer's war in the air finally came crashing to the ground when his Spitfire was hit by flak. He landed it on what he thought was the Isle of White only to discover from the farm labourers who rushed to his rescue that he was on German-occupied Jersey. Bravely, for they all could have been shot for what they did next, the islanders helped the pilot dismantle and destroy as much of the valuable aircraft as possible. After 45 minutes, however, the Germans arrived and put an end to their vandalism. Shortly afterwards Scheidhauer arrived at Sagan. Trilingual (in English, French and German) his talents were sorely needed by the Escape Committee and he was quickly press-ganged into the X-Organisation. Since his arrival in Stalag Luft III, he had been one of Wally Valenta’s intelligence experts. He knew France back to front. Their plan was to get to Paris as petit bourgeois travelling back to the French capital through Germany. There they hoped to link up with the French underground. Their papers had been produced as close to perfection as possible by Tim Welann’s department.
Des Plunkett was number 13, a position he grabbed because nobody else would take it. His partner was Czech fighter pilot Bedrich ‘Freddie’ Dvorak. They were aiming to head for Prague and, hopefully, have a reunion there with others including Johnny Marshall, Ivo Tonder and Wally Valenta who would travel to Czechoslovakia by separate means. Tim Walenn didn’t speak any foreign languages and so was going out as a Lithuanian in the hope that any Germans who stopped him didn’t speak Lithuanian either. His partner was the Lithuanian flier ‘René’ Marcinkus.
Sydney Dowse was number 21. He had been one of the hardest diggers on the tunnel and he had already made two escape attempts. Dowse was going to escape with the Polish officer Stanislaw ‘Danny’ Krol. Their plan was to head for Poland and link up with some of Krol’s underground contacts there. They had false papers as a Dane and a Slav worker respectively. Equally usefully, the ever-resourceful Dowse had obtained a three-week supply of real food vouchers from Hesse, who had also given him a well-tailored suit. Krol’s disguise was little more than his uniform and greatcoat with all the distinguishing badges and buttons replaced with civilian ones.
Wings Day was to follow him as number 22 on the list and had what he thought was the most preposterous cover story. His forged papers identified him as an Irish colonel. His story was that he had been converted to the Nazi cause by witnessing the barbarity of the Allied air assault on German cities and was being let out on parole from his POW camp with a Luftwaffe escort. Day had thought the story too ridiculous for words and strenuously protested that he wanted to go out as a Bulgarian. ‘But you don’t speak Bulgarian,’ the Escape Committee had protested.
‘Nobody speaks Bulgarian except the Bulgarians and they’re 600 miles away,’ Wings had retorted, dumbfounded. However, his objections had been overruled.
His companion for the escape was to be Pawel (Peter) Tobolski, a Polish officer wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal. Tobolski spoke fluent German so there was some hope there at least. Tobolski had married in 1940 but had never met his son, who was born after he was captured and now lived with his mother in Scotland. He was looking forward to seeing the son he had never known. But Tobolski, like the other officers from Eastern Europe, was more troubled than most by the rumours they had been hearing from von Lindeiner’s men.
Wings Day wasn’t the only one who wanted to go out as a Bulgarian. Gordon Brettell and Kingsley Brown planned to escape as Bulgarian forestry students. This, they reasoned, would give them the ideal cover required if they were to be caught lurking in forests by the Germans. Their plan was to head for the Baltic overland and find a rowing boat that they could row to Sweden.
On 20 March all the escapers had to present themselves for inspection in their disguises and with their travel belongings to Ker-Ramsay and Marshall. Anybody thought to be taking too much was relieved of his excess baggage. Big suitcases and rolls of blankets could snag on the shoring boards, causing falls and delays. Ker-Ramsay and Marshall demonstrated to each man how to lie flat on the trolley and hold their belongings in front of them, always keeping their heads down. Some of the escapers had worked in the tunnel, but many hadn’t. It was important to these that they understood how claustrophobic it might feel down the tunnel, but actually how safe the structure was. The thing the escapers feared most was that one of their members would be consumed by uncontrollable panic.
Not all of the potential escapers were aware of the problem, but one who was, ironically, was Paul Brickhill, the RAF officer who would write the book The Great Escape, and inspire the film. Brickhill had drawn a place in the second hundred escapers, but when he was given a sneak preview of the tunnel he got cold feet. He went to Roger Bushell and admitted his feelings. Bushell took him off the list, thanking Brickhill for his honesty.
The escapers also had to present themselves to the intelligence departments that covered the territories they would be escaping through. They were told about what sort of local conditions prevailed from the latest intelligence gathered and given contact details of the nearest underground movements. Thanks to Zillessen’s Keen Type, the Escape Committee not only had the timetables of trains that left Sagan station, but also details of border posts on the Czech–German frontier, and the location of berths for ships that went to Sweden from Danzig and Stettin. Not all the escapers were going to go by comfortable trains. Wing Commander John Ellis briefed the hard-arsers on outdoor survival techniques. Bushell gave them the address of a hotelier in Prague who was working with the resistance movement, and a brothel in Stettin frequented by Swedish sailors. The hard-arsers were provided with six cans of high-energy rations. Finally, everybody was handed their maps and compasses.
When the morning of 23 March dawned, a thick blanket of snow covered the compound. The Escape Committee met and postponed the decision for another day. Key to the decision process was Len Hall, a member of the RAF meteorological branch. He told the committee that the next few days would be very cold, but cloud cover would make the evenings very dark. There was a tense debate about the weather. Some of the committee felt that it would be suicide for the hard-arsers and suggested that perhaps the train travellers could break out first, Harry could be resealed, the rest go out in a month or so. Because of the appalling weather conditions the hard-arsers had been given twice as many rations as everyone else. But the prospects they faced in the freezing weather were bleak. Bushell, however, wasn’t having any of it. That evening he walked around the compound with Wings Day. As the moment of escape at last approached, Bushell’s mind stretched to the implications of recapture for the non-British officers and the prospects of survival for the hard-arsers.
‘We’ve got to go tomorrow,’ said Bushell, ‘but I hate to make the decision, because very few of the hard-arsers will make it.’
‘They wouldn’t have much chance anyway,’ responded Day. ‘About one thousand to one in the best conditions.’ Day pointed out that there was no question of any of them freezing to death. They could always hand themselves in if things became unbearable.
‘You think we should go tomorrow then?’
‘This is an operational war, Roger. It isn’t just a question of getting a few people home, because very few will make it. It’s just as important to make trouble for the Germans and if we only get half the planned number out then we’ll certainly do that.’
That night there was a heavy snowfall while a dress rehearsal of Pygmalion took place in the theatre. Flight Lieutenant Ian ‘Digger’ McIntosh, as Bushell’s understudy, paid particular attention that evening. The following morning the Escape Committee met at 11.30 and the decision was finally made. Tim Walenn sped off to date-stamp all the false documents. Crump Ker-Ramsay descended into the tunnel to make his final preparations. Shortly afterwards, in the South Compound, Bub Clark received a message that Bushell was over on the other side of the wire and wanted to talk with him. When Clark arrived, Bushell was shuffling about in the snow. He was brief and to the point. ‘We go out tonight,’ he said. ‘Please don’t do anything to screw us up.’ Clark assured Bushell that the Americans had no escape plans that evening that would clash with his and would not mess anything up. He then wished him luck.
‘And that was the last I ever saw of Roger Bushell,’ says Bub Clark, his eyes moistening. ‘And some of the finest men I have ever known in my entire life.’