by Read, Simon
The actual tunneling began in April 1943 and became “a standard pastime at Stalag Luft III.” More than six hundred men took part in the escape’s preparation and planning. An elaborate lookout system was established to monitor the guards. “Stooges,” the name for prisoners serving as lookouts, were positioned throughout the camp and used a series of signals—the tamping of a pipe, the doffing of a cap, turning a page in a book—to notify the men in the huts of approaching “ferrets.” One “stooge” would always be assigned to monitor the camp’s main gate. Dubbed the “duty pilot,” he would sit in a chair, perhaps appearing to catch some sun or idly flip through a book, all the while keeping track of the guards who came and went, relaying the information to other “stooges” through their various signals. The Germans were not entirely ignorant of the “duty pilot’s” presence, though they were hard-pressed to ascertain the plot in which he played a role. Underground, the diggers sweat and toiled in miserable conditions. One digger would lie on his stomach and hack away at a wall of earth, piling the dirt and debris near his head. Eventually, he would push the pile down toward his waist, where the digger behind him would load it into a wheeled trolley. Another man, at the far end of the shaft, would pull on a rope to wheel the trolley in and load the dirt into sacks for later disposal. When done, the diggers would pull the trolley back to their end of the shaft, and the slow, painful process would repeat itself.
Men of large physique found the tunnel work particularly uncomfortable. Even for the smallest, lightweight man, conditions were too cramped to turn around. If one digger wanted to trade places with another, the two of them would often have to crawl over each other. The men worked in long, woolen underwear, which became increasingly uncomfortable as they perspired. Some men chose simply to work naked—but there was little relief from the stifling conditions. “Digging was the worst. You had a fat lamp by your head, you sniffed fumes all day, and when you came back up again you did nothing but spit black.”
The digging generated tons of dirt, all of which had to be discarded somehow. Because the soil underground differed in color from the compound’s topsoil, this presented a considerable problem—one that fell to Lieutenant Commander Peter Fanshawe, head of dispersal, to solve. He soon devised a contraption made from the cutoff legs of long, woolen underwear. The bottom of each leg was fastened shut by a pin attached to a length of string. The idea was to fill such trouser bags with dirt from the tunnels. More than one hundred prisoners, codenamed “penguins,” would wear the contraption inside their trousers, the length of string from the bag easily accessible in their pockets. Pulling the strings would release the pins holding the sacks closed and discard the dirt down the penguin’s leg. All they had to do was tread the small amount of dirt into the ground. Prisoners were more than happy to surrender their woolen underwear supplied by the Red Cross. Itchy and coarse, it was a despised piece of clothing.
As part of his ambitious plan, Bushell ordered that all escapees be issued with pertinent travel documents and identity papers. The task fell to a forgery department—named Dean and Dawson after the London-based travel agency—headed by Flight Lieutenant Gilbert Walenn, the twenty-six-year-old son of a London graphic artist, who shared his father’s talent. Health-conscious and sporting a large, red handlebar mustache in the RAF style, Walenn neither smoked nor drank, believing both vices would inhibit his physical prowess should he make it out beyond the wire. His department relied very much on the camp’s established blackmailers and scroungers to acquire the necessary German documents for replication. For bars of chocolate, cigarettes, a tin of real coffee, and assorted other goods that arrived for the benefit of prisoners via Red Cross packages, certain guards could be swayed to lend a hand. Once that line had been crossed, there was no going back. Walenn and his team of fifty artists would eventually produce four hundred documents, including forged travel passes, permits for foreign workers, identity cards, passports, and more. German gothic font and various emblems found on the source materials were painstakingly recreated by hand, as was any typewritten script. Official stamps were replicated by carving patterns out of boot heels; black boot polish was used for ink.
Australian Flying Officer Al Hake oversaw the production of two hundred compasses. The pointers were made from magnetized sewing needles, the compass bodies from shards of gramophone records softened by heat and molded into shape. Pieces of broken glass were cut into circles for the compass covers and soldered into place using a makeshift blowtorch devised from a fat lamp and empty food tins. “Made in Stalag Luft III” read the inscription on the underside of each compass. Elsewhere in the camp, a tailoring department busied itself turning blankets and RAF uniforms into civilian suits, workmen’s clothes, and German military apparel. A cartographic team was set up under Flight Lieutenant Des Plunkett to produce maps of Germany showing not only the locations of towns, villages, rivers, and other landmarks, but details of topographic features that might aid or hinder an escapee’s progress. Information for the maps was passed on to Plunkett and his men from turned guards and fellow prisoners familiar with Germany before the war. Knowledge, no matter how scant, of the cultures, customs, and languages of other European countries was also deemed beneficial to X-Organization’s endeavor.
All the while, the digging continued, using makeshift tools and other materials scrounged from the camp or blackmailed from guards. Upon arrival in the camp, a prisoner was issued a “bed-stead and mattress, knife, spoon, fork, mess-tines, cup, 2 blankets, 3 sheets and 1 towel.” Construction of the tunnels alone required the requisitioning of nearly 1,219 knives, 582 forks, 408 spoons, 246 water cans, 1,699 blankets, 192 bedcovers, 161 pillowcases, 1,212 pillows, 655 straw mattresses, 34 chairs, the frames of 90 bunk beds, 3,424 towels, 10 single tables, 52 twenty-man tables, more than 1,200 bed bolsters, nearly 1,400 beaded battens, 76 benches, 1,000 feet of electrical wiring, and 600 feet of rope. Four thousand bed boards were used to shore up the tunnels. Lights wired into the camp’s electrical supply provided illumination underground; air pumps made of discarded kit bags, empty powdered-milk tins, wood framing, wire mesh, and tar paper supplied fresh air to those doing the digging.
This mass scrounging by prisoners, when eventually discovered, would infuriate the enemy, as noted in a German report: “While bombed-out German civilians had to do their utmost and often failed to get at least something back of their belongings, the captured terror pilots treated their furniture and linen in a really devilish way and by doing so continued the war against the Reich successfully behind the barbed wire. No doubt, the P.O.W.s destroyed part of these articles on purpose to harm the Reich.”
Digging underground was dangerous, as well as physically and mentally trying. The tunnels were no more than twenty-four inches square, leaving little room for maneuver; the constant threat of cave-ins only heightened the sense of claustrophobic dread. The fear that guards might discover one of the tunnels also played on the men’s nerves. One detachment of guards constantly manned a listening station, keeping a check on any noises picked up by the subterranean microphones. Guards sat with headphones on and listened for anything that might suggest the digging of a tunnel. Starting in May 1943—some ten months before the escape—operators at headphone stations no. 53 and no. 54 started mentioning “heavy earth vibrations” in their monthly reports. They believed the noises were caused by laborers working in coal stores in the neighborhood of microphones.
By late summer 1943, Tom was 279 feet long—ten feet short of the woods, but long enough to deem it ready for use. Bushell ordered the entrance be sealed until a date for the escape was set. Eleven months of torturous work had brought the members of X-Organization to this moment, and it was now that disaster struck. Camp officials were beginning to suspect that laborers in the coal sheds were not responsible for the noises being picked up on the underground microphones. The sonic activity often continued throughout the night, when the coal stores were empty. On the morning of September 8, guards launched a series of inspec
tions throughout the camp, methodically searching the barracks for any signs of escape activity. In the early afternoon hours, they turned their attention to Hut 123. A ferret inspecting a dark corner of the hut’s main hallway near the kitchen tapped the ground with his metal probe. To his surprise, some of the sand-and-cement sealant used to hide the edges of the trapdoor chipped away, revealing Tom’s entrance. The Germans, although dismayed such a massive excavation could have happened on their watch, were nevertheless impressed by the ingenuity displayed in the tunnel’s construction. Newspaper photographers were summoned to the camp to snap pictures before a demolitions expert was brought in to pack the tunnel with explosives. The resulting detonation not only collapsed Tom but also blew apart Hut 123, much to the amusement of the prisoners who gathered to watch the spectacle.
It was decided after the New Year that work would move forward on Harry, while Dick would be used as a storage facility. Harry was almost one hundred feet in length; its vertical entrance shaft descended twenty-eight feet belowground. A railway with tracks made from the 1,400 beaded battens from the barracks above allowed diggers to move up and down the tunnel’s length on flatbed trolleys. At Harry’s midway point, the diggers constructed an interchange station for the two-trolley system and named it Piccadilly Circus. By the end of February, with the tunnel at nearly two hundred feet in length, a second station—this one dubbed Leicester Square—was built. Construction on Harry continued until March 14, when it was estimated the tunnel—at an impressive 336 feet—had reached the cover of the trees. The date for the escape was set for Friday, March 24, a moonless night.
In February, it was decided the first thirty spaces in the tunnel would be reserved for fluent German speakers—those most likely to escape successfully—and those traveling by train. The next forty spaces were held for those who made the greatest contributions to the digging and X-Organization’s administrative work. Exit order was determined by writing names on scraps of paper and drawing them in a lottery. Although 600 men took part in the escape’s preparations, plans called for only 200 men to break out. The remaining spaces in the tunnel were allocated by drawing from the 530 names still in the applicant pool. The ballot process complete, final preparations moved forward. Cover stories were rehearsed and aliases double-checked. Kit bags and disguises were inspected, and last-minute letters home were penned in the event of a grim conclusion. Forged documents and travel papers were stamped with the appropriate date. Maps and compasses were distributed, and several days’ rations of a high-energy gelatin were handed out.
On the night of the escape, the first men were scheduled to clamber out of the tunnel at nine-thirty, but weather worked against them. Near freezing temperatures and a heavy snowfall had hardened the ground, making it near impossible to open the exit shaft. It took more than an hour to penetrate the final few inches of earth and clear a hole, revealing stars in a cloudless winter sky and a near-catastrophic problem. A miscalculation had resulted in Harry falling a good twenty feet short of the forest. A goon tower stood forty-five feet from where the tunnel broke ground near the main road that ran past the camp. After some frantic discussion, the decision was made to push ahead as planned: documents were date-sensitive, and postponement increased the likelihood of ferrets eventually finding the tunnel. Escapees would have to risk crawling across snow-covered open ground to the trees. A plan was devised to tie a length of rope to the top rung of the exit ladder. A man would hide beyond the tree line with other end of rope. In the tunnel, an escapee would wait to feel two tugs on the rope. Such a signal would mean the coast was clear. Progress through Harry proved to be cumbersome, the result of three tunnel collapses and—near midnight—an air raid. The target for Bomber Command that night was Berlin, some hundred miles away, but strong winds had blown much of the bomber stream off course. The sirens howled and the power went out, rendering the tunnel pitch-black. It took more than thirty minutes to light the grease lamps, which had been strung the length of the tunnel for such an event. By now, fewer than twenty men had made their escape, the rate of those passing through the tunnel being one every twelve minutes.
The outside nighttime temperature had sunk to thirty below zero. Underground, progress through the tunnel continued at its sluggish pace. The discomforting fear that 200 men were not going to make it out became a grim reality at two-thirty, when escapees 101 to 200 were ordered back to their bunks. Only fifty men had thus far got away, and time was quickly running out. Once dawn began breaking, the escape effort would have to cease. The first men out of the tunnel had been Flight Lieutenant Harry Marshall and his escape partner, Czech Flying Officer Ernst “Wally” Valenta; Roger Bushell and his partner, Bernard Scheidhauer, a member of the Free French forces, had followed close behind. Of these four, all but Marshall would be shot. By four in the morning, fewer than one hundred men had worked their way through the tunnel. With the first gray hints of daybreak showing in the east, it was decided the eighty-seventh man in the tunnel would be the last go. Aboveground, the sentry who patrolled the perimeter track around the camp deviated from his rounds and approached the edge of the woods to relieve himself. Nearing the trees, the guard noticed a wispy column of steam rising from the ground. He approached the anomaly with his rifle at the ready just as the eightieth escapee was about to emerge from the tunnel. Three escapees, waiting just beyond the trees, watched the scene unfold with growing dread and broke cover with their arms raised high. Startled, the guard fired a single shot into the air.
At 4:55 A.M. on Saturday, March 25, it all came to an end.
In Hut 104, pandemonium ensued. Men frantically stripped off their civilian clothes and tried to burn their forged papers and German currency. Some dashed from the hut for the safety of their own rooms but stopped when guards in the tower opened fire. Armed guards poured from the security hut near the main gate. They swarmed the compound and surrounded Harry’s exit beyond the wire. Men still in the tunnel scrambled back the way they had come, fearful angry guards might claw their way down the shaft at any moment. In all the chaos, it took more than an hour for the Germans to discover the hut from which the tunnel originated. Not until a guard, armed with a torch and a pistol, lowered himself down Harry’s exit shaft and followed the cramped passage back to Hut 104 was the point of origin determined. By six o’clock, a large contingent of guards, armed with machine guns, had surrounded the hut. The men inside were flushed out into a light snowfall and ordered to strip to their underwear.
It took nearly three hours to round up the rest of the camp and take roll call. When done, the numbers tallied were startling. Seventy-six men had escaped.
PROLOGUE
SUNDAY, MARCH 26
Hitler received the news with grave displeasure two days later at his mountain retreat, the Berghof at Obersalzberg. In the great anteroom off the villa’s main hall, with its stunning views of the snowcapped Bavarian Alps, he read the report at his desk, his rage all-consuming. Hitler pushed the document away and summoned to his inner sanctum SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Air Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, and the head of armed forces, Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel. The three men entered the room to a ranting, gesticulating Führer and immediately began assigning blame for the debacle. Responsibility for prisoners of war lay with a division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Army High Command), a point the proud and always pompous Göring was quick to make clear. Keitel bristled at the insinuation and thrust a finger in Göring’s direction, reminding those present that Stalag Luft III fell under the Luftwaffe’s jurisdiction. Göring, at the war’s outset, had requested all prison camps detaining airmen be placed under his control. A fighter ace in the previous world conflict, he felt a certain kinship with those who fought in the skies. Himmler watched, seething, as Göring and Keitel verbally assailed each other, before he, too, lashed out. The manpower required to track down seventy-six escapees, he said, would prove immense. The Breslau Kriminalpolizei (Kripo, or Criminal Police)—responsible for the area in which the camp was l
ocated—had issued within hours of the escape a Grossfahndung, a national hue and cry ordering the military, the Gestapo, the SS, the Home Guard, and Hitler Youth to put every possible effort into hunting the escapees down. Nearly one hundred thousand men needed to defend the Reich were now being siphoned off elsewhere.
“It is incredible that this sort of thing should have occurred,” Himmler said. “It should not have happened.”
Mass escapes at prison camps across Germany had plagued the Reich in recent months. Forty-seven Polish officers had tunneled their way out of Oflag VI-B, a compound in Dössel, on the night of September 20, 1943. Twenty men were recaptured within four days, dispatched to Buchenwald concentration camp, and exterminated. Another seventeen were apprehended shortly thereafter and shot by the Gestapo. The remaining ten managed to get away. The night before the Polish breakout, 131 French soldiers escaped from Oflag XVII-A in Döllersheim; only two avoided recapture. Drastic measures had already been taken to prevent a repeat of such occurrences. In February, the German High Command had issued Stufe Römisch III, an order dictating that recaptured prisoners of war, “irrespective of whether it is an escape during transit, a mass escape or a single escape, [are] to be handed over after recapture to the Head of Security Police and Security Service” and not the military. “The persons recaptured,” the order stated, “are to be reported to the Information Bureau of the Armed Forces as ‘Escaped and not recaptured.’ ” Inquiries from the International Red Cross and other aid organizations were to receive the same response. Recaptured British and American officers were to be detained by the police and handled on a case-by-case basis.