A Traveller's Life (14 page)

The intention, when the time for the break-out arrived, was to fuse the perimeter lights and searchlights and then drop the bridge on the wire. When this was done the entire band of would-be escapees would charge across it in the darkness into the wilds of Czechoslovakia. This desperate plan, which had much in common with the Charge of the Light Brigade and which cast serious doubts on the sanity of whoever conceived it, was in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention in relation to prisoners-of-war, which expressly forbade anyone who escaped from taking up arms. Fortunately for all concerned, including myself, it was never carried out. It was betrayed by an officer in the camp who was at least partly acquainted with it and who had the misfortune to have a wife and children
living in occupied Europe and the Gestapo knew it. Not unnaturally he told them what he knew. Few of us, fortunately, have ever found ourselves in such a position, and it is difficult to say what any of us would have done in similar circumstances, faced with betraying an ostensibly crazy plan with very little chance of success or of sacrificing his wife and children.

The results were tragic. At this time two Czech-speaking British officers were got out of the camp with the intention of making advanced contact with the Czech underground. It may be that the Germans allowed their escape to happen. Nothing more was heard of these emissaries until one morning the Senior British Officer was told to present himself at the main gate where he was handed two tins containing their ashes.

Within a day or two of this tragic dénouement Oflag VIIIF was evacuated. We were marched through a village, in which all the inhabitants had been ordered to stay indoors with blinds or curtains drawn, by guards armed with submachine-guns, to a railway embankment where a large number of freight cars stood waiting on what was a spur of the line to Trebovice. Here we were lined up on the edge of the embankment and handcuffed. In view of what had happened to our two Czech-speaking officers the situation looked grim.

‘You can't do this to us,' one veteran prisoner who had been captured in Norway in April 1940 shouted. ‘We're British!'

He had been handcuffed years previously in a fortress at Thorn in Poland. Nevertheless his protest seemed curiously comic at this particular moment, as the majority of us were convinced that we were going to be mown down.

But we were not mown down. Instead, we were ordered into the freight cars, the doors were locked and we began another endless journey, protracted by air raids in the later stages, this time north-westwards to Brunswick by way of Görlitz, Dresden
again, Leipzig, Halle and Magdeburg. At least we were travelling in the direction of home.

The floors of the freight cars were covered with straw and each one was provided with a barrel for us to pee in. We got the handcuffs off in about ten minutes and consigned them to the barrel. When it grew dark and the barrel was sufficiently full we asked the guards for permission to empty it down a steep embankment at one of the innumerable and interminable halts. Soon there were no handcuffed prisoners on the train at all.

Oflag 79, our new home, was at Braunschweig-Querum on the north-western outskirts of Brunswick. There we were accommodated in what had been the barracks of the Luftwaffe until the Allied bombers had made the place too hot for them to continue to live in it. One of the Luftwaffe's airfields was at a place called Waggum, about five hundred yards away on the other side of the
autobahn
from Berlin to Hanover and points west. So recently had this evacuation taken place that in one cellar signs of what must have been a wild farewell party were still in evidence: innumerable empty bottles, cigarette ends and cigar butts (which we appropriated), items of female underwear and others of an even more intimate nature. At Waggum, too, there was a military factory, soon to become a favourite target for American Fortresses, the Mühlenbau und Industrie Aktiengesellschaft which made aircraft parts and assembled ME110s. On the other side of the camp, a few hundred yards away, was the Neemo Aktiengesellschaft factory, in which hundreds of Russian and other slaves were engaged twenty-four hours a day in constructing parts for V1 and V2 weapons. Not far off, too, was the Bussing truck factory, a tank factory and an assault gun works. Surrounded by all these targets,
which had been pinpointed by British Bomber Command and the Eighth American Airforce, it was difficult to believe that this situation had not been chosen for us by the Germans without some forethought. There was no view to speak of as there had been at Moravská Trebová in Czechoslovakia, of wide open Central European spaces, spaces into which every night, as the Russians advanced westwards, the whole camp, once in bed, would shout as one man, ‘Come on, Joe!', to the fury of our hosts. Here we were hemmed in by nasty, dripping, Nordic woods.

In the first six months during which we were in residence, Allied aircraft were overhead on a hundred and sixty-nine days and nights out of a hundred and seventy-five; armadas of Fortresses of the Eighth American Airforce and attendant fighters, anything up to two hundred-strong by day, and by night RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes and Mosquitoes. The Mosquitoes were particularly unpleasant as they often came alone or in small numbers, and buzzed around for ages carrying one four-thousand-pound bomb with which they appeared to be trying to hit the Neemo factory, but without success. Meanwhile, we cowered in the flimsy cellars beneath our living quarters with our patriotism at a low ebb, listening to these projectiles as they came howling downwards, longing for the opportunity to dig ourselves slit trenches somewhere out beyond the wire which enclosed us. Altogether, up to 16 October, we were at the epicentre of thirteen heavy raids, not counting raids by Mosquitoes and four large fighter strafes. Of the heavy raids that of 24 August was the most memorable.

That morning the 102nd red air-raid warning sounded, which signified that the enemy – in this case our own side – were overhead. Almost immediately we saw the first wave of Fortresses, the harbingers of more than thirteen hundred aircraft, coming in at between twenty thousand and thirty thousand feet through
colossal flak, beautiful as flying fish, shimmering in the sun, this time not bound as they more often were for points east but, as the markers which the leaders let fall almost lazily to earth indicated, for Waggum and Querum and, among other targets, for us.

Later that afternoon, an American crew member of one of these Fortresses, which had been shot down over Brunswick, was brought to the camp to begin his life as a prisoner-of-war, after he had escaped, landing in a tall tree, being lynched by the civil population, who by this time were far more bloodthirsty than the majority of the military. There he stood for some time, surveying the smoking ruins of the barrack blocks in which the Germans were still burrowing for the dead, without saying anything. By a miracle only three prisoners were killed and forty injured. The German guards had far higher casualties. Then he lit a Camel, a cigarette none of us had seen for years. ‘Well,' he said, after inhaling deeply a couple of times, ‘I guess you can't make an omelette without breaking an egg.'

Extracts from a copy of a letter sent to Lieutenant Anthony Simpson, Royal Artillery, on the day after the events just referred to but, not surprisingly perhaps, never received by him:

Oflag 79
25 August 1944

Dear Tony,

Tell your Mum [she was in some secret job in the War Office] to send us some anti-aircraft guns. What happened yesterday – see your paper of today's date – is beyond a joke. And tell her lots of ammunition, fused for whatever height Fortresses fly at. We're not prepared to put up with this sort of thing even from our Allies from ‘across the herring pond'. However, it is not only our American cousins, as some people like to call them, who are to blame. A very
large fragment of an enormous bomb which the RAF delivered to us the other night when salvaged was found to have the name of a firm in Birmingham on it, of which the father of one of my roommates is the chairman. ‘Daddy' is not very popular at the moment.

PS.
Don't
show this letter to my parents, just
tell your Mum to Stop it
!

The winter of 1944 was gruesome in every way. All through March and early April 1945 we wondered if the SS would whisk us away east of the Elbe to be used as bargaining pawns, or simply to be obliterated as those Polish officers had been at Katyn. Plans were made to take the machine-gun towers by storm under cover of a barrage of stones thrown by massed stone throwers; but we were saved from this unspeakable necessity by the intervention of an extremely distinguished-looking member of the German Foreign Office, who turned up one day and stayed on, hoping to save his skin. Hanover fell to the US Ninth Army on 10 April after a spirited resistance by Hitler Youth and Flak Troops, who depressed the muzzles of their anti-aircraft guns in order to take them on. Then, after a night in which Allies and Germans had lobbed shells over the camp at one another, rather as if they were playing tennis, at nine in the morning on 12 April, a nice sunny day, a jeep with two Ninth Army GIs and a French worker named Pierre drove up to the main gate and took the German surrender from the camp commandant, Von Strehler.

‘We're looking forward to knocking shit out of the Russkies now,' these two amiable fellows said, and departed in the direction of Berlin. ‘Technically' we were liberated.

Later that morning, when it became obvious that we were not likely to be going home for some time yet, I went out through a hole that some other seeker after freedom had already cut in the
wire, and walked through dark woods of splintered pine trees. There were innumerable craters – a small part of the six thousand eight hundred tons of bombs dropped on Brunswick which had obliterated six hundred and fifty acres of the city but failed to destroy the camp. Standing on a bridge over the Berlin autobahn at a point where it crossed the railway line I could see what was left of the airfield, with some burnt-out skeletons of aircraft standing on it.

I had expected to see long lines of Ninth Army transport moving eastwards along the autobahn towards Berlin, but as far as the eye could see in both directions there was not a vehicle or a human being. To the south-east of Brunswick, beyond the woods that hid our prison camp from view, columns of black smoke were rising high in the sky and from beyond the horizon to the north and east came apocalyptic rumblings; but here, where I stood looking westwards across the endless flat fields of the Saxon plain, there was no sound except the twittering of the skylarks high above. They reminded me of the skylarks near Stonehenge and above the Purbeck Downs in Dorset; but all I felt was very, very old. I was liberated but I had none of the sensations of freedom.

I continued westwards along the autobahn in the direction of Hanover, passing under an exit bridge. I then continued not on the autobahn, where I might become the target of some fighter pilot idly testing his guns, but in the fields alongside. Then I crossed the Weser-Elbe canal, and on that, too, there was not a barge or a human being in sight. It was rather depressing country, with here and there a group of farm buildings or a small village, villages that I knew from studying the escape maps in the camp mostly had names that ended in ‘—
rode
' or ‘—
büttel
'. These features, together with some telephone lines that provided a link with the outside world, and an occasional plantation of trees, were the only things that broke the monotony of this great inland sea
of plain which was so extensive it was said that the King of England could stand on the battlements of Windsor Castle and, looking eastwards down the Thames Valley, know that from where he stood there was no higher land until one reached the Urals. I wondered if he was doing it now. I had always had a soft spot for him ever since, high in the Apennines, I heard his broadcast on Christmas Day 1943, when in laboured but sincere tones he had sent a message from Sandringham to, among others, those on Italian peaks. ‘Wherever you may be your thoughts will be in distant places and your hearts with those you love,' he had said. And I, together with someone else on hearing him, had not been ashamed to shed a tear.

Under the trees on the edge of one of these plantations, two or three hundred yards from the road, I could see something that gave me the shivers, a Tiger tank, hull down, apparently dug in, with its crew lounging around it, waiting. Waiting for what, I wondered? To make a last stand, someone to surrender to, an issue of cigarettes?

I crossed to the far side of the autobahn so that they would not see me and pick me off, and kept going westwards. Then, seeing an isolated farmhouse a couple of fields away, on impulse I walked across to it. Everything I did that morning was unpremeditated.

I went into the farmyard with a stone in my hand, expecting to be met by a savage dog, but there was none. I had felt fear when I saw the Tiger but now I had no feeling at all that what I was doing might be foolish, that there might be German soldiers inside the building, hiding, overrun, left behind by the battle but still effective. I was numb. I did not even stop to think why I was going into the house at all.

The farmhouse was of indeterminate age, built of that slightly shiny sort of brick which never changes its colour or texture from
the time that it is made until the house falls down. I opened the door and found myself in a large kitchen, with a big stove to one side, in which what was presumably the entire family were seated at a long table, eating what must have been the equivalent in Saxony of English elevenses. Four masks by Bosch or Breughel, mouths full of cake, with little stone eyes, regarded me, neither friendly nor unfriendly – masks in a stone wall. They were the first German civilians I had ever met.

‘
Kann ich essen, bitte?
' I asked in as amiable a manner as I could manage under their stolid gaze – old father, still robust, old matriarch, head of the family, fat son of forty-odd, thin wife, the men in greasy-looking black suits, the women in greasy black dresses and aprons, the working gear of peasants anywhere. No reply. They had stopped chewing. They even seemed to have stopped breathing. No sound except a long case clock with the name of the maker and the place of origin which ended in ‘—
rode
' engraved on its dial, tick-tocking in a corner. ‘
Kann ich essen, bitte
?' I said again, more loudly. By this time I was not interested in their bloody cake. It was a game.

Nothing.

The cake was not particularly attractive-looking, but it was round and large and sticky, and I had not set eyes on anything like it since the middle of 1942 in Egypt. It stood on a wooden platter with a big knife beside it. I picked up the knife, cut myself a modest slice and with the words, ‘
Viele danken
,' spoken in as ironic a tone as I could manage in German, turned on my heel and walked out of the door, expecting to feel the knife between my shoulder blades.

Outside I waited with my back to the wall for perhaps thirty seconds, which seemed longer, expecting to hear a babble of voices, let loose by my departure, before continuing on my way. But there was nothing. Just the wind in the telephone wires that stretched
away from the house across the plain and the twittering of the larks overhead.

In one of the villages ending in ‘—
rode
', a very small place which appeared to be deserted, I met some Americans. Only the fact that the spotless blinds were drawn in the neat houses showed that the inhabitants were there all right, hidden behind them as they had been that day we were marched through Moravská Trebová. There were half a dozen Americans with a couple of jeeps between them, armed to the teeth and carrying their weapons with the sort of negligence that spoke of long familiarity and use. In one of the jeeps a radio crackled. I told them about the Tiger and they said the place was still crawling with Krauts – Hitler Youth mostly – and that I should watch my step. They were incurious about my being a prisoner-of-war, just as I had been incurious about prisoners-of-war before I was captured. Being a prisoner was something they could not envisage. They gave me a whole pack of Camels, some tins of Spam and some weird rations contained in what looked like oversize toothpaste tubes, of a sort that I had never seen before, which the affable man who gave them to me described as ‘a loadashit'. Their morale was very high. They spoke of a possible show-down with the Russians east of the Elbe with positive relish. Just before I left, the sergeant in charge of the party who had told me to watch my step beckoned me round a corner.

‘We just hanged a guy,' he said, in a matter-of-fact way, just as he might have said, ‘We just had breakfast', pointing to something that looked like a sack of potatoes suspended by a piece of rope from a lamp-post and gently turning, first one way, then the other. ‘Here we were, as friendly as might be, and he takes a shot at us, not one shot but a whole lotta shots. I tell ya, Lootenant, around here ya gotta watch ya step.' Suddenly I was glad I was wearing an Allied uniform.