Zero Night E-Book

Mark Felton

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

'The story of a lesser known – but perhaps the greatest – escape of Second World War prisoners has been told in a new book.' The Scotsman  'This is undeniably history as it should be told and a thundering good read.'​ History of War Magazine Oflag VI-B, Warburg, Germany: On the night of 30 August 1942 – 'Zero Night' – 40 officers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa staged the most audacious mass escape of the Second World War. It was the first 'Great Escape' – but instead of tunnelling, the escapers boldly went over the huge perimeter fences using wooden scaling contraptions. This was the notorious 'Warburg Wire Job', described by fellow prisoner and fighter ace Douglas Bader as 'the most brilliant escape conception of this war'. Months of meticulous planning and secret training hung in the balance during three minutes of mayhem as prisoners charged the camp's double perimeter fences. Telling this remarkable story in full for the first time, historian Mark Felton brilliantly evokes the suspense of the escape itself and the adventures of those who eluded the Germans, as well as the courage of the civilians who risked their lives to help them in enemy territory. Fantastically intimate and told with a novelist's eye for drama and detail, this is a rip-roaring adventure story, all the more thrilling for being true.

Leseprobe

ZERO NIGHT

ZERO NIGHT

THE UNTOLD STORY OF WORLD WAR TWO’S MOST DARING GREAT ESCAPE

MARK FELTON

Published in the UK in 2014 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

[email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by

Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

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ISBN: 978-184831-719-2 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-184831-792-5 (paperback)

Text copyright © 2014 Mark Felton

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Adobe Text by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

List of illustrations

About the author

Acknowledgements

A note on the text

Prologue

1 Barbed Wire Horizon

2 Trial and Error

3 The Wire

4 Short Circuit

5 Diversions

6 ‘Big X’

7 Operation Timber

8 Practice Makes Perfect

9 The Road Less Travelled

10 Pack Up Your Troubles

11 Fifteen Yards to Freedom

12 Zero Night

13 ‘Another British Evacuation’

14 A Walk in the Woods

15 ‘Hände hoch!’

16 The Bitter Road

17 Three Blind Mice

18 Comet Line

19 The Last Frontier

Epilogue

Maps

Bibliography

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Tom Stallard with fellow Durham Light Infantry officers.

2. POW officers including Rupert Fuller, Maurice Few and Albert Arkwright.

3. Jock Hamilton-Baillie with fellow prisoners.

4. Jock Hamilton-Baillie’s identity card from Colditz.

5. MI9 sketch map of Oflag VI-B.

6. Maurice Few’s hand-drawn map of Oflag VI-B.

7. One of the ingenious scaling contraptions used in the escape.

8. A further view of the escape contraptions the day after the escape.

9. Andrée De Jongh.

10. Andrée De Jongh and her father Frédéric.

11. Baron Jean Greindl (aka ‘Nemo’).

12. Jean-François Nothomb (aka ‘Franco’).

13. Elvire De Greef with her children.

14. Albert Johnson.

15. Rupert Fuller, Henry Coombe-Tennant and Albert Arkwright.

16. Andrée De Jongh, Micheline Ugeux and Elvire De Greef meeting RAF officers whom they helped to escape.

About the author

Mark Felton has written over a dozen books on prisoners of war, Japanese war crimes and Nazi war criminals, and writes regularly for magazines such as Military History Monthly and World War II. He is the author of Today is a Good Day to Fight, an acclaimed history of the American West, and Japan’s Gestapo (named ‘Best Book of 2009’ by The Japan Times). His most recent book is China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom, 1839–1997. After a decade spent working in Shanghai, Dr Felton now lives in Colchester. He is married with one son.

To Fang Fang, with love

Acknowledgements

I should like to acknowledge the kind assistance of many individuals who have contributed so much of their time, knowledge and in many cases their memories to this project to tell the stories of the Warburg Wire Job escapers. This book could not have been written without them. They are: Major Michael Bond (Tom Stallard’s godson); Ben Hamilton-Baillie (Lieutenant Jock Hamilton-Baillie’s son); Colonel Richard Cousens, OBE (son of Major Johnnie Cousens); Kenneth Jacob (son of Warburg POW Captain Kenneth Jacob); Kevin Storey, BEM, Durham Light Infantry Museum Curator; Liz Bregazzi, County Archivist, Durham County Record Office; Joanne Penny, Service Personnel and Veterans Agency; Jo-Anne Watts, Liaison Librarian, University Library, Keele University; Sally Richards and Shahera Begum, Imperial War Museum, London; Major Chris Lawton, MBE, Officer-in-Command, The Rifles Office, Durham; Anne Beckwith-Smith; Major Colin Hepburn, Regimental Secretary, The Royal Tank Regiment; Emily Dezurick-Badran, Cambridge University Library; Amanda Tomè, Archivist, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick; Philip Chinnery, Historian, Ex-Prisoners of War Association; Steven Tagg, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery; Nina Janz, Bundesarchiv, Abteilung Militärarchiv, Freiburg; Matthew Homyk and Patricia Kahney; and Shirley Felton. A great many thanks to Andrew Lownie, my fantastic agent, whose enthusiasm and encouragement are deeply appreciated, and to my editor Duncan Heath and the excellent team at Icon Books.

Finally, I want to thank my wonderfully accomplished wife Fang Fang for her support, encouragement, advice and love.

A note on the text

Most of the dialogue sequences in this book come directly from the veterans themselves, from written sources, diaries or spoken interviews. I have changed the tense to make it more immediate. Occasionally, where only basic descriptions of what happened exist, I have created small sections of dialogue, attempting to remain true to the characters and to their manners of speech.

Prologue

Ashilling coin jangled insistently inside an empty tin can, followed by someone whispering ‘Get out, Doug!’ in an urgent hiss. Muttering a stream of oaths under his breath, Doug Crawford quickly reversed out of the narrow tunnel, its wet clay walls lit by a single guttering carbide lamp near the tunnel face.

‘Doug, hurry up, the Jerries are on their way!’ hissed Captain David Fielding, sitting on the wooden floor of the deserted ‘silence hut’ next to the camp library. The tunnel was almost finished and Crawford had been working on the vertical shaft below the exit hole when the alarm was given. Somehow, the Germans had found out about the tunnel and were racing towards them across the huge camp, hoping to capture the diggers and their escape hole.1

Several other members of the digging team crouched by the tunnel entrance, their faces masks of apprehension. By the window one man was ‘stooging’, acting as a lookout. Beyond the hut several other stooges kept watch for Germans, using prearranged signals. ‘They’re coming’, hissed the stooge by the window. ‘Maybe three minutes!’ Fielding frantically pulled the long piece of string attached to the rudimentary tin can alarm, his heart racing and his guts in nervous tumult. He yelled down the dark shaft: ‘I’m sorry Doug, it’s every man for himself!’2 Seconds later the digging team dispersed into the compound, striding off in different directions to confuse the Germans.

Emerging from the tunnel entrance into the room like a mole coming up for air, Captain Crawford presented a dreadful sight. Dressed incongruously in long white underpants tucked into long socks, a balaclava helmet and a long-sleeved woollen singlet, he was covered in mud from head to toe. But there would be no time to clean up – he had to get out of the hut and back to his accommodation before the German guards arrived, or face a lengthy spell in solitary confinement for his trouble.

A great pile of wet dirt lay on the hut floor, feverishly excavated with homemade tools, tin cups and bare hands. They had been doing what the prisoners called a ‘blitz’ – a fast breakout limited to a small handful of escapers.

Alexander ‘Doug’ Crawford of the Royal Australian Artillery caused quite a stir as he and Fielding attempted to stroll nonchalantly through Oflag VI-B after the rest of the diggers had scattered from the silence hut. He looked like he was on his way home from a long day at the coalface, and expected instant arrest. Two Germans came running towards him, and to his horror he saw that one of them was Hauptmann Rademacher, the camp security officer, with a shorter private puffing along behind him, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Crawford tensed, expecting to be staring down the barrel of a Luger in the next few seconds. But, incredibly, the Germans just jogged past on their way to the hut containing the tunnel, not even glancing at the Australian. The prisoners often joked that their captors were single-minded in the extreme, and Crawford’s lucky escape seemed to confirm this view. Not keen to push his luck any further, Crawford ducked into the nearest accommodation hut to try to make himself more presentable before slipping back to his own billet.

It was the second ‘blitz’ tunnel that Crawford, Fielding and their small team had lost to the Germans in the past few weeks. Their first effort had almost reached the perimeter fence. ‘The air in the thing was foul’, recalled Crawford. ‘It was twenty inches base, twenty inches upright, and oval in shape, because we were digging in clay.’ When the Germans discovered Crawford’s first tunnel ‘they filled it in, from the edge of the building out to the wire’. The second effort was an attempt to quickly dig into the loosely filled-in old tunnel, the last thing the Germans expected. It was a perfectly good escape route, so they had decided not to waste it. Crawford and Fielding were under pressure. ‘The Escape Committee have agreed that if we get one man out they will give us all a high priority on a future escape’,3 Fielding had told Crawford the night before they began.

Being involved in a big escape attempt was what drove men like Crawford to keep making small and often reckless ‘blitz’ attempts. It demonstrated to the camp’s ‘X’ Committee, the organisation that controlled all escapes, that they had determination, resourcefulness and, above all, guts. And Crawford, like many men in the camp, was absolutely desperate to be free. It was the dream of such men to earn a place on ‘the big show’, a mass escape.

Beneath huts and shower blocks throughout Oflag VI-B during the spring of 1942 dozens of tunnels slowly snaked towards the huge perimeter fences, dug by British and Australian officers who had already honed their escaping skills in other camps, young men who for the most part had nothing to do except try to escape. But plans usually came to naught, months of strenuous effort were wasted and successful escapes were practically non-existent. But what Doug Crawford didn’t yet realise was that his most recent failed tunnel had earned him a place on an extraordinary new team of men who were dedicated to making the war’s first great escape.

Doug was about to become an ‘Olympian’.

CHAPTER ONE

_____________

Barbed Wire Horizon

However efficient you were, there had to be that additional and elusive element of luck that was to favour the very few who ‘made it’.

Captain Maurice Few, Royal Sussex Regiment

Columns of dense black smoke puffed into the cold sky as the locomotive, a Nazi eagle embossed on its boiler, hauled a line of cattle cars into Warburg’s pretty little station. Lining the platform were dozens of German soldiers bundled up in field-grey greatcoats and side caps, their gloved hands grasping Mauser rifles. Military policemen pulled at the leads of barking Alsatians whose breath plumed in the chilly October air. The wooden cattle car doors were flung back on their runners, the prisoners blinking at the light.

To guttural shouts of ‘Aus, Tommis, aus, aus!’ and the occasional rifle butt or pushing hand, the British and Australian prisoners jumped down onto the platform with their kitbags and started to line up. Many were extremely thin, their eyes hollowed by months of near-starvation rations. For almost an hour they stood around smoking, blowing on their freezing hands or stamping their feet while their bad-tempered guards counted and recounted them. Then they were herded into ragged ranks by their sentries, who more than once smashed a rifle butt into the face or head of an obstinate prisoner, and a stiff-backed Wehrmacht officer, clipboard under his arm, bellowed out the order ‘Marsch!’ The 3,000-man column of Army and RAF prisoners began to march its way towards the new camp through the flat north German countryside.

*

An hour later the column of prisoners wearily approached the tall wooden gates of Oflag VI-B. Their hearts sank as they viewed the vast enclosure that stretched before them across the treeless plain. Conversation almost ceased – the only sound was thousands of boots pounding the road to prison.

It was late 1941 and most of the British had been prisoners since the Battle of France seventeen months before. They were members of units that had been given the unenviable task of providing a rear-guard around the Dunkirk perimeter so that the rest of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force could get back to England. They had resigned themselves to capture but had fought on, outnumbered and outgunned, until overrun by German tanks and infantry in dozens of short and very bloody engagements. They were men like Major Albert Arkwright of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, a 35-year-old regular soldier with receding blond hair and piercing blue eyes whose life had been saved by his batman taking most of the blast of a German stick grenade that was flung at them on 24 May 1940. Arkwright’s batman trudged along behind his officer on the road to Oflag VI-B, his face heavily scarred from the reconstructive surgery that German doctors had performed on his ghastly wounds.

Close by was the handsome, fair-haired Major Tom Stallard, second-in-command of the 1st Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, who had watched his battalion being filleted by German panzers on the Lys river, unable to stop the armoured onslaught as they had been bereft of anti-tank weapons. Those who survived the panzers had attempted to escape across a bridge but had mostly been mown down by German machine guns, shot in the back as they fled.

Born in Bath on 13 May 1904, Stallard was of medium height with a slim, runner’s build, and at 37 was already a highly experienced combat officer. After Sherborne and Sandhurst he had been commissioned into the Durhams in 1924. Following security duties in Northern Ireland in 1925–27 he had served in Egypt, where he became an accomplished polo player, before moving on to the infamous Northwest Frontier of India in 1929. Here he saw sporadic action against tribesmen in Waziristan on the Afghan border during the Relief of Datta Khel and the clearing of Islamic fundamentalist fighters from the border town of Makeen (both in present-day Pakistan). In 1937 Stallard, by now battalion adjutant, had witnessed first-hand the brutal Japanese assault on Shanghai when his battalion had been rushed to China to help protect the city’s International Settlement. The British troops had been forced to stand by while Japanese forces cold-bloodedly murdered Chinese civilians just a few yards away. Britain was not at war with Japan at the time and the Durhams’ sole duty was to protect the British section of the city from Japanese molestation.

Stallard did not take kindly to prison camp life – he was too active, mentally and physically, to accept its dull routine, frustrations and complete lack of objective. Instead, he decided that escaping would be his goal – his one and only aim, to the point where it would become an all-encompassing obsession.1

Majors Arkwright and Stallard were already fast friends, having planned escapes together in their previous camp, Oflag VII-C at Laufen. Stallard possessed the quiet authority of a true leader and was one of the most determined escape artists in German captivity. Arkwright had only the highest praise for him, remarking that ‘his flair for organisation, resourcefulness, and active mind made him in every sense an ideal leader’.2 Others described Stallard as ‘magnetic’, and he was all of those things and more. Stallard’s unique ability was to be able to concentrate every faculty he possessed on the single objective of escape. Most of the prisoners were happy to spend an hour or two a day on some long-term tunnelling project even though the chance of success was remote in the extreme. As long as the possibility of success remained they were content, and could spend the rest of their time attending lectures, reading books or listening to music. Stallard was not like this. He attacked his subject with unfaltering devotion and single-mindedness.3

Other prisoners marching into Warburg camp were men from the 51st Highland Division, sacrificed in Normandy by Churchill in a futile effort to keep the French Army fighting after Dunkirk. One among them had already made five escapes, and his later contribution to the first ‘great escape’ from Oflag VI-B was to prove inspirational. Of average height, with brown hair and often seen wearing an impish grin, 23-year-old Lieutenant Jock Hamilton-Baillie was known by his friends simply as ‘HB’ or alternatively ‘The Camp Brain’, the latter sobriquet being particularly apt. His last escape had taken him literally to within a stone’s throw of Switzerland after he had broken out of a German castle and walked to the Alps. Such failure would have broken the spirits of lesser men, but what HB lacked in luck he more than made up for in pluck and determination. The German commandant at Laufen had been so impressed by HB’s daring that instead of punishing him when he was recaptured, he had thrown a dinner in his honour.4

Many others, including a large contingent of Australians, had been captured following the German invasion of Crete in 1941 – another monumental foul-up that had necessitated the evacuation by sea of an entire British army. The Australians had had a terrible time of it since capture. They had spent six long weeks in a bug-ridden compound in Salonika, then endured a nightmare cattle-truck journey up into Germany and two months in a repulsive camp at Lübeck before a transfer to Warburg. They had not received any Red Cross food or clothing and a number were suffering from the deficiency disease beriberi, or were underweight. The Senior British Officer (SBO), with the approval of all the other prisoners, would insist that the Australian contingent receive two Red Cross parcels per week instead of the usual one for a one-month period to try to build them up.5

Prominent among the antipodean escapers was 28-year-old Captain Doug Crawford, a tall, well-built Australian Rules footballer with a predictably dry sense of humour and a smart military moustache. Other Aussies who were later to play an important role in the Warburg Wire Job included 29-year-old Lieutenant Jack Champ, an inveterate escaper with a cheeky grin, and Captain Rex Baxter, a tall, rangy officer from Melbourne. Baxter had been captured in hospital in Athens in 1941 when the city had been overrun while he was recuperating from a bomb splinter wound.6

Marching proudly with a straight back and an appropriately grim expression at the head of the column of POWs was the most senior British officer in German captivity, Major General Victor Fortune, former commander of the 51st Highland Division. Captivity had come hard to a man of Fortune’s age, rank and disposition.

Flanking the column every twenty yards was a German soldier, a rifle slung over his right shoulder, leather equipment jangling as he trudged along, eyes darting suspiciously from prisoner to prisoner. The POWs could see the looming guard towers and perimeter fences as they drew level with the main gate, the muzzles of machine guns in the towers covering the lines upon lines of wooden single-storey accommodation huts that stretched off into the distance. Fastened to the fence at regular intervals was a neatly painted white sign, its black lettering chillingly announcing in both German and English:

HALT! LAGERGRENZE!

Bei Überschreiten Des Drahtes

Wird Geschossen

STOP! CAMP BOUNDARY!

P.W. Trying To Cross The Wire

Will Be Shot At!

Before the POWs entered the main camp they marched past a smaller compound close by. What they saw here took away any remaining illusions they may have harboured concerning their enemy. Three filthy-looking men in tan-coloured uniforms lay prostrate on the smaller camp’s parade square as several German soldiers mercilessly beat them with pickaxe handles amid much shouting and cursing. ‘What on earth?’ muttered an astonished Major Stallard, walking at the head of a group of officers from the Durhams. ‘Russians, sir’, replied a younger officer. ‘Looks like the Jerries are using them for heavy labour’, added another. British prisoners cursed the Germans up and down the column as they passed the brutal little scene, but they could do nothing for the Soviet soldiers.

Just as Stallard and his group passed through the gates into their own camp a pistol shot cracked out from behind them, making them jump. ‘Christ almighty, they’ve just shot one of the Russians!’ shouted an RAF pilot several paces back. A large German NCO holstered his Walther pistol while shouting orders, the body of the Soviet prisoner lying at his feet in an ever-widening pool of blood. He turned and stared challengingly at the passing British, who stared back with equal hatred. Some shook their heads in quiet despair. The response of their Wehrmacht guards was predictable, yelling ‘Raus! Raus!’ or ‘Schnell!’ as they hurried the British prisoners into the camp as fast as possible, pushing them along with their rifle butts.

An hour later and almost 3,000 prisoners were arranged in neat ranks on the camp’s main sports ground facing a small wooden dais. After much counting and more shouting by their guards, the POWs had been given a short speech of welcome from the commandant, Oberst (Colonel) Stürtzkopf. Tall, immaculately turned out, with highly polished leather jackboots, service cap worn at a slightly rakish angle, Stürtzkopf looked every inch the upright Prussian officer. The prisoners would soon learn that their estimation of the man was accurate – he was tough but fair. The man standing next to him, however, was cut from different cloth entirely. Hauptmann (Captain) Rademacher was chief security officer, responsible for preventing escapes and punishing infractions against camp rules. Aged about 50, with grey hair and rather handsome Teutonic features, he was unashamedly theatrical, gesturing wildly as he spoke. The prisoners soon discovered that the man was unhinged. He would often pull his Luger out and wave it around while yelling at them, occasionally loosing off a shot or two into the air. He also owned a beautiful sword that he would wear when he wanted to create an impression.7 This was unsheathed and brandished with vigour when Rademacher’s emotions got the better of him, which was often.

Rademacher was most infamous for his ‘bastard’ searches, cruel and unnecessary treatment that focused on the prisoners’ few personal belongings. Accompanied by two of his henchmen, Rademacher would march into any hut and at first apologise for the inconvenience to the startled prisoners. His personality would soon change. If less contraband was found than he expected, his rage would grow deeper. He would stamp back and forth across the wooden floor, ordering the guards to find the radio and tunnel that he knew must exist, waving his pistol and/or sword about to emphasise his superiority in front of the silent British prisoners.8

At the height of his rage Rademacher would order the POWs’ belongings to be thrown out of the windows and door, regardless of the weather outside. Soon a tangled mess of blankets, clothing, and personal effects would pile up. Tins of milk and jam from the Red Cross would be tipped over the hut floor and then walked in. Rademacher would often squeeze toothpaste all over the prisoners’ bunks. As the prisoners who arrived at Oflag VI-B soon discovered, they could do nothing about Rademacher or his ‘bastard’ searches – to complain or intervene would have meant instant punishment.9

*

Stürtzkopf had the POWs subdivided into five ‘battalions’, as the Germans termed them, each of roughly 600 men and given its own section of the camp and its own German security officer, though a British POW was also appointed to each battalion as senior officer.

The prisoners had come from four POW camps that the Germans suddenly emptied to create the vast Oflag VI-B at Warburg. Among the thousands of men was a hardcore of escape artists who had already made life very difficult for the Germans in their first camps – men like Stallard, Arkwright and Hamilton-Baillie – and it seemed to many of the POWs that the intention of the Germans in sending them to Warburg was to place all of their bad eggs into one well-guarded basket.

The hardcore escapers were busy quietly comparing notes as they waited on parade, eyes taking in everything, scanning their surroundings for opportunities, kicking the dusty soil with their boots. Tom Stallard chatted with Major Arkwright. ‘I say, Tom’, said Arkwright, ‘what’s that for, do you reckon?’, indicating with his eyes a long wooden hut set in its own little compound just outside the main gate, strands of barbed wire hammered across its narrow, high windows. ‘Cooler’, said Stallard, using the POW colloquialism for the solitary confinement punishment block. ‘Jolly large’, said Arkwright.

‘I think they might be expecting plenty of trade’, replied Stallard with a grin.

Although it was Oberst Stürtzkopf ’s primary responsibility to keep the prisoners firmly under lock and key in one of the biggest camps in Germany, he was also a realist. He knew that it was every soldier’s duty to attempt to escape, and no matter the camp, escape attempts would occur. It was the German staff ’s job to minimise the number of attempts and their success rate, and to punish those who were caught.

The camp seemed to stretch for ever, enclosing almost three-quarters of a mile of dusty plain between Paderborn and Kassel in north-western Germany. The perimeter fence was twelve feet high and doubled, meaning that there were two parallel fences with a barbed wire-filled void in between to make climbing it impossible. Floodlights illuminated the fence at night, and sentries patrolled its length or stared down from a dozen wooden watchtowers that were equipped with machine guns and searchlights. A road ran from one end of the camp to the other, passing through heavily guarded gates at each end.

Stallard and his cohorts’ eyes soaked up every aspect of the camp’s layout and security. But only when they were dismissed from the parade and assigned to their huts did the absolute necessity of escape become clear. The accommodation at Warburg was like nothing they had seen before.

‘They must be joking’, said Arkwright, as he and fifteen of his colleagues were herded into one of the rooms inside the 29 large huts the Germans had allocated for prisoner accommodation. In other camps only six to eight POWs shared a room. Double bunks lined the walls, straw-filled palliasses giving off an unpleasantly musty smell. Rodent droppings lay beneath the bunks. The windows were grimy, the rooms smelly and the huts generally in a poor condition and extremely draughty.

At Warburg each hut was divided into ten large and four smaller rooms. The large rooms, which measured about twenty feet by twelve feet, each accommodated between twelve and sixteen officers. A few acetylene lamps dimly lit the rooms, for the huts were without electricity.10 For several months the Germans would lock the prisoners into these stygian sheds from dusk till dawn.

The prisoners soon discovered that Warburg was almost unfit for human habitation. Mice and rats scampered around underneath the bunks at night, or ran across the sleeping forms of the prisoners, leaving their droppings everywhere. The vermin in turn carried fleas that added to the lice that already infested the prisoners’ uniforms and sleeping quarters. The British had never experienced such conditions as prisoners, and the medical officers daily expected a serious outbreak of disease. They were not disappointed, as diphtheria soon made an appearance.

Tom Stallard viewed his accommodation with barely concealed revulsion. ‘I don’t know about you chaps, but I intend to get the hell out of here as soon as I can’, he announced, his lip curling in disgust. ‘I wouldn’t lodge my dog in a place like this.’ Added to the prisoners’ misery was inadequate heating that made the huts freezing cold during the harsh German winter, cold enough that cases of bronchitis were reported to add to those of diphtheria. There were also no indoor latrines, just stinking earthen ones that required constant emptying.

The British soon worked out why the accommodation was so bad. Lieutenant Colonel H.R. Swinburn, an early and influential member of ‘X’, the camp Escape Committee, discovered that the camp ‘was only a makeshift affair which was supposed to make do for a few months until such time as the war ended in the Germans’ favour’.11 Some officers deluded themselves into believing that so many POWs had been gathered together so that they could be repatriated to Britain. With Hitler’s armies stalled outside Moscow by winter 1941, this eventuality looked increasingly unlikely.

To the further horror of the prisoners, the Germans continued to deliberately starve them. Already lean after months of captivity, the prisoners started losing weight by the stone rather than the pound. Meals in October 1941 consisted of hot vegetable soup only once a day with a meagre issue of bread, margarine and jam, amounting to only about 1,000 calories. Fortunately Red Cross parcels were available in large quantities; without these the prisoners would have started dying of starvation.

Sickness spread quickly among the POWs, packed like sardines inside their filthy huts. The Germans provided an infirmary with 84 beds and this was filled to capacity between October and December 1941, ‘a bad sign’, commented an MI9 intelligence report, ‘considering that no sick prisoners of war had been brought into the camp when it opened up’.12

*

Meetings between the major escape leaders and a large number of willing volunteers had begun in their vermin-infested accommodation shortly after arrival. Groups were coalescing around certain charismatic and experienced escapers, and the mixing together of four camps’ worth of prisoners meant that there was an abundance of talent, many providing fresh ideas and impetus to solving the perennial problem of ‘getting out’. The seven-man ‘X’ Committee had been formed under the leadership of Brigadier H.C.H. Eden (codename ‘Big X’), tasked with formally approving each escape plan to prevent any overlapping with other groups and vetoing the more reckless or suicidal ones.

‘The soil around here is just about perfect for tunnelling’,13 announced Jock Hamilton-Baillie to a close group of his fellow diggers at one such meeting shortly after arrival. Hamilton-Baillie would be one of the camp’s most prominent ‘Toasters’,14 POW codename for potential escapers. ‘We’ll also have little trouble scraping together enough timber to line the tunnel with all these wooden huts to pilfer’, he added. ‘The Jerries have also dropped the ball by placing some of the huts so close to the wire.’ In some places the huts were less than five feet from the perimeter.

‘I think that Hager will prove to be a thorn in our side, HB’, said Captain M.E. Few, a handsome officer in the mould of a young John F. Kennedy. Although the camp security officer Rademacher was widely despised, there were several other candidates among the German staff for ‘most hated jailer’. A strong contender was Leutnant (Second Lieutenant) Hager, a former schoolmaster, one of the battalion commanders, who treated the POWs under him harshly.

Hager seemed to personify everything that the prisoners hated about their captors. Major Arkwright reckoned that the German sentries detested the martinet Hager almost as much as the prisoners did, as he was regularly observed bawling at them on the slightest pretext.15 Hager became a figure of fear and loathing, a strutting jackbooted Nazi clutching a notebook containing the names, photographs and descriptions of ‘problem’ prisoners in one gloved hand. His cold eyes and stony expression at the twice-daily roll calls commanded silence; his relentless inspections of the huts in a never-ending hunt for illicit escape equipment were sources of constant stress for the prisoners. Discovery meant a stint in the cooler, where conditions were even more spartan than in the regular camp, and where a man was left alone with his thoughts for days on end on a diet of bread and water.

On 15 January 1942 the Germans suddenly moved General Fortune, Brigadier Eden and 200 of the most senior officers to Oflag IX-A, and Colonel G.W. Kennedy was detailed to take over as Senior British Officer. The leadership of the ‘X’ Committee was decimated by the sudden move. Eden handed over his role as ‘Big X’ to a much more junior officer, the respected Major Ken Wylie. The effect of having younger men in charge of escape planning was to inject some much-needed drive and determination into the entire enterprise and the fostering of closer cooperation between the Escape Committee and seasoned escapologists like Major Stallard and Hamilton-Baillie.

At the same time as the senior officers were moved out, morale began to steadily improve as the Germans made efforts to tackle conditions inside the camp. At the end of December 1941 ten new brick accommodation buildings had been completed, easing some of the overcrowding, and by the end of January 1942 the Germans, fearing the outbreak of diseases like typhus, exterminated the fleas and vermin that had plagued the prisoners since their arrival. Food gradually improved too, both in quality and quantity, but the dining halls remained very overcrowded. The sanitary conditions still left much to be desired and the heating and lighting were as inadequate as ever.

The Germans did create an excellent 4,000-volume library, three netball pitches and a cinder football ground so that the POWs could burn off some energy, stave off boredom and divert their attention from escaping. But the changed conditions actually had the opposite effect. With minds and bodies somewhat rejuvenated, the number of little escape attempts by small groups of plucky young officers increased exponentially. A veritable rabbit warren of tunnels soon appeared beneath Oflag VI-B, dug with furious speed by small groups of determined escapers.

*

The tunnels that were dug by the prisoners ranged from very professional operations with electric lights to quite small affairs. Good carpenters and joiners were needed as well as tunnellers to line the tunnels with timber and create concealed entrances. Although dirty, dark and often dangerous work, some of the tunnellers actually enjoyed the process. ‘Time spent on the face was not a terrible chore because the pleasure of being completely on one’s own, except for one’s mate who you handed mud and stones to, in a camp full of thousands of people was unusual’,16 wrote 26-year-old Welsh Guards Captain Hamish Forbes. A tall, elegant man from an aristocratic Scottish family, Forbes would become an inveterate tunnel man at Warburg, as well as involving himself in several other types of escape. The only downside to tunnelling, as far as Forbes was concerned, was too long spent on damp earth, which led to stomach aches and the occasional low-grade infection.17

Major Arkwright, Hamilton-Baillie and over 30 other officers had started a major tunnel during the winter of 1941–42. They had broken ground a month after arrival, digging down below one of the accommodation huts located just fifteen yards from the perimeter fence. For nearly five arduous months this tight-knit group worked in shifts, carefully removing the spoil and installing wooden props in the tunnel shaft until it was almost twenty yards long. Getting rid of the dirt led to some ingenious ideas. One was pouches that were worn inside the trousers, pinned at one end. Tunnellers would walk out onto the sports fields, covertly release the pins allowing the earth to run down their legs and over the ground, and then tramp it into the surface of the field. Tons of spoil was also hidden in the roof spaces of huts, particularly the camp theatre. But nature, rather than the Germans, conspired against the tunnellers when late one night in March 1942 the heaviest rainstorm the prisoners had yet seen deluged the camp. The soil that was so easy to dig out became the tunnel’s Achilles’ heel, soaking up so much rainwater that the tunnel collapsed under its weight.

The frustration felt by the teams was palpable – months of intensive labour completely wasted in the space of a couple of hours. ‘Tunnels at that time were rather a sore subject’,18 commented Arkwright with commendable understatement. On the night of the collapse the commander of that evening’s digging party was 28-year-old Squadron Leader ‘Dim’ Strong, a Wellington bomber pilot who had been shot down off the coast of Denmark in September 1941. Once he and his men had dug themselves back out of their ruined, waterlogged tunnel and discovered grinning and armed German soldiers at the entrance, the appropriately named Strong, in a moment of impotent fury, had advanced on the German guards ‘with clenched fist and flashing eyes’ and received ten days in the cooler for his trouble. Hager had Strong’s record card marked ‘especially obstinate and arrogant’ and he was removed from the camp shortly afterwards. He was part of a group of 50 officers that the Germans deemed ‘hard cases and troublemakers’19 and these men were sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Poland, the future site of the ‘Great Escape’ in 1944.

Dim Strong’s reaction was not unexpected from men who had been starved, forced to live in squalor and then witnessed their hard labour ruined because of the vagaries of the German weather. Smaller tunnelling efforts launched around the same time also invariably failed. ‘The German technique in discovering them is, frankly, getting better than our ingenuity at keeping them hidden’, said Arkwright at an escape meeting called after the loss of the main tunnel.

‘I think the main problem is the number of people we can actually get out of them before Jerry intervenes’, said Hamilton-Baillie. ‘Really none of the tunnels have been fully successful. A few people, one or two, get out of some, but they break them too close to the wire and are seen quite soon.’20 The men waiting inside the tunnel would then be captured, and months of work lost. The psychological blow was incalculable to men who had stared with increasing desperation at the barbed wire fences penning them like animals inside the camp. Several were already showing signs of cracking up, becoming what the prisoners termed ‘wire happy’. One had nearly been shot dead for climbing into the perimeter wire in a probable suicide attempt.21

‘“Deep Field” certainly complicates matters’, said Stallard, referring to the new German method of capturing tunnellers. Oberst Stürtzkopf had realised that finding a tunnel entrance was extremely difficult, for the prisoners had become adept at concealment. But finding the exit would be straightforward, as the tunnel would break the surface beyond the wire at the moment of escape and prisoners would start emerging and running off. The Germans therefore created a twenty-man unit that was ordered to patrol at night about 50 yards beyond the wire. Once the guards in the towers had pinpointed the tunnel exit, ‘Deep Field’, as the prisoners christened the German snatch squad, would rapidly descend on the escape point and gather up most of the prisoners. ‘We began to realise that the German command were frightened of large escapes, and a lot later we found out that the critical number was twenty’, said HB. ‘Anything over twenty who got out, it went to the Nazi hierarchy who investigated why this had been allowed and made trouble for the commandant.’22 Only much later did the tight-knit group of escapers realise that ‘Deep Field’ presented them with a marvellous opportunity.

‘I think we’d better give tunnels a rest for a while’, said Stallard bitterly, to the agreement of many of his co-conspirators, with the exception of Hamilton-Baillie, who refused to be dissuaded even when working on other, non-subterranean projects.

Stallard continued: ‘I can’t go on with this business if I’m going to see tunnel after tunnel discovered. It’s a futile waste of time and resources.’

‘So we dismissed tunnels’, said Arkwright, ‘and went on to the second method, which gave us two alternatives: to pass through the entrance gate disguised or concealed in such a way as to hoodwink the sentry, or to cut a hole in the wire fence and make our own exit.’23 As Arkwright and his team were to discover, finding an alternative to tunnelling was to prove one of the greatest challenges of their captivity. But from the depths of their collective desperation would emerge a brilliant idea, a conception so fresh that not even the far-sighted German administration had any contingency against it.

CHAPTER TWO

_____________

Trial and Error

Warburg, an overcrowded hutted camp with nonexistent sanitation, all mud in winter, all dust and smell in summer.

Captain Dick Tomes, Royal Warwickshire Regiment

Walking slowly towards the main gate, the German Unteroffizier (corporal) occasionally turned back and shouted ‘Raus, raus!’ at the group of men following him. Twelve others dutifully picked up the pace at the corporal’s command, eleven workers dressed in slightly shabby civilian clothes and another armed sentry bringing up the rear. Before them Oflag VI-B’s main gate loomed. In fact it was two gates – an inner double gate controlled by an armed sentry that adjoined the camp’s inner perimeter fence, then a gap, followed by the main outer gate, also guarded, creating a rectangular-shaped wire box between the two portals. A wooden guard tower with machine gun overlooked the inner gate and beyond it were the guardroom and the punishment cell block.1

‘Halt!’ bellowed the corporal, and his ragtag party stopped before the inner gate. ‘Eleven French orderlies leaving the camp’, he said to the gate guard.

‘Pass?’ asked the sentry, holding out his hand for the necessary documentation.

The corporal reached inside his greatcoat pocket and produced the paperwork.

‘Carry on’, said the guard, unlocking the wood and wire gate.

The little party trudged through the two sets of gates and started to walk up the main road outside the camp. They had gone perhaps 50 yards when the sentry, bothered by something on the pass, shouted for them to come back.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked the escort corporal.

‘Your papers are not in order’, said the guard. ‘They are missing the duty officer’s signature. I can’t let you leave.’

‘But it will make me late delivering these men’, said the corporal, gesturing to the work party behind him.

‘I can’t help that’, said the sentry. ‘Leutnant Hager was only down here yesterday and he gave us all a talk about correct documentation. He made it clear that any slackness would earn a soldier a transfer to the Eastern Front.’

‘That’s Hager’, replied the corporal, grimacing. ‘All right, I’ll have to take them back in and get the duty officer to sign me off.’ He turned to the work party. ‘About turn … Marsch!’ And they shuffled back into the camp. Once out of sight of the main gate the corporal stopped, removed his side cap and turned to the French orderlies.

‘Too damned close for comfort, chaps’, he said in perfect English.

‘I don’t know, we thought you handled it beautifully, Stevens’, said one of the Frenchmen, who beneath the costume was RAF Squadron Leader ‘Bush’ Kennedy. The rest of the party agreed with Kennedy’s comment.

‘Let’s get out of these togs before Jerry catches on’, said the other German guard, Flying Officer ‘Prince’ Palmer, unbuttoning his greatcoat.

Kennedy, Palmer and the others had just made a unique escape attempt. But the man who had led them was also unique.

*

Tom Stallard’s would not be the only large-scale escape that was put before the Committee. The general disillusionment with tunnelling had forced some officers to become more creative in their escape attempts.2 Bluff was a well-tested method.

The man who played the German corporal so well was not British at all. Twenty-two-year-old Pilot Officer Peter Stevens had transferred into Oflag VI-B with another RAF officer following a failed escape from Lübeck. He was already an expert evader: the British police had been actively seeking him long before his game of cat-and-mouse with the Wehrmacht. Born Georg Hein in Hannover in 1919 to a wealthy Jewish family, he had been sent to school in England. When war broke out in 1939 all Germans resident in England were supposed to register as ‘enemy aliens’ and be interned, but, not prepared to accept this fate, Hein assumed the identity of a deceased school friend, Peter Stevens, and enlisted in the RAF. He trained as a bomber pilot and was commissioned in November 1940, despite the fact that he was then the subject of a police manhunt. On his 23rd combat mission over Germany, Stevens had been shot down.

Arriving at Warburg on 12 October 1941, Stevens discovered that he was something of a celebrity. Any officer who had managed to remain free for even a couple of days was lauded by the other prisoners, several of whom pumped him for information about the outside. Every prisoner who escaped and was recaptured underwent a quick interrogation from his own camp Intelligence Officer. ‘I’ would pass on any relevant information to the Escape Committee for use in future operations.3

Promoted to Flying Officer in November, Stevens took part in the audacious bluff that almost succeeded in getting over a dozen men out of Warburg without digging a tunnel or cutting the wire. They would simply walk out of the main gate.

If unmasked by the Germans, Stevens would have been immediately handed over to the dreaded Gestapo and undoubtedly executed as both a traitor and a Jew, so he was playing for much higher stakes than any other prisoner in Warburg.

Camp tailors Dominic Bruce and Peter Tunstall had taken a pair of RAF greatcoats, recut them and then dyed them Wehrmacht field-grey. Stevens and his escape partner ‘Prince’ Palmer also wore fake black leather belts with silver buckles and leather equipment. They were both armed with imitation Mauser rifles that had been cleverly carved out of solid blocks of wood and then painted. The eleven French orderlies were of course suitably disguised British officers.

*

The camp Escape Committee insisted that the audacious bluff be tried again after a suitable cooling-off period. The uniforms and weapons had been carefully hidden and the Germans were none the wiser. In such a big camp, Germans were coming and going all the time, new guards transferring in as replacements while others left or returned from leave or hospital. Stevens volunteered enthusiastically when given the chance to lead the escape again. The advantage of having a native German in on an escape was incalculable, and in the case of a bluff, language was the most important factor.

On 8 December 1941 Stevens, dressed once more as the German Unteroffizier, marched another party of ‘French’ orderlies up to the main gate, this time with two fake German privates as escorts. But the fresh guard on the gate became suspicious because he didn’t recognise any of the soldiers. Although that was not unusual in itself, he decided to follow his instincts. ‘Show me your pay-books’, said the guard in an aggressive tone. ‘All of you.’

Not having fake paybooks, only a forged gate pass, Stevens, thinking on his feet, quickly replied: ‘We’ve left them in our quarters. Shall we go back and get them?’

‘I think you’d better’, ordered the guard, eyeing the little group suspiciously. So Stevens, bellowing orders in German, marched the prisoners back into the main camp, but as they tramped through an interior gate the guard decided to fetch some help in identifying Stevens and his two ‘German’ companions. Perhaps he had noticed that something was not quite right about the uniforms or the weapons. Either way, he followed protocol and raised the alarm, at which point Stevens and his party scattered like hunted rabbits. Unfortunately, Royal Navy pilot Lieutenant C.H. Filmer and Squadron Leader ‘Bush’ Kennedy were quickly snatched by guards and sent to the cooler.4 The rest escaped punishment after disappearing into the camp and ditching their disguises but it would be some time before such a bluff, dubbed ‘The Coolest Escape of the War’,5 could be attempted again.

Stevens would later play an important part in Stallard’s Wire Job scheme, using his language skills to assist the camp’s forgery department in the production of identity documents. He also became an accomplished scrounger, chatting to guards and bribing them for vital equipment needed by the escape organisation, such as cameras, film and woodworking tools.

‘Escape season’ was at an end for 1941, save for the slow tunnelling efforts that continued all year round. The weather was freezing, with deep snowfall. On New Year’s Eve the RAF battalion celebrated the coming year with a raucous party fuelled by illicit homemade hooch. The temperature was –25°C and the water pipes froze, forcing the prisoners to collect water for washing in buckets from the one still-functioning tap in the camp. The huts actually shrank during the winter, the thin wooden walls contracting in the cold so that the prisoners could see out between the boards.6 A bitter wind howled across the open Warburg Plain, making life even more uncomfortable for the prisoners who wandered around bundled up in every item of clothing they owned. In fact, the winter of 1941–42 was the coldest seen in Germany for 40 years.7

The New Year brought Hauptmann Rademacher’s suspicions to the fore. On 4 March he ordered two recently uncovered tunnels to be blown up with dynamite – the explosions were so great that windows in the nearby huts imploded.8 Throughout March Allied air raids increased, with nearby German towns the targets. On the 10th, 12th, 14th and 17th there were night raids, during which the Germans would hastily extinguish the camp’s lights as an air raid siren wailed mournfully. The prisoners would lie in their huts listening to the drone of aero engines passing high above them, and if they looked out of their windows in certain directions they could see a glow against the horizon as the bombs did their work. It raised morale, but it also made the Germans more aggressive and unpredictable. On 17 March, just before the fourth air raid, Rademacher claimed that there was a tunnel in Hut 29. He ordered all 150 prisoners out and the rooms dug up. Nothing was found, but the officers had to endure considerable discomfort.

*

9 April 1942 had been a cold day, winter’s grip still lingering on the north German plain. Now, the weak sun was starting to fade from the horizon. Stallard, Dick Page, a strongly built officer, and James McDonnell, a fluent German speaker, pretended to hoe and weed a vegetable patch close to the wire. They wore nondescript outfits and blended in well with the usual bustle of activity as prisoners attempted to grow extra food or loitered about outside their huts watching. Stallard and his companions were waiting for a particular event to take place. Close by, watchers had the two nearest guard towers under intense observation. Stallard was watching a POW outside one of the huts, waiting for the signal that the German guards in the towers were both looking away from his position.9

Suddenly, the signal was made. Dropping his hoe, Stallard muttered to his two companions and the three men rapidly crossed the path that ran around the inside of the perimeter, stepped over the ‘line of death’ – a trip wire parallel to the inner fence – and pressed up against the fence itself. No warning shouts followed their movement, and no shots.

A few days before, Stallard had made an interesting discovery. Looking at the fence, he had noticed how the top section leaned into the camp to prevent anyone climbing it. But this arrangement actually made it impossible for the guards in the adjacent towers to see into the space below the overhang. If someone stood or lay against the inner fence they would be invisible to the guards. Stallard had quickly formulated a plan – he and two companions would dash to cover under the overhang, cut through the inner fence, crawl through the barbed wire coils between the two fences, cut another hole in the outer fence, and then stroll off looking like German civilians going about their usual agricultural tasks outside the perimeter. The escape would have to be launched in broad daylight because during clear days Rademacher did not place any sentries on foot along the perimeter, only sentries in the towers and on the gates. The biggest dangers would be crossing the ‘line of death’ and dashing to the wire, and walking away from the camp on the other side in full view of the guards.

So far, the plan was working like clockwork. But timing was all-important. They had left the attempt until dusk so that they would be less conspicuous as they walked away, but this meant that it would not be long before the German ground sentries came on duty. A prisoner close by reported to Stallard that the sentries were parading by the German guardroom and were preparing to take up their posts.10

Page worked quickly with his homemade wire-cutters and clipped a hole in the inner fence big enough for the three of them to crawl through. Then the three escapers wriggled slowly and carefully through the barbed wire coils, pausing to unhitch each other’s clothing if they became snagged. Page then cut another hole in the outer fence. Tugging on homemade cloth caps and pulling out small satchels filled with rations, Page, Stallard and McDonnell struggled through the hole, stood up and began to saunter away through the open fields that surrounded the camp. McDonnell’s job, fortunately not required, was to answer any questions from the guard towers in perfect German, to convince them that they were simply locals going about their lawful business.