In August 1944 much of Langley’s and Nelson’s time at IS 9(WEA) was absorbed by a plan called ‘En-Dor’, which envisaged the imminent German collapse that most Allied staffs then took for granted. The plan’s object was to process released ex-prisoners as fast as possible, and in its revised version it stated that ‘No interrogations by IS 9(WEA) officers shall be allowed to hold up the return to U.K. of any British or American prisoner of war.’ The extent to which administrative detail had been foreseen may be gauged by a note of McCallum’s to SHAEF: each interrogator would have sixty pounds of personal baggage plus 100 pounds of stationery, and a further nine tons of stationery were held in forward reserve.
On to what targets was this paper barrage to be fired? An IS 9 estimate of 5 September 1944 supposed that there were about 160,000 British Commonwealth prisoners in German hands, over 100,000 of them east of the Elbe, and over 30,000 Americans, three-quarters of them in the same area.
A few days later Crockatt summoned Nelson and Langley to confer with himself and Holt at Beaconsfield about the conduct of ‘En-Dor’ and the future of IS 9(WEA). At this conference there was a general feeling of cautious optimism that Germany would be overrun in a matter of a few weeks, that the war in Europe would end by Christmas and that the rescue of the few evaders and escapers in Holland would be merely a matter of collecting them from their hiding places and ensuring that they were interrogated. When this had been done, the unit would be available for any final tasks in connection with prisoners from the Oflags and Stalags, and perhaps to search for the men 324and women of the escape organisations who had been sent to concentration camps. As usual Crockatt’s orders were clear and concise and left little room for discussion.1
‘The liberated POWs will first be sent to SHAEF staging camps in France and Belgium where you will be responsible for ensuring that every individual completes a short form which Colonel Holt and I have prepared, before he is flown to England. These forms will supply all the information that we require for a possible more detailed re-interrogation later in England or the States. No ex-POW will be permitted to board the aircraft until he has filled in one of these forms. Any questions before I outline your other minor duties?’
Nelson and Langley looked at one another, the same picture forming in each of their minds: row upon row of released prisoners, many of them prisoners since May 1940 and some embittered by the fiasco that had followed the ‘stand fast’ order in Italy, sitting like schoolboys at an examination to answer questions which the majority would feel were a waste of time and utterly pointless now the war was over. ‘I don’t think,’ said Nelson, ‘that they will take kindly to such treatment. They will regard it as one more maddening obstacle delaying their return home. I think we will have a lot of trouble on our hands.’
Crockatt smiled as he replied, ‘I don’t for a moment think they will take kindly to such interrogation and I expect their reactions will be vociferous and occasionally violent, but those are your orders and you will carry them out. Now for my second point. The staff at the staging camps will prepare nominal rolls and I wish you to go through these and pick out anyone who is on the list we have prepared; they are men who were inveterate, if unsuccessful, escapers, members of the escape committees and so on, who have performed outstanding work on escaping. You will tell them that Colonel Holt and I look forward 325to meeting them after they have been on leave and to learning more of their activities.
‘Further, we have also drawn up a black list of names of those POWs who are suspected of having collaborated with the enemy. You will be on the look-out for these men, inform us of any you identify and hold them pending further instructions.2 Any questions?’ Nelson and Langley exchanged glances again, and Langley asked, ‘Do we put these men under close or open arrest?’ It was the turn of Crockatt and Holt to glance at each other.
‘It is a question we both hoped you would not raise,’ Crockatt replied. ‘The whole matter is fraught with difficulties as in some cases the evidence is insufficient to justify such action and in most is largely unsupported and consists of vague accusations which may well be prompted by personal antagonism. No arrest until you receive an order and don’t start asking how you are going to hold any suspects back without arousing their suspicions. That’s your problem. Finally I wish to make it absolutely clear that Colonel Holt and I are not having the teams or interrogation sections swanning all over Germany. You may authorise specific missions to locate and help our people such as Pat or Dédée in the concentration camps, but no general unauthorised roving around.’
As Nelson and Langley drove to Northolt to fly back to Paris and Brussels respectively the sky was filled with the throbbing of aircraft engines as an armada of troop carriers and gliders passed overhead. Operation ‘Market Garden’ was under way and ‘En-Dor’ went into storage for another six months. All through that time IS 9(WEA) was busy with routine briefing work, with rescuing ‘Market Garden’ survivors, and with providing reports codenamed ‘Mercury’ on whatever turned up of value for evaders. Twenty-three of these reports were issued between 13 July 1944 and 31 March 1945.
326Most fighting forces would have given in by the stage of allround defeat the Germans were at in early September 1944. Yet their leadership, including wide swathes of the educated classes, recalled how Frederick the Great of Prussia had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the Seven Years’ War nearly two centuries before, and hoped against hope that the miracle would be repeated. The last serious spasm was the Ardennes offensive of 16 December 1944, which petered out on Christmas Day before it had got even half-way to its objective, Antwerp. United States prisoners played an unwitting part in such success as it had: 2,300 complete American uniforms were forcibly removed by the Germans from the Red Cross clothing store in a camp in Pomerania on 1 November 1944, and the same number of US army paybooks were confiscated. This provided Skorzeny’s Panzerbrigade 150 with 2,300 opportunities to confuse the Allies next month.
Meanwhile, as the German mood hardened, from almost all the camps came coded presages of the fate that SAOs and SBOs feared was about to overwhelm them: massacre. With our subsequent knowledge that massacre was only a mirage – 166,560 British Commonwealth prisoners had in fact been recovered by 4 June 1945 – are these worried senior officers to be written off as alarmists? By no means. When the Army Council instructed the military mission in Russia to do what it could to secure the prompt release of Commonwealth prisoners overrun by the Red Army, it stated that ‘Few questions arouse stronger feeling throughout the British Commonwealth than the treatment and welfare of our prisoners of war in German hands’, and it is possible that the German government was aware of this: by midwinter 1944–5 its leading members were past caring.
Goebbels indeed put up to Hitler in February the proposal that the Germans should repudiate the Geneva Convention and shoot every pilot they held. As Trevor-Roper puts it, ‘This, he said, would both stop the Allied bombing and deter German soldiers from surrendering in the West, lest they be treated 327likewise. Those already captured, apparently, could be written off.’ Rumours of this conceivably leaked out, perhaps down some Luftwaffe grapevine; in any case, given the Nazis’ known views on men and methods, and the more and more desperate straits into which the course of the war was driving them, some sudden and savage blow was only to be expected. Nor was there any reason to believe that pilots alone would suffer.
Crockatt and Johnston had to consult higher authority on a point of so much weight. It was not a mere intelligence technicality, such as the decisions that there were code-users enough already in the camps, which Crockatt had made as far back as the end of 1943 (the American rate of change of pilots was so high that Johnston was still encouraging the teaching of fresh code users as late as the summer of 1945). After the Sagan executions had become known in England in early May 1944, and after the war had taken a decisive turn for the better when the Germans were bundled out of France and Belgium in September, the problem of whether it remained a captured fighting man’s duty to escape was referred as high as the British chiefs of staff. Crockatt meanwhile sent a direct order to Colditz: there were to be no more escapes from there. The chiefs of staff considered the point at the turn of the year, and ruled that while escape was still praiseworthy, it need no longer be considered a duty. This was passed on to Marlag-Milag Nord early in January 1945 in these words: ‘in view increasing german ruthlessness and lack of regard to Geneva convention chiefs of staff rule that under present circumstances it need no longer be considered duty of p/w to escape but it is not forbidden to do so do not let Germans know.’ The Americans agreed that their orders and training should conform.
A further, difficult problem now arose: ought prisoners of war in Germany, faced with the possibility of massacre, to be armed? Some camps had already taken the bit between their teeth. Private Edward J. Zayd, captured unconscious near Salerno in 328mid-September 1943 and repatriated a year later, reported that Stalag IIIB had bought pistols, light sub-machine-guns and ammunition in exchange for coffee, cigarettes and chocolate: an enterprising piece of trading with the enemy. Even at Colditz, supposedly the strictest though not as has been shown the securest of camps, the prisoners built and hid in an attic a glider in which a couple of them could escape into the countryside in a dire emergency, and David Stirling of SAS had them organised to attempt to overpower their guards below by unarmed combat.
Crockatt and Holt attended a conference at SHAEF’s main headquarters at Versailles in February 1945. Colonel (Sir) Robin Brook, SOE’s liaison officer at SHAEF, attended: so did Langley and Nelson. Evidence that Hitler would order the mass extermination of prisoners of war was reviewed. It was agreed that the SS would carry out such an order with alacrity, even with relish. It was as well that no one present was aware that a reorganisation at the highest level in Germany had already handed over to Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, from October 1944 command inter alia of the Kriegsgefangenenwesen, the main administration of prisoner of war camps: luckily for these prisoners Himmler had too much else on his mind – such as the final solution of the Jewish problem, which he believed to be in sight – to bother about prisoners of war at all. Whether Wehrmacht units guarding prisoners would obey orders to mow them down was more doubtful; but was hope in the Wehrmacht’s mercy to be the only resource? Numerous camps had requested pistols at least. Ought not a much more massive armament to be provided?
Pistols could be dispatched easily enough by parcel, but with all the changes and chances of the parcel system was this a risk worth running? If a snap Gestapo raid on a parcel office found even a single round of pistol ammunition, would that not provide the Nazis with excuse enough to denounce the Convention and open fire? Crockatt at any rate thought so, and the rest agreed.
Only air supply remained. To drop containers direct into camp compounds, then in itself a difficult feat of airmanship, would 329only be to invite a fusillade from the watchtowers by which almost every camp was surrounded. The only troops who might be available to accompany an arms drop, and had the rare and necessary qualifications of bravery, agility, skill at arms, initiative, parachute training and combat experience, seemed to be the survivors of the ‘Jedburgh’ teams who under Brook’s direction had reinforced the French maquis with so much success during ‘Overlord’s’ opening stages; but they numbered less than 300 men in all. Survivors of the SAS brigade and of the OSS operational groups also involved in ‘Overlord’ and ‘Dragoon’, might have been considered as well, had the committee not gone on to consider what was to happen after a camp had been armed. All the difficulties that had been apparent in Italy about converting prisoners of war into efficient infantry at the fall of a parachute were still painfully in point; by 1945 there was no prospect of infantry holding ground for more than a few minutes against armour and artillery, of which the Germans still had plenty, and no prospect that wandering bodies of armed prisoners in a strange land could maintain themselves for more than a few hours.
To throw more good men away in order to give their prisoners a chance to make a series of heroic Custer’s last stands seemed to Crockatt and Holt a feckless, indeed an infantile plan. The SHAEF conference unanimously agreed that ‘Jedburgh’ teams should stand by to fly in to the aid of directly threatened camps, as a very last resort, if an emergency appeal by wireless was received and immediate armed intervention provided the only hope of saving the inmates’ lives; but that there should be no general attempt to arm the camps. This decision was so obviously the only practical one that both Nelson and Langley wondered why it had been thought necessary to have a conference at all. The answer was that the ghost of the Italian ‘stand fast’ order haunted the high command. Crockatt was not alone in his determination that in any subsequent inquiry there would be ample evidence that the future of POWs in Germany had been given the fullest possible consideration; further, that 330the decisions had been unanimous at all levels, so that there was no question of order, counter-order, disorder.
The business of clearing the camps was made much more intricate by a run of more or less panic German decisions, as Germany disintegrated under invasion from east, south and west at once. The theory seemed to be that no camp was to be overrun with prisoners still in it. Even from Auschwitz and Birkenau, the great killing-grounds west of Cracow, the concentration camp inmates who happened still to be alive were marched out, or packed into westbound cattle trucks, as the Russians drew near. Prisoners of war got the same treatment with less brutality. Thousands of them around Thorn for example were moved away by train to Falling-bostel south of Hamburg, where the indispensable Warrant Officer Deans quietly exerted his authority. Not even he could persuade some of the army prisoners not to trade independently with the thoroughly demoralised guards, but he bought enough pistols, ammunition and grenades to overpower the gatehouse if the worst came to the worst. Numbers had swollen to 12,000 by 18 April 1945, when the whole party were marched off towards Lübeck; those who stayed with it were liberated on 2 May.
Most of the sailors in Marlag-Milag Nord were marched towards Lübeck also, in the fortnight 10–23 April, in company with a large RAF-USAF contingent who had made a much longer march already, from Sagan. By a stroke of bad luck, their column was shot up by a pair of P-47 Thunderbolts on the second day, 11 April; three prisoners were killed at this distressingly late moment, and two wounded (an example of the weakness of the air weapon against alert troops). Twelve officers and nine ratings escaped during the first two days. Captain E. H. B. Baker, RN, the SBO, then banned further escapes; he had noticed that the Germans were sweeping the surrounding woods for their own deserters, to whom they gave short shrift, and reckoned potential escapers were safest in the main party. This was sensible, but 331earned him few immediate thanks. Other SBOs and SAOs were more flustered. Small wonder that some senior officers, who had had no opportunity to exercise a wholly independent judgement for years, made some mistaken decisions at the crisis of liberation. When finally the Third and Last Reich foundered in a cloud of putrid dust, some 250,000 British, Commonwealth and American prisoners marched briskly out of the ruins.
Immediately after the Armistice in May, IS 9(WEA) set about its final task. Everyone not otherwise engaged – teams in Holland were busy with famine relief – was sent to reinforce the interrogation sections which, as had been anticipated, were not having an easy time. Most liberated prisoners accepted, though often sullenly, the reimposition of service discipline, and filled in the prepared ‘En-Dor’ forms, though the replies ranged from an uninformative ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to obscenities. The major exceptions were two. First came those who utterly refused to co-operate and promptly went absent without leave, usually to visit friends in Belgium or France made during an earlier abortive attempt to evade or escape, and then hitchhiked back to England, there rejoining the stream destined for home.
Secondly were those who regarded the MI 9 forms as a totally unexpected but none the less heaven-sent chance to pour out all their grievances from capture onwards, and to give vent to all their frustrations. These people gave IS 9(WEA) most trouble. Their outpourings were usually vicious accusations of collaboration with the Germans by fellow-prisoners, or self-justifications of their own activities, in the form of long rambling accounts of their unsuccessful attempts to escape. The staff could do no more than keep them supplied with paper and pencils. These essentials, notably pencils, often ran short, for the staff failed to take into account the habit acquired in prison camps of pocketing any small object that might serve some useful purpose in the future. There was much silent sympathy for those in MI 9 or MIS-X whose task it would be to evaluate these statements. 332None of these forms have yet been released. They may all mercifully have been pulped. A few disgruntled members of escape committees worked up a series of grudges against MI 9, for being too slow and for failing to provide the earth and a quarter, when they came to write camp histories. There was also a small minority who could not write or whose English was insufficient for understanding or answering the questions.
The hope that SHAEF’s administrative staff would be able to supply accurate nominal rolls in the three main ex-POW transit camps, at Antwerp, Brussels and Rheims, proved unfounded.
Groups of liberated prisoners would arrive, frequently without warning, at all hours of the day or night, hungry, dirty, often in rags. Dealing with their immediate requirements was given priority, and on many occasions men had left on the next stage of their journey home before the interrogators saw any nominal roll or had time to read over anything that had been written down on the ‘En-Dor’ forms. As a result only one man on the black list was picked up at Brussels: a British corporal who had been captured wounded at Dunkirk and had since accumulated some serious black marks.
Crockatt refused to allow this man to be put under arrest or handed over to the military police, and ordered that he be kept at IS 9(WEA) headquarters until such time as an MI 9 officer could be sent over from Beaconsfield to conduct him back to England for further questioning. He was put in the charge of a senior NCO but slipped away during the night, and as far as Elwes and Langley were concerned he was never seen again. There were reputed to be more than five hundred British and American deserters hiding in Belgium and northern France, mainly near such ports as Antwerp. It was not difficult to slip aboard a ship returning to England and thence into the oblivion of civilian life. Even this chance was missed by one pathetic character, an Ordnance Corps private taken prisoner with all his unit by a single German officer in a tank on 13 June 1940. He had the enterprise to slip away five days later, and walked westwards, 333hoping for a boat to the Channel Islands; could not find one; got work as a farm labourer; had a brush with the police about a stolen bicycle; and ended up, pretending to be a Fleming, building pillboxes on the Atlantic wall: Ichabod, Ichabod.
The available figures indicate that out of the 166, ooo odd Commonwealth prisoners alive in Germany at the end of the war, about 54,000 filled in the ‘En-Dor’ forms. Not unnaturally the IS 9(WEA) staffs became depressed at what they felt to be failure to carry out their duties. However, Crockatt and Holt made it clear that they were more than satisfied with what was being achieved, and this encouragement kept the staffs going till the transit camps were closed down. IS 9(WEA) was formally disbanded in August.
Its supreme advantage had been that it operated in countries with strong pro-British and pro-American sentiments dating back to 1914–18 and beyond, and with a section of the population prepared from 1940 onwards to help evaders and escapers without regard to the risks involved or the fearsome penalties inflicted by the Germans if they were caught. To this was added the backing of the lines arranged through P15, and strong support from the governments in exile of France, Belgium and Holland (the French were not recognised by the Americans or the British till October 1944).
‘Pat’ Guérisse was safely recovered, shaken but not crushed by Natzweiler – where he caught sight of his former courier Andrée Borrel on her way to the furnace – and by Dachau. And one of the anonymous grey wraiths who were left upright in Ravensbrück turned out to be Andrée de Jongh. She had managed to swap identities with a girl who looked quite like her, and thus to evade a Gestapo search made particularly for her; she got lost in the ruck, looked after her sick companions, and held on. None of the forty-odd SAS in Belsen survived. They were too well known to their captors, and there was no crowd in which they could hide. None had the luck and courage combined to imitate John Godwin, and take one with him when their time came to be shot. 334
Among the debris to be cleared away in the ruins of Germany there emerged again Harold Cole, the scourge of the ‘Pat’ line’s early days. He surfaced in the American zone, again called himself an English captain, and indicated he was engaged on some unspecified intelligence task. When the British heard of this he was arrested and taken to Paris, still in American custody. He was not closely watched, and had no trouble in slipping on an American sergeant’s tunic and strolling away. He hid up in the flat of a woman he knew; a neighbour caught sight of the tunic, and reported him as a suspected deserter. Two gendarmes came to question him. He opened fire, wounding one of them; the other shot him dead.
IS 9(CMF)’s experiences were less paper-laden – there were fewer prisoner of war camps to be overrun in Austria than in Germany – and can be more summarily treated. Jock McKee, whose adventure at Sulmona may be recalled, had another and a more effective chance to assert his personality when a sizeable body of quite senior SS officers tried to refuse their own Oberbefehlshaber’s order to surrender: McKee had personality enough, in a captain’s battledress, to overawe these figures in immaculate black leather, several of whom were shortly on trial for war crimes. (Skorzeny had laid on a ratline by which the wilier SS high command could slip away to Argentina, but that is not an MI 9 story.)
The oddest business on the southern front was the apparition of those two revered figures from the stresses of the late 1930s, Leon Blum the French Socialist and Kurt Schuschnigg the Austrian Catholic, accompanied by Giles Romilly, Michael Alexander and Lord Hopetoun, Prominente from Colditz castle. They had all been spirited away in mid-April 1945, at a moment when it looked as if the Nazi redoubt in Bavaria might after all be going to mean something: their lives were to be used as bargaining counters. Romilly and Alexander’s account of how the entire hostage project fizzled out is too good to miss.
Routine problems continued to dog the section to the bitter 335end, above all the old one about whom to move. On 11 April Derry had to remind ‘Squad’ Dennis that ‘your charter covers Polish troops captured by the enemy while fighting for us and NOT deserters from the German army’; above all, Dennis simply needed to use his common sense to see what was reasonable to do, and do it.
A. F. Tuke, a future chairman of Barclay’s Bank, was overrun in Padua with about fifty fellow-guardsmen captured south of the Po; they had disengaged themselves from their retreating captors and were behaving with the Brigade’s usual imperturbability. Fillingham, who had acquired a captured Mercedes to help him sort out evaders and encourage helpers, remarked that ‘We have never worked so hard in all our lives.’
A word is needed in conclusion on the war in Europe about those who tried to escape eastabout from Germany – or westabout from Japan – through the USSR: attempts that led sometimes to success, usually to imprisonment, sometimes to disappearance, often to disillusion.
As early as 18 April 1942, one of General Doolittle’s crews who had taken part in his famous raid on Tokyo had landed at Vladivostok instead of trying to regain their carrier. They were all interned for several months in a village near the Urals. With the connivance of a local magnate, they escaped over the Persian border on 11/12 May 1943, met the nearest British consul, and were escorted by him to Quetta on the western confines of India.
They had by then formed an ‘exceedingly poor opinion of the Russians’, and gathered it was reciprocated.
Not long before this crew was interned in Russia, the British mission in Kuybyshev (the Soviet government’s rear headquarters) at last got a positive answer to a long series of inquiries made of the Russians, about whether they had any news of escapers who were known in London, through coded letters, to have moved eastward, usually from Thorn. Their first object would have been to make contact with the Polish 336underground, in the hope of a passage to Sweden or a move into the Balkans. Failing that they might try the USSR in hope of repatriation.
Littledale, Sinclair and Davies-Scourfield had had promising friends in Warsaw, and there were other cases; but those who pressed on into Russian-occupied Poland for the most part simply disappeared. In fact when arrested they were treated as political prisoners and confined in appropriate jails. After the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 fresh inquiries were set on foot, with the same negative results. Yet a few months later the Russians informed the British military mission that they had ‘discovered’ some ten British prisoners, and arrangements were made to fly them to Archangel; there they could take an aircraft for home.
Their story was an odd one. In June 1941 they were in a train en route, so they understood, for a slave labour camp in Siberia. Suddenly they were transferred to a train going in the opposite direction, and ended up in a luxury hotel in the Crimea where for some weeks they lived off such fat as there was in the land, until physically at least they showed little sign of the privations they had undergone. They got back to Great Britain eventually, after a rough journey; it was not an incident that anyone concerned in it remembered gladly.
Several later British escapers, including Cyril Rofe the travel agent, did succeed in picking their way through the vast and confused eastern combat zone to safety in the Russian lines and eventual return home. Several more set off, and never arrived: presumably disposed of by one or another of the several combatant sides. For the war in south-west Russia was a more intricate affair than the straight Nazi-Soviet head-on collision that figures in all the textbooks. There were at least five combatant groups, German, Jewish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, with roots on the spot, not to speak of the Spaniards, Hungarians, Romanians and others dragged along in the Germans’ wake. Any one of the five main groups might, under sufficient pressure, 337fight any of the other four, and there were fearsome complications that need to be unravelled one day; though not while the area bears its present political complexion. No fate was more likely than a prompt journey to oblivion for an escaper born an English-speaker who tried to cross the Ukraine in the early 1940s.
There was never any direct liaison between MI 9 or MIS-X and any Soviet staff; all relations were conducted through the service attachés in London, Washington, and Moscow/Kuybyshev. It was even supposed in MI 9 that there was no equivalent Soviet department. On the other hand, there are a few traces in the American archives of exactly what on a priori grounds one would have expected: ‘a highly developed Russian intelligence organisation’ for infiltrating prisoner of war camps in which Red Army and air force prisoners were held, collecting information from them, and organising escapes. One document is dated on All Fools’ Day; and we have found no trace at all of any Soviet organisation to help evaders from the Russian air force, who must have been many. Their orders may be presumed to have been to get in touch with the nearest reliable partisan gang and await instructions.
Several Russian escapers have been mentioned already, who turned up in the west and were helped along IS 9’s lines. It is just worth mentioning the two youngest, boys of sixteen and seventeen who deserted to the Allies from a unit of Vlassov’s Russian collaborationist army in Normandy. They, like the rest, were interrogated by John Buist, who spoke good Russian, and handed over to the Soviet embassy in London; after which nothing more of their fate is known. They may be presumed to have encountered at least the minimum sentence, of five months in a penal battalion, which the Soviet regime visited even on successful escapers if they had ever put on a German uniform.
On German soil there were awkwardnesses: the worst when the Red Army overran Stalag IIIB and opened fire on the 338American prisoners, killing some fifty and wounding several hundred; they said they took them for Hungarians.
By a decision made at Yalta, MI 9 was able to send a small delegation to Russia to look after Commonwealth prisoners of war overrun by the Red Army on the eastern front. MIS-X sent a similar team to look after Americans. After a short visit to Moscow, the two teams settled side by side on the waterfront in Odessa, the port to which those seeking to leave the USSR were all directed; and to which those being returned to that stern regime were shipped from the west. A shipborne interpreter has indicated the contrast between the glumness of those going back into Russia and the cheeriness of those coming out.
Quite a crowd in fact turned up in the end, over 2,500 each of British Commonwealth and of American citizens – thus bearing out Crockatt’s calculation that as many as one in seven of all the successful escapers from Germany came this way, for all the horrors, difficulties and dangers attendant on the journey. This is no contemptible figure, and is a tribute both to the escapers’ courage, and to the courage of the thousands of unrecorded Polish and Soviet citizens who helped them on the earlier stages of their journey.
Averell Harriman, then American ambassador in Moscow, ‘expects some severe criticism of the Russians from the American prisoners now on their way home’, according to his British colleague; and indeed some Americans – like some Englishmen – were vociferous about the dirt, the harshness, and the plain theft they had encountered near the front. Many Soviet citizens helped themselves to any capitalist wrist watches, fountain pens, or other nice-looking portable objects they met, remarking airily ‘You can get another when you get home.’ But a moment’s reflection made it clear that the main problem was lack of organisation and resources, not negligence or even ill-will. Colonel Frederick W. Drury, overrun in a camp in Poland in late January 1945, reported that he had had an uncomfortable, 339underfed, overcrowded journey; still, ‘the Russian officer who was with us lived in exactly the same conditions in which we did … I feel the Russians gave us everything they had and that their attitude was friendly and as helpful as conditions permitted.’
In Odessa, Buist’s opposite number was Major Paul S. Hall; each had a doctor and a small clerical staff. There was plenty of volunteer clerical help from prisoners who were glad to have something constructive to do again, beyond shoring up tunnels or fabricating Ausweise. Conditions were rough, but the best that the ruined city could afford, and as well as the constant ineffectual pumping by Tass correspondents there were superlative opera and concert performances, and a splendid circus.
The Asian war did not slacken at Hitler’s death: on the contrary, Mountbatten and MacArthur, the two principal supreme commanders, were each preparing combined operations of great complexity, subtlety and strength. In a remote American desert an international team of scientists – eminent among them Niels Bohr, who had been spirited away from Copenhagen in 1943 – was preparing in deadly secrecy a bomb that would make any previous bomb look like a fire-cracker. The Japanese, wholly ignorant about the bomb, were feeling the pinch of war very tightly indeed, and some of their diplomats were beginning to wonder how to get out of it, but their dominant military caste seemed to grow less and not more flexible as things got worse: like the English at the battle of Maldon long ago. Prisoners were still treated as less than the dust beneath their captors’ feet. Only wild chance or wild heroism made escapes possible, and the implacable terrain, the huge expanses of ocean, militated as ever against evaders.
Crockatt had been out to Asia in the middle of winter, seizing a moment in passing to see his son Dick who was a subaltern in the Royal Scots in Burma. He could not fail to notice while he was in India the utter lack of MI 9/MIS-X integration 340there, and on 28 January 1945 sounded off about it in a private and manuscript letter to Johnston: ‘I wish to God people would forget about themselves and their nationalities and get on with this bloody war, so that you and I could get our boys back’, a cri de coeur that Johnston certainly echoed. MIS-X had another new set of superiors under whom to work: he had returned to Washington from a highly successful visit to London in mid-June 1944 to find ‘all of G-2 being upheaved’. Catesby Jones had gone across to a policy desk, and Colonel Russell H. Sweet had become head of Captured Personnel and Materiel; at least Sweet, being new to the job, gave Johnston no trouble. But the incessant jostling for jobs that is common in all capitals did not leave MIS-X in perfect peace, when the whole of the American war machine was being re-geared to cope simply with a trans-Pacific instead of a trans-Atlantic and a trans-Pacific war. Many British commentators have remarked how the tendency of Americans to do things their own way, always marked, became more marked than ever after July 1944, when for the first time they had more troops in contact with the Axis enemy than the British did. Even the warm friendship that had grown up between Johnston and Crockatt came under strain – marked by de Bruyne’s somewhat abrupt return to England in the spring of 1945 after a storm in a teacup. Crockatt and Holt remained firm allies, but Holt’s office in London lost its raison d’être with Germany’s defeat, and he went home.
To the Americans and Europeans who knew the Japanese best, the eastern sky seemed overcast with portents, especially where the fate of prisoners of war was concerned. Nothing seemed more probable than that they would be swept away in massacres, by guards who would follow their ceremonial killing with mass ceremonial suicide.
Laurens van der Post has explained, with force and grace, how even the fiercest and proudest of the Japanese were released from the shame and dishonour of defeat by the new kind of catastrophe that overwhelmed Hiroshima and 341Nagasaki: bombs that rightly appalled good Christians, and yet provided for a devout Buddhist warrior an ample excuse to bow his head.3
But this was something miraculously new, something not foreseen in their or our own philosophy. It was something on so gigantic and undeniable a scale, such a manifestation of new power at work in life, that even they would know, as we who had been its terrible instrument of delivery would have to learn to know, that all the old ways, laws, rules, conventions and creeds which had brought us to this terrible impasse, had been judged invalid by life and something else would have to take their place.4
The work of rescue of the emaciated waifs who survived in the Japanese camps – about 140,000 from the British Commonwealth and 20,000 Americans, plus nearly 60,000 Dutch, both military and civilian – does not fall within our scope: this was medicine and administration, rather than organising evasion or escape. Douglas Clague, more or less single-handed, overawed the Japanese in Siam and secured the surviving prisoners’ prompt release. And when Mountbatten was negotiating the details of surrender in Burma and Malaya, E Group provided him with a map of the locations and strengths of the prisoner of war camps in his command that astounded the Japanese by its completeness, its accuracy, and its superiority to their own scrappy information.
Up to the last moment, which came when the Japanese at MacArthur’s instance signed an act of surrender on an American warship in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, there was much 342unease and some flurry about how their armed forces were going to react to total defeat. MacArthur put out an order, which Mountbatten’s staff copied and passed on, that the honourable susceptibilities of Japanese generals were to be observed: they were to be allowed to keep their swords. Slim, having discovered what the Japanese had done to prisoners from his Fourteenth Army, and having satisfied himself that this was not just a local whim, but a matter over which their commanding generals had had control, decided that these were not men of anything he could recognise as honour. He disobeyed MacArthur’s order, insisted on holding a ceremonial parade to receive the sword of the principal Japanese he had defeated, and kept it on his own chimneypiece thereafter.
As the fighting drew to its spectacular close, with the fall of Berlin to the Russians at the end of April 1945 and the collapse of Japan under the impact of two atomic bombs in August, a rather more acrid note than hitherto crept into some of the prisoner of war files in Washington and London. Staff officers could be found to argue that, now that Germany had vanished from the world map – as happened, temporarily, at the Potsdam conference – prisoners from the Wehrmacht were no longer covered by the Geneva Convention, and could be used as slave labour. This indeed was the fate of a large number of those captured on the eastern front, where there was more repair work to be done, where the Convention did not apply, and where consciences were less tender than in the west.
A different sort of scare, a minor one, raised by administrators in the Pentagon may serve to bring the military narrative to an end. On 20 April 1945 G-1 there wrote to G-2 to propose that lepers, of whom fifteen had been discerned already among Japanese prisoners of war, should be segregated into the leper colony at Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands. Now Molokai had made a small mark already in history: it had been there that Father Damien, the Belgian peasant boy turned missionary, had gone to work among the sick and had died of leprosy 343himself. Andrée de Jongh the inspirer of ‘Comet’, rescued from Ravensbrück, looked first after what was left of her family, and then remembered how much her dead father had admired Father Damien as well as Nurse Cavell. She worked for many years in a leper colony in Ethiopia and now does so in Senegal.
Though the military narrative is over, the administrative burden was not one lightly to be laid down. Crockatt handed MI 9 over to Sam Derry, the organiser of the Rome escape line, and retired to private life; not over-burdened with honours with a CBE, to which the Americans added a Legion of Merit and the French the Legion d’honneur and a Croix de Guerre. The playing of the fountain of honour is notoriously a shade erratic; nobody however would dream of grudging ‘Pat’ Guérisse his George Cross or Andrée de Jongh her George Medal. As she was technically a civilian, while he was technically a serving officer in the Royal Navy, their more or less equal services were unequally rewarded: an instance of the intricacies of the British system, which not even the British altogether understand. Johnston and Holt retired early also, leaving it to younger men and women to run the awards bureaux that were set up in liberated Europe (where not banned by liberators of Marxist leanings) to trace helpers and to offer them at least a token of a reward.
There were endless difficulties, not least in fending off self-interested collaborators with the enemy who were looking for a quick cover to protect themselves against irate neighbours, or in establishing just what had been done, and for whom, by undoubted secret helpers who could give no traceable details of the people with or for whom they had been working. There were political troubles as well. De Gaulle’s government, for example, officially warned Peter Murray (Prince Murat) that as he had committed the enormity of accepting a commission in a foreign army,’ if he re-entered France he would be liable for a court martial on a charge carrying death, or life imprisonment and forfeiture of all his property, as probable penalties. SHAEF 344took this up, equally officially, and the threat was withdrawn, hardly before time.
One further incident, this time all-British, tarnished the work of the bureaux. When the format and wording of certificates of thanks had been agreed, the question arose of who should sign them. For a number of reasons it was thought inappropriate to ask the Monarch, and the obvious second choice was Churchill, once himself an escaper. He accepted with alacrity, promising to sign each one personally rather than use a rubber stamp. Then the Air Ministry, perhaps disgruntled at the War Office’s control of MI 9, protested that as a high proportion of evaders had been airmen, signing should be the duty of a senior officer in the RAF. The outcome was that the certificates were rubber-stamped with the signature of (Lord) Tedder, Eisenhower’s second-in-command. The Americans were less riddled with interservice jealousies in Western Europe; Eisenhower signed the American equivalent, though again with a rubber stamp.
In Italy nearly 90,000 claims that help had been given were received, assessed and sorted. Certificates were signed either by Field-Marshal Alexander or by the American General McNarney. Many Italians seemed pathetically grateful, after a generation under Fascism, to find that any government would honour its word for anything.
The Air Ministry did something important to atone for its unfortunate intervention over the certificate signatures: it sponsored and financed the RAF Escaping Society, which took over where the awards bureaux left off and flourishes down to the present day. That the Air Ministry gave this venture such strong support was entirely due to the determination of some RAF officers who had themselves evaded or escaped, Embry at their head, that the men and women who had risked and sacrificed so much to help them should not be forgotten. Some of these helpers did not wish to remember; it was an interlude in their lives so tragic and sorrowful that they had no desire to have it recalled by services or reunions. 345
Crockatt founded a 919 dining club, which had an annual dinner at which former members of the staffs of MI 9 and MI 19 could meet each other and various eminent former escapers, evaders, organisers or helpers; it was wound up a few years after his own death in October 1956. His regiment, at least, had recognised him for what he was, and he was for ten years its Colonel.
Of the various friendly commemorative groups, amicales that were set up in Western Europe among groups of helpers after the war, only ‘Comet’ has survived intact: that seems, like the line, to be indestructible. Every year there is a reunion in Brussels and a requiem mass for those who died in the line’s service. P15, the British and American air attachés, a strong contingent from the Escaping Society and representatives of the vigorous USAF Escaping Society are always present. And when Andrée de Jongh’s mother was on her deathbed, Air Transport Command found it convenient to route a training flight from Aden to Wiltshire via Addis Ababa and Brussels; and sent one back on the reciprocal course after the funeral; carrying the line’s inspirer each way. Both the American and the RAF Escaping Societies have done a great deal of valuable work in looking after helpers’ families; an interesting and refreshing contrast with what some other comparable bodies have had to leave undone.
An agreeable Easter present awaited all the American prisoners who got home in 1945: a circular by Stimson and Forrestal, Secretaries of War and Navy, on 31 March informed them that they were all to be promoted one rank at least, to make up for the promotions they would have earned had they not been prisoners. The poorer and more Treasury-ridden British reverted to their war substantive rank after three months in prison, and with the outbreak of peace lost that. By 30 November 1945 a minute by Russell Sweet recorded that ‘MIS-X has been entirely liquidated’, an unhappy phrase to a European; he only meant it had been disbanded. 346
There is hardly need to do more than refer the reader again to Appendix 1, if he wants to review the scope of MI 9’s and MIS-X’s work: about three divisions’ worth of active men recovered from captivity, or the risk of it, for the war. Crockatt’s gloss on the apparent total of 26,190 Commonwealth escapers and evaders was: ‘It can be fairly claimed that of these 90 per cent of evaders and 33 per cent of escapers were brought out as a result of MI 9 organisation and activities.’ The American proportions were certainly no lower.
After the world war, the subject has not been left to slumber as it did in the 1920s. MI 9 has been succeeded in Britain by an interservice unit comprising intelligence and rescue teams; the Intelligence Corps and the Special Air Service both keep a keen eye on the subject. Various people were active in the Korean war of 1950–3, at which Guérisse was present as the chief Belgian medical staff officer, an appointment that did not keep him from being decorated yet again, this time for rescuing wounded under fire.
That the Americans also keep the subject under constant review is shown by an odd incident in the Vietnamese war, on 21 November 1970. In operation ‘Kingpin’, United States airmen and rangers tried – much as Charles Lamb had advocated at Laghouat – a rescue a party of their imprisoned colleagues by an airborne landing at a camp at Son Tay, not far west of Hanoi. A technically brilliant coup was spoiled by the brute fact that the camp had been empty for some weeks.
The dark glass of the future is as impenetrable as the jungle leaves round Son Tay. Bombs today make the Hiroshima bomb in turn look like a fire-cracker, and governments today talk and write in apparently good faith of using them. In that sort of war there will not be much scope for the comparatively archaic devices we have discussed; nor is any future combatant likely to allow prisoners of war – if he takes any – to communicate with their homeland at all. The world is getting back to the state Jacky Fisher threatened at the first Hague conference, when he 347remarked that the way to get peace was to let it be known that any prisoners you took, you would promptly boil in oil.
It remains true that free men cannot be cooped up indefinitely, no matter how well-intentioned or how dialectically correct the system that seeks to coop them. Equally, men on the run will always find helpers. Even in the iciest wastes of Siberia, the most torrid central or southern African or American jails, prisoners go on escaping, as Day escaped from Sachsenhausen, as Dyess escaped from Camp O’Donnell. Anyone who has to embark on such an adventure will be lucky if he has a staff to back him in secret that is in hands a tenth as capable as Norman Crockatt’s. 348
1 As on pp. 216–7 above, what follows is not claimed as an absolutely verbatim record, but it gives the gist of what was said.
2 The black list and all relevant files are at present withheld from research. (Dame) Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason, remains by far the best study.
3 Contrast G. E. M. Anscombe, Mr Truman’s Degree with van der Post, The Night of the New Moon, two utterly sincere works that arrive at opposite conclusions.
4 Ibid. 124.