He was also eager to find out what happened to his alter ego Don Fair, the New Zealander with whom he had swapped identities in order to get himself transferred to Heydekrug. Around the time of the publication of his memoir Under the Wire in 2005, Bill did ‘a bit of digging’ which ‘resulted in the news that Don Fair had settled in London after the war, had lived less than a mile from [Bill’s] home in West London, had married and had a family and a very successful career as an economist.’9 It was a source of great regret that he only learned this some years after Don had passed away.
Bill’s marriage to Patricia did not last. His relationship with the BBC also faltered, as his employers grew increasingly disturbed by his Marxist views. He got married again, to Ranjana Sidhanta, a leftwing academic, and continued to get work at the corporation as a script reader in the drama department. According to his daughter Juliet he ‘had a very, very close relationship with his children and particularly his grandchildren’ – of whom there were five.10 His career had taken him off the path he had set for himself in the camps, lying on his bunk filling notebooks with stories. In the early 1960s, his dedication began to pay off. In 1961, his first novel, The Lotus in the Sky, appeared. It was followed by Choice of Arms (1962) and The Longest Way Round, the latter earning praise from Anthony Burgess. There were two more but sales did not match the critical reception. It did not matter too much to him. Money was never important and the income from his BBC earnings and his Canadian war pension kept the wolf from the door of his and Ranjana’s flat in Bayswater, west London.
In 1961 the Sagan kriegies saw their experiences dramatized in a film that became one of the most successful war movies in history. The Great Escape, produced and directed by James Sturges, was inspired by the mass break-out from North Compound of Stalag Luft III in March 1944, and contained many scenes that echoed actual events. Some of the characters were based on real individuals, others were composites of several. One of the most striking was Captain Virgil Hilts of the USAAF, played by Steve McQueen. Hilts was the ‘Cooler King’, a dedicated escapologist who whiled away his frequent spells in solitary by endlessly bouncing a baseball off his cell wall and catching it in a leather mitt. Was Hilts really Bill Ash? It was a question Bill was asked frequently and his reply was typically modest. He pointed out that he had not taken part in the Great Escape, as he had been in a different compound and anyway in the cooler at the time. He had just returned from his post-Heydekrug spell in the hands of the Gestapo and was serving a deferred sentence for having impersonated an NCO in order to get out of the camp. There are other claimants for the title of inspiration for the role but Bill seems a very plausible candidate as a model. Stalag Luft III was full of extraordinary men. There was no one quite like Bill, however, and Hilts’s indomitable courage, laconic manner and dry wit seem to catch his essence perfectly.
For all his eloquence and love of words, Bill never quite pinned down what it was that fed his determination to escape. It seemed to consist of several elements. Escaping was a way of passing the hours that limped by on leaden feet as the kriegies served a term that had no predictable end. He was also moved by a strong desire to get back into the fight. Bill believed that his career as a warrior had never properly started and felt it his duty to make a real contribution to the great cause of smashing fascism. Beyond that, though, was something intangible and universal. It was above all an act of defiance against all that was bad in the world, ‘an unwillingness’, as he had once put it, ‘to crawl in the face of oppression.’11
Bill Ash never lost the innocence that he carried with him since his earliest days as a wide-eyed boy in Texas, seeking adventures wherever they might pop up.
He died in London on 26 April 2014. He did not believe in God but he believed in the goodness of man, despite all the evidence he had witnessed to the contrary in his ninety-six years of life. His prisoner-of-war experiences convinced him there was a noble side to everyone, which would flourish if only it was allowed to. It was the great paradox of war. Conflict assuredly brought out the worst in mankind. But it brought out the best as well. ‘In peacetime we only tend to see the differences,’ he wrote, ‘not realizing that what united us then is still there now, like a tunneller approaching the surface, waiting to pull down that first handful of earth that is topped with a tuft of grass; waiting for the first breath of cold night air that will bring us to freedom.’12
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 147.
2.
Private Papers of Wing Commander H. W. Lamond, Imperial War Museum (henceforth IWM) 6293.
3.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 182.
4.
Stalag Luft III Camp History, April 1942–January 1945, The National Archives (henceforth TNA) AIR 40/2645.
5.
Arthur A. Durand, Stalag Luft III:The Secret Story, Louisiana State University Press, 1999, 108.
6.
TNA AIR 40/2645.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Crawley, 29.
9.
T. D. Calnan, Free as a Running Fox, Macdonald, 1970, 163.
10.
William Ash, A Red Square: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Revolutionary, Howard Baker, 1978, 122.
11.
Paul Brickhill, Reach For the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader DSO, DFC, Collins, 1954, 325.
12.
Ash and Foley, 324.
13.
For full details see www.icrc.org.
CHAPTER 2
1.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 5.
2.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 152.
3.
Richard Passmore, Moving Tent, Pitman Press, 1982, 48.
4.
Ibid. 31.
5.
Ash and Foley, 150.
6.
Paul Brickhill, Reach For the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader DSO, DFC, Collins, 1954, 324–5.
7.
Ibid. 324.
8.
Ibid. 324.
9.
Ash and Foley, 161.
10.
Patrick Barthropp, Paddy: The Life and Times of Wing Commander Patrick Barthropp, DFC, AFC, Howard Baker, 1990, 58.
11.
Ash and Foley, 158.
12.
Ibid. 159.
13.
Barthropp, 58.
14.
Ibid. 57.
15.
Ash and Foley, 161.
16.
TNA AIR 40/2645.
17.
Crawley, 182.
18.
IWM 6293.
19.
Ibid.
CHAPTER 3
1.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 153.
2.
TNA AIR 40/2645.
3.
TNA AIR 40/2449.
4.
Ash and Foley, 172.
5.
RAF Air Publication 1548.
6.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 5.
7.
Ash and Foley, 161.
8.
TNA AIR/40 2645.
9.
Ash and Foley, 153.
10.
William Ash, A Red Square: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Revolutionary, Howard Baker, 1978, 123.
11.
TNA WO 208/3338/703.
12.
Ash, 115.
13.
Ibid. 117.
14.
Ibid. 119.
15.
Ibid. 121.
1
6.
Ash, 121.
17.
TNA WO 208/3338/703, interview dated 20 August 1945.
18.
Ash, 117.
CHAPTER 4
1.
William Ash, A Red Square: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Revolutionary, Howard Baker, 1978, 117.
2.
Patrick Barthropp, Paddy: The Life and Times of Wing Commander Patrick Barthropp, DFC, AFC, Howard Baker, 1990, In fact his father died on 21 November 1954.
3.
Ibid. 53.
4.
Ash, 123.
5.
Barthropp, 54.
6.
Ash, 127.
7.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 59.
8.
Ash, 128.
9.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 152.
10.
Ash, 128
11.
Ash and Foley, 163.
12.
Barthropp, 57.
13.
TNA AIR 40/2645.
14.
Ash and Foley, 168.
15.
Ibid. 169.
CHAPTER 5
1.
Quoted in Simon Pearson, The Great Escaper, The Life and Death of Roger Bushell: Love, Betrayal, Big X and the Great Escape, Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 120.
2.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 161.
3.
William Ash, A Red Square: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Revolutionary, Howard Baker, 1978, 16.
4.
Ibid. 21.
5.
Ibid. 74.
6.
Canada’s Clayton Knight Committee, which encouraged volunteers from the US, had processed 6,700 applications to join the RCAF and RAF by the time America entered the war. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Squadrons.
7.
Ash, 76.
8.
Ibid. 78.
9.
Ibid. 86.
10.
TNA AIR 87/1803.
11.
Ash, 81.
12.
Ash and Foley, 107.
13.
Ibid. 108.
14.
Ibid. 109.
15.
Ibid. 110.
CHAPTER 6
1.
Arthur A. Durand, Stalag Luft III: The Secret Story, Louisiana State University Press, 1999, 105.
2.
Jonathan F. Vance, A Gallant Company: The Men of the Great Escape, Pacifica Military History, 2000, 9.
3.
T. D. Calnan, Free as a Running Fox, Macdonald, 1970, 172.
4.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 174.
5.
Ibid. 176.
6.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 199.
7.
Patrick Barthropp, Paddy: The Life and Times of Wing Commander Patrick Barthropp, DFC, AFC, Howard Baker, 1990, 58.
8.
Crawley, 200.
9.
Calnan, 173.
10.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
11.
Crawley, 200.
12.
Ash and Foley, 180.
13.
Crawley, 201.
14.
William Ash, A Red Square: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Revolutionary, Howard Baker, 1978, 129.
15.
The Gazette, 17 May 1946.
16.
Ash and Foley, 191.
17.
Ibid. 194.
18.
Ash, 130.
19.
Ash and Foley, 195.
20.
Calnan, 170.
21.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
22.
Ash and Foley, 184.
23.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
24.
Calnan, 191.
25.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
26.
Aidan Crawley, Leap Before You Look, William Collins, 1988, 178.
27.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
28.
Richard Passmore, Moving Tent, Pitman Press, 1982, 163.
29.
Private Papers of Sergeant R. C. W. Watchorn, IWM Documents 3553.
30.
Ash and Foley, 201.
31.
Ibid. 204.
CHAPTER 7
1.
T. D. Calnan, Free as a Running Fox, Macdonald, 1970, 178.
2.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 209.
3.
Calnan, 177.
4.
Ash and Foley, 209.
5.
Calnan, 194.
6.
Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, 206.
7.
Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company, Jonathan Cape, 1982, 11.
8.
Calnan, 189.
9.
Kee, 123.
10.
Crawley, 77.
11.
Calnan, 191.
12.
Crawley, 75.
13.
Ash and Foley, 212.
14.
Crawley, 206.
CHAPTER 8
1.
Henry Probert, Introduction to Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, viii.
2.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Crawley, 35.
5.
http://www.wartimememoriesproject.co.uk/peterlovegrove.
6.
TNA AIR 40/266.
7.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 216.
8.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
9.
Historical Record of IS9, www.arcre.com.
10.
Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company, Jonathan Cape, 1982, 124.
11.
T. D. Calnan, Free as a Running Fox, Macdonald, 1970, 200.
12.
Ibid. 202.
13.
Ibid. 208.
14.
Patrick Barthropp, Paddy: The Life and Times of Wing Commander Patrick Barthropp, DFC, AFC, Howard Baker, 1990, 59.
15.
Calnan, 203.
CHAPTER 9
1.
T. D. Calnan, Free as a Running Fox, Macdonald, 1970, 214.
2.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 221.
3.
Calnan, 215.
4.
Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company, Jonathan Cape, 1982, 124.
5.
Calnan, 214.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Ash and Foley, 223.
8.
Calnan, 215.
9.
Ash and Foley, 224.
10.
Kee, 127.
11.
Ibid. 129.
12.
TNA AIR 40/1908.
13.
Calnan, 218.
14.
Henry Probert, Introduction to Aidan Crawley, Escape from Germany: The Methods of Escape Used by RAF Airmen During the Second World War, HMSO, 1985, ix.
15.
Anthony Barber, Taking the Tide, Michael Russell, 1996.
CHAPTER 10
1.
William Ash with Brendan Foley, Under The Wire, Bantam, 2006, 226.
2.
&
nbsp; Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company, Jonathan Cape, 1982, 147.
The Cooler King Page 24