The Great Escape (11 page)

Roger went in search of Travis and found him in his room filing a broken knife into a screw driver.

“Can you make me a rifle?” he asked, and Travis stared at him.

“It’s for show, not for shooting,” Bushell explained.

“What sort of a rifle exactly?”

“German one. Imitation. We’ve got a new show on. D’you remember the time just before we moved they took a mob out from East Camp to be deloused?”

“Yes,” said Travis. “Someone on a new purge came in with wogs all over him.”

“That’s it,” said Roger. “I think we can put on a couple of unofficial ones. We’ve got to have some Goons to go as escort. Guest is making the uniforms. You’re going to make their guns.”

“They’d have to be terribly good to pass the gate
Postens
, Roger,” Travis said slowly. “I don’t know that we can do it.”

Roger swiveled his twisted eye on him. “I want them in a week,” he said, and walked out.

Travis, McIntosh, and Muller tried to put on paper an accurate plan of a German military carbine and found they didn’t have a clue about the detail and dimensions. Muller went and got Henri Picard out of the forgery factory. Picard, a young Belgian, was one of the best artists in the camp. Muller’s idea appealed to him, and he went away and cut a rough pair of calipers out of a piece of tin.

Coming off appell that afternoon Muller started chatting to one of the guards, and Picard stood just behind very carefully measuring with his calipers the width and depth of various parts of the carbine slung over the guard’s shoulder. Then he stood beside him and calculated the length of the rifle, noting where the barrel came to about the height of his head and where the butt finished by his thighs. For the next day he cautiously trailed several guards drawing in rough detail parts of the gun.

Travis had noticed that about one in every three hundred bedboards was made of beech instead of pine, and Williams toured every hut and swiped every beech board he could find. The boards weren’t thick enough to make a rifle, so they sawed and carved out each rifle in two halves, glued them together, and clamped them to set in vises made out of reinforced ping-pong net-posts. They carved out in wood the parts that were supposed to be metal, barrel, breech, and bolt, and rubbed and polished them with a lump of graphite brought in by a tame German till they looked like blue gun metal. The wooden parts that were really wood they stained with tan boot polish and rubbed and rubbed till it looked perfect.

The clips around the barrels Muller made from strips cut off a metal jug; he used bent nails for the sling clips and belts for the slings. Muller didn’t think the polished wooden barrel looked quite perfect enough so he melted down the silver paper from cigarette packs into lead and cast a proper barrel end in a soap mold. He polished it with graphite until it
was
perfect.

By happy chance, the gray of Luftwaffe uniforms was almost identical with R.A.F. gray-blue, and Tommy Guest used old R.A.F. uniforms to cut out several unteroffizier’s uniforms. Six of his amateur tailors hand-sewed them.

Muller made the little eagles that went on the lapels and the belt buckles by casting melted silver paper in soap molds, carving the eagles in the mold himself. The belt buckle was perfect. One of the contacts got his Goon to take off his tunic on a hot day while he drank his daily brew and Muller stealthily pressed the buckle into the soap to make his mold. Guest cut a bit off the tail of a terrible old shirt of Kirby-Green’s to make the color patches on the uniforms.

Tim Walenn produced several beautifully forged gate passes (the originals had been brought in by a tame guard). The “unteroffiziers” would have to show the passes to get out of the camp with their party, and Walenn’s staff had hand-lettered them, working nonstop on the job for about a week. He took the passes to Roger.

“Which is the real one?” he asked.

Roger peered at them for a while. “They’re bloody good, Tim,” he said. “I don’t think I could pick them apart.”

“As a matter of fact,” Tim said, “they’re all forgeries.”

And the day it was all done and thirty-two men were getting their last briefings for the break, the German unteroffiziers came in without rifles. They all had pistols instead, in holsters on a belt. It was a new order. Unteroffiziers weren’t going to carry rifles any more, and there had to be an unteroffizier on the fake delousing party. An ordinary
Gefreiter
(private) wouldn’t be allowed to escort a party out of the gate.

Roger really lost his temper this time, and for two days he was quite unbearable. Travis and Muller weren’t much better.

One of Tommy Guest’s men had been a handbag maker in private life, and Roger put him to work making imitation pistol holsters out of cardboard. He marked the cardboard to give it a leathery grain and rubbed it with boot polish, and you couldn’t tell the result from a real holster. McIntosh made a couple of dummy pistol butts out of wood and fixed them so they peeped coyly out of the holster flaps.

Roger planned the break in two phases. First, twenty-four men escorted by two “unteroffiziers” were to march out of the gate (they hoped) ostensibly bound for the delousing showers. Ten minutes after they were clear, Bob Van Der Stok, a Dutchman in the R.A.F. who spoke perfect German, was to march out a party of five senior officers for a “special conference” with the Kommandant.

Roger, Wings Day, and the committee hand-picked the people to go, selecting men who’d been working hard for “X” and who’d been behind the wire for a couple of years or more. Roger himself toyed with the idea of going, but Wings and the others energetically talked him out of it. As Wings pointed out, there was a very fair chance of the alarm being given quite quickly, in which case many of them probably wouldn’t get very far, and if Roger was caught again so soon after the last time, he knew what to expect.

“Wait till you can get out through ‘Tom,’” Day said. “You’ll be out of the area by train then before they wake up to it.”

Roger reluctantly agreed, partly because he was banking so much on “Tom.” Floody wanted to go on the delousing party too, but Roger vetoed the idea, and they had a short, sharp argument. Arguments with Roger were often sharp and always short.

“We need you for the tunnels,” he told Floody flatly.

“God, I’m sick of tunnels,” Floody groaned. “I seem to spend my life down a stinking hole in the ground. I want a change.”

“Look, Wally,” Roger said. “We’re just getting somewhere now, and everything’s going like a bomb. Don’t spoil it. We’ll get ‘Tom’ out in a couple of months, and then you can go for your life, but
not
now. You’re needed here.”

“But I’d be back,” said Floody, spreading his hands appealingly. “They’d catch me. Nothing surer. I’ll go on the delouser now, and in two days I’ll be back in the cooler. Then I can have a nice rest for a fortnight and come back fit. How ‘bout that?”

“No,” said Roger.

It was just after two o’clock on a warm afternoon that twenty-four men fell in outside 104, carrying bundles wrapped in towels, presumably to be dumped in the steam delousers. It would be too bad if the gate guards inspected them because they contained uniform jackets and pants converted to look like civilian clothes and little packets of concentrated food cakes made from oatmeal and breadcrumbs, milk powder, chocolate, and sugar. In the pockets were maps and a little German money. Two “unteroffiziers,” holsters at their waists, formed them into three ranks, and they straggled off toward the gate laughing and joking with the fake heartiness people show as they climb into the dentist’s chair. The atmosphere was a little electric. Roger and the envious Floody felt it a hundred yards away where they sat by a corner of a hut, unobtrusively watching.

The party stopped at the first gate, and one of the “unteroffiziers” showed his pass. The guard hardly even looked at it, and then the big barbed-wire gates were swinging open. They marched to the next gate, the guard looked casually at the pass, and in a few moments they were walking out into the road that curved into the pine wood. It was practically an anticlimax.

Three hundred yards down the road without a German in sight they turned sharply and vanished into the trees, then broke into a run for half a mile. Deep into the woods they changed into their traveling clothes and split up into ones, twos, and threes.

At a quarter-past two, Van Der Stok walked out of 110 with the second party and headed for the gate. Goodrich, the senior, was an American colonel of about forty, with a red, rough face and barrel chest. Beside him walked Bob Tuck, slim and elegant, a Battle of Britain ace with a D.S.O. and three D.F.C.’s; then Bill Jennens, R.A.F. squadron leader and compound adjutant with a voice like a drill sergeant and a face like a lump of uncarved granite. The other two were the lanky “Nellie” Ellan, who looked after the camp radio, and a Polish wing commander.

Van Der Stok showed his pass at the first gate, and they walked through. At the next, the guard was a little more conscientious and turned the pass over and looked at the back. (We found out later that it was only a week before that the Germans had put a new mark on the back of the gate passes in case they were ever copied.) Van Der Stok’s pass didn’t have the mark, and the guard looked suspiciously up at him. It was only then that his brain slowly grasped the fact that he had seen this man walking around the compound as a prisoner. He raised a shout and a dozen German soldiers came clumping out of the guardhouse.

Van Der Stok bowed disarmingly and raised his hands.

Brioli came over from the kommandantur in response to an urgent message. He was chief security officer, a plump little major with shiny black hair, given to monumental anger when prisoners escaped and patronizing politeness when they failed to. He greeted the little group jovially.

“Mr. Van Der Stok,” he said roguishly, “you are improperly dressed. Ah, it is too bad, gentlemen,” (with a happy grin)…“the fortunes of war. Perhaps you will have better luck next time.”

He congratulated the guard on recognizing Van Der Stok, and the guard put his foot right in it.

“I thought it unusual, Herr Major, that two parties should leave the camp so close together,” he said smugly, and Brioli looked suddenly older.

“Two parties?” he asked in a voice of doom, and the guard told him.

“Mein Gott, sechsundzwanzig,”
shrieked Brioli, and with a terrible look at Van Der Stok and Goodrich he ran for the guardhouse phone.

The Kommandant reached the gate within two minutes and strode in followed by Brioli (sweating), a dozen guards from the guardhouse and a screen of ferrets. The ferrets and guards ran ahead shouting, “
Appell! Appell!
” Pieber ran in flapping his hands. He went straight to Bill Jennens’ room to get him to hurry everyone along for appell and stopped foolishly in the door when he remembered Jennens was with Goodrich, Van Der Stok, and the others in the cooler. Through the trees from the kommandantur marched nearly a hundred jackbooted and helmeted troops carrying rifles and tommyguns. They moved into the huts clearing everyone out.

Block “X’s” went quietly through their huts and out in the compound telling everyone to take his time. There would be an identification parade to discover who was missing and the longer it took, the better chance the delousing party would have to get clear. The prisoners were all moving like snails, and Pieber found Wings Day.

“Please,” he said. “Efferybody on appell quickly, and we will have no shooting. The Kommandant is most angry.”

Von Lindeiner’s face was the color of a storm cloud. He stood apart from everyone watching the eight hundred men dawdling. Glemnitz stood apart, too, his mouth shut in a hard line, and you could see the jaw muscles sticking out at the sides. Rubberneck, as usual, showed more outward signs than anyone. He was very red in the face, his forehead creased and his mouth drooping as though he’d been found in a girls’ school without his pants. No one laughed because he had a pistol in his hand.