But the system of watchers could still be improved. Sergeant Bain rigged up an electric bell system using buzzers and bits of wiring that the prisoners salvaged or pinched from all over the castle. Buttons were secretly installed in Vaughan’s bedroom and De Wiart’s bathroom that were connected to a buzzer in the chapel porch.49 A simple series of signals was worked out that enabled the watchers to alert the digging team to approaching trouble.
One buzz meant ‘stop temporarily’. Two buzzes meant ‘carry on again’. Three buzzes signalled ‘alarm – come to surface and prepare to evacuate’, while four buzzes was the most serious, warning, ‘really serious – be prepared for anything’.50
*
On 1 October 1942 Dick O’Connor returned from Campo 5. He had been held longer than his sentence, probably due to some administrative mix-up. His bout of solitary hadn’t dampened his escaping spirit at all; in fact, his recent failure had made him even more determined to get out. ‘I was delighted to see my friends again,’ wrote O’Connor, ‘and was also pleased to find that they were already well on with another escape project.’51
*
Air Vice-Marshal Boyd told Neame that he no longer wanted command of the digging operation following some bickering with the other men, and he reverted to an ordinary worker for the duration. Dick O’Connor joined, replacing Brigadier Todhunter, who dropped out, and Neame asked the charismatic O’Connor to take command of the working parties. General De Wiart would continue to organise and command the lookouts. As usual, General Dick was raring to go.
*
In early October Brigadier Todhunter celebrated his birthday and, as was now customary, a party was thrown in his honour. It was a pleasant diversion from the serious business of tunnelling. ‘The kitchen staff managed to make an iced cake with chocolate with the Arms of Essex on it,’ wrote home Todhunter proudly. ‘For dinner we had hors d’oeuvres in which the pièce de résistance was tinned pâté de fois gras: “Viener Schnitzel” made of rabbit with fried onions and potatoes and a savoury of tinned bangers on toast.’52 But Todhunter had pause for reflection over what occurred next. ‘I took my cake down for the batmen to finish and it made me feel a bit old,’ he wrote. The batmen evidently had the measure of Todhunter as a hunting, fishing, country gentleman of the old school and were discussing appropriate decorations for him: as he approached the messroom he heard a booming voice say, ‘The poor old bloke might have had a gun on his cake!’53 It was Todhunter’s 42nd birthday; he was one of the youngest of the senior officer prisoners in the castle.
*
One morning in late October 1942 Owen Boyd had just come off a digging shift in the tunnel. Progress was exceptionally slow. Between opening the shaft in the chapel porch on 18 September and O’Connor’s arrival back at the castle, the vertical shaft had progressed just three feet. The need to work as silently as possible, and the two short excavation periods each day slowed the work. The dimensions of the hole also meant that only one man could work, while his partner stood by to relieve him.54 The soil was hard-packed clay with horizontal strata of rock. Working through the rock bands was very difficult with the basic tools that were available and the other limitations. Boyd was exhausted. It was 8.00am, and he clambered back through the hole in the chapel wall on to the lift, before emerging from the shaft in the pantry beside the orderlies’ kitchen. Like everyone else, he wore an old pair of woollen pyjamas when digging, and these were filthy and encrusted with dirt and clay.55 One day, when General Neame had been so dressed, and clambering awkwardly through the chapel wall hole from the lift, one of the other diggers had facetiously remarked, ‘the ghost goes west’.56 It was a more appropriate remark than many realised at the time, for they were like wraiths, surreptitiously flitting about the great castle at all hours and disappearing through apparently solid walls.
Boyd wore long socks pulled up over his pyjama bottoms to keep the worst of the dirt from accumulating on his shins. The socks had been stripped off and stuffed into his greatcoat pockets, and a pair of unlaced shoes hastily slipped on. Boyd didn’t feel worried about moving around at this time – Carton de Wiart’s screen of watchers had given no alarm on the tunnel’s warning buzzer.
Boyd started back up the stairs towards his room. As he turned a corner he ran straight into Captain Pederneschi. Boyd took a step back in silent horror, his heart hammering in his chest. No Italian officer should have entered the keep without a warning sounding from one of the two watchers on the first floor. What the hell the castle’s chief watchdog was doing prowling around at this time of the day immediately put Boyd in mind of a search or the discovery of their escape plot. Pederneschi stared at Boyd, his eyes looking him up and down, evidently intrigued by Boyd’s unusual sartorial arrangement.
‘Air Marshal Boyd,’ said Pederneschi, ‘where are you going?’
Boyd, involuntarily thrusting his dirty hands into his pockets, thought quickly.
‘A book, Captain,’ he said. ‘I was looking for a book.’57
‘I see,’ replied Pederneschi flatly. His eyes glanced down at Boyd’s pockets. ‘And where is your book?’
‘Couldn’t find the blessed thing,’ spluttered Boyd. ‘Must’ve left it in my room after all.’ Pederneschi didn’t look convinced, and he kept looking Boyd up and down with his sharp brown eyes.
‘I’m getting old I guess,’ said Boyd, adding a nervous laugh. ‘Forgetful.’
Pederneschi relaxed and smiled.
‘Ah yes, getting old is a terrible thing, no?’
‘Indeed,’ muttered Boyd. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, Captain, I must get dressed for breakfast.’ Boyd pushed past Pederneschi and rapidly climbed up the stairs, the slightly grubby legs of a pair of white long johns sticking out from under his coat as he climbed.
Pederneschi watched him go. The security officer stood for a few seconds, staring up the now empty staircase, as if deep in thought, his dark eyes slightly narrowed and blank. Then he turned, shrugging his shoulders, before he resumed climbing down to the ground floor.
CHAPTER 12
___________________
Under the Dome
‘Neame with his sapper’s knowledge gave us the lay-out for our labours, and with such a degree of accuracy that at the end we were hardly a centimetre out.’
Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart
The Virgin Mary, her face calm and composed in the dim light of the chapel, her hands pressed together in silent prayer, swayed slightly, the rope around her waist coming taut. Then, out from the hole in front of the large heavy marble statue, holding on to the rope, crawled a man so filthy that his clothes were indistinguishable from his head and hands. Brigadier James Hargest lay for a moment on the cold floor of the chapel, waiting for his breath to return. He was exhausted.
‘Okay, Reg,’ said Hargest breathlessly to his digging partner Brigadier Miles, who waited by the small hole in the floor of the chapel porch, ‘away you go.’
Several buckets were neatly stacked beside the hole ready to be lowered down and then hauled back to the surface full of spoil from the tunnel. The soil and rocks were progressively filling the floor space inside the chapel, a great mountain of dirt held back by bits of furniture and coconut matting. The whole room smelled musty with spoil. Looming over the tunnel entrance in silent repose was the great heavy statue of Our Lady, pressed into service as an ersatz bollard, the attached rope enabling the diggers to climb their way out. Hargest propped his back against the cold of the statue’s marble and listened. He soon heard Miles scratching and digging away at the rocks and hard clay ten feet below where he sat resting. Within minutes came the familiar command ‘bucket!’, muffled and distant inside the tunnel. Hargest wearily hitched a canvas pail to a second rope and lowered it down through the floor.
*
The first big challenge for the excavators had begun when they had managed to sink the vertical tunnel access shaft six feet below the floor of the chapel porch. They struck hard, unyielding granite.
General Neame, the tunnel’s designer, shared Combe’s pessimism. Normally, such a blockage could only be cleared with explosives.1 It was decided to excavate further, to determine the dimensions of the granite plug.
After several more days digging the rock revealed itself to be dome-shaped and very large. It didn’t bode well for the tunnel. It was soon christened ‘The Dome of St Paul’, for it looked as immovable and as huge as a cathedral.
‘We’ll have to try to undermine it somehow,’ said Neame, his grimy face creased in concentration. After some discussion, a method was worked out. They decided to excavate horizontally to see just how large the thing was. If it extended for several feet in all directions, then it was game over for the tunnel.
The diggers went at the dome with the homemade iron bars, eventually finding the edges of the object. Using the bars was difficult because every thump and bang of iron on rock reverberated up through the keep. The watchers on duty on the first floor exchanged concerned looks – how could the sentries not hear the row coming from underground? Nervous fingers hovered over buzzers, ready to immediately call a halt to the operation if a sentry so much as looked in the direction of the chapel.
After several days of furious activity, the Dome of St Paul was revealed as a large granite plug surrounded by what Hargest termed ‘rotten rock’. This flaky rock was hacked and dug away until two stout ropes could be passed around the solid central plug. It took four sweating, straining and cursing men to haul the granite boulder out of the shaft and into the chapel.
*
Air Vice-Marshal Boyd’s early morning encounter with Captain Pederneschi, along with some other near-misses, had led Dick O’Connor to conclude ‘there is no doubt that Generals as a class do not make good sentries!’.2 Nevertheless, General De Wiart continued to perfect his screen of watchers. Each morning Trooper Collins, O’Connor’s batman, would make a quick sweep of the castle to check that no Italians were in the POW areas. The emergency buzzers would also be tested before the first shift of the day came on. Collins would report on the status of the castle to De Wiart, who would buzz the diggers to commence excavating.
The Italian garrison worked to set timetables, so by careful observation De Wiart’s team knew what was normal behaviour from their captors and what was not. At 7.30am the watchers would see a small gate open in the white wall, and an Italian NCO would step through to extinguish the light above the cloister steps. He would then open the door to the courtyard. Fifteen minutes later came a changing of the guard in the Italian courtyard beyond the white wall. Special attention was paid to this, as sometimes the officer of the day would wander into the prisoners’ area afterwards. At 9.00am an Italian private would walk over to the prisoners’ kitchen with the day’s fresh milk. Because he was close to the chapel, a watcher always gave a one-buzz warning to the diggers in the tunnel. They would immediately cease work, and inevitably one would turn to the other and mutter ‘milkman’ with a grin. On some days laundry would be taken out or returned.
At weekends there were some changes. On Saturdays at 8.30am the ‘shopping sergeant’ brought the weekly flowers to Brigadier Stirling. These were to be used at the religious service that General Neame presided over in the dining room on Sunday morning. At 7.45am on Sundays the three or four Roman Catholics among the prisoners would be escorted to a local church for a service.3
The prisoners observed their 200 guards very closely, and came to know many of their habits and eccentricities. The guards never knew that several pairs of eyes were watching their every move throughout the day when they were on duty. Each sentry was different. Some were very alert and suspicious; others were lazy, spending their time chatting to other sentries, reading letters or even dozing in the sun.4 Captain Pederneschi remained a wild card, often appearing in the keep suddenly and without warning; he would prowl around like a cat, looking for signs of illicit behaviour. Searches were made every night, with Pederneschi instructing guards to pick over the prisoners’ garden or rubbish piles. They found nothing. There were no more concealed maps, coils of homemade rope or civilian clothes stashed under tiles or beneath flowerpots. Perhaps the Italians thought that they had finally defeated the British since O’Connor’s failed wall escalade. The strengthened defences on the perimeter wall and more rigorous guarding routine appeared to be working. But the Italians, though they never realised it, were being purposely lulled into a false sense of security while below their boots the prisoners sweated and dug.
*
Neame had determined that the entrance shaft to the tunnel must reach ten feet deep, and he had set a provisional date of 31 October 1942 to achieve this. But once the Dome of St Paul had been removed, the going downwards improved, and the required depth was reached a few days ahead of schedule. Now the direction changed, with the actual tunnel begun at right angles to the keep wall. The soil was even tougher than in the vertical shaft, and was ribboned with frequent horizontal strata of hard rock.5 Fortunately, the rock layers were cracked, meaning that with patient hard work the rocks could be prised loose and removed. Splitting up these rocky layers took weeks of exhausting labour. Neame, an experienced mining engineer from the Western Front in the First World War, said that normally such a task would have required ‘a miner’s pick-axe, a miner’s drill and hammer’;6 the prisoners had to make do with a kitchen knife, a couple of iron bars and some woefully unsuitable carpentry tools.
Some of the rocks were large enough to require two men to roll them back down the tunnel to the shaft for extraction. John Combe became a noted expert in patiently extracting rocks, with Boyd and Miles also very good at this tedious and backbreaking task.7
Noise remained a constant concern. De Wiart laid on some ‘noises off’ – these diversions included loud discussions between officers, the splitting of logs for firewood, and boisterous games of deck-tennis or football, all designed to distract the sentries on the outer wall and cover up any noises from the chapel.8 Almost all of the prisoners, regardless of rank, were involved in diversions as the digging continued for month after month. Whenever a sentry strayed close to the tunnel, De Wiart would buzz the diggers to stay quiet. It was a nerve-wracking business, and even the usually bluff ‘Long John Silver’ started to feel the strain.
Buzzing usually started because De Wiart or one of the other watchers had noticed a particular sentry on the wall stop and give the impression of listening to something close by. Sure that the sentry had heard the excavation, De Wiart would curse and press the buzzer, his heart racing, his eye never leaving the Italian. Then, the sentry would lose interest and wander back to his sentry box and De Wiart’s panic would subside.9 This cat-and-mouse game would drag on for almost seven months.
*
Five inches a day was considered good progress through the hard clay and rock. Sometimes it took a week to proceed that tiny distance. That it was done entirely by hand, by middle-aged amateurs using homemade tools, made it an achievement almost beyond imagining.
The tunnel slowly passed beneath the keep’s great foundations, which were discovered to be much shallower than Neame or any of the others had imagined for such a massive building. The tunnel was initially four feet two inches high, but as the digging progressed and the miners developed their skills, it was found that they could safely reduce the height to only three feet four inches. The two downsides to a smaller tunnel were reduced airflow and increased heat.10
As per Neame’s design, the tunnel was dug downhill at an incline of one in eight, meaning that the tunnel dropped four feet by the time it reached the castle’s outer curtain wall. But two thick layers of solid rock were encountered in November, requiring intense and exhausting excavations, slowing progress to mere inches on some days. Fortunately, all of the rocks were fissured and cracked, but the diggers had to patiently widen the crac
ks with their basic tools or undermine the rocks by excavating above and below them. Water was sloshed over the rocks to try to reveal cracks, the men straining their eyes by the light of Sergeant Bain’s single-bulb jerry-rigged lamp run down the tunnel attached to stolen Italian wiring. Using water meant that the men had to work in a permanent mud bath, increasing their discomfort greatly, and threatening their health. This practice was soon abandoned.11
Every Sunday General Neame would carefully survey the tunnel using his homemade instruments, and any recommendations were noted.12
*
Outside it was mostly raining during November. ‘Winter is closing in on us here,’ wrote Brigadier Todhunter. The rain kept them ‘tied to the house which is a bore, but the longer the cold and snow hold off the better’.13 The plunging temperatures would make working on the tunnel increasingly uncomfortable and heavy rain still managed to penetrate the entrance shaft through leaks in the chapel.
While the digging continued, preparations were begun for the second Christmas at the castle. ‘We had a visit from the Swiss Embassy this morning, which makes a change,’ recorded Todhunter on 19 December. ‘They are very painstaking in looking after us. Both they and the Red Cross say that our parcels may be delayed but luckily we have got a very fair stock here so we shall be all right for a bit.’14
When the last team knocked off on the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1942 the prisoners had been labouring on the tunnel for almost four months. Under the most secret and trying conditions, this band of generals and brigadiers had done the impossible. They had sunk a shaft ten feet down from the chapel porch and excavated a tunnel twenty feet in length towards freedom.
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