Tommy Calnan had already learned about locks in Stalag Luft III. He joined Marshall and they waited for a quiet moment when neither the quartermaster nor his staff was around. The door to the stores posed no problem. He turned the key and they walked in to ‘a treasure house of valuable material. There were two rooms stacked to the ceiling with two-tier wooden bunks and literally thousands of bed slats. There were also many other items that made our mouths water.’11
They decided not to be greedy. If they were caught they would be in trouble not just with the Germans but with their own side as well. Despite all the goon-baiting and organized disobedience there were certain rules of conduct in the camps that the SBO and his staff insisted on. One was a ban on too-obvious thieving from the Germans. If a theft was discovered, the Germans would first report it to Day, who would be duty-bound to appeal to the culprit to return the stolen goods immediately. If they failed to do so, the Germans could impose collective punishment.
Carefully they extracted a stack of bed boards, removing them from the back of the pile so that at a casual glance there seemed nothing amiss. There were just enough to meet the carpenters’ immediate requirements. They decided that rather than stockpile supplies they would return to the stores when more slats were needed.
To do their work the tunnellers needed light. Someone had suggested they rigged up an electric bulb powered by a feeder line run off the wiring in the Abort. Bill Ash had been all for it, but Eddie Asselin reminded everyone that a prisoner in another camp had been electrocuted by a faulty connection while digging in a damp tunnel. Tommy Calnan also warned that the connecting wire might well be noticed by a nosy ferret, which would lead him straight to the tunnel. They fell back on the tried-and-tested fat lamps.
These were one of the many inventions that kriegie ingenuity had devised under the spur of necessity. They were simply old tin cans, filled with margarine which had been boiled up to reduce the water content, and with a piece of old shoelace or pyjama cord for a wick. They gave limited light but were easy to produce and burned little oxygen, a serious consideration if you were labouring in a stuffy hole. It was another example of how, over time, prisoners had learned how to turn mundane items into useful artefacts. For shoring tunnels they needed saws, chisels, hammers and nails. Men planning to go over or through the fence needed ladders or wire cutters. Those who attempted to slip through the gates in disguise needed keys or dummy rifles which had to look totally authentic.
Despite the SBO’s desire not to provoke the Germans by overt theft, escape activity could not have gone on without a high degree of larceny. The activists stole what they could not make. There was usually construction work going on somewhere in a camp and as Aidan Crawley noted, ‘it was difficult for workmen to be unceasingly vigilant against a community in which theft was a virtue.’12 Sometimes a theft was noticed, reprisals were threatened and the items recovered. It was also likely that the guards might not report the missing item for fear of being disciplined. Furthermore in Schubin, the Polish workmen who visited the camp were almost to a man on the side of the prisoners. What the prisoners could not steal they might acquire by bribery. Some of the guards were susceptible to offers of cigarettes or chocolate or some other luxury from the Red Cross parcels in return for services rendered.
Even these sources were not adequate, and any bit of junk that in peacetime would have been overlooked as rubbish took on a potential value. ‘Broken bits of iron, the bars of an old grate, old motor-car springs lying in a dump, the rims of cartwheels or the bands of a barrel were seized upon at once and guarded almost as carefully as food,’ wrote Crawley.
There was a surprising amount of metal around. Barrack huts constructed of wood were reinforced with iron angles in the corners and long bolts through the beams. The hinges on shutters if filed for long enough turned out to make excellent wire cutters. Stoves proved to have lots of promising extraneous bits and pieces and the barrack kitchens were reasonably well equipped with utensils which could be put to a dual purpose. To the seasoned kriegies’ eyes there was virtually nothing which did not have some potential use to increase their comfort or aid their escape.
Making an air pump that would ventilate the shaft while digging was in progress therefore presented no problem. The design was simple and effective. It was based on an ordinary kitbag – there were hundreds lying around the camp – which was transformed into a large bellows. The bottom of the bag was attached to a square wooden board. This was pierced by two holes, each covered with a leather flap to form a valve. On the outlet valve the flap was on the outside and on the inlet valve, on the inside. The other end of the bag was attached to a round piece of wood with a handle attached. The kitbag was reinforced with wire rings sown onto the outside to prevent it collapsing, and the whole apparatus attached to a wooden frame. By pushing and pulling on the handle as if he was playing a giant concertina a man could keep a steady flow of air coursing out of the outlet valve. This was carried down the tunnel by a pipe made of old tins of Klim, the powdered milk that came in Canadian Red Cross parcels. The lid end of the can was slightly tapered so they fitted together neatly and could be extended indefinitely.
As the work advanced, the diggers’ initial enthusiasm began to falter. ‘The tunnel, as it grew longer and longer, passing sixty feet, became a suffocating place,’ Bill Ash remembered. ‘Each trip down it required a little more courage, and the need to blot out the thought of all those tons of earth pressing down on you, knowing that a cave-in would leave us trapped, breathing mouthfuls of mud and unable to go forwards or backwards.’13 Soon it was taking half an hour to crawl to and from the face in order to spend an hour digging. The further they burrowed the more they felt the grip of claustrophobia closing around them. Clad only in ‘combination’ underwear they ‘felt the cold clay around us, pressing in on us and seeping into our bones until we almost became part of the tunnel.’ When the margarine lamps flickered and died, which they frequently did as the air grew increasingly foul, the men lay entombed in total silence and darkness that was both awesome and terrifying.
The work provided little distraction from fearful thoughts. The digger shovelled the dirt into a canvas kitbag attached to a rope. When it was full, he tugged on the rope and a helper at the other end answered with a double tug and hauled it back. Rope was scarce and hard to manufacture and as the tunnel grew there were frequent breaks. Then a man was stationed to pull the bag back to a midway point from where another waiting at the entrance would take over.
The practice of disposing of some of the spoil through the toilet holes was soon deemed unnecessary. It could be mixed evenly into the cesspit slurry by simply poking it with a stick. The method had to be reassessed following an incident which Bill Ash witnessed after emerging into the late afternoon light from a long day’s digging. He came across one of the pilots, Josef Bryks, a 27-year-old Czech whose name had been anglicised to Joe Ricks to avoid reprisals being taken against his family. Ricks was talking to an elderly Pole, the man who had been engaged by the Germans to pump the contents of the cesspit into a horse-drawn tanker known to kriegies as the ‘honeywagon’. The old man seemed upset about something and Ricks explained that he was complaining that the honeywagon was choked with sand and gravel when he emptied it after each trip. The old man was a patriot and was easily talked into keeping quiet about the discovery. Ricks even persuaded him to cooperate in a scheme to smuggle him out in the tanker after some future visit.
This plan was duly taken to the escape committee. They had some serious misgivings. If it was discovered that the old man had aided and abetted Ricks’s escape he would certainly be shot and perhaps his family along with him. However if the attempt was timed to coincide with the tunnel break, then the Germans would assume that Ricks was one of the escapers and the old man would be in the clear.
As the thaw set in and the tunnel lengthened, the team’s excitement grew. They went to work with lighter hearts and the cursing and grumbling as they scraped and hauled
was tinged with hope. The latrine tunnel was not the only engineering project underway. Early in December, a prisoner called Dickie Edge had started a rival tunnel from beneath the wooden floor of the night latrine of one of the barracks. This knowledge introduced an extra urgency to Bill and the team’s efforts. If Edge and his boys broke out first, the guards would tear Schubin to pieces looking for any sign of other escape activity. The luck they had enjoyed could not possibly last; the tunnel would be uncovered and all their work would be in vain.
The Germans sniffed the air and knew that something was afoot. But their Wehrmacht noses were nowhere as keen as those of the Luftwaffe bloodhounds of Stalag Luft III. Captain Simms tried to catch the prisoners out by ordering extra Appells. Instead of two, there were three, sometimes four and five a day. He also attempted to change the rules so that kriegies had to be back in their barrack blocks by 5 p.m. instead of the normal time of 7 p.m. Harry Day argued that it was essential for the prisoners’ health that they spent as much time in the open air as possible. Fearing an outbreak of some contagious disease that would inevitably infect Germans and kriegies alike, Simms backed off.
This was good news. The problems with the honeywagon meant alternative means of dumping spoil had to be found. As the ground began to thaw and the ice turn to slush, the latrine team took advantage of the early dusk to disperse the evidence. ‘Every evening groups of prisoners could dimly be seen walking up and down the dark side of the football field or digging methodically in the gardens,’ wrote Aidan Crawley. ‘At given signals kitbags full of earth were carried out and dumped in front of them to be trampled into the ground.’ There was little to fear from the Germans, for at that time of the day ‘the only guards in the camp were two ancient infantrymen who wandered slowly and harmlessly around the compound and were easily trailed.’ Furthermore there were ‘too many trees, buildings and banks to make searchlights any real danger’.14 As they trudged back to their bleak accommodation, the escape team could warm themselves with the thought that it was all going remarkably well.
EIGHT
The tunnel was supposed to emerge in a dip in the ground about fifteen yards beyond the perimeter fence. There the escapers would be hidden from the guards who patrolled the wire at night. It was essential to know whether or not the tunnel was on track. There was only one way to find out. One day in mid February Eddie Asselin crawled to the end of the tunnel and poked a slim iron rod through the roof. Above ground, a group of observers loitered near the fence trying to see where it came out. The seconds passed and there was no sign of the rod. Then at last someone spotted it. It was not where it should have been. It was only a few feet beyond the wire and about thirty feet south of the line which led to the dip in the ground. It was apparent that the trajectory of the tunnel had wandered off track by some fifteen degrees during the digging. It was easily done. Compasses did not work below ground and the diggers had to rely on a protractor and string arrangement to calculate the angle. It was a setback but not a catastrophic one. The engineering team went back to work to find the right line to put the tunnel back on course. Bill, Eddie and the diggers stayed on the surface for a day or two while the problem was worked out.
All this activity, the burrowing and the shoring, the hauling and the pumping, represented only part of the escape effort. While some were toiling away in the darkness, others were engaged in more delicate work, doing what they could to ensure that when the escapers at last emerged they would have every possible chance of success. The truth was that breaking out was the easy bit. Staying at large long enough to reach friendly territory was the real challenge. To meet it you needed all the help you could possibly get.
The basis of success was good intelligence, and a competent intelligence officer was vital to success. At Schubin the role was occupied by Aidan Crawley. He had the perfect qualifications for the job. He spoke German, and early in the war was drafted into the Balkan section of the Secret Intelligence Service and sent to Turkey. His duties took him to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and he was in Sofia when the Germans took over in March 1941. He managed to escape and returned to flying with 73 Squadron in North Africa. In July that year the squadron was ordered to carry out an ill-judged ground-strafing mission against targets east of Tobruk. Of the six aircraft that took part in the raid only one returned. Crawley was brought down by ground fire and crash-landed in the middle of a company of German soldiers.
While he was being escorted to Germany by train a soldier showed him a copy of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung magazine. To his horror there was a picture of himself on the front cover, accompanied by a story describing him as a great explosives expert and dangerous British spy who had been planting bombs all over Sofia before being smuggled out. Mercifully his stubble and battleworn appearance meant he bore little resemblance to the smooth fellow in the photograph.1
Crawley, then, was a professional, and brought considerable experience and expertise to the job. Any information that had a bearing on the kriegies’ situation was his domain. By the beginning of 1943 he had managed to build up a comprehensive intelligence network that would have impressed his old masters. He relied primarily on the human touch, recruiting a team of ten officers who were called ‘traders’, charged with obtaining information and also useful items. Most of them could speak German but also possessed the necessary patience, tact and powers of persuasion to exploit their contacts with the German and Polish guards and local workers who came to the camp every day to cook, clean and carry out building work and repairs. ‘The “trader” gained a “contact” by chatting with him in a quiet corner and offering him a cigarette or piece of chocolate,’ the camp history reported. ‘Once the contact proved to be helpfully disposed, the trader would ask him for some innocuous item such as glue, ostensibly for making a bedside cupboard or shelf, for which he would pay handsomely in cigarettes, chocolate or any other commodity.’ After a while they would ask for less innocent seeming goods. By then the contact was compromised and open to blackmail. The traders found, though, that ‘this rarely was necessary’.2
Crawley could not resist using the system to disseminate some black propaganda among the camp staff. He sifted BBC bulletins and German newspapers for items likely to undermine morale. By the end of 1942 it was becoming difficult for the Germans to disguise the extent of their setback at Stalingrad. Crawley briefed the traders, who shared the bad news with their contacts. It rippled satisfyingly through the enemy ranks and was often amplified and repeated back to the traders as original information. Prisoners thought they detected a slump in the guards’ morale. It certainly had the effect of making some of their contacts even more inclined to cooperate.
By subtle human manipulation the escape-organization officers were thus able to acquire an extraordinary range of useful kit. Their contacts supplied them with clothing, badges and military insignia. They got their hands on specimen documents from which to produce forgeries, train timetables and maps. The traders also gleaned information about the layouts of Schubin and nearby Bromberg and details of railways, airfields and barracks. Prisoners leaving the camp to pick up deliveries of mail from the station were briefed by Crawley on what to look out for, and interrogated on their return. Those who were sufficiently sick to merit treatment in Bromberg hospital were quizzed about what they had seen.
All this material was of immense help to the latrine-tunnel team as they considered their onward strategy once they had emerged from the tunnel. In Stalag Luft III two schools of thought had emerged about the best way of travelling. One favoured moving in the open, making maximum use of public transport, and staying in cheap hotels. The second, the ‘hard-arses’, believed in footslogging, lying up by day and walking at night, making every effort to avoid human contact.
The first method was less risky than it sounded. In Germany, the trains were packed with shabby, submissive men who spoke neither Polish nor German, part of the army of 9 or 10 million foreign workers drafted in to run the war economy. The important thing was t
o not stand out. For that the escaper needed certain essential knowledge about the way things were done. For example, Crawley’s intelligence service learned that railway passengers were allowed to sleep in station waiting rooms, but if they didn’t have a ticket they would be arrested.
Schubin was well placed for rail connections. Bromberg was only a three-hour train journey to Danzig. In the minds of many kriegies, Danzig was the gateway to freedom. Most of the air force prison camps were closer to the Baltic than to any of Germany’s other frontiers, and the ports were full of craft sailing to and from neutral Sweden. From Danzig there was a ferry service to Stockholm and the quays were lined with cargo ships flying the Swedish flag.
The Cooler King Page 12