by Damien Lewis
Byrne felt his body withering away. Much more of this, he noted, and he would not be physically capable of escaping, even if he got the opportunity. His thoughts became uncharacteristically dark. As he lay on his wooden bunk, thoughts of ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ chased themselves around in his mind: if only he’d waited at the rendezvous for the LRDG; if only he had stuck to crossing the desert under cover of darkness; if only he had accepted the Bedouins’ hospitality, staying with them in their tents. He wondered how many of his SAS friends had been killed, and he felt ashamed of himself, locked up and useless, while his comrades soldiered on.
Though his spirits spiralled downwards, somehow, with superhuman effort, Byrne endured. When finally he was released back into the main prison – without further comment from the guards – he resolved to redouble his efforts to escape. He scrutinised every possibility, considering any potential, no matter how seemingly marginal. But during his long confinement there had been a mass breakout attempt and the vigilance of the guards was much intensified.
Byrne learned that the only way for a prisoner now to leave the camp was to perform coal fatigues – manhandling coal-sacks into the camp. Despite his emaciated state, he took a place on the coal-carrying parties, during which he spotted a garage lying adjacent to the coal yard that seemed to offer a temporary place of hiding. Once more he approached the escape committee. Outlining his plan, he won their approval. Again, they gave him food supplies, plus detailed maps of the route from the camp north to Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), lying on the Baltic coast, and south-east to Warsaw – furnishing two alternative escape routes. They also devised a ruse that would make it appear as if Byrne were still in the camp days after his breakout, so buying him precious time.
Finally, he tried to put together a more convincing disguise, so this time, if he managed to make it out of the camp, he would not alert any casual observer’s attention so swiftly. He duly acquired ‘a pair of blue pin-striped trousers, a black morning coat’, plus a civilian style cap, all of which had been manufactured ingeniously by the camp’s tailors, using blankets stained in dyes made from jam.
Byrne’s official escape report took up the story. ‘I put on these garments . . . and wore an army overcoat over that. I carried a compass, and stowed my food, some chocolate, a razor and soap, in bags under my arms. On . . . 15th March ’43, I went out with a coal party, and managed to slip into the garage . . . The other members of the party and their guard shut the door of the garage, leaving me inside. When they had gone, I immediately got through a window . . . made my way to the pigsties and by luck again found a bicycle . . . I mounted this and rode through the town . . . then turned down a side road and hid my bicycle among some trees.’
Byrne trekked over the marshy Polish countryside, heading for the large railway marshalling yard at Bromberg. The damp conditions caused his feet to swell painfully and he decided he needed to board a train. He found the railway track and followed it to a point where a number of goods trains were parked up. After observing them from a ditch, he climbed into the guards’ wagon of an empty train, which was duly shunted into a marshalling yard. There he proceeded to jump between wagons as they were moved back and forth, until he found one full of coal and managed to hide himself amid the blackness.
The following days were ‘some of the most miserable I have ever endured’, Byrne later remarked, for after the coal train left Bromberg it travelled only a short distance, before halting for several days. Finally, Byrne decided he had to risk swapping trains, but as he sneaked between wagons at a busy station, wild-looking and covered in coal dust, he was spotted by some railway workers. They chased after and seized him, after which Byrne was duly returned to the punishment block at Oflag XXI-B.
Worse still, in the five days that Byrne had been on the run, conditions at the prison camp had changed utterly. There had been a mass tunnel breakout, and while most of the escapees had been recaptured, the Gestapo had seen fit to seize control of Oflag XXI-B. The new camp commandant sentenced Byrne to twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for escaping, but first he was to be sent to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. He was taken to an unmarked vehicle by two silent, black-clad officers. On arrival at their headquarters he was thrown into a four-foot-square cell. The Gestapo kept the lights on, so Byrne had no way of knowing how long he was there, but he figured it to have been five or six days.
When, finally, he was taken out, he was brought before a Gestapo officer. The man gestured to a pile of papers lying on his desk. They were all concerning Byrne, he remarked, and did not make for ‘very pleasant reading’. Byrne had proven a real ‘nuisance’. He had one question to ask. If Byrne answered truthfully, he would be returned to the prison camp. But if he lied, he would be given into the hands of ‘someone who will be more persuasive’. Was that clear, the Gestapo officer demanded?
‘Yes,’ Byrne replied simply.
‘All I want to know is how you escaped from the prison camp.’
Byrne had long been considering how to answer this question. He had heard tell of the Gestapo’s torture techniques, and he didn’t feel that anyone could endure them for long. He’d decided that his only chance was to lie convincingly.
‘I escaped through the tunnel,’ Byrne announced abruptly.
The Gestapo officer looked doubtful. According to their records, Byrne was still in the prison camp the day after the tunnel was discovered. The escape committee must have managed to cover up his getaway so convincingly that the guards had still thought him inside the camp, even after the tunnel breakout. By way of answer, Byrne stuck doggedly to his story, insisting that he had slipped away at the same time as all the other tunnel escapees.
He had not, the Gestapo officer countered. He had in fact slipped away the day after the tunnel had been sealed shut. Not only that, once they had taken control of the camp the Gestapo had ensured that the perimeter guards were tripled, the staff inside the camp doubled and general security massively tightened. ‘Yet, in spite of all these precautions, you succeeded in escaping,’ he pointed out accusingly.
Suddenly, Byrne realised what was his interrogator’s main concern: it wasn’t chiefly for the camp’s security, but for the Gestapo’s reputation. Playing to the man’s fears, Byrne pointed out that no man could have escaped after the Gestapo had imposed such stringent extra security measures. Perhaps amid all the confusion of the mass breakout, there had been a miscount, and Byrne’s absence had been missed?
The Gestapo officer considered this for a moment. Following the tunnel breakout, the prisoners had been counted by the old security staff, he mused. Byrne could sense the Gestapo officer was tempted to go with this version of events. If Byrne had slipped away through the tunnel along with all the others, that would let the Gestapo off the hook, for it could be blamed on a counting error by the previous staff. He watched the man sip his coffee, nibble some biscuits, then wander around the room smoking a cigarette, deep in thought. Byrne’s head throbbed and his stomach ached, for he had not eaten for days, but he remained silent and still, as the officer made up his mind.
Finally, Byrne’s inquisitor perched on the edge of his desk and offered a cigarette. ‘You escaped through the tunnel with the others,’ he ventured. That was before the Gestapo had taken over responsibility for the camp. The former prison staff had simply miscounted. Byrne felt a surge of relief as he enthusiastically agreed, but then the Gestapo officer added some dark words of warning. If Byrne were to make one further escape attempt, ‘we will shoot you’. If by chance he achieved ‘the impossible’ and reached England, ‘we will search you out when we occupy your country and execute you.’ Was that clear?
‘Yes,’ Byrne replied.
The interrogation over, Byrne was returned to Oflag XXI-B where he was again locked up in the punishment block. Before his term of solitary was up, the majority of the camp’s inhabitants were transferred to Stalag Luft VI, in the far north-east co
rner of the Third Reich. Byrne was left behind in the cells, until on 15 July 1943 he began his journey to Stalag Luft VI, along with a handful of other prisoners.
‘I was taken under guard to Berlin, and thence to Königsberg [now Kaliningrad] by train, en route for Stalag Luft VI,’ Byrne reported. He knew that Stalag Luft VI would likely be escape-proof. So, despite the Gestapo officer’s stark warning, he had to look for any chance to break away now. Some twenty-four hours into their journey they arrived at the Königsberg transit camp, where they were given medical treatment by some French POWs.
One of Byrne’s fellow prisoners, Flight Sergeant Jock Callander, had served with the French Foreign Legion and spoke fluent French. He and Byrne had already discussed the possibility of escape, and Callander asked one of the Frenchmen for help. From him they learned that the French POWs were free to walk about Königsberg, for they were easily identifiable by their French uniforms, which sported a special diamond symbol on one arm. The Frenchman told Callander that his countrymen would be sure to assist them in any way they could. He wished them good luck, before giving Callander 10 Reichsmarks and 100 French francs. Byrne and Callander split the money between them, and readied themselves to escape, should the opportunity arise.
A few hours later Byrne was let out of the prison hut to visit the latrines. He noted that on the far side of a wire fence were a number of Russian POWs. They motioned to him that they wanted cigarettes. Throwing a couple of precious packets over the wire, Byrne managed to get a look at their side of the camp. The drain from the latrine ran beneath the fence, and the Russian side seemed less well-guarded than the British and French sections. He reckoned from there it might be possible to reach the road, out of sight of any guards.
Byrne was about to return to fetch Callander, when a party of French POWs arrived, momentarily distracting the prison guards. He sensed that if he were to make a break for it, it was now or never. ‘I dared not wait for Callander to join me,’ he recalled. Decision made, he lowered himself into the latrine drain, which was about two feet deep, slid under the wire and crawled across into the Russian sector. Then he scrambled into some thick grass near the perimeter fence, adjacent to the road.
Byrne lay hidden in the grass for a moment, waiting for any sign that he had been spotted, but the noises of the camp continued as usual. The best place to get through the fence appeared to be at the corner, where the wire looked worn, but this was directly beneath the guard tower. Studying the guard above, he became convinced the man was reading a book, for each time he looked around his posture would return to the exact same position, staring intently at something in his lap. Byrne decided to seize the opportunity.
At the point he had chosen the wire turned out to be old and rotten, and he managed to break through with his bare hands. He crawled out onto the road, and, taking a deep breath – taking his very life in his hands – he stole away. ‘The road on which I now stood ran parallel to a railway line,’ he wrote in his escape report, ‘and between the road and the railway there were a large number of rusty metal bins. I lifted one up and got underneath it. Here I remained until dark.’
While thus concealed, Byrne took stock of his supplies. He had ten cigarettes, a box of matches, plus the Reichsmarks that Callander had given him. In addition to his trusty razorblade compass, he had also managed to acquire a map of the area of their proposed transportation route. He was dressed in khaki battle-dress with a blue RAF shirt – so nowhere near as well disguised as he had been on his previous breakout attempts. But crucially, he also had a razor and a bar of soap, which should enable him to maintain an air of clean-shaven respectability, as a stubbly chin would signify to any onlooker that he was on the run.
Hidden inside the metal bin, Byrne’s mind strayed to thoughts of Callander. He wished there had been time to alert him to the escape plan. But he remembered that they had agreed that if either ‘saw an opportunity to escape’ they should ‘take it independently’. Either way, once darkness fell he would have little option but to make his way into Königsberg alone and try to enlist the help of the French POWs there.
Come nightfall, Byrne made his way along the railway tracks into the town, trying to work out where the docks must be, for the city lay on the Baltic coast. By a stroke of luck he noticed a discarded sailor’s hat, complete with ribbons, gleaming white against the darkness. Might that provide just the disguise he was looking for to bluff his way aboard a ship? Delighted with his find, he slipped the hat inside his tunic. At the docks he found a number of empty goods wagons, one of which was damaged and parked a little way from the others. He climbed inside it and fell into an exhausted but fraught sleep.
If he were caught, he was dead: Byrne knew that. He was over a thousand miles from Britain by now, for his gaolers had kept transporting him eastwards, away from friendly shores. This was his very last chance. Somehow, he had to make it home.
The next morning, 18 July 1943, Byrne, peered out of the wagon, noticing a number of Frenchmen standing in groups near by. They had all the appearance of work gangs, and he waited anxiously for one to draw near, so he could try to attract their attention. None did. He remained hidden all day, unwilling to reveal himself, especially since certain execution at the hands of the Gestapo would follow recapture. Just as dusk was falling, he noticed a gang of prison workers leaving the docks. They appeared to be unguarded, and most were dressed in battledress blouses, with the distinctive diamond badge on their sleeves. Despite the danger, Byrne seized his chance. He jumped from the train, shaking hands with those nearest and furtively explaining that he was an escaped ‘English airman’.
Obligingly, they swept up Byrne in their midst, hurrying him along until they reached the hut that was their sleeping quarters. There he learned to his distress that there were no ships of any significant size in Königsberg – just a few small coal barges. It was hopeless to try to escape by sea, and so, together with his new accomplices, he weighed his options. During his long imprisonment Byrne had heard the escape story of Sergeant Wareing, who had become a good friend in Stalag Luft III. Wareing had managed to reach neutral Sweden by stowing away on a ship sailing from Danzig. Danzig lay over a hundred miles to the west of Königsberg, but still Byrne felt it represented his best shot. He asked if his newfound friends would help scavenge some civilian clothes. Obligingly, they gathered together a suit of blue worker’s overalls, a beret and a haversack stuffed with food. He accepted it all, but refused to take the money they offered, for he still had cash stitched into the lining of his trousers.
He asked for one more favour. Might they procure for him one of their diamond badges, so that he could more convincingly pass as a French POW? That done, Byrne bade farewell to his accomplices. As they left to report for work duty, Byrne hurried towards Königsberg town centre, searching all the while for an unattended bicycle. He spotted one lying in a gateway, got his hands on it without the alarm being raised and moments later he was pedalling away.
Byrne was little troubled by such acts of thievery. Theft, burglary and larceny had lain at the heart of their SAS training. Anyone who hadn’t the stomach for it was weeded out fast. When Byrne and fellow recruits had first arrived at their SAS training camp at Kabrit, all they found was a small board stuck in the ground, with ‘L-Detachment’ daubed upon it, and with nothing but ‘a vast empty space behind it’. When one perplexed recruit had asked David Stirling where the camp was, their leader had replied: ‘Well, that’s the first job you do – you steal one!’
The British military bureaucracy – which Stirling famously referred to as ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’ – had refused to provide him with the equipment he needed to begin training, or at least not fast enough, hence his exhortation that his men should ‘go out and start stealing’. But apart from satisfying their immediate needs, he also wanted to normalise the idea of thieving from civilians and other military units, so that his men would think nothing of resorting to such meas
ures while on operations.
Recruits had been only too happy to oblige. ‘We thought this was the unit to be with!’ one recalled enthusiastically.
Pedalling his stolen bicycle, Byrne headed westwards, following signposts to Elbing (modern-day Elblag), which he knew to be on the route to Danzig. As he approached the town he saw a roadblock up ahead, where travellers were having their papers checked. Luckily, he was just in time to turn down a side path leading into a wood. There, he hid himself until dark, when he shouldered the bike and struck out across country, stumbling around in the inky blackness until he was sure that he had bypassed the danger. That done, he hid the ‘bicycle under a hedge, climbed into a tree, and spent the rest of the night among the branches’, his escape report noted.
Come dawn, Byrne washed and shaved in a nearby stream before remounting the bike. He passed through Elbing without incident, but in a village on the far side he had a stroke of misfortune. The front tyre burst and, having no pump or puncture repair kit, Byrne was forced to carry the bike on his shoulder. He cursed himself for not being more careful about his choice of bicycle. His previous escape attempts had taught him that as long as he was on a bike, it reduced the risk of anyone stopping him to talk. As Byrne spoke no Polish or German, even something as innocent as a passer-by asking him for directions could reveal his identity as an escaped Allied POW.
Wandering the country roads with a bike on his shoulder, Byrne felt horribly conspicuous. He needed to get off the road. He followed the first track he came to, found a hidden field and sat with his bicycle under a tree. There he painstakingly ‘stuffed the punctured tyre with grass’, chewing it into a green pulp so he could more easily squash it inside. When he was done the tyre still looked flat and bumpy, and Byrne conceded that he would only be able to ride the bike ‘in an emergency’, but at least he would be able to wheel it along rather than carry it. He remained in the field that night, sleeping in the branches of a large tree, the bicycle hoisted up alongside him.