The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  The Abort had a cement floor which extended to the edge of the wooden benches. Below lay a cesspit, the contents of which were pumped out once a month into a tank mounted on a horse-drawn cart provided by a Polish contractor. The sewage was then spread over nearby fields as fertilizer. The floor of the urinal was also cement-covered. The ground beneath it though was solid. The cesspit ended where the urinal area began.

  As Bill explained, it was this feature of the Abort’s construction that made it such an attractive place for a tunnel. The space below the urinals could be hollowed out to make a sizeable chamber. This would be large enough to accommodate the workforce as they bored a lateral tunnel westward, deep beneath the wire.

  The men could work at a steady pace, completely hidden from the eyes of the ferrets. Even better, there would be no telltale spoil from the digging to give the game away. The disposal of dirt was the tunnellers’ greatest headache. Ingenious ways had been devised to disperse it, such as trickling it over vegetable patches from bags concealed beneath trouser legs, but the process was very slow and the risk of detection high. Once a ferret spotted suspicious-looking spoil, the camp’s Russian slave workers would be put to work with spades and the tunnel would be uncovered. There was no such problem with the latrine project. The excavated dirt could be dumped straight into the cesspit, where it would soon blend in with the contents. Even the most dedicated ferret was unlikely to spend much time probing the effluent when the truck came to pump it away.

  There remained the question of how the initial chamber was to be excavated. Bill and his team had the answer to that. Their idea was not to burrow down through the cement floor of the latrine but to make a start from the side of the cesspit. They would attack it by slipping through one of the lavatory seats next to the urinal and unbricking a hole in the pit wall big enough for a man to clamber through. From there work could begin on digging out a space big enough for eight to ten people to operate in comfort. Perhaps ‘comfort’ was not the right word. Nobody relished working amid the fumes of a sea of excrement. But as Tommy Calnan, who was among the listeners, immediately recognized, the plan sounded like a winner. ‘It was ingenious in its simplicity. All the major risks of detection had been very nearly eliminated.’3

  From the start it was envisaged as an ambitious project, using the latest tunnelling techniques, shored all the way with wooden planking and ventilated by an air pump. If it succeeded it could indeed channel scores of men to – at least temporary – freedom. Day was looking for a large-scale breakout. Exactly how many prisoners should be involved was a moot point. To some the notion of a mass escape was very appealing. They argued that once the tunnel was completed and ‘broken’ – the term used for the final stage of burrowing upwards and through the last layer of topsoil – it should be open to all comers until the Germans were alerted.

  Calnan, though, was adamantly opposed to the idea. They were not attempting to break the record for the greatest number of escapers. They were trying to give those who dug the tunnel the best possible chance of getting back to England. If the last man was out of the tunnel by midnight and the breakout was not noted until dawn, then the escapers would be well clear of the area before the balloon went up. After all, only three hours train-ride away was Danzig, from where there was a chance of stowing away on a boat bound for Sweden. The argument went back and forth but Calnan won the day. ‘We would, it was agreed, keep our numbers as low as possible and only take on essential workers. It was to be a private tunnel for the benefit of those who had made it and nobody else.’

  Palmer raised the delicate question of the extent to which they should involve the escape committee in the project. The rules demanded that they get its backing before proceeding further. Its approval was potentially valuable. The promoters of the scheme would then get access to all the expertise and resources at the committee’s disposal. The camp history records the latrine tunnel as a straightforward operation carried out under the authority of the escape organization. Tommy Calnan gave a different account. He claimed that he opposed involving the committee at this early stage on the grounds that the more people who were involved, the greater the chance of someone making an unguarded remark that would be picked up by the ferrets. ‘Let’s do it ourselves,’ he urged. ‘It’s more work but it’s safer.’ Apparently the others agreed. All that remained was to decide on what was the bare minimum of men needed to carry out the labour. They decided finally on a figure of twenty-five.

  Between them they would cover all the main elements of the project. Palmer was in charge of engineering, designing the ventilation, lighting and shoring, aided by Charlie Swain, the best carpenter in the camp. This side of the project would in time be overseen by a Fleet Air Arm officer, Lieutenant Commander Peter Fanshawe. The actual digging was the responsibility of Bill Ash and Eddie Asselin, whose band of labourers included Paddy Barthropp, Ian Cross and Robert Kee. Intelligence and security were in the hands of Aidan Crawley and Tommy Calnan.

  The first phase of the work was in some ways the most vulnerable to discovery. It involved modifying one of the lavatory seats nearest the urinal and took two days. The section of bench was sawn through so it could be lifted sideways to rest against the wall. The carpenters worked in brief spells, protected by lookouts – ‘stooges’, in camp slang – ready to signal when a ferret came near. The result was impressive. The bench was transformed into a folding lid which opened sideways, creating a hole three feet square, beneath which lay the cesspit. The lid was released by a hidden catch and moved on hinges. Opening and shutting it took only seconds. If any German appeared in the Abort, one of the stooges would fold down the seat and whip down his trousers.

  The underside of the bench was fitted with a handrail. By hanging on to it, a man could swing through the hole in the brick wall of the pit that led to the chamber below the urinal. As yet the breach had not been made. Tommy Calnan, who was small and light, was given the job. He lowered himself head first into the pit while two men held his legs. Then he began banging at the brickwork of the cesspit wall with a hammer and cold chisel.

  It was tough work. The job was made even harder by the nauseating fumes assailing his nostrils. He managed to keep it up for a heroic fifteen minutes. After that, so much blood had drained to his head that he could no longer see properly. His thumb was already throbbing from repeated miss-hits. His grip on the hammer and chisel never slackened. The tools were precious. He knew that if he dropped them he would have to descend on a rope and fish them out of the noxious lake below.

  When Tommy’s time was up a succession of wall-bashers took over. They were careful not to let any of the bricks drop into the pit. They were to be saved to fashion a removable hatch that would be put in place to camouflage the entrance to the chamber at the end of a day’s digging. Over the next three days they worked in short shifts to hammer out the hole. The wall-bashers were shielded by a network of stooges standing watch over every possible line of approach to the Abort. They could expect to get three minutes warning of any approaching German – enough time to suspend operations, replace the lavatory seat and clean up.

  Then at last the final brick was removed and they were through to the hard-packed sand that lay beneath the urinal floor. Two days later they had dug out enough of it to put a man inside. The first occupant was Eddy Asselin who soon enlarged it to the point where Bill Ash could join him. A day or two later there was room for four men, so the digging could start in earnest. The twenty-five men of the escape team all took their turn. They worked in two-hour shifts – Dienst, as they called it, using the German word for ‘duty’. The short stints enabled them to work flat out and accelerate progress. Getting into the chamber meant reaching through the lavatory hole for the handrail, lowering oneself down into the pit then raising your knees gymnastically and propelling your legs through the entrance. The first man through would then help the next in and so on. Later, diggers would have to first remove the concealing hatch before getting through.

 
As chief tunnellers, Bill and Eddie had to perform the feat more often than anyone. ‘Entering… was a daily experience of horror as I wriggled through the hole where the toilet seat was and my face came to within a few inches of the great stinking lake of sewage,’ wrote Bill. Inevitably he was reminded of his immersion in the Vieille-Église village sewer after he had been shot down. Malodorous encounters seemed to be part of his war.4 But the essential fact of kriegie life was that if you wanted to survive, and certainly if you wanted to escape, you had to be able to get used to anything. And so it was. Fastidious men who in their previous lives would have wrinkled their noses at the prospect of wearing the same shirt two days running now barely noticed a stench that would fell an ox.

  Once the chamber was big enough to hold them, the carpenters arrived to tidy up the access hole and fit the hatch door. Asselin wanted the chamber as big as possible, to maximize the number of diggers at any one time and leave space for undispersed spoil. Eventually about 500 cubic feet of dirt were excavated, leaving a large space measuring about 10 feet by 15, and tall enough for most men to stand upright in. As well as accommodating the team there was room to store all the tools and equipment.

  Work could now begin on the tunnel itself. On a normal two-hour shift, two men, stripped down to their underwear, would dig using scoops made out of old tin cans and cut-down broom handles or coal shovels from the barrack stoves. They would pack the spoil in kitbags which were hauled back on ropes to the chamber and emptied. It was decided to keep digging and dispersal as separate operations. It would have been simple to just shovel the dirt through the chamber entrance and into the cesspit below. Before long though it would form a suspicious-looking mound which would be instantly spotted by any ferret who chose to inspect the pit. Far better to spread it evenly over the whole surface, where it would sink invisibly. Tommy Calnan came up with a plan to sprinkle the soil through the seventy toilet-seat holes that ran the length of the Abort. Aluminium jugs from the barrack washhouses would make ideal containers. In a day’s work the digging teams dislodged enough dirt to fill about a hundred jugs. It was decided to leave the spoil in the chamber overnight then disperse it in an hour-long blitz each morning. Once it was over, the digging team could shut themselves in and carry on work undisturbed.

  There would be four men in the dispersal team inside the chamber. One filled the jugs and passed them to a second who handed them up to two helpers hanging through the seat flap to haul them up. There were some risks. Both the hatch door and the folding section of lavatory seat would have to be open for the duration of the exercise. A full complement of stooges was needed to give warning if the ferrets showed up. Calnan was confident the operation was feasible and that the best time to conduct it would be between 8.30 and 9.30 in the morning, when the whole camp had breakfasted and, ‘the British constitution being what it is’, the Abort would be at its busiest. Even the most observant German guard was unlikely to notice that a dozen or so men who had visited the lavatory had not emerged. This was the team charged with systematically emptying the jugs through the toilet seats.

  On the first day that the exercise was tested it did not go quite according to plan. Bill was at the workface with Eddie, assisted by two helpers to haul back the soil. The four-man team began filling the jugs from the kitbags and passing them up through the hole, where four more men were waiting to disperse them up and down the lines of thrones. It was the busiest time of day and all were occupied. Many of the occupants responded belligerently when told to shift so the jug could be emptied. So stiff was the resistance that Calnan was forced to think again. ‘We had made the great error of not remembering that there are some moments sacrosanct to an Englishman, when he may not be disturbed for any reason,’ he wrote. As a result, ‘the next morning we changed our system. We increased our dispersal team to seven workers. Of these, four occupied lavatory seats through which the sand could be poured, changing their station whenever the departure of a client permitted it.’5 The others ran back and forth, emptying the contents through whatever holes their comrades had reserved.

  They had decided on a deep tunnel, running about seventeen feet below the surface. This would minimize their risk from the underground microphones, which as at Sagan had been buried in the earth to pick up suspicious vibrations. As it turned out this was an unnecessary precaution. Crawley’s intelligence network soon learned that ‘these microphones were far too sensitive and that the noise of the prisoners walking around the perimeter of the camp or skating on the flooded football field made it impossible for other sounds to be detected clearly.’6 The breakout point was to be in the middle of a cluster of potato clamps on the other side of the perimeter fence, which would provide cover from the patrols that circled the camp at night. To reach this haven would mean digging a tunnel of about 150 feet.

  The team’s pride in their project was growing by the day and a degree of perfectionism touched every aspect of the work. The entrance to the tunnel was neat and robustly framed in timber to deal with the wear and tear of constant coming and going. By Christmas Day they had burrowed ten feet, creating a shaft two feet square. Tiny though it sounded, this was just big enough for an undernourished man to crawl along it and work reasonably efficiently at the face.

  Christmas was a time for forced jollity in kriegiedom. There was something rather melancholy about the preparations, made more profound by the greetings that arrived in the mail from homes which at this season seemed particularly dreamlike and far away. This year, the kriegies of Oflag XXIB even received a Christmas card from King George VI, delivered to Harry Day with all due reverence by one of the senior guards. For weeks beforehand the Red Cross parcels were hoarded to provide a blowout on the big day. The prisoners’ fertile minds had easily solved the problem of conjuring a booze supply out of nowhere, distilling spirits from raisins, sugar and the like, in clandestine Heath Robinson assemblages. The results were given fanciful names which bore virtually no resemblance to the real thing. It hardly mattered. The point was to get spectacularly, amnesiacally drunk. The Germans wisely decided to leave the kriegies to let off steam. The flavour of the celebrations was caught well in an autobiographical novel written by Robert Kee after the war.

  We decided it was time to start on Jack Nopps’s apricot brandy. It tasted of petrol mixed with hair oil. Jack took one gulp, said ‘Lovely stuff’, and went off to tune in to the King’s Speech on the secret wireless which only he could operate. Soon it was dark and the Christmas evening was in full swing.

  The drink made me excited and confused so that time seemed to be moving in a series of huge uneasy jerks, sometimes accelerating wildly and sometimes standing absolutely still.

  First I was in a room where people stood crowded together in the atmosphere of a cocktail party.

  ‘Of course I was in the same squadron as him for a time.’

  ‘If I can get drunk enough on this stuff I might be able to get away with it on the next repatriation board.’

  ‘It was one of the finest knocking shops in Cairo.’

  ‘If only we can get a foothold around Calais.’

  Every now and then people would step neatly aside while the person they were talking to was sick on the floor. ‘Awfully sorry, old boy…’

  Later Nopps, now much the worst for wear, reported back on the King’s message to the nation: ‘He said… the prisoners of war… were conducting themselves… with great dignity.’7

  For the select group in on the latrine tunnel, that year’s festivities felt a little more authentic. The system they had evolved seemed ferret-proof, so much so that they were able to cut down on the number of stooges and employ them below ground.

  They rehearsed the emergency drill so thoroughly that by the end they could close down the lavatory seat entry-point while the diggers stayed below. If they had to come up in a hurry, for an unexpected Appell or some other emergency, they could be out and on display, looking the picture of innocence, in less than three minutes.8

  The w
ork was boring, dirty and smelly, but strangely satisfying, providing a focus and a purpose that was missing from life above ground. ‘The routine had become part of us, and though we often hated it and grudged the time, we felt affectionate and possessive about it,’ wrote Kee.

  There was something stimulating about the hours spent digging at the tiny face, tugging on the rope for the earth to be dragged away and receiving the faint answering tug from the other end, or squeezing backwards cursing to join the rope where it had snapped under the strain. When we came up to the familiar tea and the squalor and the faces it was as if we had spent the afternoon in another planet.9

  The operation was being carried out in the most public place in the camp so every kriegie knew about it. The exclusive nature of the scheme meant that all that was required of them was to keep their mouths shut and to donate useful items to the cause. Each prisoner was asked to contribute a bed board or two, to be put into service as pit props, shoring up the tunnel’s sides and roof to prevent falls. Almost all of them complied, though Bill Ash noted that some whined at this further reduction in their comfort. As a team leader he was expected to show an example. Eventually his bed was left with no boards at all and he was forced to weave a string net across the bedframe to support his mattress.

  Even so, the supply of boards eventually ran out. Almost everyone in the camp was down to five slats – the bare minimum to support a mattress. It fell to Marshall to come up with a new supply. For a while he considered seeking the help of the escape committee, to use their authority to insist on a levy of one more plank from every prisoner. But that risked turning the camp against the latrine team and limiting cooperation they might need in other areas. He decided to seek a solution elsewhere. He went instead to the German quartermaster’s stores. They were located in the basement of the White House, which was out of bounds to prisoners. The Wehrmacht guards had still to wake up to the full extent of the kriegies’ wiles, and believed that a locked door would stay locked. But by 1943 every prison compound had one or two expert locksmiths who had learned their craft by dismantling and studying the locks and padlocks they encountered during their imprisonment. Most fixed door locks in the camps were of fairly simple design and were relatively easy to pick. ‘All that was needed was a strong piece of wire about an eighth of an inch thick, one end of which was bent at right angles and the other formed into a loop to serve as a handle,’ wrote Aidan Crawley. The angled end was beaten with a hammer to flatten the wire. This was then filed square and inserted into the lock. By trial and error it was then trimmed until it was the right shape to free the bolt. In Crawley’s estimation, ‘with a set of wire keys of varying lengths and widths, and with lots of practice most fixed door-locks could be picked in well under a quarter of a minute.’10