In the second week of December we had our first snowfall and I awoke to a feathery pile of snow next to my bed, thanks to a broken window. The brick stove in the middle of our hut provided very little heat, particularly with the small ration of coal we were allowed each day. For warming up food, Wilf came up with an ingenious invention. Using Red Cross cans, he created a miniature blower with a tiny hand-cranked fan. It created a current of air that ran through a pipe made of cans to a tin bowl, in which we burned twigs or scraps of cardboard. When a can of water was placed over the bowl it could be brought to a boil quite quickly with air blowing on the fire. Soon most muckers’ groups had built their own blowers, though Spitfire delighted in kicking them over whenever he saw them.
The cold concrete floor soon gave me (and others) a bad case of chilblains, a nasty condition that caused your feet to swell up and turn red and itchy. Mackie managed to trade cigarettes with some Brits for a pair of wooden clogs for me. They helped with the chilblains and many of the men began carving their own clogs. We soon became used to the sound of wooden shoes clomping around our hut. Bill managed to find sheets of brown burlap to cover the leaky windows. A couple of the French-speaking FMRs decided to decorate these with murals representing each Canadian province — from leaping salmon for B.C. to a girl with a basket of potatoes for P.E.I.
For Christmas that year, one hut had a large mural depicting the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa with the clock tower shining through a snowfall. A Mohawk soldier from the Essex Scottish drew it with soap on a blanket and it made us all long for home. British Red Cross parcels arrived just before Christmas too — something that raised our spirits considerably. The goons allowed us to keep the chains off from Christmas Eve till the end of Boxing Day and we were spared the Appell in the freezing cold on Christmas morning. With the silver paper from cigarette packages we made tinsel and hung it around the brick chimney of our stove. On Christmas Day we sang carols and tried to banish our homesickness. I remember heating water for cocoa for our muckers’ group using the handy blower. As we sipped the hot cocoa and ate some tinned plum pudding from the Red Cross parcel, we wished each other a Merry Christmas.
“And may this be the last Christmas we spend in Stalag VIIIB!” said Big Jim.
“Hear, hear!” we replied, the words echoing around our hut.
CHAPTER 14
TUNNELLING
February 14, 1943
Kriegsgefangenenpost
14/2/43
Dear Mum:
Many thanks for your letter and parcel, which just arrived. I see that you sent it on November 12, so it took a while to get here. So sorry to hear that you didn’t learn that I was still alive until the end of October! I can only imagine how anxious you must have been. Especially after Mrs. McAllister was told that Mackie had been killed at Dieppe. Luckily, he was only wounded and he now sleeps in the bunk above mine. His foot has pretty much healed up and he is walking around quite well.
POW camp is not fun but we are surviving it in good health. And the war can’t last forever. Many thanks for the scarf and gloves you knitted. And the books are a godsend! There’s a lineup of guys wanting to read the two Agatha Christie mysteries. And I’m savouring every page of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Please thank Mrs. Newman at the library for suggesting it.
I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to receive another package but could you please send some cigarettes? Don’t think I’ve taken up smoking! They’re what we use here for money and can be swapped for soap and other necessities.
And please don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine. Much love to Elspeth and Doreen.
Your loving son,
Alistair
Books! I couldn’t believe how much I’d missed them. I wasn’t a big mystery fan but I devoured Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile in about a day each. I passed them on to Mackie, who was soon renting them out for one cigarette per read. (He said this would prevent pages being torn out for latrine paper.) The parcel from home had arrived right in the middle of the coldest month of a miserable winter when I needed it most. Ernest Hemingway’s big fat novel about the Spanish Civil War kept me going right through to the end of March.
By then Mackie had become totally consumed by the digging of the escape tunnel. All tunnelling had stopped on October 8, the day our hands were tied. The concrete slab had been sealed and the seam disguised with a paste made of milk powder, cocoa and sand. When the ropes were replaced with shackles that we could unlock, tunnelling once again became possible. As the ground began to thaw in March, Beesley decided that work on the tunnel should resume. Mackie soon became one of the keenest tunnellers, volunteering to work late into the night. When the shaft reached three yards in depth, Bill decided they should dig straight out for 40 yards or so, aiming to come up in some bushes beyond the wire. But the soft, sandy soil meant that the tunnel could easily collapse. Soon, most of our bed boards were down in the tunnel, acting as supports for the ceiling and walls. To hold up our mattresses we made nets with the string from the Red Cross parcels and slung them under the sagging palliasses.
As the tunnel lengthened, there was more and more sandy earth to be disposed of without alerting suspicion. During a cold snap in early April, one of the guys decided to spread sand on the icy roadway between our compound and the air force camp next to us. When the goons asked him what he was doing he said he was helping to prevent their trucks from skidding on the ice. And they believed him! A few days later we even received a commendation from the camp commandant for helping to keep the paths and roads safe!
Tin lamps for the tunnel were made with cloth wicks soaked in melted margarine. But black fumes from them sent the diggers up choking and coughing. A French-Canadian named Robichaud created a bellows from a groundsheet that could pump fresh air down into the tunnel through a pipe made of Klim cans. When Mackie worked the night shift as a digger I would often lie on the floor pumping air down to him. He lay on his belly in the tunnel on a trolley made of wooden slats with tin-can wheels. It was often so hot down in the shaft that Mackie and the other diggers would usually work naked. This was easier since any dirt on clothes would have been a giveaway. I would often brush Mackie off when his shift was done and then sweep the ochre soil into a Red Cross box.
“Tunnel’s gotta be outside the fence by now,” he whispered to me late one night in May, while I was cleaning him up.
“Sure hope so,” I replied. “Don’t want to pop out right under a goon tower.”
Once Bill Lee and Sid Cleasby were fairly sure the tunnel was the right length, they then began to carefully dig upwards. Extra boards were found to build a trap door for the end of the tunnel. Mackie volunteered to help Bill install it — a very risky job since the goons patrolled the compound at night with Alsatian dogs. Bill and Mackie waited for the first moonless night. After midnight they went down into the tunnel in dark clothes with their faces blackened. Mackie went first, carrying a homemade ladder and shovel. Bill followed with the trap door, which was hinged in the middle for easier transport.
I stood near a window holding some matches. If I saw a guard approaching, I was to strike a match in the window as a warning to Mackie.
Mackie’s job was to dig out the last few yards of earth from the shaft, place the ladder, and then crawl outside. From there he was to help Bill install the trap door and then cover it with dirt and dead leaves. When all was ready, Bill would open it just enough to allow Mackie to slither back into the tunnel.
As I stood in the shadows by the window, I listened to the sounds of men snoring in their bunks. About fifteen minutes passed. Surely Bill and Mackie should be done by now, I thought.
Spotlights from the goon towers made regular sweeps over the compound. During one of these, I suddenly caught a glimpse of a guard with a dog. He was walking along the wire right towards the trap door! With shaking hands I found a match. I struck it but it wouldn’t light! I took another and struck again. This one sparked
into flame and I held it up in the window.
The dog barked and the guard yelled. I fled from the window and dived into my bunk. Then I heard footsteps outside. The barracks door crashed open and the guard shone his flashlight around our bunks. We all lay very still. Spotlights from the goon towers splashed light through the windows. I knew that the trap door was only about 18 yards away from a guard tower.
I lay there frozen, my heart racing. “Please don’t shoot Mackie … Please don’t shoot him … Don’t shoot, don’t shoot … No shooting, please, please,” I breathed silently in time to my beating heart. Eventually the sound of tramping boots outside died down and my breathing began to slow as well. I lifted my head and peered out the window. All was darkness.
I waited for what seemed a very long time. Then there was a tap, tap, tap sound from underneath the concrete slab. In seconds Sid was on top of it and yanking it up with his powerful arms. I soon spied Mackie’s white teeth gleaming through his blackened face. He and Bill quickly cleaned themselves up and crawled into their bunks before Spitfire or one of his goons could make another spot check. All too soon, however, Spitfire’s snarling tones through the loudspeakers summoned us to yet another morning Appell.
It wasn’t until Mackie and I took our afternoon walk around the compound that I found out exactly what had happened to him during the night. He said that it had not been easy to fit the trap door inside the hole in pitch darkness. He had been lying on his stomach, reaching down into the shaft, when he spied the lit match in the window. He immediately rolled backwards to get out of spotlight range. When the guard yelled and moved towards the barracks, Mackie dived back even farther into the trees. He said he lay there for a good twenty minutes or so, watching the spotlights sweep by. When they finally stopped, he looked up and caught sight of the barracks inside the barbed wire. He said that he then had to force himself to go back towards the trap door.
“I could smell freedom,” he told me with his eyes dancing. “It was a spring night in the woods. I wanted to just take off like a jackrabbit.”
“Sure, and they’d shoot you like a jackrabbit, too!” I responded.
“Naw-w-w,” he replied, “they’d have to catch me first! But I’ll tell you one thing, Allie. There’s no way they’re gonna keep me chained up in here for years. Just no way.”
Harry Beesley and the escape committee made it clear that they would decide who would be allowed to leave through the tunnel. Beesley said that mass escapes from other camps had ended in disaster. “So we are going to do it differently,” he told us, “and make sure that every man who leaves here stands a good chance of getting back to England. Only two men at a time will be allowed to escape. And we will cover for them at roll call for as long as we can. Those of most importance to the war effort will go first.”
A few days later, we had a new bunk-mate in 19B. He was an English soldier who had been sentenced to death for committing sabotage on a work party — some English POWs had done work at a nearby brick factory. The condemned man had been smuggled out of his cell and given a Canadian uniform and shackles. Soon he was joined by a newly captured British colonel who was being transferred to another camp, since officers weren’t kept at Stalag VIIIB, only sergeants, corporals and ordinary privates like us. The sergeant-major in charge of the British compound had received word from the War Office in London — the Brits got messages through a crystal radio set hidden in their barracks — that this colonel had to escape as quickly as possible.
When new prisoners arrived, the goons usually allowed other POWs to bring food to them. During our welcoming party in the British compound, the colonel switched clothes with a Canadian who looked a little like him. He then returned with us to 19B right under the noses of the guards. The next day the colonel was outfitted in a navy blue suit with a raincoat and a fedora hat. He carried a leather briefcase that had all his faked passes and identification papers, and even a pipe and a tobacco pouch. The soldier who was escaping execution wore a woollen jacket, a peaked cap and wire-rimmed glasses that made him look like a million other workers in Germany. I was astonished at how the British POWs had managed to pull all this together. The navy suit had been tailored from a khaki uniform that had been dyed with beet pulp. The spectacles were made with wire and broken window glass. The briefcase had been acquired by bribing a guard.
But creating the false identity papers was the most amazing feat of all. British POWs who knew German would pore through newspapers filched from the goons. They would find job ads and then carefully forge letters from a company official inviting the recipient for an interview. The cleverest English forgers could even imitate typewriter type using very fine brushes. Everyone in Germany had to carry an identity card and a police pass as well as travel documents. These were duplicated on a hand-turned copying device made with a broom handle and the rubber grip from a cricket bat. They were then stamped with the official-looking insignias each document required. The stamps had been carved out of a potato or the heel of a boot.
It was decided that the colonel and the condemned soldier would escape in broad daylight. The plan was for them to catch a train at the Lamsdorf station that would take them to the city of Dresden. From there they would take other trains until they reached a little town near the Swiss border. A climb through the Alps could then take them safely inside Switzerland, a neutral country in the war.
Early that afternoon, Mackie and I both served as lookouts at the barracks windows. Bill Lee and the two escapees wrapped themselves in burlap palliasse covers to keep their clothes clean. Sid then hoisted the concrete slab and Bill led the two men through the tunnel. Outside in the compound, a game of touch football had been started to distract the guards in the towers. Right at the time the two escaping men were due to crawl out the trap door, one football player socked another on the side of the jaw. As the two of them fell down and wrestled in the dirt, the other players gathered round yelling. The guards in the tower grinned and stood up to get a better look. While they looked the other way, our two “civilians” dashed into the cover of the forest.
Over the next six months, thirty-six men escaped through the tunnel, two at a time. At Appell we would cover for the missing men by saying they were sick and in their bunks. When the goons charged in to check, they would always find a sick-looking man in the bunk of the escapee. Another trick was for a couple of us to dodge back in the line after Spitfire had counted us.
Eventually the Germans would discover that there had been an escape. We were then made to stand outside for hours while all of the barracks were torn apart. The goons would bring in poles and tap on the concrete floors, hoping to hear the hollow sound of a tunnel. But after every escape we would fill in the shaft under the hut with loose dirt that was stored in Red Cross boxes hidden under bunks. So the tunnel entrance in 19B was never discovered.
After a while we heard that about half of the men who escaped managed to make it back to England — a very good average, and proof that the escape committee’s methods were working. All of the men selected for escape had to be able to speak German or French fluently. This gave the French-Canadian FMRs a real advantage, and many of them were sent through the tunnel disguised as French workers.
By September, Mackie was getting desperate to escape. He felt he’d earned it.
“Nobody worked harder on that tunnel than me. Nobody!” he’d say to me angrily on our afternoon walks.
“I know that, Mack,” I’d reply. “But you don’t speak any German or French.”
“Yeah, but you do,” he’d say. “We go together and you say I’m deaf or something if we get stopped.”
My French was improving from the card games with the FMRs, and I’d picked up some German, too. But I wasn’t fluent in either language and I told Mackie his plan just wouldn’t work.
As the first anniversary of our year in chains approached in early October of 1943, Mackie was getting desperate. He kept asking Beesley to be put on the escape list, but Beesley was not very enco
uraging. Mackie was so persistent that Beesley finally arranged a meeting with the English sergeants in charge of the escape committee. When we told them our plan, one suddenly fired a question at me in German about who I was and where I was from. I answered in rather stumbling German that my name was Fritz Schulz and I was from Hamburg. Then the other sergeant asked me in French how I liked the food in Germany. I replied a little more confidently to this question, but I could see that the Englishmen were not impressed. Mackie then described how much work he had done on the tunnel, but that didn’t impress them either.
“I’d give you chaps three days at best,” one of them finally said. “Within three days you’d be in the hands of the Gestapo and very likely shot.”
As we walked back to our hut, Mackie poured out his disappointment to Beesley.
“I tell you what, lad,” Beesley replied when Mackie had finished. “Your best bet is to get on a work party and make your escape from there. I can get you a compass so you’ll know what direction you’re going. If you can get to France, maybe some pretty farmer’s daughter will hide you in the barn.”
“He-e-ey, that sounds good to me!” said Mackie, cracking a huge smile.
This raised his spirits enormously. But as the days and then weeks passed, no work party passes came his way. More of the Brits had been deliberately damaging equipment at the brick factory, so the owners weren’t so willing to take POWs as workers.
I was beginning to worry about Mackie. I’d hear him thrashing about in the bunk overhead during the night. Each morning when they would fasten the shackles around his wrists, he would get red in the face. I began to fear he might slug one of the goons. The Germans would often play Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts over the loudspeakers, describing all the glorious German victories that had happened recently. Mackie would listen with a stony face.
“Don’t listen to that baloney!” I’d tell him. “I’ve heard that the Russians are pushing out the Jerries. And our guys and the Yanks have landed in Italy! We’re gonna win this thing!”
Prisoner of Dieppe Page 11