The Great Escape (4 page)

After tramping through the woods to the Oder River eight miles away, Piglet found a rowboat and they set off downstream toward the Baltic, hundreds of miles away. Within a few hours the boat was reported missing, and a policeman downstream on the watch for it picked them up at gunpoint.

To stop this sort of tunneling nonsense the Germans dug an eight-foot-deep ditch between the warning wire and the fence. Three men crawled nervously out of their hut one night, dodged the searchlight beams, snaked under the warning wire, dropped into the trench and started to dig a blitz “mole” tunnel like Lamond’s. They only had about twenty feet to go to get outside the wire, but they didn’t push enough sand out of their entrance hole into the trench. No matter how tightly you pack it, sand that is dug out fills up a third as much space again in its loose form. Before they reached outside the wire the sand they had passed back had filled in all the tunnel behind them and they could pass no more back. So they were trapped — couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. All they could do was to dig up, and when they surfaced it was dawn and they were caught, feeling rather foolish out there by the wire.

The Germans very quickly filled in their anti-escape trenches and took new, and much more efficient, precautions, burying microphones all around the wire, as at Barth. Over in the
Kommandantur
(the German administrative compound) men sat with headphones plugging in to each detector in day-and night-long watches.

Buckley heard about it and he and the tunneling experts, Wally Floody, “Crump” Ker-Ramsay, Johnny Marshall, Peter Fanshawe, and others had a conference at which they decided to dig two tunnels thirty feet deep to get out of the range of the microphones. If one tunnel was found, they might break out from the other. They made camouflaged trap doors in the floors of two huts, and then came the master stroke! They dug two shallow camouflage tunnels about thirty feet long and stopped them there. Halfway along each of these they made a second camouflaged trap in the floor and under this sank a shaft twenty feet vertically and started the real tunnel from there. If the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnels they probably wouldn’t find the secret deep shafts, and the diggers could burrow down to the real tunnel from another direction. They were learning, growing in cunning.

The ferrets did find one of the dummy tunnels, and then, by accident probably, hit upon the hidden trap door in it and that was the end of that one, the other tunnel forged ahead, the tunnelers hacking at the crumbling face in stinking darkness, passing the sand back in a metal washbasin drawn by plaited string. Special dispersers hid the sand under the hut and carefully raked it over so it did not seem obvious.

They devised a crude form of ventilation for the deep tunnel. Short sticks were fitted into sockets in each other like a fishing rod and pushed up through the soil till they broke through the top, twenty feet up. A P.O.W. sentry (always know as a stooge) lay upon the sand above to hide the stick as it pushed through, and then he camouflaged and protected the hole with a stone. Stinking air filtered up through these little holes. They made conditions just possible for working below, but only just. After a couple of hours of blind digging at the face, men crawled painfully back up with splitting heads and retched up green vomit. Pretty often it was dry retching because on German rations you didn’t have much to bring up.

Johnny Travis, a dapper little Rhodesian, had been a mining engineer until he was trapped for three days 4,000 feet down a gold mine once by a fall of rock. He had bad claustrophobia from that, but he still used to go down the tunnel and work close to screaming point for a couple of hours, then come up to vomit. The sand was so crumbly there were frequent falls and there was always a number two digger close behind to haul you out by the legs if you were buried. It was grim.

Buckley noticed that Travis was a minor genius with his hands, making baking dishes from old tins, and shaving brushes from hunks of wood and bits of string. He pulled Travis out of the tunnel and started him making escape equipment — fat lamps from old tins with fuel made from margarine boiled to extract the water, and wicks made of pajama cord. He made shovels for the diggers from bits of metal from old stoves and filed down broken table knives for chisels. (Buckley got the bits of file from bribing German guards.)

As the tunnel lengthened, the air got so bad they couldn’t go on. Buckley commandeered an old accordion from one of the prisoners, and they used this to try to pump some air in. Then Marshall, Travis and some helpers designed a rough pump from a kit bag, with old boot leather for valves. It was just finished when someone fell on it and smashed it. He made another, and the Germans found it before it could be smuggled below. He made another, and it pushed just enough air into the tunnel to enable them to carry on.

The level of the dispersed sand was rising too noticeably under the hut so they dug a short tunnel back to the adjoining hut and started putting sand under there. The main tunnel was steered under the kitchen hut to disperse more sand there, but they were disappointed to find that there was no room underneath. There was a huge fall under that hut, and Wally Floody was nearly suffocated under half a ton of sand. It shook him up.

Then the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnel. All of us held our breath, but the Germans missed the secret trap door in it. They destroyed the dummy tunnel, so Floody and Crump dug a new dummy tunnel from another room and sank another secret shaft to line up with the main tunnel again. They didn’t know the burrowing had undermined the hut foundations, and the weight above collapsed the new dummy tunnel as Floody was crawling naked along it. Ten feet of it came down along his body but by a miracle he had his face just over the trap door to the secret shaft and could breathe. The tunnel team dug madly for an hour and got him out. He was lucky.

They dug another shallow dummy tunnel, sank another deep shaft and at last made contact again with the main tunnel.

They’d been working for months now, and the X organization was slowly growing all the time. Tim Walenn and a couple of men who’d been artists before they became airmen started a little factory for forging papers and passports. Tommy Guest organized a tailor shop to convert uniforms into rough civvy clothes. More metal workers and carpenters joined Johnny Travis. The tunnel pushed on till it was over three hundred feet long; less than a hundred feet to go now, but the sand was rising blatantly under the new dispersal hut.

A gang of ferrets raided the hut one morning, cleared everyone out, and almost took it apart. Underneath they found fresh sand over the exit of the dispersal tunnel, dug down to the trap door, and traced it right back to the deep shaft. They blew up the lot.

Buckley, Wings Day, the Dodger and others were purged to Schubin, a camp up near Bromberg, in Poland. In the train going there the dogged Dodger prised up a floorboard in his cattle truck and jumped out. A guard saw him and a posse jumped off the train and persuaded him to come back at pistol point. Paddy Byrne got out too. Also caught.

Within a week of arriving at Schubin, Buckley, Wings and company were tunneling from one of the lavatories, and this time there was no hitch. The tunnel was 150 feet long when they surfaced outside the wire, and nearly forty men got out through it.

It wasn’t discovered till
Appell
(counting parade) next day, and even then the Germans nearly missed it. Normally we paraded in five ranks for appell, but that morning some sections paraded in fours. The German officer had nearly finished counting when he noticed some of the fives he was counting were not fives but fours, and his blood pressure nearly sprayed out of his ears.

Five thousand troops turned out for the search, and before long the escapees had nearly all been caught. Wings Day was out for a week till a Hitler Youth boy spotted him hiding in a barn, and the local Home Guard winkled him out with shotguns.

Two they never caught and this was tragedy. Jimmy Buckley and a Danish lad in the R.A.F. got to Denmark and started out in a little boat from the Zealand coast. Five miles across the water lay Sweden and freedom. No one ever found out exactly what happened. Maybe they were rammed, or shot, or just capsized. The Dane’s body was found in the sea weeks later. They never found Buckley.

Late in 1942 Roger Bushell arrived in Sagan. The Gestapo had grilled him for several months, trying to pin charges of sabotage and spying on him, but Bushell’s tough and nimble brain had kept him clear of the firing squad. They would probably have shot him in any case if Von Masse, chief censor officer at Stalag Luft III, who knew and liked Bushell, hadn’t heard that the Gestapo was holding him. Von Masse’s brother was a
Generaloberst
(colonel-general), and he used this influence to have Bushell handed back to the less lethal custody of the prison camp.

In Prague Bushell’s Czech host had given him a smart, gray civilian suit, and it never occurred to the Gestapo, who dealt mainly with civilians, to take it from him. Roger wore a tattered old battle dress back to Sagan and carried his suit with him, wrapped in paper. Von Masse met him when he got to the camp, and Roger went for him with bald-headed fury over the way the Gestapo had treated him. Von Masse apologized.

“Don’t blame us, please, for what the Gestapo do,” he said. “They’re not the real Germany.” He added warningly: “What I particularly want to say is that you’re lucky to get back this time. You won’t get away with it again. I’m telling you that if you get out once more and they catch you I think they’ll shoot you.”

“If I get out again they won’t catch me,” Roger said, and went off into another tirade about the Gestapo, upsetting Von Masse so much that he forgot to search him — which was what Roger had banked on. He brought his suit into the compound, planning to use it on his next break.

This was a changed Roger — not the old boisterous soul who thought escape was good, risky sport like skiing. When he skied he used to take one course straight down at uniform, maximum speed, swearing like a trooper. Now he was moodier, and the gaze from that twisted eye was more foreboding. In Berlin he’d seen the Gestapo torturing people, and he did not tolerate Germans any more. By now he’d been behind the wire nearly three years, and his frustrated energy was focusing on the people responsible. He cursed all Germans indiscriminately (except Von Masse), but inside it was a clear, cool-headed hatred and it found sublimation in outwitting them.

With Buckley and Wings Day gone, he took over as Big X.

It looked like a long war, and the Germans were building a new compound at Sagan. In the pine woods across the
Kommandantur,
gaunt Russian prisoners had felled some trees to clear a patch and workmen were putting up the long, wooden huts.

“You will be happier there,” said Hauptmann Pieber, the lageroffizier, who had stopped by the wire to welcome Roger to Stalag Luft III. Pieber, who had known Bushell at Barth, was a kindly little man with dueling scars on his cheeks and a sentimental heart. If he’d been lageroffizier in hell and had seen you brought in screaming he’d have blinked tenderly behind his glasses and wished you a felicitous sojourn.

“Most of you will be going to the new compound,” he added. “It will be a happier new year for you. You will have taps in your huts and even lavatories.”

“A change,” said Roger sarcastically, “is as good as a holiday. When are we moving?”

“I think March,” Pieber said, and Roger, eyeing the snow that hung on the ugly wire, was thinking of summer, the escape season.

He called on Wally Floody, and the collected Fanshawe, Crump Ker-Ramsay, and the others.

“If the bloody Goons don’t rupture themselves, we’ll be in the new compound by spring,” he said. “We’re going to get cracking on schemes now. My idea is to dig three major tunnels simultaneously and get about five hundred men on the job. The Goons might find a couple of them but we ought to make it with at least one. What d’you think?”