Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Thus it was time to present their plan to the escape committee, from which of course Joe would be recused. It met in the shed where Red Cross parcels were distributed, known as the PX. The cover for the committee to be there was that it was Coleman's auditing group to make sure krieges got what was coming to them. The escape committee played that role well because honest distribution was of prime importance to everyone. They spent much more time counting parcels than they did hearing escape plans.

  On the day of a proposal, security was posted around the PX to warn of any guards who might come through the area. A rough wood table was cleared of Red Cross parcels, then the presenter laid out his plan. The committee hunched over on their elbows to hear what the low voice had to say. Now Joe was the presenter, but the other four members of the committee didn't treat him any differently.

  “My plan was simple. We would offer one of the night guards twenty packs if he let us cut the wire while he was walking his post. Then we'd go through when his shift changed so he wouldn't be blamed. A train went by III-C every night. We'd hop on it like hoboes. No, we weren't sure where it was going, but since this is Poland, all railroads probably led to Warsaw. Warsaw was hundreds of miles east. East was where the Red Army was coming from. We'd noticed how fewer Russkies were being brought into III-C. That was a good sign they were winning.

  “We'd leave the train when we figured it was close to the Eastern Front, then hole up and wait for the Russians to overrun our location. Along the way we'd have plenty of cigarettes to buy cooperation from anyone who could help us.”

  As he finished his pitch the power generator failed and they were sitting in the dark. Someone laughed and said that wasn't a good sign, but Joe said yes, it was, because the plan was to break out on a no-moon night in early November.

  Out of the darkness came very sober questions: had Joe identified a guard to be bought? No, but there were a couple he'd chatted with and they had been corrupted before. One had even offered, for a high price, to slip Americans over to the next compound to have sex with their choice of Russian female POWs. Someone on the committee knew a better candidate. Joe was glad to leave bribery to him.

  Faint light came back on, and the committee decided that the deal, if Coleman approved Joe's plan, should be ten packs' down payment, ten more after the three escapees were gone. How many days' worth of food was needed? All the supply committee could afford, Joe answered. The committee said don't expect more than a few potatoes, apples, and Red Cross biscuits. That should be enough because the three had saved up a bagful of Spam, cheese, and chocolate.

  What about reprisals, Joe was asked. Reprisals? The commandant had never stated a reprisal policy because no one had ever escaped from III-C. Reprisals were a big kraut bluff, Joe argued, because a commandant, to hide it from his superiors, wouldn't want to announce an escape, much less advertise it through reprisals (which, it should be added, were condemned by the Geneva Conventions, which commandants were reviewing with increasing interest as the war turned hard against Germany).

  Did Joe have any alternatives if he couldn't link up with the Russkies? No, he didn't, except that by turning north they'd eventually reach the Baltic Sea, where there might be a chance of getting over to Sweden, cigarettes for a sailboat. Did they need weapons? Joe wasn't prepared for that question. Sure, it would be great to be armed, ideally with Schmeis-sers, but firearms cost the highest bribe of all. There probably weren't enough cigarettes in all of III-C to buy a pistol. Joe said the three had shivs and were satisfied with that. It was nice though to hear the committee even mention the possibility of getting a firearm. They were sold on the plan, the first ever to win a single vote. “Okay, Joe,” the chairman said, “we'll ask Coleman to approve.”

  The plan went into motion. Within a week a guard on the right shift had been bought, one so cooperative he offered advice that on moonless nights the commandant required extra security; however, with the recent cloudy weather every night was dark so the one picked was as good as any. Joe told the go-between to slip this guard another pack and ask him about the dogs and if he knew the night train's destination.

  The answers came back that it would help if dogs were barking all night. That had already been taken into account. Sometimes they barked a lot, other times not much at all, but it seemed that the darker the night the more they barked. And it didn't matter much: krieges and dogs had become so familiar that they ignored each other. Nevertheless Joe took the guard's advice and asked that barking be aroused (perhaps by a small scuffle) around the huts on the far side of the compound from where the three would be going out. Coleman vetoed such a distraction because it meant bringing more krieges into the plan. Joe didn't argue—he expected to be through the wire before the dogs picked up a scent.

  The erratic floodlights were more of a concern. The train went by between nine and eleven. The maximum electric load on the generators was at around six o'clock, so that's when they hoped to slip out, while the lights were dim. The bought guard would be on duty as the escapees were cutting wire, so the more light then the better. He wasn't much help about the destination of the train—it came up from Breslau, he knew, because there was a girl there whom he'd visited on a two-day pass. The camp also got some supplies from Breslau. Where the northbound train went from III-C he didn't know, but he assumed it was east because everything on wheels was being used to bring up war materiel to try to stop the Russians. He did mention that when the train came south it often contained transportees to a place called Auschwitz.

  “We weren't going south, we'd never heard of Auschwitz, and the last possibility on our minds was leaving a kriege camp and ending up in a concentration camp,” Joe says.

  “But that happened to some POWs who had H [for Hebrew] on their American dog tags. Before D Night, Jewish troopers in the 101st were advised to change the HtoPor C, and I think most of them did. Rosenfield in my battalion didn't. He said he'd lived a Jew and he would die one. He paid. The Nazis didn't treat his wounds when he was captured in Normandy. They sent him to Buchenwald, but luckily his convoy was ambushed by the FFI and he got away.”

  The last part of the plan was how to abort or postpone. A candle would be lit in a hut doorway if the bought guard had his shift changed. That meant not to go out and cut the wire. If something went wrong after it was cut, there was no turning back: they'd be escaping during the next guard's shift, and he definitely wasn't in on the deal. Word that came back through the escape committee was the bought guard and his relief were rivals for a local girl—indeed that the bought guard may have planned it so that the other guard would catch hell when the escape occurred on his watch.

  “There were potential squealers and double-crossers on both sides. We were playing the odds like a crap game, the best odds we had. Quinn, Brewer, and I didn't talk about it much. For one thing, we couldn't let the other guys in our hut know we were up to something. They'd only know when we slipped out right after curfew. It's not that we didn't trust our hut mates, it was that we didn't want to have to trust them.”

  The wire cutters were two long shivs bolted together, strapped to Quinn's thigh. One by one the three went to the door, watched, listened, and slipped out without looking at their hut mates. If anyone had asked why, the answer was the squirts. Indeed they sat in a latrine, pants down, in case a guard came upon them. It was the latrine where they'd stashed a board from the ceiling of an unused hut, a board to help them through the wire if necessary. Before total darkness, the three separated. If one was caught, the other two could head back to their hut. Back and forth individually they slunk from the shadow of one hut to another, giving one another an all-clear signal after each move. It reminded Joe of some night maneuver at Toccoa.

  “I felt Colonel Sink was nodding,” Joe recalled. “My parents and Sister Angelique were also watching and supporting in the background. The plan was working. We couldn't hear any barking except over at the Russian compound, where the most vicious dogs always patrolled. I had this feeling that S
chultz had called them off from our compound, that maybe he was in on our escape plan or had wind of it.”

  When they reached the shadow of the last hut it was time to really put it to the touch (“sort of like a cherry jump”). Joe crawled under a trip wire and quickly out to the fence and began working on it with the cutter. There were four strands closest to the ground, three above them, two more above that, then a weave of barbed wire they could never cut. If they had to get through that tangle of wire, it would be with the ceiling board.

  Joe was determined to sever the lowest four strands before letting Brewer take over. The wire was rusty but tough. The wire cutter was clean but not so tough. Pushing his hands together over and over put severe strain on his wounded shoulder.

  “It must have taken me five minutes to cut that first strand minutes as long as hours. I don't have flashbacks anymore, but when I did they were about that first strand. I could even feel pressure in the palms of my hands.”

  No one had a watch, so it seemed they couldn't do enough cutting before the guard shift changed. Joe's right shoulder began to tremble so much he could cut no more. He signaled back to Brewer, who crawled up and took over. His look said that Joe had stayed at it too long. Brewer had the third strand cut before Joe got back into the shadows. Brewer whistled for Quinn, who thrashed up and went after the next layer of wire. Joe was still panting when they gave him the okay sign: everything that needed to be cut had been cut. Unhurriedly his buddies molded candle wax to connect the cuts.

  “That took forever. The wire kept popping out of the wax. They gave up, glanced over at me, and shrugged. Only about half of the wire had been reconnected with wax. When they crawled back they looked with me, and I said I couldn't see much difference from the rest of the wire except a little droop in the bottom strand. They appreciated that because I wouldn't tell them anything except the truth just to make them feel better. We'd agreed not to fake anything about what we saw or felt.”

  In the shadows, teeth clenched, they waited for the bought guard to stroll by across the fence. Yes, it was him; they could tell by his limp while he was still far away. The guard knew what to do—nothing—and did it well. When he came back he gave the signal, by pissing, that his shift was over in five minutes. Beyrle, Brewer, and Quinn were more than ready, but the bought guard had insisted that they not escape on his shift. He would linger as long as possible with the new guard giving the escapees between two and three minutes to crawl through the cut, reseal it, and get into the woods alongside the rail track. The moment the bought guard buttoned his fly and turned his back, Joe crawled like a starved python, but he was third to the wire.

  “We went through, through the fence, and resealed the wire with time to spare. It was the planning, the preparation, the ‘execution’ as they say in football, that got us out of Sta-lag III-C. So we were out, free to some degree. That was a thrill! It was like leaving home for the first time as a teenager. III-C was something to get away from, someplace to leave to be on your own. Old British krieges had told me to throttle back, wait it out, take what comes and live with it. Good advice, but not for us.”

  Outside the fence was a patch of scrub pine, the beginnings of the forest Joe would walk through in 1992. In 1944 he had about four hours to wait for a train, time for the three to grow closer in a suddenly transformed environment where hope and fear were in nearly equal balance. In a few hours they had gone from hut mates to soul mates. However, Joe recalled, “I should be able to say much more about them than I can, but I can't, I just can't, and don't know why. We were all Airborne and had been together for months, but I don't even remember their first names, their units, or where they were from. I'm not even certain if ‘Quinn’ is right. Something erased all that. There's an empty pit there in my mind.”

  They were like mountaineers brought together for the first time to conquer an unclimbed summit. In the compound they had not been a threesome. Brewer and Quinn were buddies, more so than Joe was a buddy with anyone. He respected them; they respected him. Their lives now depended on one another. That was enough of a level to work at—more could have been distracting.

  This detachment, the interpersonal distance, contrasts with Joe today, who is an easily approachable and congenial fellow, the ideal seat mate on an airliner. Want to talk? He's a ready listener. Want him to talk? Joe is a broad-gauge conversationalist. Rather read? That's fine too. Joe reads slowly. He will not let himself misinterpret a term or miss a nuance. His World War II library fills most of the Beyrle basement and claimed a lot of his time while he painstakingly mined the background ore and lore of his experiences for this book.

  But when it comes to what must have been a most intimate connection with Brewer and Quinn, they who went through the worst part of his life with him, the memory tape has been erased. Or so spotted that their pictures degenerated like Dorian Gray's.

  AFTER SWEATING THROUGH the wire, the three were damp and cold in the woods, waiting for the train. In a soldierly way they reviewed what to do when it came along or didn't. Though the escape committee had arranged stand-ins for morning roll call, they knew that if the train wasn't running that night they'd have to start up the tracks on foot and hope to catch another one somewhere. If that happened, their odds of getting away approached zero, but to improve them they planned to split up if search dogs were heard. Maybe with different scents in different directions one could get away. Brewer spoke some German. Quinn said the two of them would stick together. That was okay by Joe. On potato details he'd picked up a little Polish, and ever since the escape plan was approved he'd spent time over by the Russian fence to learn some of their language.

  The wait in the woods was like D Night in England: they had prepared in every way, and what happened next was up to God and fate. They exchanged addresses of parents, repeated them in the frosty darkness till each became a potential locator of the other's next of kin. Such thoughts Joe pushed away, saying let's get our dobbers up—we're about halfway home, we did the hardest part, breaking out of the stalag. A million Russkies were coming, and the krauts didn't have enough troops to look for three little Amis.

  They imagined the sound long before they heard it. The locomotive didn't toot as it sometimes did; instead it huffed and puffed. That night the boiler was on overdrive to climb the slight grade where they were waiting. From the steam jets and slow progress, they guessed this train must be very long and loaded, easy to board. It went by at the speed of a fast walk, so they had their pick among the cars. First came the coalers, then flatbeds carying Mark IV tanks. Almost at random, the escapees swung onto an unsealed boxcar. As they heaved open the sliding door, it seemed like a rolling j ackpot.

  It was half full of grain, no doubt for horses, the prime movers for Germans on the Eastern Front. So this train must be headed east, confirming a key assumption in the escape plan, and the grain was a bonus, something to munch while saving emergency rations. They had to munch slowly, removing husks like tiny pistachio shells. The grain was hard and tasteless, but if it kept horses going, it could do the same for fugitives.

  In addition to emergency rations, the supply committee had provided a primitive compass but without luminous points, so Quinn had to push the boxcar door open in order to read it. After trundling along in a northeasterly direction, the train heaved to a halt at a junction. After some jolting detachments, switching and reattaching, it moved off again—southwest, Quinn murmured. Around midnight the tracks made a new sound, the same sound Joe had heard going over the Oder for the first time. Now he was recrossing it, slowly drawn back into Germany.

  The train went along the southern edge of Berlin. Joe found the rail yard fifty years later, still big, bleak, and in the worst section of town. In 1944 it was heavily cratered, a junkyard of twisted track and derelict boxcars. Joe's train arrived before dawn, then their car detached and shunted to a siding.

  “What if we'd hopped another car, one right by the tanks that were sure to be going to the Eastern Front?” Joe reflects.
“We took the grain car out of instinct, I guess. It must have been wishful thinking. I've learned that when instinct is right, it usually comes as a surprise. The boxcar instinct was no surprise, it was ‘Hey, let's grab this one—looks like the best one coming along.’”

  Stupefied to silence, the three contemplated how their situation couldn't be worse: they were smack in the center of Hitler's Reich, its capital, at maximum distance from friendly forces, with huge German armies to get through in either direction. Joe had prayed so hard, kept his faith, but been rewarded with disaster. There was no answer but destiny to why they ended up in that boxcar, only the certainty that they couldn't stay in it till Berlin fell to the Allies.

  Back in England they'd heard something about a German resistance movement, and as krieges they'd learned there had been an assassination attempt against Hitler in the summer. Their only hope now was to try to find Germans in the resistance. Yeah, said Quinn. How do we do that? Just walk down Main Street in Ami uniforms and yell, “Hey, anyone want to help us? We're going to win the war, you know!”

  In the boxcar there was plenty of time to debate. Quinn counseled patience. He felt the car was sure to be picked up sometime and taken somewhere, and anywhere was better than here. Horse feed probably wasn't the Germans' highest priority, but eventually it was sure to be moved to where there were horses, and that meant out of Berlin.