The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  The tales were astounding. There was the rear gunner of a Whitley bomber that had crash-landed one night in Germany. When the aeroplane finally slewed to a halt the gunner climbed out of his turret and went in search of his crewmates only to find that he was alone. The intercom had been knocked out when they were hit and he had not heard the order to bail out. He had survived a landing in a pilotless aircraft.

  There were pilots who had been knocked senseless and blown out of their cockpits at 25,000 feet, who woke up a few hundred feet from earth, pulled the ripcord and landed safely. Some reached the ground unharmed without benefit of a parachute at all. One man fell two miles through the air then collided with another whose canopy was just opening. He grabbed his saviour’s legs and touched down with him.

  But thankfulness at having cheated death did not necessarily induce a feeling of contentment and a desire for a quiet life. It took less than an hour to explore every nook and corner of East Compound. The knowledge that henceforth life would extend no further than its boundaries was devastating to men who had known the freedom of the air.

  Among the prisoners were men who had entered the RAF in the 1930s, whose manner and outlook distinguished them as service professionals. By now this cadre had been heavily diluted by volunteers who joined up when hostilities started and who had no desire to stay on a day longer than the war lasted. For them war had been an interruption, not a professional opportunity.

  Among them were embryonic artists, engineers, actors, musicians, financiers, lawyers and businessmen. The one thing that united them was that they were all airmen. They had joined the air force because it was not the army or the navy. To them, as to everyone at the time, the aeroplane was an almost magical invention. Above all it was a symbol of liberty, promising unfettered movement and defiance of the laws of nature, the very opposite of having to fight sealed inside the steel walls of a warship or a tank. Aircrews enjoyed a freedom of action unknown to the other services. Once on operations they were beyond the reach of the earthbound hierarchy and they lived and died largely on their own initiative. Now their horizons had shrunk to the size of a forest clearing and it seemed you could not turn around without catching yourself on barbed wire.

  Once the gates of Stalag Luft III closed behind them all new prisoners acquired a new identity. They were still airmen shaped by their training and experiences and the esprit and traditions of their squadrons. But they were also now ‘kriegies’. It was short for Kriegsgefangenen or prisoners of war, and the domain they inhabited was ‘kriegiedom’. There was no shame in it. The terms were used freely. It was simply a recognition of the way things were.

  As a kriegie a man had to learn to cope with spartan communal living. This was an officers-only compound. Many inmates had attended British private boarding schools. They told each other that camp life reminded them of their schooldays, a joke that was not that far from the truth. For those like Bill Ash who had not had the privilege of a middle-class British education, the regime took some getting used to. From now on life would be appallingly circumscribed, and defined by absences. Food would become of overwhelming importance. But, as Richard Passmore wrote, ‘there were other scarcities queuing up to have their turn at us: lack of affection; lack of fulfilment; lack, and worse than any of the others, of freedom.’4

  He might have added ‘lack of privacy’. Everyone ate, washed, slept and relieved themselves within a few feet of each other. In such an environment social camouflage was soon stripped away, leaving virtues and failings alike on open display. Like boarding school, the kriegie life would bring out the best and the worst in a man. It was soon clear that everybody had something of both in them.

  The air force tended to attract individualists and there was no shortage of powerful personalities among the inmates at Sagan. They included some of the RAF’s most illustrious names. Arriving in the compound, wrote Bill Ash, ‘was like finding I had died and arrived in the feasting halls of Valhalla, where a previous generation of warriors were already at home’.5 There was Bob Stanford Tuck, the quintessential fighter ace, with his clipped moustache, sleek hair and silk scarf, who had destroyed at least twenty-nine enemy aircraft before being brought down by flak on a ‘sweep’ over Northern France in January 1942. There was Norman Ryder, a former schoolteacher who had gone on to become a celebrated Battle of Britain pilot. And there was Douglas Bader.

  Bader was short, square-headed and belligerent. He stumped around the camp on two aluminium legs, replacements for the ones he had lost when he crashed while stunt flying a decade before. The RAF had pensioned him off, but using the determination he applied to every aspect of his life he had overcome every bureaucratic obstacle to return to front-line flying. He took part in the defence of the beaches during the Dunkirk evacuation and flew in the Battle of Britain, shooting down nine aircraft. He went on to command a Spitfire wing based in Tangmere, West Sussex, and in the spring and summer of 1942 led it on many sweeps over northern France. These were essentially coat-trailing exercises of doubtful military worth and they cost the lives and liberty of many valuable pilots. On 11 August 1941 Bader’s name was added to the list when he was shot down ten miles east of Saint-Omer.

  The Germans knew their prisoner’s reputation and treated him with due respect. His prosthetic right leg had come off when he baled out. The local Luftwaffe commander, the fighter ace Adolf Galland, gave safe passage for an RAF bomber to drop a replacement. These courtesies did nothing to soften Bader’s pugnacious attitude. On his first night in captivity he climbed out of the hospital where he was being held. He was soon caught and sent to Oflag VIB near Warburg before arriving in Stalag Luft III in May 1942. By then the pattern was set. Every morning he woke up and relaunched his personal war against the Germans, constantly looking for ways to escape and goading and provoking his captors.

  According to his biographer Paul Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot and inmate of Stalag Luft III, Bader went out of his way to ensure that ‘life was a series of uproars’.6 When German squads ‘strode past singing their marching songs he organized bands to whistle opposition tunes and put them out of step’. When the authorities ordered shutters on the hut windows to be closed at night, ‘he wanted the camp to tear them all off and throw them into the middle of the compound’. He was systematically rude to the camp authorities. Once he was standing, arms folded, chatting to Lindeiner when the compound commander, Hauptmann (Captain) Pieber reprimanded him mildly, telling him he should stand to attention when speaking to the Kommandant. ‘When I want you to teach me manners, I’ll ask you,’ Bader snapped. ‘Until then, shut up.’

  Despite his prominence Bader had no formal position of authority. The convention was that the highest-ranking prisoner took the title of Senior British Officer, acting as the inmates’ commanding officer and representing their interests to the German authorities. It was a formal appointment. The SBO and his adjutant were given an office with furniture and a typewriter. In June 1942 the position was held by Wing Commander Harry Day, lean, cheerful and hawk-faced, who at forty-two years old was twice the age of many of the prisoners. He served in the First World War in the Royal Marines, winning a medal for saving the lives of two men trapped below decks when their ship was torpedoed two days before the Armistice. Later he switched to the RAF, where he led an aerobatics display team. In the summer of 1939 he was commanding 57 Squadron. Six weeks after the war began his Blenheim bomber was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over Germany. He baled out but his two crewmates were killed. He was thus one of the longest-serving British prisoners, well attuned to the way the system worked. He combined a warrior’s credentials with a talent for diplomacy, a strong streak of common sense and an understanding of how far the Germans could be pushed.

  He knew Bader of old. They had both served in 23 Squadron in the early 1930s, and Day had led the unit aerobatics team of which Bader was a member. Long acquaintance did not make relations any easier. Bader’s abrasive personality and determination to exasperate
the enemy regardless of the consequences made friction inevitable. Bader’s proposal to tear down the hut shutters sparked an early clash. According to Brickhill it provoked ‘a violent argument… Day himself had a streak of the fiery rebel and would have loved to have torn the shutters off, but he also had the job of keeping the Germans reasonably placated so the prisoners could retain privileges to help escape work.’7

  It was a delicate feat to bring off. Day was as dedicated as anyone to the principle that being a prisoner of war should not be a deterrent to carrying on the struggle against the enemy by all means possible. He had shown his determination at Dulag Luft, where he was also SBO, overseeing the digging of a tunnel the entrance to which was underneath his bed. In June 1941, together with sixteen others, he escaped in what was the first mass breakout of the war. All were recaptured after a few days, but the experience did nothing to diminish his devotion to escaping.

  The episode taught Day the value of organization and discipline. His next camp was Stalag Luft I, where he was again SBO. Together with a naval airman, Jimmy Buckley, who had been on the Dulag Luft venture, he formed a committee which controlled and coordinated all aspects of escaping: approving proposals, gathering intelligence and stockpiling vital materials, including clothing, food, maps and documents. This model would be used in Allied prisoner-of-war camps for the rest of the war. The approach required large reserves of patience and a willingness to submit to group discipline, which were not among Bader’s more obvious qualities. Most of the prisoners backed Day in the spat over the shutters. But Bader’s approach did have its supporters. ‘Camp opinion divided,’ wrote Paul Brickhill. ‘There were the turbulent rebels devoted to Bader, who believed in riling the Germans at every chance and others, some who wanted only peace and some, the wise cool heads, who wanted a judicious amount of goon-baiting mixed with enough tact and cooperation to ensure peace for escape work.’8

  Bill Ash and Paddy Barthropp fell into the first category. Bill regarded Bader as ‘an inspirational leader who really practised what he preached’.9 Bader was thirty-four years old, and carried a certain amount of paternal authority as well as his celebrity as a fighter ace. It was not surprising that young newcomers would want to win his approval. Soon after their arrival they joined in one of his goon-baiting pranks. The prisoners had been ordered to line up for an extra Appell, the roll call that the Germans conducted morning and evening to check numbers. After a long and tedious wait most of them had been counted off and only a small group remained. ‘When there were only fifty or so left to count, Douglas Bader decided it would be a good idea for about twenty officers to run across to those already checked, thereby making the Germans do the whole thing all over again,’ Paddy Barthtropp remembered.10 He and Bill Ash led the charge. ‘With a whoop we set off, racing from the uncounted herd to the counted one, and others joined in,’ wrote Ash.11 For a moment the guards seemed to fear that a mass breakout was in progress and reached for their guns. Then they realized that it was another goon-baiting exercise. On this occasion, however, they were not in a mood to shrug it off. They were eager to find culprits, and Bill and Paddy were the obvious candidates. The pair were arrested and marched through the Kommandantur then out through the front gates of the camp. Hilarity at the escapade rapidly gave way to a mounting feeling of dread. The guards prodded them forward with their rifles, across the clearing and into the woods. ‘We marched deeper and deeper into the forest’, wrote Ash, ‘into the gloomy permanent twilight caused by the thick pine branches blocking out even the smallest rays of optimism from the sun. Each tread of a jackboot on a twig sounded like a gunshot as we marched forward with a row of guns trained on our backs… in a clearing carpeted by pine needles, we were ordered to halt.’12

  According to Paddy Barthropp’s account they were then ‘forced to our knees for what we both thought was going to be the inevitable’.13 Bill felt ‘time passing with almost glacial slowness as we waited for the end’. Paddy had ‘never prayed so hard in [his] life’. Then the game was over. They were ordered to stand and marched back to the camp. The gates and the barbed-wire fences seemed almost welcoming.

  They were taken straight to Lindeiner, who delivered a lecture and ordered them to be taken to the cell block. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners were subject to the disciplinary procedures that applied to the armed forces of the detaining power. The most severe punishment permitted was thirty days imprisonment. The pair gave different accounts of the length of their sentence – Bill said a fortnight, Paddy twenty-eight days. Either way, it was their first spell in the ‘cooler’, a place they would both become very familiar with in their prison careers.

  The cooler was housed in the Vorlager and had only just been completed. The walls of the cells were freshly whitewashed and the cement on the floor still smelled damp. Each one was furnished with a bunk, table and stool of newly planed pinewood, and the mattress on the bed was clean and comfortable. A small barred window set high in the wall let in noises from the outside world. After their ordeal in the forest both found the solitude and quiet soothing at first. Paddy felt ‘the first two or three days in solitary were, in some strange way, rather pleasant. You hadn’t the company of your fellow men in a cramped room, so there was nothing to argue about.’ The feeling soon wore off. Prisoners were supposed to be allowed books and writing materials, but the Germans seem to have frequently ignored this aspect of the Convention, an omission which added greatly to the burden of solitude. For the first three days the food ration was cut to a double ration of bread and water. It was not long before the irritations of normal camp life were forgotten. ‘Towards the end of your spell,’ wrote Paddy, ‘when you were really hungry, not only for food but also for companionship, it was a relief to be back among them.’14

  Bill was also surprisingly sanguine about his first experience of the cooler. His tough upbringing meant he had learned to rely on his own resources and company. In all he would spend about six months in solitary confinement. Nevertheless the experience always tested his mental resilience to the limits. He was fortunate in being able to take refuge in an inner life; this helped him emerge with his sanity intact from an ordeal that disturbed the minds of other men.

  The day came when the key turned in the lock and they were led through the Vorlager and back into East Compound. It was not long before they bumped into Bader, whose stunt had landed them in the cooler. According to Bill, ‘Paddy expected at least a pat on the back. Instead [Bader] asked us where we had been as he hadn’t seen us around. Luckily he then smiled before we both exploded.’15

  The rebel’s days in the camp were numbered. Under Bader’s constant goon-baiting, Lindeiner’s patience snapped. Sometime in July Bader was summoned to be told that he was being sent to Colditz, the castle in Saxony reserved for the most troublesome prisoners. Bader’s crime was less that he was an ardent escaper, though he was certainly eager to be included in any project, than that he was simply too much of a nuisance. Both his detractors and his supporters lined up to see him go. As expected, he put up a bravura performance. Forty guards stood ready to conduct Bader from the camp. As he was escorted out he paused then walked down the line of guards, carefully examining each one as if he was holding an inspection. The kriegies hooted with laughter. He stumped away on his tin legs with the cheers of his comrades echoing behind him.

  Bader’s grandstanding was one way of showing defiance. Others believed that the most effective way of resisting the Germans was to organize a successful escape. Work had begun almost as soon as the first prisoners arrived, directed by an escape committee founded on the one that had been created at Barth. It was led by Jimmy Buckley and overseen by Harry Day. Day was replaced in June by Group Captain Herbert Massey, who arrived at Sagan after being shot down during the second of the ‘thousand bomber’ raids instituted by the new chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris. Both were convinced of the value of escape attempts, and according to the private history of the camp produced by the RAF after the war, an a
stonishing sixty or seventy tunnels were started during the course of the summer. The would-be escapers, though, were up against a security apparatus that was determined that the camp should be ‘escape-proof’. Most of the tunnels were ‘very shallow and were discovered before [being] completed’.16 A more ambitious one was under construction for six months before the ferrets discovered it.

  Sagan posed particular problems for tunnelling. The layer of sandy topsoil was deep and well drained. Excavating it was easy, but it was conspicuously yellowish in colour and disposing of it without alerting the ferrets was a huge problem. Then there was the question of where to dig. The barracks provided an obvious starting point. At first the space beneath the huts was blocked off by wooden skirting, designed to stop cold draughts whistling through in winter. But the Germans soon discovered that the boards would also shield any tunnelling operations from the eyes of the security staff, and had them removed.17

  These setbacks depressed the spirits. ‘Morale became very low,’ remembered Henry Lamond, a 36-year-old Flight Lieutenant from New Zealand.18 It was Lamond, together with two other inmates, who eventually came up with a viable means of circumventing the German precautions. The three had met after Britain’s calamitous withdrawal from Greece in the spring of 1941. In late April he was piloting a Sunderland flying boat alongside Flight Lieutenant Bill Goldfinch, helping evacuate British forces from the mainland. Landing off Kalamata to pick up evacuees, they hit an underwater obstacle and sank. Six of the ten-man crew were killed. The pair spent several hours clinging to a piece of wing before being picked up by Greek fishermen and taken to hospital. Shortly afterwards the Germans arrived and they went into the bag.