The great turn of the war’s tide at Stalingrad affected escapes as well as evasions. Once the size of the disaster had sunk into ordinary Germans’ minds, they realised that the Wehrmacht was no more invincible than the Führer was infallible. They did not in 1943 think that they had lost the war, but they knew that they had not – or not yet – won it. By the autumn of 1944, after the loss of western Russia, of Rome and of Paris, secret weapons provided the only serious hope left alive, and that too failed. These shifts in German morale affected prisoners’ guards as much as anybody else, and made the business of more or less genteel blackmail, that was so helpful in getting escape kit that could not be sent in from outside, considerably more easy. The same point about morale applied with greater force to Germany’s satellites than to the Third Reich itself.
In Poland there was no satellite government, a fact of which all Poles are justly proud. Professor Bartoszewski’s books show how harsh the German occupying regime was to the surviving natives; most Commonwealth and American prisoners of war could count themselves lucky they were not Slavs. MI 9’s advice, to MIS-X and everybody else, was to avoid the risks and dangers of an east-about escape; though in fact this route was managed by one in seven of all the successful escapers from Germany, it was thought in London to call for exceptional courage and luck. Some general interest attaches to de Bruyne’s comment on a particular escaper, a Czech sergeant called Volka who turned up in the west by way of the USSR: ‘Individual instances of successful escapes by this route do not invalidate 253th[e] general instruction’ not to attempt it, for one is likely either to be shot out of hand – either by the Germans or by the Russians – or to be imprisoned indefinitely, ‘as has been the fate of many British escapers who up-to-date can still not be traced.’ It is only fair to add that the original source for this advice lay in the Polish government in exile in London, a body that by the winter of 1943–4 was unhinged by the disastrous news from Katyn, but there is evidence enough to suggest that it was sound. The Russian attitude was even in a wry way defensible: the Red Army was too busy fighting off the Germans to have time to bother about feeding or housing a few strange foreign escapers whose presence could only be unsettling to morale and who from a Marxist staff officer’s standpoint were least nuisances dead? Beyond warning people not to get entangled in it, with this range of atrocity MI 9 and MIS-X had hardly anything to do.
Hungary
Nor were they able to achieve a great deal in Hungary. Early in the war, Budapest – still then a neutral capital – had been an important staging-post for escapers coming out of Poland, and a centre from which some of the more eager Polish exiles tried to work back into their homeland. But step by step the regime of Admiral Horthy, regent for the notional Habsburg king in exile, had been driven into closer and closer co-operation with Hitler, in spite of the admiral’s eventual clandestine approaches to OSS and SOE (he tried SIS, who did not want to know).
Great Britain, at Stalin’s insistence, declared war on Hungary in December 1941, but a lot of pro-British sentiment remained among Hungary’s aristocratic ruling classes. The Regent gave an affectionate personal farewell to the retiring British and American ministers, and both Szombathelyi, his chief of staff, and Kallay, his Prime Minister, were anxious to get out of the war. An OSS mission that was parachuted into Hungary in mid-March 1944 arrived just in time for its leader Florimond 254Duke – formerly Time magazine’s advertising manager – to be arrested and sent to Colditz, where he passed the rest of the war helping to sustain his fellow prisoners’ spirits. What dished Duke’s mission was the complete German occupation of the country on 19 March; followed on 15 October by a coup d’état by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascist movement, which pre-empted Horthy’s attempt to surrender.
What meanwhile was happening to escapers from German prisoner of war camps who got as far as Hungary? In principle they were interned, but more as guests than as prisoners, in Count Andrassy’s castle at Szigetvar, well to the south near the Yugoslav border. Their senior officer, Colonel Charles Telfer Howie, had been captured in Tobruk in 1942 – he was a South African AA artilleryman – and had already brought off a remarkable feat enough, an escape from a camp in Silesia and a march to the middle Dunube. On this march he was accompanied by Sergeant Tibor Weinstein, a Jew who was spending the war in British uniform. Weinstein turned out to be a trained wireless operator; there is not a word in the files to confirm or to deny what the Hungarians suspected, that he and indeed Howie as well were British secret agents of some kind. Weinstein had lived in Budapest as recently as 1937, and spoke fluent Hungarian and German.
There is no need to suppose that Howie was anything but what he said he was, a senior escaper. He was treated with marked consideration by the regime when he and Weinstein reached Budapest in mid-September 1943. The Unitarian bishop Sandor Szent-Ivanyi looked after him, and through the bishop Howie was able to meet the Regent’s son Nicholas, a diplomat, and various other members of a group of well-placed young resisters.1 Ostensibly Howie had a stomach ulcer, treatment for which necessitated his staying in the city.
255Six months’ talk brought no serious advance; parallel negotiations were going on meanwhile with the British through SOE’s office in Istanbul. When the Germans invaded on 19 March 1944, Howie was hidden in a flat close to the Gestapo headquarters, and spent a week in the Regent’s own apartments. He was flown out of Hungary on 22 September with a Hungarian general, Naday, in a Hungarian aircraft that crash-landed near Termoli; Naday was entrusted with one more attempt to get Hungary out of the war, which failed.
The escapers in Szigetvar dispersed as soon as they heard of the German invasion. Some were recaptured, some made their way through Yugoslavia to safety; Simonds had an agent in Yugoslavia, near the Hungarian border, who reported at Bari on 15 June 1944 that if people pretended to be French, movement in Hungary was comparatively easy: ‘present officials in Hungary are easy to bribe.’2 Details are only available in a single case, that of a quiet, well-spoken RAF warrant officer called Reginald Barratt, who was using at the time the name of G. S. Godden. He made his way to Budapest, where he was succoured by an English girl called Evelyn Gore-Symes whom nobody had bothered to intern and by a young Hungarian lawyer called Dr Raphael Rupert. Rupert introduced him to Kristof Kallay, son of the Prime Minister, though it is no longer clear when.
Barratt stayed for some time in Rupert’s flat, and was clearly engaged in some sort of intelligence activity. In the late autumn of 1944 he had access to a clandestine transmitter, possibly Nussbacher’s, which was repaired for him by another helpful Hungarian called L. Csuros, now a senior official in the British electricity industry. Rupert remembers taking Barratt for a 256pillion ride on a motor bicycle to investigate the results of RAF mining of the Danube, and of German efforts to demagnetise the mines by flying JU-52 trimotor transports over them equipped with anti-magnetic coils.
This was getting out to the edge of MI 9’s brief. Barratt met Weinstein and sent him through to the Russian lines early in December 1944 with some target information, of which the Russians made use. On 8 December Rupert, Barratt and a Dutch officer, Lieutenant van der Vails, were overrun by the Russians; all disappeared. Barratt is known to have been held prisoner by the Russians in Bratislava at midsummer 1945; for many years there was no later news of him at all. Rupert, who was eventually released, now lives in Ireland. Van der Vails’ family were officially informed from Moscow in the middle 1950s that, by a regrettable breach of Socialist legality, he had been imprisoned in the Lubyanka and had died there of pneumonia. Barratt’s widow discovered at about the same time that her husband had been shot by Communist police in Bratislava, ‘while trying to escape’, an all too familiar cover for the disposal of troublesome prisoners.
Romania
In Romania there was a good deal more conventional escape activity, among American aircrew shot down in the various great day raids on the Ploeşti oilfield. For example, there were numerous reports of tunnelling at a camp at Timisol de Jos, from which two men got as far as the Bulgarian border, and there was some contact with people from the Jewish Agency; but there seem to have been no completely successful escapes till the second half of August 1944, when King Michael engineered a coup d’état against his own government and Romania changed sides.
Maskelyne’s and other lectures bore useful fruit. In Camp 13 in Bucarest, the capital, for instance, most of the prisoners of war had retained discipline and organisation enough for them 257to be prepared to react en masse if the Germans tried to take over their camp from the local guards. Captain George W. Call, a journalist from Waco, Texas, shot down in an aircraft of 414th Bombardment Squadron on 22 July 1944, was among the leading spirits who were arranging a march out into the hills to link up with partisan groups that were at work there already.
If American discipline remained good, Romanian did not. There are various odd tales of the ease with which agents of British and American subversive and escape services could communicate fairly freely with the outside world, even at one remove with Wolfson or others in Istanbul, from inside prisoner of war camps or even prisons in Bucarest. Simonds sent in several pairs of his Jewish agents by parachute, starting as early as 1 October 1943 with operation ‘Mantilla’. These two, sergeants Liova and Fichman, were arrested on arrival, and held at Timisol, but could communicate with their colleagues from prison, and were let out to live under surveillance in Bucarest. ‘Goulash’, sergeants Macarescu and Levy who dropped on 2/3 May 1944, were also soon arrested. Three other parties, ‘Schnitzel’, ‘Ravioli’, and ‘Doiner’ were dropped in during the summer. So, at the second attempt – at the first, she burst into tears on nearing the dropping zone and declared she couldn’t bear to go3 – was a good-looking young blonde called Sarah Braverman. She was to have worked with Berdichev, but fortunately for her he left her behind when he moved away to Slovakia. All of the agents left in Romania were safely recovered in the last few days of August, after the coup d’état of the 23/24th and the subsequent Russian occupation.
It then emerged that Macarescu had done particularly creditably, having survived ninety-six days’ solitary confinement enlivened by ‘constant interrogation and threats’, and having kept his morale high enough to organise his fellow-prisoners for escape work once he had been released into a camp. ‘Great 258tribute has been paid by senior American Officers to the work done by our agents,’ by him especially. Two British soldiers and twenty-seven members of the RAF were among those rescued, as well as two Dutch naval officers and a French soldier; the great bulk of the recovered prisoners were from the American air force. In the first rescue flights 474 officers and 652 enlisted men were brought out; five of Simonds’ agents remained behind in Bucarest, hunting up about a hundred prisoners who were believed to have gone astray in the late August confusion. It may be presumed that as soon as they had completed this task, Romania’s new and pro-Russian authorities were glad to see their backs, but on this point the files are silent.
The USAAF had reacted very promptly when Romania became an ally; transport aircraft were flying into Bucarest airfield to collect ex-prisoners of war within a matter of hours – 1,274 men had been extracted from Romania by 20 October. This was a magnificently prompt administrative effort, but can hardly be classified as escape.
Bulgaria
In Bulgaria life was a lot rougher and tougher: so rough that Private R. W. Richardson, shot down on 22 July 1944 on his first mission, to Ploesti, had more to complain of when he returned than ubiquitous rats and lice in a filthy camp at Shumen, and a severe shortage of food. He happened to parachute down near a German radar crew, who beat him up before handing him over to the Bulgars. He was fed on soup, a little mouldy bread, and promises. In the camp hospital there were no medical stores, gangrene in wounds was common, and he saw a Bulgar surgeon who was about to amputate a leg have his patient anaesthetised by a blow on the head with a rifle butt.
The 303 Americans brought out of Bulgaria in September 1944, by contrast with their well-treated colleagues in Romania, had had a thoroughly disagreeable time. MI 9 counted 305 – 135 officers and 170 enlisted men – when they reached Aleppo by 259train; ‘a virtual clearance’ of Bulgaria. Eleven officers and eighteen NCOs from the RAF, two Dutch officers, one Polish officer and five Italians completed the party; a Syrian autumn made a welcome change after a Bulgar summer. Holder visited Bulgaria for a few days, to see what could be done about tracing helpers and hindrances, but found in fact there was hardly anything he could do.
Some of these people must have escaped into Bulgaria (how else can the Dutch for instance have got there?), but no escapes out of Bulgaria seem to be on record. This was not for lack of attempts by Simonds to engineer some.
On 20 October 1943, Wolfson told him, he had on his desk an offer to release the crews of four American heavy bombers held in Bulgaria, ‘with connivance senior members German I[ntelligence] S[ervice],’ for a hundred thousand gold dollars. ‘This figure fantastic,’ Wolfson’s telegram added justly enough. Simonds replied on the twelfth, offering £5,000. The War Office, six days later, inquired ‘is not cost exorbitant and will it not be bad precedent?’ The whole negotiation petered out; the Germans’ cupidity outran their discretion, and their greed exceeded what any Allied authority was prepared to think of paying.
One pair of agents, both called Yusef (‘Chair’ and ‘Carpet’ of operation ‘Interval’), were sent to the Turkish-Bulgarian border in July 1944; with no results so far reported.
Greece and Albania
The Russians rapidly conquered Bulgaria and moved on north-westwards. The Germans pulled out of mainland Greece, though they left well-stocked garrisons behind in the Dodecanese and in Crete. Follow-up parties from MI 9, among other bodies, trod quite closely on their heels as they moved away. In Salonika in mid-November as many as 113 people turned up and asked for MI 9’s aid, as escapers or evaders: a note that happens to have survived divides them by nationality, and shows how important 260 it had remained to remember Dudley Clarke’s rules about who could, and who could not benefit from such services as MI 9 could offer. Two of them were British, one was Australian, six were Cypriots, twenty-four were French, twenty-five Belgian, fifty Polish, and the remaining five Czech.
Albania was the scene of a simple, elegant escape by someone who had heard and pondered a lecture on what to do if he found himself in enemy hands. An American lieutenant, John D. Murray, bailed out over the coast when engine failure made his aircraft unmanageable on 26 August 1944. He and most of his crew were at once captured, and were piled into a lorry with Germans to guard them. With one of his crew, he managed to fall off the back of the lorry, unnoticed for the moment. By the time a search party came back to look for them they had vanished. They joined up with a British mission, and were flown out to Italy on 21 October.
Italy
A previous chapter has described in some detail the mess that was made in Italy at the time of the Italian surrender. It did not attempt to quantify the number of escapers who made themselves scarce after the Italians had dropped their guard, and before the Germans imposed their own, and estimates vary widely. Christopher Soames noticed that the German broadcasts claimed 50,000 taken away to Germany; over 70,000 had been notified by the Red Cross as in Italian camps; only about 4,000 had been recovered by the time of his inquiry, half in Italy and half in Switzerland. Where were the rest? Had there been a massacre, or were they all evading? After the war, it was clear there had been no major catastrophe, only the colossal misunderstanding discussed above. The then British ambassador in Italy Sir Noel Charles once put the figure of those who had gone spare from the camps, and were hiding up in the countryside, as high as 30,000. This last estimate seems to us a good deal too high, but we have not found data on which to found an exact figure.261
N section was busy, needless to say, probing for information about ex-prisoners’ whereabouts, and came up late in February 1944 with the following rough locations:
over 2,000 in the Gran Sasso, a mountain range ENE of Rome
5,000 near Venice
2,000 near Padua, to the west of Venice
1,000 near Belluno, in the Dolomite foothills north of Venice
1,000 near Treviso, midway between Belluno and Venice 100 in Florence
and 60 in Slovenia, moving south. (Slovenia was the north-easternmost province of wartime Italy.)
In any case, before the troubles began Philip Holder had been quite right to remark to Ed Johnston that ‘It is not difficult to break out of any prison camp in Italy. It is, however, extremely difficult to get out of Italy itself.’ A very few exceptionally brave and capable people managed to do so. Lieutenant (later Admiral Sir) Ian McGeoch was captured, wounded in the eye, when HMS Splendid, his submarine was sunk off Capri on 21 April 1943; lost the sight of the eye; but retained vigour and initiative enough to get out of his hospital at Bergamo, thirty miles north-east of Milan, on 10 September 1943, an hour before the Germans arrived. Three days later, sustained by his MI 9 training, he walked into Switzerland ‘at a part where there were neither patrols nor wire.’ Later he found his own way to Spain. Towards the other end of the social and military spectrum, Lance-Corporal H. G. Challenor of 2 SAS, who parachuted into central Italy on a special operation on 7 September 1943, fell so ill with malaria that he did not hear of the armistice for a fortnight; made himself useful to partisans in his Apennine neighbourhood till he was taken prisoner on 20 January 1944; escaped from prison at L’Aquila, fifty miles north-east of Rome, disguised as a charwoman; and headed for the battle line. In the danger zone as he approached it he was again captured on 2625 April. His captors removed his boots, pending a more secure hold on him; he ran off in his stockinged feet, and was back with the British army on 7 April.
After the Italian surrender in September 1943 a marked shift in opinion took place. Fascism had long ceased to be popular; and now, in Sir Noel Charles’s words, ‘the majority of the Italian people formed a strange alliance with the prisoners, and they worked together against the Germans and the Republican Fascists.’ One domestic example of this, a trifle absurd, is characteristic both of English and of Italian feeling. A naval chief petty officer, H. W. Cantle, captured on 15 June 1942 from HMS Bedouin, escaped from a big camp at Chiavari on the coast some twenty miles east of Genoa on 13 September 1943 by using his wits and exploiting local feeling. Prisoners had had a few days’ comparative freedom while standing fast as ordered, and the main gate was momentarily not strongly held. He slipped out, mingled with a crowd of local people, got into a bus, and – having previously bothered to learn some Italian – threw himself on the mercy of his fellow passengers. He stayed in a hill village called Isolona: ‘All the village knew of my presence, and were so keen to feed me that I sometimes had as many as three dinners a day.’
There were many thousands of escapers who like Cantle were cherished by the peasantry among whom they found themselves. There is a striking example in Newby’s book of peasants who looked after him, in the hope that somebody else would look after their sons in Russia. Some of them settled down to make themselves useful as woodcutters, farmers, shepherds.
In mid-July 1944, N section’s emissaries remarked how difficult it sometimes was to winkle ex-prisoners out of village communities in which they had become comfortable and accepted members. Quite a few of these people merged quietly into the local population, were missed by N section and everybody else, and have never bothered to surface. Others declared their identity when eventually the battle caught up with them, 263in 1944 or 1945, returned to Britain or America or New Zealand or wherever, and ceased to try to pass as Italians. Others again were more uneasy, lacked the language skill or the manners to get on with the locals, feared the onset of winter, and roamed the countryside in irresolute bands, wondering where they would find their next meal.
There was a steady south-eastward flow of ex-prisoners who tried to walk back, and N section gradually developed ratlines to help them as they got close to the battle area. Interrogators at the Bari base got used to hearing praise of their agents’ helpfulness, without letting on to the escapers that much of the help had been prearranged. Yet ratlines close to the battle did not suffice to meet either the needs of the escapers, or the combative instincts of Rodd and Holder at AFHQ or of Fillingham and ‘Squad’ Dennis who were in charge of the Bari base. Fuller and closer contact needed to be made with the indigenous resistance movement.
At the working escapers’ level, this was not difficult. For example, the American Sergeant Warren H. Cook ditched off Salerno on 25 August 1943 and was picked up by an Italian seaplane. He thrice escaped, and was thrice recaptured; ‘Had been briefed very well on escape procedure and said it aided him immensely’; escaped for a fourth time, got right away into the Apennines, and fought for some weeks with a unit of Montenegrin guerrillas (and how on earth, one cannot help wondering, did they turn up there? No doubt by some freak of Italian conscription policy in conquered Albania). On 22 June 1944 he is recorded as having ‘returned to duty’: not the happiest of phrases for someone who could hardly be described as having been off duty for the previous ten months.
Fillingham and Dennis believed that they could arrange more escapes by sending agents in by boat or parachute to establish lines deep in German-occupied north Italy. A number of these people had some startlingly odd cover jobs, redolent of operetta as much as war: Dick Lewis for example, during a spell of six weeks in enemy-held territory, found himself acting 264as billeting officer for a Luftwaffe squadron. Two of their agents were outstanding: Kunieri and Losco. Lieutenant Ugo Ranieri (‘Hugh’) ran for seven months a highly successful ratline on the Adriatic coast north-east of Rome, from December 1943 to June 1944. In spite of arrests and murders, he saw through over 400 men. He was then overrun, and after a short rest briefed for a further mission, to make contact with the north Italian Committee of National Liberation (CNL) which had its headquarters in Milan.
His main object was to help escapers in Piedmont and Lombardy to find their way into Switzerland. If he could reach the liberation committee, he was to say that ‘We cannot praise too highly the generosity and self-sacrifice of all classes of the Italian people who have so readily helped Allied escapers and evaders … We receive continual reports of the excellent work being done by the CNL in this connection. The Allied command attaches great importance to the rescue of Allied personnel at large in enemy territory (for reasons of morale, man-power and humanity). Therefore it is requested that the CNL continue to do all in its power to assist P/W and route them to safety in neutral or Allied territory.’
It is worth pursuing this contact with the CNL for a moment. Several months later, on 16 November 1944, Dennis held a meeting at Bari at which four leading members of the CNL were able to be present: Longhi, Parri, Franchi and Mari. Parri (subsequently Socialist Prime Minister) inquired what priorities Dennis would lay down for rescuing Allied servicemen. Dennis replied, first, those conducting any sort of special operation in the neighbourhood; second, aircrew; third, those who had taken part in the current campaign in Italy; and fourth, escaped or released prisoners of war from earlier battles. Parri estimated that ‘some hundreds’ of escapers were living with families in the Po valley, and ‘agreed to notify and instruct all Partisan bands’ in touch with his committee to give ‘every help’ to IS 9, as N section had now come to be called. Parri was less affected 265than were some of his colleagues in national liberation movements farther east by a tendency that one of Simonds’ agents in Yugoslavia described thus a couple of month earlier: ‘the closer the Russian forces get, the more indifferent the Partisans are becoming to the Anglo-Americans.’ Parri shortly returned to
Milan; where he soon fell into enemy police hands. Milan had, before ‘Ugo’s’ visit, been the beat of the other star agent, Captain Andrew Losco (‘John’), but at the moment of Ranieri (‘Hugh’s’) second mission Losco was recovering after one of several spells in an Axis prison. This time he got out in late May 1944 with a South African corporal called Vivier who was on his fifth escape and a partisan lieutenant called Penna. They had been held in the town jail of Macerata, about fifteen miles north-west of the Tenna valley where many escapers congregated. There were five warders in the jail; Losco’s party overpowered them all, and walked out.4 They moved back towards the Tenna, and had the good fortune to meet one of the most forceful of N section’s forward operatives, Jock McKee. Losco was back in action in September, when he rescued – presumably with BATS’ help – about a hundred prisoners from Maribor, north of Zagreb near the Austrian border, before being caught yet again.
McKee had shown courage and energy at Sulmona in the earliest days of the Italian crisis. He had now gone over to a longer-term, still more demanding task: working, mainly behind the more-or-less-fixed battle front, to mobilise parties of escapers, marshal them down to a suitable secluded beach, and see them onto one boat or other of N section’s private fleet that was stationed sometimes at Termoli and sometimes at Manfredonia.
One of these sea operations, ‘Darlington II’ on 24/25 May 1944, is claimed by Fillingham as undoubtedly the most successful 266pickup conducted by any service anywhere on the peninsula; this was thanks to a sublime stroke of luck. The two craft which took part, an American patrol boat and a British infantry landing-craft (LCI), got separated on the outward journey from Termoli. The American craft, the P-402 (Lieutenant Gene P. Moritz, of the 22nd Army Air Force Emergency Boat Crew), reached the mouth of the Tenna. ‘Underwood was sent ashore with two dinghys. He never showed up again. We were 100 yards from shore. The sea was flat calm. There were lights ashore [to guide him in]. The man had four oars, two well inflated dinghys and a lifebelt on. God knows what happened to him; we don’t… Another night like that one,’ Moritz remarked, ‘and I am going to apply for old age pension.’ He had to beach his craft – no light matter, for she was 63 feet long – collect the twenty-six escaped prisoners of war who were waiting for him, and kedge off again. He made it.
The LCI, having failed to find anyone at what its crew believed to be the mouth of the Tenna, was also returning to base when, several miles to the southward, the correct signals were spotted from an unknown beach. The correct reply was given; a commando covering party went ashore; and in just over half an hour had been re-embarked, with 127 escapers and evaders.
N section ran its own craft, mainly with Italian crews: how the craft were found, who paid for them, who fuelled them are questions we are in no position to answer, but which need one day to be cleared up. Gene Moritz’s work in 1944 in P-402 was described as ‘outstanding’ when his health at last broke down at the end of the year. Sub-Lieutenant Ian MacPherson RN, who had joined the section in November 1943, ‘looked after the practical side of all our boating operations… extremely well and personally participated in all landings and evacuations’, on both sides of the Adriatic; he too was withdrawn, a few weeks after Moritz left, to rejoin a combined operations beach command. The little fleet remained in being. Service in such a unit was not 267the professional’s dream of a pathway leading straight to high command and high responsibility. Yet it called for seamanship of high quality, for strong nerves, and for versatility; and the men who served in this forgotten corner of the war could read the good they were doing easily enough in the faces of the men they brought out from Axis Europe.
Covering parties for such excursions, when they were judged desirable, had to be found from outside N section. Commandos, SAS, and ‘Popski’s’ Private Army all from time to time took part. They seldom had to fire a shot, but welcomed the training, the risk and the adventure. ‘Popski’ did not think highly of the first partisans he met, when there was a brief spell of open warfare in midsummer 1944: ‘all seen so far just playing Red Indians bristling with weapons much odio[u]s red scarves no guts no intelligence no military sense no nothing should be suppressed. Hope found them less scared further north.’ He did; within a fortnight he had found ones with whom he could gladly work.
The quantities of ex-prisoners rescued by these parties – most of them on the Adriatic coast, but some also on the western shore – are much harder to establish than the fact that such operations were going on. A count in November 1944 reckoned that in the previous fourteen months 2,156 people at least had been recovered by IS 9 parties at work on Italian soil: rather larger than the total strength at that moment of the SAS brigade operating into northwest Europe, and some indication of the amount of work the parties run from Bari had been achieving. Among those who came out safely was de Bruyne’s brother; who bothered, as few did, to write a letter of thanks. When the personal files emerge, it will be possible to sort out more details on some passengers of quality. Two highly distinguished generals, Neame and O’Connor, and Air Vice Marshal Boyd, arrived at Termoli in a fishing-boat just before Christmas 1943, after a series of escapades described in Neame’s book in lavish detail. A party of five brigadiers arrived with eleven 268 other escapers at Termoli by boat in mid-May 1944; bringing with them a warning that ‘the enemy is fully aware of many of the activities occurring behind his front line and reacts every now and again in sheer desperation.’ They had been collected, transported through numerous hitches, and finally seen onto their boat by Losco and several other agents. A few days later came one of many reports of German agents disguised as British troops, touting for help from peasants, and then arresting them when it was given. A small reward, 5,000 lire, was offered by the Gestapo for anybody who denounced a passeur. It would be interesting to know how often it was claimed. Five or six renegade Allied prisoners were working with the Dienststelle Schistler, hunting mainly for tactical intelligence and trying to recruit MI 9 guides; again, one day, it will be interesting to know what became of the renegades.
An even more distinguished character than O’Connor or Neame, General Carton de Wiart, VC, got home before either of them. He was recaptured not long after his escape from Florence by the Italians, who treated him with the respect that a man of his standing and bravery commanded; and the Italian government used him, during the protracted armistice negotiations between Mussolini’s arrest on 25 July and the official surrender on 8 September 1943, as a semi-secret envoy to Lisbon and London to discuss (he thought) the precise conditions on which they were to surrender unconditionally. The initial proposal to use him was made through the captured transmitter of an SOE operator who was in prison in Rome.5 His mission was not an unqualified success, because the Italians’ real object was to discover how much help the Allies could give them against the Germans: not quite the inline proposition. But while he was in England, he stayed quietly with Crockatt 269at Beaconsfield, and so was able to give the head of M1 9 some direct impressions, even if at a rarefied level, of what life in an Italian prisoner of war camp was like. What impressed Crockatt even more was Carton de Wiart’s account of the difficulties that had been brought on unintendedly by the ‘stand fast’ order.
There was a good deal of air as well as sea activity aimed at helping the thousands of escapers who were roaming around Italy. Ships were better for getting them out of occupied territory than aircraft were – the Termoli LCI could carry over 250 men with ease. Aircraft on the other hand were better than ships for distributing food, clothing and blankets to parties in mountain areas. In the first nine months of 1944, for example, eighty-three tons of stores and nineteen agents were parachuted for escape purposes into northern Italy. Aircraft were not available for special duties of this kind in vast numbers, and they had many commitments to partisans in the Balkans – not to speak of Poland: during the Warsaw rising the Polish special duties squadron lost all but one of its aircraft6 – but they could usually meet Fillingham’s requests for drops. A minimum of discipline and common sense on the dropping zone, and some sort of organisation for moving the stores away from it, were all that were needed, at the escapers’ end; once an N section agent had made touch.
Unhappily, a prolonged spell in a prisoner of war camp does not always sharpen the military character: on the contrary. One ‘stupid, ill-organised and ill-timed’ result is on record; there may well have been others. In March 1944, near the front of 2 Parachute Brigade, a batch of more than forty escapers – including a major and three captains – with as many as 150 Italian refugee hangers-on attempted a mass unarmed break through the front lines. They had an N section guide with them, ‘Domenico’, who was keen but over-enthusiastic and underinformed. The movement of a crowd of nearly 200 could not 270be kept a secret. The party was shattered by a storm of rain and fell into a German ambush; the officers failed to take command; and three-quarters of the whole mob were shot.
Another entry on the debit side of the Allied account, though this time no sort of fault of IS 9’s or of any escaper’s or evader’s had to be made at the beginning of December 1944. A Lysander, that invaluable aircraft originally designed for frontline army co-operation – for which it was all but useless – was on its way with an IS 9 agent on board to a prearranged daylight reception not very far from Venice, when it was bounced out of the sun and shot down by a passing P-51 Mustang fighter, which mistook it for something hostile. Agent and pilot were both killed.
A strong combative spirit remained active in IS 9(CMF)’s agents. Lieutenant McArthur for example, who reached Bari just after Christmas 1943 with a party of seventy-three other escapers – three of them officers – from Croatia, was put ashore at the northernmost tip of the Adriatic in early April 1945, just before the German front collapsed altogether; was recaptured; was very severely tortured; and was still quite cheerful when, like Losco, he was released by the final Allied advance.
Though the Adriatic coast naturally enough preoccupied the IS 9 staff at Bari who lived close to it, the section had some parties at work on the western coast also. Peter Fowler distinguished himself here, particularly on a mission to Gordon Lett, a Royal Indian Army Service Corps officer who ran a partisan force at first about 300 strong in the mountains west of Genoa. He was armed by SOE, and could pick and choose among the escapers who tried to join him. He settled on six: two Australians, one an infantry sergeant and one an anti-tank gunner; an ordinary seaman, RN; and three English privates from regular battalions. His force got smaller – he and casualties between them had reduced it to about forty by November 1944 – but he kept his six escapers, and did sterling work with them.
Fowler tried to visit him in a ship of a rival private navy, 271run for SOE in Corsica under the codename ‘Balaclava’ by that formidable character Andrew Croft. Of the fifty-two operations Croft attempted, either from his main base at Bastia or from the subsidiary one at Calvi, twenty-four succeeded; five of these operations were on Fowler’s behalf, of which two succeeded – two organisers were landed in Italy on 18 February and four on 28 April 1944. All three IS 9 failures were due to the absence of a reception committee on the beach. These committees could be delayed or distracted for a myriad of reasons; still, Croft did note that only four of his operations ever failed for lack of reception, and three of these were Fowler’s.
Croft would have approved the action of an SOE party in Italy who were approached in January 1945 by a man who claimed to be an A Force courier, but could give no password, nor either the real name nor the code name of anyone in A Force: they shot him. He was as sad as everybody in IS 9(CMF) when Fowler, joining like Croft in the general exodus of staff officers to the Continent in August 1944, was killed in action in the south of France.
On 10/11 August, the night before he was killed, there were some agonising decisions to be made. A C-47 transport landed in Provence at a nominally deserted grass airfield to collect some assembled aircrew, but there turned out to be as many as twenty- six of them: too great a weight. Eight deplaned; eighteen men were safely flown out; by the next night the Germans had reoccupied the field. At that point the file falls silent, but operation ‘Dragoon’ was about to liberate Provence in any case, and it can be hoped that the eight disappointed men were not disappointed for long.
Switzerland
A minor useful side effect of ‘Dragoon’ was that the frontiers of Switzerland were no longer sealed. Brigadier General B. R. Legge, the American military attaché in Berne, personally saw a party of sixty-six aircrew over the Savoyard border when the 272Swiss opened it again in September. These were some of the successful escapers from Swiss internment, from among several hundred aircrew who had necessarily suffered that fate. For they had made forced landings at Dubendorf airfield by Zürich, on finding that their aircraft had been too badly damaged by flak or fighters to stand the journey back to base; and in those circumstances it was no good trying to follow the MIS-X lecturer’s advice, and pretend that one had been a prisoner and had made a bona fide escape. This last resort, often used by the USAF by day, was not taken up by the RAF at night.
In November 1944 the Swiss government suggested to the British that the remaining ninety British military interned in Switzerland might be released, in return for releasing an equal number of military Germans to Germany, and a few weeks until they proposed to the United States to release 1,503 Amerlom internees against the return to Germany of 1,503 soldiers, custom officers and border guards. Airmen in the American party were not to operate again in Europe. The British did not think this worth pursuing, and the Americans’ first reaction was that in the Germans’ current manpower crisis anything that presented the enemy with two fresh battalions was to be deplored. General Legge however pitched in a telegram on 10 December in which he remarked on the high value for the Pacific war of the 790 American airmen still stuck on Swiss territory, General Arnold backed him up, and the exchange finally went through.
France
France in 1943–4 presented hardly any escapers’ problems save one, but that one was serious. Under Hitler’s ‘Commando order’ of October 1942, ‘all terror and sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices, who do not act like soldiers but rather like bandits, will be treated as such’: the protection of the Geneva Convention was refused to the Special Air Service brigade.
This was an international brigade, mainly British and French, but including also a Belgian independent company, 273some Yugoslavs, a Pole, a few Spaniards and a few concealed Austrians. It operated by parachute, fairly close behind the main fighting front, in uniform. An SOE spectator reported that SAS ‘supplied the trained military direction’ which the French maquisards inevitably lacked, and ‘formed the hard core of French resistance in the field’. About a hundred SAS were taken prisoner; six survived. Four escaped, one (the Pole) was overrun too badly wounded to stand, one was exchanged in a similar state for an unwounded and much-decorated German, and the rest were either shot in cold blood after capture, or taken to a concentration camp and executed there. In particular, a party some thirty strong, surprised and captured near Poitiers, were executed on the spot.
As early as 24 August 1944, about seven weeks after these particular killings, Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, proposed a strong but secret protest. Diplomatic argument lasted through the winter. By the spring of 1945, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, was much exercised about this, and wrote to the American chiefs of staff on 3 March to urge both an official protest and a propaganda campaign against this treatment of men ‘carrying out legitimate military tasks’. On 24 March 1945 a broadcast in Eisenhower’s name was made to the Wehrmacht, stressing the illegality of executing parachutists and threatening legal reprisals: ‘The excuse of having carried out orders received from above will not be considered as valid.’ The process of interdepartmental, let alone international consultation was far too slow for anybody to get to the point of decision before the war was over, and the atrocity, bad as it was, looked comparatively minor by the time Belsen and Dachau had been discovered.
At a much lower but not in this case a less effective level, rough justice had been meted out months before. Several quite junior army and air force officers were appalled at the massacre near Poitiers, the largest illegal killing of SAS in the field. A signals sergeant had evaded the disaster, and had still got his set, 274his codes, and good local friends. SAS signals were provided for them by a squadron of the ‘Phantom’ regiment which specialised in long-range wireless telegraphy, commanded by (Sir) J. J. Astor. Information from the sergeant was slipped, demi-officially, through an SAS staff channel to the TAF Mosquito squadron that had been attacking targets the SAS party had signalled. Some Mosquito pilots pursued the SS unit that had done the killing, burned up several barracks in which it tried to shelter, and reduced its strength by four-fifths: an ample revenge.7 The SS officer responsible in Paris, Josef Kieffer, was tracked down and hanged after the war; to the annoyance of SOE, SAS had him arraigned, condemned and strung up before SOE had had a proper chance to interrogate him.
Germany
To conclude this chapter we must consider Germany, still the main field for escape endeavour. One tremor of a change was perceptible: ‘guidance and help’ from isolated south German and Austrian peasants was reported for two recent British officer escapers, in battledress, in the very early spring of 1944. The same report added an ever-necessary warning: all escapers had to be vigilant against the ‘helper’ who was too smartly turned out, who moved about too cavalierly in daylight, and who kept pressing for service information; because such a one would very probably be a Gestapo nark working in a bogus line.
Crockatt continued as always ‘to discourage violent mass break’ outs because of the danger of mass reprisals’. One mass escape of 1,500 Canadians from Stalag IID at Stargard in Pomerania in November 1944, ‘involved a considerable number of deaths’, and seems to have borne him out. There were three successful escapes from Stargard, one by a pair of NCOs, Sergeant MacMillen and Corporal Nelson, who cut the wire and got away on 9 June 1944, hid with French prisoners 275at Swinemünde for three days, and spent a fortnight on an involuntary Baltic cruise before they reached Sweden on 1 July. The Canadian J. H. Kimberley, Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, left a week earlier, but was fool enough to have forgotten his cigarettes, and sensible enough to go back for them; he was spotted and rearrested. On 3 August he skipped from a working party in Stargard town. This time he had plenty of cigarettes on him, and with 250 of them he bought from a French driver a lift to Stettin. Here he visited the foreign sailors’ brothel, which was out of bounds to Germans – one of MI 9’s most ingenious rendezvous – and found help. By an unlucky accident, it was demolished in an air raid a few days after Kimberley called at it. A ship took him across to Sweden, where he swam ashore on 11 August. He always preferred to do things his own way.
One well prepared mass escape was made from Oflag VIIB at Eichstätt in Bavaria on 3 June 1943. A strong escape committee, plentifully aided by MI 9, had long been at work on several schemes; a tunnel enabled sixty-five officers to get out at once. All were recaptured and brought back in a fortnight, but during that fortnight they had absorbed the attention of 50,000 Germans: police, troops, home guard, and Hitlerjugend. This in principle was a useful diversion of enemy effort, on just the lines foreseen by Holland before the war. In practice it did not turn out quite so well, for it gave the Bavarian authorities plenty of opportunities of learning how to look out for strangers and round them up. This made Bavaria much more dangerous for evaders from the RAF’s disastrous raid on Nuremberg in March 1944.
In January 1944 Crockatt was able to review the achievements of his department over the previous four years at a secret press conference which was designed to explain to London newspaper correspondents both what MI 9 was and did, and why in wartime no reference to its existence or activities could be made in any published paper. In his survey of what had already been done, he mentioned that he reckoned one officer in four among 276all the British prisoners in Germany ‘has been at large’ already. After the war, when he had a chance to review the German field at more leisure, he drew up an interesting if perhaps overprecise table of percentages:
| Successful Escapes from Germany8 | |
| Via | Per cent |
| Sweden | 29.79 |
| Western Europe | 24.49 |
| Switzerland | 18.50 |
| Russia | 14.29 |
| Balkans | 12.93 |
People often write of life under Nazism as if it had been drearily uniform, with that sameness which is one of the many vices of dictatorships and of prisons. But the Third Reich was large, its regime was new, dullness had not yet set in universally; and a survey of the surviving camp histories suggests eccentricity quite as much as conformity. A few examples of the oddities may help to establish the point.
There was an Oflag – IX A/Z – at Rotenburg, south-west of Cassel, in the premises of a former girls’ boarding school, with the ex-headmaster as commandant. There was among its overcrowded prisoners – there were as many as 566 in April 1943, including 154 Americans captured in North Africa – an unusually large number of elderly officers. A result of this was, or seemed at any rate to the Dominion prisoners in the camp to be, a degree of over-organisation by the escape committee. Plans were too grandiose; too much attention got paid to details by outsiders; too many men were involved in each project for safety. Only two people ever got clean away from the camp, two Indian officers who managed the journey of some 250 miles 277into Switzerland. This was a considerable feat, more startling still for Asians than for Europeans; unfortunately, there is no available record of their names.
There was one fort at the vast Stalag XX at Thorn, Fort XVII, from which escape seemed much more easy than from anywhere else in the camp: a visit to that beautiful city showed why. On the left, unbeautiful bank of the Vistula, Fort XVII is slap opposite the railway station, a point nobody had bothered to mention in the camp history. It was from here that Paddon, Hawtin and several others got away, but one needed luck as well as judgement; the sentries were trigger happy, and the prisoners’ count of those shot arbitrarily by them rose as high as twenty-two. Still, there; were thirty-one former inmates of Thorn back in the United Kingdom before the end of the war. They did not include Private J. Gilliland, a Cameron Highlander who escaped eight or nine times and was ‘finally shot by the Germans’ whose patience had run out, according to Lance-Corporal A. Coulthard of field security, who also made nine unsuccessful escapes, but survived to say so.
Other camps had a steady run of parcels – Thorn had none at all until 1943. ‘Opinions were mixed’ here about the success of a scheme of Langley’s, the dispatch of boxes of Christmas crackers by the Lancashire Penny Fund intended to reach camps by mid-December 1943, accompanied in each case by an open letter to the commandant inviting him to share in this harmless good cheer, and preceded by a code letter warning the camps which colour of box they should secure for the prisoners, not for the commandant. Half the crackers were as innocent as they seemed the other half contained maps, money, dockyard passes, compasses and other escapers’ goodies. In some camps this worked like a charm; in others suspicious commandants discovered what Langley was up to, and uttered unseasonable thoughts. The Germans even complained to the Red Cross Society, as there had been red crosses on some of the labels.
At Stalag XVII A at Kaisersteinbruch bei Bruch, south-east of Vienna and conveniently near the Hungarian border, the 278 French prisoners had a wireless set; but they could never resist the temptation to gossip about the news they heard on it, and so the French quarters were constantly being raided. The British prisoners bought a wireless for 3,000 Reichsmarks from a local sympathiser, observed rigid security, and were never searched at all. About thirty people escaped from this camp, but they were all recaptured and brought back. At Stalag XIII C, at Hammelburg-am-Saale east of Frankfurt-am-Main, there were two home-made crystal sets, a fact kept a deadly secret. Work here was so hard that even the Australians found themselves ‘completely exhausted by the evening’, and no escaper got clean away. On the other hand at Stalag IV A at Hohnstein in Saxony the guards were so thoroughly bribable that a prisoner could borrow a wireless for five cigarettes an evening. And at Steglitz in the suburbs of Berlin, at Stalag II D, there was never any trouble with parcels: one man got eighteen running from the Licensed Victuallers’ Association, none of them censored, all of them loaded with escape equipment.
The Russians here were exceptionally badly treated, dying like flies from typhus. Yet one of the sub-camps, at Genshagen, was used by the Germans as a sort of holiday camp, with decent food, sheets on the beds, a little alcohol, an atmosphere of comfort: intended to weaken non-Slav prisoners’ morale by softening them up.
An alternative dubious way in which prisoners could raise their morale was by gambling. Bridge or poker certainly provided a method of taking one’s mind off one’s predicament, and several camps had serious card-playing clubs; one SBO complained that gambling was so heavy in a small group of officers, British and Sikh, that it endangered the discipline of his camp at Querum.
Dangerous though that small group was, another group in the same camp managed to be dangerous in a different way: they built a home-made generator, so that they could still hear the news on their secret wireless when the Germans cut off the power. At Colditz the two forms of danger were combined. A 279large treadmill was built, disguised when not in use as a wardrobe, to power the motor stolen from the organ in the disused chapel; power from the motor enabled the prisoners never to pass a day without hearing a news bulletin; and in the last few months of the war large sums of money changed hands in sweepstakes on the dates at which towns fell to the Allies.9
The prize for sheer eccentric brilliance must go where an Englishman would expect it to go: to the Royal Navy. Lieutenant D. P. James was captured from his sunken motor gun-boat off the Dutch coast on 28 February 1943. ‘Owing to the large number of uniforms to be seen in Germany I resolved to attempt to escape in full British naval uniform, carrying a card purporting to be a Bulgarian naval identity card in the name of I. Bagerov, a trade name that will be remembered long after my own is forgotten.’ He slipped away from a bathing parade at Marlag-Milag Nord on 9 December – his fellow prisoners fudged the count for him, with the help of a portable dummy; changed in a lavatory into his smartest kit, which his family had sent out to him; and got as far as the dock gates at Lübeck via Stettin before a pettifogging sentry unmasked him. Quite undaunted, he did the bathroom trick again soon after he had served his spell in solitary, and this time adopting the quieter disguise of a Swedish sailor hid – with a Communist stoker’s help – in a Finnish ship at Danzig. This took him, via an uncomfortable call at Lübeck, to Stockholm. He could never have attempted either escape without the detailed information about dockyards sent in by IS 9.10
Morale at Colditz as elsewhere varied with the war news, the composition of the camp, and with occasional local triumph or disaster. As Neave had been there himself, he could provide 280 detailed knowledge – if it was ever needed – on points of tactics and on personalities. The basic position remained the same there as it does in any camp, in any prison: how to get over, under, or through the barriers round it. As Colditz was the spot where the fine flower of unsuccessful escapers from several nations was concentrated, there were many ingenious attempts, but the second half of the war was less fertile in successful expedients than the first.
The news of the Sagan tragedy was an extra depressant at Colditz, for several of the dead men had friends there, and Colditz was one of the places where the rhythm of escape work was noticeably slowed down by the atrocity. One man there, though, would slow down for nobody: Michael Sinclair.
Michael Sinclair was one of those men who felt that they have been given a second chance at life. On the fourth anniversary of his country’s entry into the war, 3 September 1943, an attempt of his to escape from Colditz misfired. He had disguised himself with real brilliance as the camp sergeant-major, beady eye, bristling moustache, highly polished uniform, tricks of speech and intonation, way of walking, everything. At a suitable moment after nightfall, he marched two nondescript ‘German’ soldiers – also perfectly accoutred, to the eye – up to the main gate, as if relieving the guard. He could not know that, when crossing a little bridge out of sight of the prisoners’ quarters, the real sergeant-major always glanced right and left into the ditch it spanned. The omission caught the eye of Corporal (Gefreiter) Pilz, who was on the main gate, looked at the newcomer narrowly, and challenged him. After a moment’s bluster had proved ineffective, Sinclair was standing with his hands above his head when the over-excited Pilz shot him, at point blank range, through the chest. The bullet passed clean through him, two inches from his heart; and he came out of hospital more determined to escape than ever.
On 19 January 1944 he made another attempt, with one of Colditz’s ‘ghosts’, Jack Best. By a complicated system of ropes, 281bar cutters, wire cutters, comradely help, and split-second timing, they got clean out of the castle in seventy seconds flat; accidentally pressing an alarm bell on the way, without alerting the guard to what was going on. They were recaptured two days later just short of the Dutch frontier. Best did his solitary under a false name; the camp police had mis-identified him.
Sinclair was obsessed with the idea that he had to escape; the nearer the war seemed to finishing, the keener the obsession became. On 25 September 1944, when those prisoners who cared to do so – he usually did not – were taking an hour’s heavily guarded walk in the park below the castle, he suddenly ran for the wire surround, and was shot as he tried to climb it. He died a few minutes later, leaving an unforgettable impression of bravery and strength of character behind him. ‘The Red Fox’, as the Germans called him, had gone out in what the next visiting Red Cross team described as ‘an act of despair [which] throws a light to the adverse conditions under which in particular some of the young officers suffer.’ His heroic and pathetic end may have been brought on as much by a death-wish as by a sense of honour affronted by captivity.
There are many NCOs’ escapes fit to be mentioned in the topmost class for enterprise and bravery, just as much as those of the better-known officer escape stars.
Consider for example the enterprise of Sergeant Clayton who had a short spell in Oflag XII B at Hadamar. He was sent on a working party to Trier, wangled a job as storeman, secured and secreted some civilian clothes in the store, and on 31 July 1940 when nobody was looking changed into them, and walked away III the railway. He jumped a train into Luxembourg and walked away again, this time with a stolen scythe over his shoulder, into France. He went to his home near Lille to look after his family, an officially reprehensible step but not one for which, forty years on, any but an officious moralist would want to blame him; otherwise, he might have beaten Private Coe by several months. 282
Driver Thomas Speed, from a field battery in the 51st Highland Division, crawled out of a work camp near Erfurt on 23/24 May 1943 with a party of friends, who separated. He rode south on a series of stolen bicycles – one of them a policeman’s – till he came to the Rhine, north-west of Zürich. Quite simply, ‘I tied my clothing on my back and swam to the opposite bank. I do not know how long I was in the river, but I was exhausted when I reached the other side.
‘A Swiss peasant found me on the river bank and gave me shelter until the police arrived.’
Fusilier Purvis, a miner from Ashington, Northumberland, was in another work commando in the same camp. He took part in the thirty-five man escape which was as much a protest against the lice as a serious attempt to get away; and met a serious punishment. On 29 April 1943 he could bear work in a salt factory no longer, and walked away into the forest. He came back next night to raid the kitchen for food, and then went to look over the labels in the railway goods yard. He got into a railcar full of salt bound for Italy, spent six ‘disagreeably thirsty’ days in it till he heard French being spoken at a halt, got out safely onto Swiss soil, and was fighting with a maquis in southwest France in August 1944.
John Dominy’s book on The Sergeant Escapers has done much to bring out the devotion and courage of a group of RAF warrant and non-commissioned officers, many of them regulars, who worked whole-heartedly in Sagan and Heydekrug to confound the King’s enemies and make them fall. Warrant Officer J. A. G. Deans, their elected camp leader, is one of his heroes; a greater is Warrant Officer George Grimson, a Putney boy shot down early from a Wellington. All the people who knew him well ‘refer to Grimson as the greatest man who ever lived’.
Grimson got out of Sagan disguised as an electrical repair worker, who dropped his pliers on the outside of the topmost barbed wire fence while checking the insulation, slipped past the sentry on the gate to fetch them, and then had the sentry 283distracted: simple, but a stroke of genius. He was recaptured and sent Heydekrug, out of which he walked dressed as a ferret, with a well forged pass. His object was to set up a ratline – though he did not use that phrase – from Heydekrug to Danzig, or any other suitable port he could find, and thence to Sweden. In the course of this work, he vanished suddenly in April 1944, and it has never been quite clear whether he was shot then or later – Heydekrug is now deep in the USSR. So, conceivably, is Grimson, but it is not easy to think that so marvellously independent-minded a man would endure such a system for long.
At Heydekrug the professional detectives of the Gestapo had met their match. There were frequent and intensive searches, ferrets sneaking about at almost all hours and in almost all places; quite in vain. The duty pilot system – there called ‘Tally Ho!’ – worked faultlessly. Forgery and tailoring went on pretty well continuously, thanks to a deft piece of carpentry. Late one night, the Heydekrug prisoners built themselves an extra room, about fifteen feet by six, between the camp library and the camp office; its doors were always kept locked unless someone was passing through them. The cover story was that it was for watch repair, and indeed there was always somebody in it repairing a watch, whenever there was a ferret near by. When the Germans tumbled on it, they ‘made no comments and appeared to be quite unsuspicious.’
Maps, money and compasses were received from IS 9 without any trouble at all, and in the secret room a wealth of papers could be forged: identity cards for Volksdeutsch – Gummideutsch the prisoners preferred to call them, that is, citizens of the supposedly defunct Polish republic with Germanic ancestry; or for French volunteer workers, or temporary workers on airfields; passes for Danzig harbour; passes, Luftwaffe or civilian, for the gate of their own camp; Luftwaffe paybooks; civilian travel permits and letters of introduction. A camera, provided by IS 9, was a weighty tool in the blackmail business; a German 284would be photographed with it arm in arm with a prisoner, be shown his own photograph, and then be told that it would be passed to the commandant – clear evidence of complicity with the prisoners – unless he did what they wanted.
There was a naval camp at Heydekrug, in a quite separate compound with which there was no liaison; but there was close and constant touch between the RAF and USAAF compounds, which were side by side. The extent to which the prisoners ran the camp can be judged by the remark in its history that the Germans never normally knew that a man was missing ‘until the Escape Organisation had decided that it was no longer necessary to conceal the fact.’ All this tremendous display of solidarity and energy only produced two ‘home run’ escapes: Warrant Officer Flockhart, whose name had long been familiar in IS 9 because he had taken a leading part in so many attempts, and Aircraftsman Gewelber, an English Jew who prudently enough gave his name to the Germans as Gilbert when he was captured in Crete. Each followed Grimson out through the Heydekrug gate in January 1944 and he saw each onto a boat for Sweden. Townsend-Coles, the next man to go, fell into Gestapo hands and was shot, and thereafter the incipient line seems to have been snuffed out.
The other main airmen’s camp, the smaller Stalag Luft III at Dobrilugk, had extra high morale under Warrant Officer R. J. Alexander, RAF, its elected leader. ‘The whole Camp was united in any scheme designed to damage the German morale, or to further escape plans.’ But like Haina Kloster, it was so small that; there was no privacy for forgery or tailoring; food was short; and so not much escaping could be done.
Airmen were not of course the only users of the Baltic ports. There was, for instance, Signalman P. J. Harkin, who had had a cushy job at general headquarters of the 1939–40 expeditionary force. He had been captured in Calais on 26 May 1940 and after nearly four years as a prisoner decided it was time to go. He listened to such advice as he could get in a working party 285in Silesia, and chose a companion from his own regiment, J. B. O’Neill. They slipped away from work, with no trouble, on 24 April 1944, and lay up in a deerstalker’s hut near Karlsbrunn, living mainly on chocolate. They got some help from French workers, and their camp escape committee had given them money enough to take trains. They tried the Stettin brothel, made friends with some Swedish sailors, walked onto their ship, were hidden by the crew when the Germans searched it, and were in Stockholm on 29 May. The actual process of boarding a ship and hiding on it could be extremely tricky. Philpot’s book gives a terrifying immediate account of how perilous it could be, yet Eric Williams, who had got out of Sagan through the same wooden horse, simply strolled up a gangway – following, it is true, a new-made friend in the crew – and got away with it.
For once, there is a slight variant in what an escaper reported at the time and what he published long afterwards. Eric Williams said in his original report that, in a hotel in Stettin, ‘On Wednesday, 3 Nov. we had breakfast with a Colonel and two Captains of the German Army, all three producing bread from their pockets to eat with their coffee. We produced American ration biscuits, feeling quite in order.’ In his book they all ate bread.
Having got to Sagan, we must now deal with the disaster.
This particular camp’s history is unusually full, and can be supplemented further from associated files compiled by its former inmates. It was a camp so large and so well run by its prisoners that the escape set-up in it needs an organigram to explain it. This smells a little of the lamp, but officer prisoners of war have a great deal of time on their hands, and some of them liked to put everything hard and fast. The tunnel committee was larger and more powerful than usual – observe that the diagram overleaf gives it joint control, with the security staff, over a wide range of supplies, as well as the normal sub-sections for engineering and disposal. The wooden horse tunnel was a speciality, and only involved a couple of dozen people intimately. Incidentally, 286Wing Commander R. H. Maw built the actual vaulting horse round which the whole scheme turned, and Flight Lieutenant A. W. McKay had the awkward and delicate task of sealing up and hiding the inner end of the tunnel after Williams, Conder and Philpot had disappeared down it. Its success was followed by ‘Chattergun Friday’, 29 October 1943, when the camp was full of nervous Germans loosing off their machine pistols; fortunately no one was hurt, and they found little. Between sixty and seventy tunnels were begun at one time or another. Three flight lieutenants dug one in the summer of 1942, soon after the camp was opened, went through it to Sagan airfield, ‘could not see any promising aircraft’, and were caught at Stettin; this was how Jack Best earned his sojourn in Colditz. Three teams each of seventeen men dug a three-hundred-footer, plus a hundred-footer for sand storage; the Germans found both in October 1942.
Eventually the escape committee decided to concentrate on three big tunnels, called ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’; and ‘Harry’, 120 yards long and twenty-five feet deep, was finished in the spring of 1944. There was an enormous tailoring and forging operation to match the tunnelling; it was aided by the dumbness of the guards. The Feldwebel in charge of the clothing store for instance removed all the buttons from all the Red Cross overcoats that reached the camp, in the belief that this would render the coats unusable in escapes. Squadron Leader R. Abrahams, responsible to the escape committee for clothing, simply abstracted all the buttons from the shelf on which the Feldwebel had put them down.
The escape committee decided to allow a mass break-out through ‘Harry’.11 There has been long debate among prisoners and staff officers about whether mass break-outs are worthwhile. The case against them was that if only ten or a dozen men got out, they could have the best of everything, fine clothes, good maps, plenty of money, practically perfect papers; whereas a large party was bound to overstrain the resources of the camp’s forgery and tailoring departments. It was generally held that proper civilian clothes were twice as much use at least as camp-made coats, and the quantity of them was bound to be limited. On the other hand, was it reasonable to ask or to order several hundred people to toil for months on an escape scheme, and then not allow them to participate? MI 9 and MIS-X had been pouring in dyes, maps, money, patterned blankets and so on for years; searches by the Germans seldom found much of importance. The committee, having weighed all this up, came down in favour of a mass escape, provided that those who had done the hardest parts of the work went first. The rest drew lots.
287
OVER, UNDER OR THROUGH
Ideal Camp Organisation
1 In the original – WO 208/3244, 6 – these two were counterchanged, either by an error of memory, or to suit a peculiar set of camp conditions and personalities.
288Paul Brickhill has given an excellent account both of the digging, and of the final difficulty – marshalling 200 people into a single hut. At 22:15 on 24 March 1944 Flight Lieutenant L. C. Bull, RAF, opened the exit shaft, got out, and saw the next twenty men through the exit. Many of the escapers had not been down a tunnel before; many had bundles with them too fat to fit. By 2 a.m. it was clear that only one hundred at best, not two, were going to get through; at 04.50 hours it was decided that the eighty-seventh escaper was to be the last.
‘Just as this man was disappearing down the entrance shaft, a shot was heard. The escapers still in the tunnel were called back, men were put to watch from every window, and the remainder of the two hundred started burning all their forged papers, getting out of their civilian clothes and hiding all their compasses and food.’
Seventy-nine people passed through the tunnel. Three were arrested close to the exit. Three – all in the first batch to leave, and all Continentals by birth – got right through to the United Kingdom: Flight Lieutenant van der Stok, who came through Holland and France, and two Norwegian Spitfire pilots, Sergeant Pel Bergsland and Second Lieutenant J. E. Miller. They went together straight to Stettin, and were in Sweden within ten 289days. All the remaining seventy-three were recaptured in various parts of the Reich – Roger Bushell got as far as Saarbrücken, with a friend; several others got into Austria. Fifty of them were shot dead, after recapture, without trial, on orders from the top.
Each of the dead men was said to have been shot while trying to escape. Contrary to the otherwise unvaried practice of burial,12 all their bodies were cremated. Detailed study of where each urn full of ashes returned to Sagan came from made it possible to establish the place of death in every case. The prisoners’ clothing was also all returned to Sagan; none of it bore any bloodstains or bullet holes. And there were no wounded. For once, it is pretty clear who decided what. In the words of Wileden, a fairly senior SS officer in charge of the criminal police at Breslau, ‘The shooting took place on the express personal orders of the former Führer Adolf Hitler.’
Two major-generals, one about to hand over to the other the command of the Kriegsgefangenenwesen, the office for administering prisoners of war – Graevenitz, who retired in April, and Westhoff – went to see Field-Marshal Keitel, the head of Hitler’s military staff, who was ‘very excited and nervous and said: “Gentlemen, this is a bad business … Gentlemen, these escapes must stop. We must set an example. We shall take very severe measures. I can only tell you that the men who have escaped will be shot – probably the majority of them are dead already.” Graevenitz said: “But Sir, that’s out of the question. Escape isn’t a dishonourable offence. That is specially laid down in the convention.” Keitel replied, “I don’t care a damn; we discussed it in the Führer’s presence and it cannot be altered.”’ Gestapo Müller handed down the order, and declared the subject ‘forbidden’. Westhoff complained that ‘I didn’t sleep a wink for nights 290on end. Alter all; one does have one’s feelings of honour. But we couldn’t do anything about it.’ The bankruptcy to which the German officer class had reduced itself could hardly be more clearly expressed. Even Kaltenbrunner, the head of German security, not the most fragrant of Nazis, said ‘I considered it a dirty affair’, when lying to exculpate himself from any part in the Sagan executions.
No principle is discernible by which some were taken, and some were left. Among those who were left was ‘Wings’ Day, a member of the Sagan escape committee from a very early stage. He, on being arrested, was neither shot nor returned to Sagan: he was put in a place of safety, the Straflager at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while higher authorities were consulted about who would rid them of this turbulent fellow. Day wasted no time in consulting higher authorities than his own common sense. He and a few other recaptured fellow escapers in the same hut began a tunnel within twenty-four hours of arrival, digging as fast as they could and dumping the spoil beneath their hut. Ten days later they were out. They had no papers, no money, no maps; though Day had retained a small MI 9 compass. They moved by night, westward, and hid by day. By bad luck they were reported to the police as suspected looters; the luck turned to their advantage. For they were rearrested and recorded in the books of the ordinary police; it was therefore more awkward for the Gestapo to rub them out as if they had never been outside Sachsenhausen. They were returned to an innere Straflager at that grim camp, chained in separate cells; were moved south in April 1945 to be mixed in with the more famous Prominente near the Brenner; and were eventually rescued by an American patrol as a result of a stroke of Day’s initiative.
1By courtesy of Dr Leslie Veresa, who translated it for us, we have been able to read the bishop’s article on the Howie episode in Magyar Hirado (Vienna 1 October 1974). The bishop now lives in the USA. See also Weissberg, Advocate for the Dead, 51–4, for the story of a quarrel.
2‘Albert’s’ report in WO 208/3381. He had taken a month to come through from Budapest himself, and is not further identifiable.
3Simonds’ recollection, 1978.
4WO 208/3416, newsletter 27, 3 June 1944; sent by Crockatt to Davidson, who minuted ‘Good show’.
5See Dorothy Barlow, ‘From Enemy to Co-Belligerent: Italy mid- July to mid-October 1943’, unpublished Manchester MA thesis (1972), 126.
6Conversation with the surviving pilot, Warsaw 1978.
7Personal knowledge.
8WO 208/3242, 79.
9Reid, Colditz, 461–3, with evocative drawing of the treadmill in use.
10WO 208/3242, 157–65; and his own A Prisoner’s Progress. He is now a back-bench Conservative Member of Parliament for Dorset.
11Excellent diagram of ‘Harry’ in P. Brickhill and C. Norton, Escape to Danger.
12We are glad to acknowledge our indebtedness to the Imperial War Museum for sight of an unnumbered file of papers on which the next two paragraphs mainly rely. On a macabre detail, see Dominy, Sergeant Escapers, n – 13.