by Paul Simpson
Undeterred, Bushell ordered the men to reopen and continue work on Harry as soon as it was safe to do so. From overheard conversations, it seemed that the Germans had been fooled: they did not consider the possibility of there being another tunnel being as advanced, one of the reasons Bushell had wanted to dig three simultaneously in the first place. (It was around this time Williams, Codner and Philpot escaped from the other compound.)
After work recommenced on 10 January 1944, Harry was completed that March, with two halfway houses – known as Piccadilly and Leicester Square – ready as resting spaces for the escapers, with the second one directly beneath the perimeter fence. Despite warnings from the Germans that the punishment for escaping would be considerably more severe than it had previously been (usually a spell of solitary confinement), the escape committee resolved to continue with the plan. Some of their key members were moved to a satellite camp five miles away at the start of March, but that was not enough to deter the POWs.
A date of 24 March was chosen, and even though the weather wasn’t particularly good – which would cause problems for any of the escapers who had to travel across country – Bushell decided that they had to proceed. The Germans had increased their surveillance, and it was only a matter of time before the tunnel was discovered. No trains ran on Sundays, so if they didn’t go that day, they would have to wait until Monday, and by that time it would no longer be a new moon and they would lose the advantage of darkness. A huge logistical operation had been prepared to ensure that all the escapers had the necessary items, and on the morning of Friday 24, Bushell gave the order to proceed. All the forged documents then had that date (or an appropriate one as necessary) inserted.
Bushell still hoped to get 200 men out through Harry. Included in the first hundred were the group known as serial offenders, who were those with the best chance of making it back to England: they had escaped before and many of them spoke German. The other seventy or so were men who had spent the most time working underground on the tunnel. The second group of one hundred was selected by lots from the other five hundred men who had contributed to Harry; these were nicknamed “hard-arsers” and weren’t expected to have a great deal of chance of making it. Their benefit was, as POW Jack Lyon later explained, “to contribute to the success of the whole operation – the more people on the loose at the same time, the more confusion and difficulties for the Germans.”
The night of 24 March was bitterly cold and when the escapers arrived in Hut 104 to travel through Harry, according to some accounts they discovered that the entrance had frozen solid. It took ninety minutes to force the hatch open, and then the plan hit a further snag. When the tunnel was pushed through to the surface at the far end, it hadn’t reached quite as far as they had anticipated: the exit wasn’t within the treeline, but was out in the open. They quickly came up with a solution: a rope was tied from the ladder at the end of the tunnel to a nearby tree. When each man came through the tunnel, he waited for two tugs on the rope to indicate that it was clear to run from the exit into the trees; when he reached shelter, he then kept watch to advise the next escaper.
This slowed the escape down tremendously: Bushell had hoped to get one man a minute through. Instead, the rate dwindled to ten per hour. It was quickly agreed that no one with a number higher than 100 was going to be able to go through, and even that wasn’t achieved – the electric lighting in the camp (and therefore in the tunnel) was switched off because of an air raid, and then there was a small collapse in the tunnel itself which had to be repaired.
Seventy-six prisoners of war managed to get through Harry before the exodus was spotted by the guards. At 4.55 a.m., the seventy-seventh man was seen, and surrendered. The alarm was raised, but the Germans took so long to reach Hut 104 that the POWs were able to burn their fake papers. The Germans were unable to find the tunnel entrance, and in the end sent one of their men through from the other end to locate it.
Only three of the escapees made a home run. Norwegian pilots Per Bergsland and Jens Müller reached Sweden; Dutch airman Bram van der Stok headed south through France, and finally gained safety at the British Consulate in Spain. Hitler was furious when he heard about the escape, and wanted all of them found and executed; in the end, when Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goring both pointed out that this would be political suicide, since there would be no way of covering it up, he compromised at fifty. The pursuit and disposal of the prisoners was handed to the Gestapo and of the other seventy-three, fifty were executed – not all at once, as the feature film account of the escape suggested, but singly or in pairs as they were captured. Roger Bushell’s death certificate was typed up as soon as he was captured at Saarbrucken, one of the first escapers to be caught – there was a small error in his travel documents.
At Stalag Luft III, Harry was pumped full of sewage, topped with sand. A few of the escapers were returned there, but on 6 April, news was passed on that “forty-one of the escapers were shot while resisting arrest or in their attempt to escape again after being recaptured.” Nine days later, a list of forty-seven escapers who had been murdered was posted within the camp; a further three were added a little later. As Hitler had demanded, fifty of the POWs had paid the ultimate price. It was described by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden as a “cold act of butchery”, and post-war, various members of the Gestapo were held accountable for the executions.
A new tunnel was started by the Escape Committee, but more for morale-boosting than because they expected it to be particularly effective. Before it could be used, the Second World War came to an end.
By pure coincidence, around the same time as the seventy-six escapers from Stalag Luft III were making their way through Sagan on the morning of 25 March 1943, another trio of fugitives from the Germans were making their way through the town. John McCallum, his brother Jimmy, and their friend Joe Harkin had managed to get away from Stalag Luft VIII-B.
McCallum had been captured in France during the German invasion in 1940 and sent to the camp in Upper Silesia, close to the Polish border. VIII-B had been established to deal with the prisoners captured during the initial Nazi blitzkriegs so very quickly became a melting pot of different nationalities.
At VIII-B, McCallum was reunited with his brother – who thought he had been killed in action in France – and Harkin. Escape wasn’t possible for the first year of imprisonment: McCallum’s ankle had been very seriously injured during a battle, and he needed to rebuild mobility. However, escape attempts were plentiful during that time, and the three men took note of what worked, and, more importantly, what didn’t.
Many of the POWs volunteered for working parties, simply to relieve the monotony of their existence in the camps. The McCallums and Harkin ended up working on a railway construction project and engineered their own departure from that in 1942, after managing to persuade the Germans that they were non-commissioned officers. They then volunteered to join a party working in a holiday village in the mountains, and were moved to a much less well-defended camp nearby.
This brought them in contact with a lot of the locals – particularly the young ladies – and in order to have some enjoyable fraternization, they built a tunnel from their quarters to an outside toilet near the barbed wire. They had no intention of using this for a proper escape: according to McCallum, in working parties, there was an unwritten rule about not escaping from a good camp, in case it jeopardized the others who were left behind. For some time, McCallum used the tunnel to go for assignations with local girl Traudl, and later some of the POWs went out to steal a radio so they could keep up with the BBC news.
In early 1944, after two years, the working party was wound up, and the men returned to Stalag Luft VIII-B. Traudl offered to help the McCallums and Harkin with an escape: she would have access to information they would need. The idea was that they would volunteer for another party, escape from there, and return to Traudl’s village. However, the escape committee in VIII-B refused to assist them, as the policy wasn’t to help firs
t-time escapers, no matter how good their plan might be.
They were sent to a factory in Jagerndorf, around ten miles from Bad Karlsbrunn where Traudl awaited them. However, this wasn’t a lax regime like the camp they had been in before: they were kept in a concrete blockhouse, with iron-barred windows and barbed wire surrounding it. They had arrived on a Friday, intending to leave that Sunday, but were taken aback by the security measures.
Thanks to help from a couple of fellow Scots who had been working on an escape previously, they were able to go on the Monday: the other POWs had already cut through the iron bars in the windows. Harkin had smuggled pliers into the camp with them, and made short work of the barbed wire. That easily, they were out and heading for Bad Karlsbrunn.
While his brother and Harkin waited in a hut in the woods, McCallum visited Traudl and with her help, forged various documents. At 2 a.m. on 25 March, they made their way down to the local train station and caught a train to Sagan, arriving there around midday. They had hoped to look for help from the local Resistance. However, they weren’t welcomed with open arms: Sagan was being shut down by the Gestapo following the escape from Stalag Luft III. McCallum decided that the only thing to do was continue with their journey, and head for Frankfurt. They were lucky: no one stopped them to check their documents, and they were able to leave Sagan safely. (Their papers did eventually pass muster when checked on one of their train journeys.) They arrived in Stettin, and Harkin, a former Merchant Navy seaman, found a ship on which they could stow away to Sweden. They reached Malmo, and went to the British Consulate. Shortly after D-Day, 6 June 1944, they were flown back to the UK. Although she waited for McCallum for some time, Traudl eventually married a Czech officer.
An equally daring escape was tried by another pair of prisoners, but unlike the events chronicled above, this hasn’t received a lot of attention. Perhaps this is because it features German soldiers trying to flee from Great Britain?
Leutnant Heinz Schnabel and Oberleutnant Harry Wappler were being held at Camp 15 at Shap about ten miles from Penrith in Cumbria. The former Shap Wells Hotel had been set up as a prisoner-of-war camp, with around 250 naval and Luftwaffe officers held there fenced in with two rings of barbed wire, as well as searchlights, while guards lived in Nissan huts in the grounds. Wappler’s Heinkel He111 bomber had been shot down over Newport and the pilot was taken to the Royal Herbert Hospital, in Woolwich, where he met Schnabel, a fighter pilot who was shot down in his Messerschmitt ME 109 on 5 September 1940.
On 24 November 1941, the two men made their escape from the camp. Some sources say that they hid in a laundry basket, others that they went for a walk, having given their word that they would return. Either way, they were equipped with identification papers they had forged using art materials supplied to them by their guards, which claimed that they were Dutch airmen.
The two Germans put flying jackets over their German uniforms – particularly at that stage of the Second World War, no one wanted to risk being accused of spying – and headed by train into Carlisle. From there they went to RAF Kingstown just north of the town, and were able to bluff their way onto the airfield.
Their plan was simple: steal a plane, and fly back to Germany. There were about fifty Miles Magister aircraft sitting on the airfield, which were being used for training flights. A ground mechanic eagerly helped them to start up, and they headed south, landing at another airfield to refuel. From there they set off across the North Sea.
Unfortunately for them, they had miscalculated. They needed to travel about 365 miles to the Dutch coast, and the maximum flight range of the Magister, in ideal conditions, was 367 miles. The margin of error was too small, and when they started to encounter bad weather, the two Germans realized that they would have to turn back. Very reluctantly, they turned around, and landed near Great Yarmouth on the Suffolk coast.
Still posing as Dutch airmen, they were taken to RAF Horsham, but their ruse was seen through there when news of the theft of the Magister arrived. They still had time to have a meal in the officers’ mess before they were rumbled. For their exploits, the pair received twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement. Shortly afterwards they were sent to Canada, where they spent the rest of the war.
Sources:
Gill, Anton: The Great Escape (Review, 2002)
McCallum, John: The Long Way Home: The Other Great Escape (Birlinn, 2005)
Free as a Bird
Over the course of the Second World War, there were many daring escapes from Colditz Castle, quite a few of which were ultimately successful, with the prisoners of war making “home runs”. Whole books have been written charting these escapades, so rather than try to give too broad an overview, this is the tale of just one of the attempts, which, as events transpired, was never seen through to fruition. It’s the story of the Colditz Cock, the infamous glider.
Colditz Castle has become synonymous with the POW camp that began there in November 1939. The movie The Colditz Story in 1955 was one of the first to tell the tale, based on the books by Major Pat Reid published in 1952 and 1953. A major BBC television series from 1972 to 1974 inspired a popular board game (devised by Reid himself in its early incarnations), and still attracted large audiences for cable television when it was repeated in 2011. Even now, the townsfolk are happy to cooperate with documentaries that revisit that period.
The castle sits several hundred feet above the town of Colditz in Germany, and in its long history had been used as a sanatorium and insane asylum.
Many of the prisoners who were sent to Oflag IV-C, Colditz’s official designation, tried to escape. They attempted disguises; they duplicated keys; one small officer even managed to hide inside a Red Cross packing case and was taken up to the German command area, from where he was able to flee (unfortunately he was apprehended while trying to get on board a ship in Danzig a week later). There were various tunnels, and in one six-week period in 1942, twelve officers escaped from the castle, with six of them making home runs. Heinrich Himmler may have claimed that the castle was escape-proof, but the POWs were determined to prove him wrong.
The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III changed a great deal at Colditz, as it did in all the camps around the Third Reich. Previously, escaping had been, to an extent, regarded as an adventure. Of course the Germans would shoot at escapers, but usually with intent to wound rather than kill (the one fatality at Colditz came when a bullet ricocheted into Lieutenant Mike Sinclair’s heart). However, after it became clear that the Nazis were now regarding escape as punishable with death, the predilection of the officers to “have a go” was reined in. MI9, the branch of British military intelligence that assisted potential escapers, advised caution.
However, one plan was still being worked on in secret: the Colditz Cock, the brainchild of Flight Lieutenant Bill Goldfinch, who had been sent to Colditz from Stalag Luft III after tunnelling out, and Lieutenant Tony Rolt, a former racing driver. In the winter of 1943, Goldfinch was standing in a room overlooking Colditz town and observed the way in which the snow drifted up and over the top of the castle. It showed that there was a really smooth flow of air, which would be perfect to use in a glider. As he explained to a Channel 4 documentary in 2000, “All the other methods of escape had been attempted by somebody. This seemed much simpler to me – to stand on the roof and jump off.”
They would need to improvize a runway along the forty-foot ridge, and then use a counterweight to catapult themselves off the roof down towards a field on the other side of the River Mulde, about five hundred yards away. On the roof, they were out of the way of the searchlights, but they would need to build the glider in secret within the castle walls, and then get it into position. A bath filled with concrete would be fastened with a bed rope to the end of the glider. When it was dropped from the third floor of the chapel block, it would be enough to send two escapers on their way.
The escape committee gave their blessing to the attempt, reasoning, in part, that work on the glider would keep the officer
s focused. To his delight, Goldfinch found a two-volume book in the castle library entitled Aircraft Design, which explained exactly what was needed to build and fly a glider. A false wall was built in the attic above the chapel, which made the upper room seven feet shorter, but the POWs gambled on the Germans never measuring the rooms. A trapdoor in the ceiling allowed entrance to this new secret room, in which construction work began on 1 January 1944.
Sixteen men were directly involved with the work. The originators – Goldfinch, Rolt, RAF pilot Jack Best and Jeff Wardle – were assisted by twelve “apostles” building the glider, while forty others kept watch and diverted the Germans’ attention. Thirty-two ribs had to be made for the wings and the tailplane, all of which had to be exactly accurate or the glider wouldn’t fly. In the end, over 6,000 different pieces of wood were used, while electricity cable was repurposed for the control cables, and beds were taken apart for their bolts. Saws were created from the spring of an old gramophone. But the prisoners played fair: the Germans had allowed them to use tools for the flourishing theatre in the camp grounds so long as they weren’t used to help with an escape. Not one of these ever went into the workshop.
The skeleton of the glider was complete by the summer of 1944. Paillasse covers were then stretched over the top of the fuselage, and painted with what the POWs called “dope” to keep it tight – although none of it was waterproof, meaning that the glider’s sole flight would need to be on a dry night.
The glider never flew. It soon became clear that the tide of the war was turning against the Germans. The D-Day invasion in June 1944 saw the Allies start to march on Berlin, but those in the camps were unsure how their captors would react, particularly one group held at Colditz, the “Prominente”. These were relatives of key members of the Allied forces, such as Winston Churchill’s nephew by marriage, a nephew of King George VI, and the son of the American Ambassador to Britain. When the POWs learned that squads of SS soldiers were now stationed in Colditz town, probably with orders to exterminate the Prominente if necessary, it was decided to hold the glider as a potential lifeline to alert the outside world of an impending massacre.