The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (61 page)

One movie that did steer close to the facts of the case was
The Wooden Horse,
based on events at Stalag Luft III, the same camp from which The Great Escape would take place in March 1944. Three men – Lieutenant Michael Codner, Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams, and Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot – escaped after digging a tunnel whose entrance was out in the yard of the camp.

The first compound at Stalag Luft III was opened in March 1942, and RAF navigator Eric Williams arrived there the following year after being shot down in December 1942 and proving to be a difficult POW for the Germans. He and Michael Codner escaped from the first camp in which they were being held, so were sent to Stalag Luft III since it was meant to be escape-proof. It had the standard German security measures, including guard towers, searchlights, barbed wire, fences and armed guards, and a few refinements, such as microphones in the soil which could detect the sound of tunnelling. The camp’s location benefitted the Germans as well: the ground in that part of the former Poland had a grey topsoil, but a very distinctively yellow-coloured stratum underneath that made tunnelling harder, since it was so fine that tunnels were likely to cave in. As far as the Germans were concerned, this was the most secure facility that they possessed.

To make things harder for any escape-minded prisoners, which was the majority of them, the huts were built on stilts (except for concrete foundations around the stoves and the washrooms), and were around a foot off the ground. To reach safety, a tunnel would have to be dug underneath the entire yard, beneath the fence, and then for some further distance before it reached the treeline. In total, as the escape committee discovered very quickly, a tunnel would have to stretch for nearly a hundred yards. This, of course, did not deter the British soldiers from attempting to escape since tunnelling was the only way of getting out, and it was their duty to try.

But if they did manage to get out, they still faced other difficulties: the camp was built in the middle of a huge pine forest, about 400 miles from the Swiss border, or 175 miles from the Baltic coast.

Williams and Codner considered the problem, and reasoned that if they couldn’t move where the tunnel finished, then in order to shorten the length, they would have to move the starting point closer to the treeline. Something of the sort had been tried before: some POWs had tried to dig a tunnel in the open ground area simply using their hands and covering the hole with bed-slats and sand, hiding the sand in their pockets. This hadn’t got very far, but Williams thought that there must be a way of hiding the trapdoor into the tunnel out in the open. Ideally it should be right underneath the noses of the Goons (the nickname that the POWs gave to the German sentries). Codner was not enthusiastic about the idea until Williams had a brainwave. What if they could find something that could cover the trapdoor which would not attract suspicion?

What Williams was thinking of was a wooden vaulting horse, like the ones that they had used in school gymnasia. The horses were about three feet high, two feet wide at the base, and tapered as they went up, to around a foot width at the top. One could easily be made from the crates that were sent to the men by the Red Cross, with cigarette-packet wrappings used to create the top. Once the Germans were used to seeing it out in the yard, a man could be transported inside it, clinging to the sides, until the horse was placed over the trapdoor. He would then dig down during the day, fill up bags with sand, and attach them to the underside of the horse. He, and his cargo, would then be carried back to the POWs’ hut, and the sand dispersed in convenient places around the camp. The trapdoor would be disguised with extra grey topsoil each day so the yard would look completely clear. While he was excavating underground, the POWs who brought the horse out would carry out athletics training, thumping down onto the ground as they landed from the horse, thus deflecting the attention of the seismographic microphones from the digging. (Interestingly, in the obituary for Michael Codner in
Time
magazine, it suggests that the wooden horse was his idea “with his knowledge of the classics”.)

Codner and Williams had to bring a third man, Canadian RAF pilot Oliver Philpot, into the scheme, since he was the escape committee coordinator for the hut in which they were living. Like Codner, Philpot was unsure about the chances of success, but was willing to help by organizing the vaulters and the transport of the horse, as well as overseeing the disposal of the sand. The escape committee gave the go-ahead, and the horse was constructed.

Over a number of weeks, the vaulting horse became a familiar sight: it would be carried out from the hut each day, supported by a pole at each end (when these were removed, the holes that they left provided air for the tunneller), and placed in the same spot, which eventually became very obvious. The Germans, of course, were naturally suspicious, and made regular checks to see what the British were playing at; every so often, one of the POWs would “accidentally” knock it over to show how innocuous it was.

When they judged that it was as safe as it was ever likely to be, Codner and Williams began the tunnel. First off, they had to dig a shaft down through the topsoil to the level at which they were going to head horizontally towards the trees, and they lined this with plywood panels taken from the Red Cross parcel boxes. To create the thirty-inch square, five-feet-deep shaft took four days; the trapdoor was eighteen inches below the surface and was covered daily with topsoil – it needed to be that far beneath the ground to prevent any alert German guard from hearing a hollow echo as they walked around the yard.

The next part of the tunnel was in many ways the riskiest, since it was being dug directly beneath where their POW colleagues were thumping down onto the ground as they vaulted over the horse. To ensure that there weren’t any inconvenient cave-ins, the first seven feet of the tunnel were fully shored up, with bed boards on the bottom, the roof and the sides. There wasn’t sufficient timber to line the entire tunnel; the Germans would certainly notice that much going missing. They had to hope that the chances of cave-in remained slim, although, as with any tunnel, it was an ever-present risk.

The digger would excavate sand at the “front” end of the tunnel and then drag it back to the bottom of the shaft, and place it in the bags for lifting and disposal. It was a slow job, and to begin with, only around twelve bags per athletics session could be lifted. When Philpot took a more active role as one of the diggers, they switched to a slightly different system: two men would dig out thirty-six bags, and leave them at the foot of the shaft, then on the next three trips, one man would lift twelve to the surface. This helped to alleviate the pressure on the vaulters who were beginning to get tired from all the exercise that they were having – these included future star of the
Carry On
films, Peter Butterworth.

The work proceeded without too many major mishaps: on one occasion, the roof gave way when Codner was digging, which actually left a hole in the surface of the yard. Luckily, one of the athletes saw the ground opening, and deliberately landed badly, so that he could fall convincingly to the ground and cover the entrance. As he lay there, Codner was able to scoop away the sand, and shore up the roof with some planks that he took from the shaft.

It was difficult to be sure that the tunnel was proceeding according to plan. The escapers used a poker to ascertain its position, and realized that it was at about the right level, but was running about thirty degrees away from the necessary course. The physical effort involved tired out all three men considerably, and Williams ended up hospitalized for almost a week from exhaustion.

Eventually, at the start of October, the tunnel had reached beyond the wire, so the trio started their preparations, sorting out their cover stories, and planning their routes to freedom. They decided to take advantage of the no-moon period at the end of the month, and set a date of 29 October 1943, 114 days after they began digging, for the escape.

That morning Codner and Philpot went to the tunnel inside the horse to collect some sandbags; Philpot was brought back to the huts, but Codner stayed inside the tunnel to finalize the digging. He ventilated the tunnel by sticking a metal pipe up through the soil to create some air holes. The POWs were adept at covering for missing officers during roll call, so Codner’s absence wasn’t noticed by the Germans, and once that was complete, Williams and Philpot were carried out to the tunnel entrance. With them came another POW, McKay, whose job it was to seal them in once they had got under way. Just after 6 p.m., they broke out from the far end of the tunnel.

During the preparation for the escape the three men had agreed that Philpot would make his own way once they were at liberty. He had created a character for himself called Jon Jörgensen, a Norwegian margarine salesman. Williams and Codner posed as French workmen. All three made their way to Sagan railway station and caught the train to Frankfurt. There Philpot had hoped to continue straightaway to Küstrin, but had to wait until the next morning for a train. He decided to hide in the woods rather than risk hanging around the train station and being caught. He managed to get to Küstrin the next day, and then headed on towards Danzig. Although he nearly made the classic mistake of POWs travelling across Germany and swearing in English, he successfully bluffed his way past a police officer, and started to look for a ship that would take him to Sweden. He found one, but the captain tried to make him leave in case he risked the crew’s freedom; luckily for Philpot the chief engineer took pity on him, and hid him until the ship was safely at sea. On 4 November, six days after he had escaped from Stalag Luft III, Oliver Philpot was taken to the British Legation in Stockholm. He became a senior scientific officer in the Air Ministry for the rest of the war, and in later years became chairman of the RAF Escaping Society. He wrote up his experiences as
Stolen Journey.

A number of the items Philpot used during his escape were donated to the Imperial War Museum in London by his family after his death, with the compass selected as one of the BBC’s
History of the World in 100 Objects.
It shows the ingenuity of the escapers: as Philpot described in his memoir: “The bowl was a moulded gramophone record and it had a glass top measuring three inches across, and in the bowl stood an inverted gramophone needle. Two pieces of a razor blade had been magnetized by the camp electric light circuit, and had been pasted on to the underside of a circular cardboard compass card. The card had, in the middle, a press-stud from an officer’s uniform into which the gramophone needle fitted neatly, enabling the card to swing freely under the glass. The card markings were large and clear, with phosphorus added from old and broken watch-faces.”

Williams and Codner also made a “home run” as a successful escape to England was termed. They travelled by rail as far as Stettin, a port city now in Poland, and were able to make contact with members of the Resistance. They were sent by ship to Copenhagen, hiding in the bilge to avoid the regular searches of the vessel – it was initially checked out by SS officers with sniffer dogs before it was allowed to leave port. Once in Denmark, they were transported across to Sweden in a fishing boat. Once there they went to the British Legation, to find Oliver Philpot waiting for them.

Eric Williams was posted to the Philippines for the rest of the war; on the journey back to Britain he wrote the first draft of what became his book
The Wooden Horse
(which fictionalized some of the adventures that he and Codner experienced on their travels from the camp). After the war, Michael Codner applied to serve in Malaya, living in a village ringed with barbed wire. When guerrillas sabotaged the water pipe, Codner was killed in an ambush when he went to repair it. When Williams learned of his death, he said, “He was quite the bravest, the most gifted and the most unassuming man I’ve ever met.” Oliver Philpot added: “It’s appalling, but it’s the way you might have expected him to die.”

“If you see me walking around with a tree trunk sticking out of my arse, don’t ask any questions, because it’ll be for a damned good reason.” So said Squadron Leader Roger Bushell to new arrivals in the North camp of Stalag Luft III. Bushell had been sent to the camp in 1942 after escaping from various places but never quite making it across a border to safety. When the Germans purged the camp of some of the real troublemakers, in an effort to reduce the number of escape attempts, Bushell was placed in charge of the Escape Committee. He came up with an audacious plan: to dig three tunnels simultaneously, and try to get two hundred men out of the camp, all equipped with suitable disguises, papers and cover stories. The three tunnels were codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry; Bushell himself was known as Big X.

The tunnels were begun in the spring of 1943, but in the early summer it became clear to the Escape Committee that they were going to lose some of the expertise that they were using to dig the tunnels: the United States Air Force (USAF) officers were being transferred to a new part of the camp (ironically this was being built in a forest area which had been the target for Dick). To try to get one tunnel completed before their forces were split, Bushell gave the order to press ahead with Tom. However, when the tunnel reached the perimeter fence, the Germans suddenly decided to cut down the trees around the area that those going through Tom would have surfaced. It was clear that either the Germans’ surveillance microphones were considerably better than they had anticipated, or that there was a traitor among the POWs. When Bushell realized that the Germans had no idea that Tom began in Hut 123, he decided the former was the reason, but it meant that he had to divert their attention.

Digging continued, but the disposal of the earth by “penguins” – POWs moving around the camp, letting pieces of dirt slip from concealed pouches made from old socks within their greatcoats – had to be curtailed, so progress was slowed. Hut 123 was one of many barracks that were targeted, but the Germans didn’t find the tunnel whose entrance was in a dark corner of the hall. When Tom was less than twenty feet from completion, the Germans got lucky during an inspection – a metal probe dropped to the floor, which dislodged the sand and cement that disguised the tunnel entrance – and the tunnel became the ninety-eighth to be found within the camp. The tunnel was destroyed.