The Escape Artists
Page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
Captured
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
All Roads Lead to Hellminden
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
The Tunnel
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Photos
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Breakout
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Epilogue
The Holzminden Escape List—July 23 to 24, 1918
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Sample Chapter from THE WINTER FORTRESS
Buy the Book
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Neal Bascomb
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bascomb, Neal, author.
Title: The escape artists : a band of daredevil pilots and the greatest prison break of the Great War / Neal Bascomb.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058527 (print) | LCCN 2018030636 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544936904 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544937116 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Prisoner-of-war escapes—Germany—20th century. | Escaped prisoners of war—Great Britain—Biography. | Prisoner-of-war camps—Germany—20th century. | World War, 1914–1918—Prisoners and prisons. | Airmen—Great Britain—Biography.
Classification: LCC D627.G3 (ebook) | LCC D627.G3 B27 2018 (print) | DDC 940.4/7243092321—dc23
LC record available at https://LCCN.loc.gov/2017058527
Maps © Maeve Norton, Scholastic Inc.
Cover design by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Cover images: front cover and spine © Getty Images (WWI planes; barbed wire and wall) and Shutterstock (watchtower; dark sky); back cover © Daily Mirror / Mirrorpix via Getty Images
Author photograph © Meryl Schenker Photography
v1.0818
To Liz and Susan, my editors par excellence
Stone Walls do not a Prison make. Nor Iron bars a Cage.
—Inscription to Holzminden cell wall,
from Richard Lovelace poem “To Althea, from Prison”
It seems to me that we owed it to our self-respect and to our position as British officers to attempt to escape, and to go on attempting to escape, in spite of all hardships.
—A.J. Evans, inveterate World War I breakout artist
Main German prisoner of war camps in the narrative
A Map of Holzminden
A cross-section of the working area and entrance to the tunnel
Progression of the tunnel
The final route of Blain, Kennard, and Gray, as well as Rathborne’s train journey
Dramatis Personae
Key Holzminden Escape Artists
Captain David Gray, “Father of the Tunnel,” Royal Flying Corps (RFC) pilot
Second Lieutenant Cecil Blain, RFC pilot
Second Lieutenant Caspar Kennard, RFC pilot
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Rathborne, senior British officer, Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) wing commander
Sublieutenant Leonard James Bennett, RNAS observer
Other Holzminden Prisoners
Second Lieutenant Frederick William Harvey, “the Poet,” Gloucestershire Regiment
Lieutenant William “Shorty” Colquhoun, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, originator of the tunnel
Second Lieutenant William Ellis, RFC pilot, originator of the tunnel
Captain Joseph Rogers, member of the Pink Toes, Durham Light Infantry
Captain Frank “Mossy” Moysey, member of the Pink Toes, Suffolk Regiment
Private John “Dick” Cash, camp orderly, Australian Imperial Force
Lieutenant Harold Medlicott, RFC pilot
Captain Hugh Durnford, adjutant to Rathborne, Royal Field Artillery
Second Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, Zeppelin killer, RFC pilot
Captain Douglas Grant, London Scottish Regiment
German Officers
General Karl von Hänisch, head of the 10th Army Corp Division
Karl “Milwaukee Bill” Niemeyer, Ströhen and Holzminden commandant
Heinrich “Windy Dick” Niemeyer, Clausthal camp officer
Commandant Blankenstein, Osnabrück camp
Commandant Gröben, Gütersloh camp
Commandant Courth, Crefeld camp
Commandant Dietz, Schwarmstedt camp
Commandant Wolfe, Clausthal camp
Prologue
July 14, 1941
For all his wife, Elsie, and two young children knew, Jim Bennett was leaving for an overnight business trip. As he was the eponymous owner of a small import-export business that traded in china, couture clothes, and other fine goods, they expected such absences, even during wartime—perhaps especially during wartime. No effort could be spared in keeping the bottom line from seeping red.
Dressed in a light-gray tailored suit with a white linen handkerchief in his pocket, he bid his family goodbye and walked out the front door of his five-bedroom brick house in Northwood, a bucolic neighborhood threaded with golf courses fifteen miles northwest of London. The son of a farmer, Bennett had come a long way from the rolling fields of Somerset.
Carrying a brown leather suitcase heavier than one might imagine he would need for an overnight, Bennett joined the others heading down Kewferry Road at morning rush hour to the Metropolitan line London Underground station. Few could keep to his normal brisk pace, even with the skies threatening a thunderstorm. At forty-nine and with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair, Bennett remained trim and fit.
On the half-hour ride into the city, there was plenty of time to page through the Daily Express. Its headlines read, “Moscow Denies Claims by Berlin” and “Nazis Flee from Syria.” Most interesting to Bennett was the story about the British air raid on Bremen, Germany. On the thirty-second-straight night of attacks into Germany, bombers had struck the city’s shipbuilding yards and factories. Two British planes had not returned to base, the fate of their crews unknown. With the number of these raids accelerating every month, and more and more airmen shot down, Bennett knew that his particular expertise was in very high demand.
He switched lines at Baker Street and arrived soon after at Paddington railway station, not far from his offices. Three months before, the station had suffered a direct hit by German bombers that demolished the southwest corner and killed eighteen people. In quick order, the rubble was hauled away from the tracks and train service resumed. Still, the piles of bricks and hollowed-out windows bore witness to the destruction that could rain down on London at any moment. Bennett boarded the 10:30 Great Western to Penryn, Cornwall, and settled into the second-class carriage for the five-hour journey.
His firm had no business on the southw
estern tip of England. Nor was he traveling there for its sandy beaches, now fortified with pillboxes, minefields, and barbwire enclosures against the threat of a German attack. Instead he was headed to the Royal Air Force base at Predannack to lecture fighter-squadron pilots on what to do if they found themselves captured or on the run in enemy-occupied territory. In his suitcase was an Optiscope projector that looked like a small cannon, a number of slides, purses of foreign currency, silk maps, and compasses hidden in button studs. Earlier that morning, before his family awoke, he had taken these items out of the locked chest of drawers he kept in the house.
While running his import-export business, Bennett also worked for MI9, a top secret organization within British military intelligence. Recruited immediately after its founding, he was sworn to secrecy, forbidden from revealing his involvement even to family or friends. MI9 had been started in 1939 under the leadership of Major Norman Crockatt, a medaled veteran of the Royal Scots and former stockbroker. Its purpose was to codify and teach principles of evasion and escape for the use of Allied soldiers, airmen, and naval personnel caught behind enemy lines.
Crockatt did not draw these principles from Boy’s Own fiction or mothballed old tales, although there were stories aplenty of dramatic breakouts in the history of war and strife. Empress Matilda escaped from Oxford Castle in 1142, avoiding her pursuers by hiding in the snow under a white sheet. In 1621 the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius was smuggled out of Loevestein Castle, where he was being held prisoner, in a book chest. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the French statesman Léon Gambetta rose up and away from a besieged Paris in a hot-air balloon. Winston Churchill himself escaped from a Boer prisoner of war camp in South Africa, by jumping over a fence and making off. These true stories were sedate compared with the adventures of the literary Count of Monte Cristo, to say nothing of Odysseus’s supernatural deliverance out of Calypso’s grotto.
For MI9, however, Crockatt called upon the lessons learned from the firsthand experiences of those who had escaped the Germans in World War I. And one of the participants in the greatest, the most successful, breakout of that war was Jim Bennett.
Late in the afternoon, Bennett arrived at Redruth station, where he was met by an RAF driver who whisked him southward to the newly built Predannack Airfield, near Mullion. On the apron of grass stood a line of Hawker Hurricanes and Bristol Beaufighters. They were a sight more advanced than the wood, linen, and wire-strung contraptions in which Bennett used to hunt U-boats as a Royal Naval Air Service sublieutenant.
At 8:45 p.m., his slide projector at the ready, Bennett stood at the head of a crowded hall. In his hand, he held a sheet of paper roughly torn from a notebook, upon which he had scrawled his lecture notes in bullet points. Addressing the assembled airmen, he spoke of the possibility of their being taken prisoner by the enemy, and stressed that if captured, they had a “duty to escape.” Britain needed them back in its ranks. An escape attempt would also divert the attention of the Nazis, requiring the allocation of men and resources that might otherwise be used on the front line against Britain and its allies. Bennett added that if captured, the men’s best opportunity to flee was the “earliest opportunity,” either while in a makeshift detention spot or during transport to a POW camp. Once arrived, their chances of breaking out diminished precipitously. Yet even suffering extreme mental and physical stress, Bennett stated, they were to remember that their war effort was by no means over.
He went on to detail escape routes from Germany and to explain how to create a simple code for secret messages. He stressed the need to stay fit during captivity and the importance of having a compass in order to reach the border. All of these lessons he framed within the context of his own story of crash-landing into the sea in 1917, fifteen miles from Zeebrugge, the Belgian port controlled at that time by the Germans. After he and the plane’s pilot had drifted in the downed craft for almost an hour, a U-boat surfaced beneath them and its crew seized the two men.
Bennett illustrated his account with slides showing his aircraft, the camps in which he had been imprisoned, coded letters, and tools used in various escape attempts. He spoke about Holzminden, the most notorious POW camp of the Great War, and the tunnel he and his fellow inmates had dug to escape its walls—how, over months, they had scraped away dirt, clay, and stone to burrow an underground passageway, inch by inch. He chronicled their preparations for the treacherous 150-mile journey through Germany to reach the Dutch border, how they had smuggled in supplies and hidden them in fake ceiling beams.
Although Bennett had delivered this lecture many times, his voice still conveyed the range of emotion he had experienced during the breakout from Holzminden. No doubt his audience was riveted as he described the events of that night: The thrill of the call to go. The first moments moving into the tunnel on his belly, clawing his way forward in the darkness without enough space overhead even to raise himself up on his forearms. The stalled advance. The rats scampering over his arms and legs. The muffled grunts and panicked breaths of the men in front of him and those behind. The straps of his escape kit getting caught on a rock. The hour it took to travel a distance he could have walked in a minute. The tunnel roof that was slowly collapsing on top of him, threatening to entomb him and all those who remained. The terror of possibly facing a rifle when he surfaced at last . . .
The sense of responsibility Bennett felt made his retelling all the more visceral and electric. The young men gathered before him were running defensive patrols against German raiders and participating in offensive sweeps over France. There was a good chance that some of them would soon find themselves behind enemy lines, held as POWs or on the run. Given the Nazi reputation for torturing, and sometimes hanging, captured airmen, Bennett knew that his story, the story of the leaders of the 1918 Holzminden breakout, might well save the life of a pilot in that hall.
Part I
Captured
One
The sky lightened from gray to pink as the No. 70 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps prepared to take off from its base. Already the din of shelling sounded in the distance. It was August 7, 1916, at Fienvillers, twenty miles from the Somme battlefront. “Contact, sir!” called the mechanic, his hand on the black walnut propeller of a Sopwith 1½ Strutter biplane.
“Contact!” answered its pilot, Cecil Blain, from the fore cockpit, pushing the throttle open halfway, allowing fuel to rush into the nine-cylinder rotary engine. The mechanic jerked the propeller downward counterclockwise. With a belch of blue smoke, the Sopwith sputtered to life, the rush of air from the spinning propeller flattening the grass on the airfield behind the tailplane. As the engine warmed, its castor oil lubricant filled the air with the odor of burned almonds, nearly overwhelming Blain and his observer, Charles Griffiths. Seated in the aft cockpit, the observer’s role was critical. His various tasks included radio communication, aerial reconnaissance, and manning the guns. Once they finished their flight checks, Blain waved his arm fore and aft, and the mechanic yanked out the wooden chocks securing the biplane’s wheels in place.
All of nineteen years of age, the youngest pilot in his squadron, Blain might well have stepped straight off a Hollywood silent-movie screen. With his square shoulders, handsome boyish face, sweep of ruffled blond hair, and the perennial glint in his eye, he was well suited for the part of troublesome rascal. In the cockpit that morning he looked like he might have been playing the role of Arctic explorer. Over a woolen pullover and a double set of underclothes, he sported a heavy leather jacket with fur-lined collar. He wore heavy boots and thick gloves. His neck was sheathed in a white silk scarf, and his face was slathered with whale oil and covered by a balaclava and goggles. He would need all that protection to withstand the blistering cold at ten thousand feet.
After his squadron commander’s plane took off, Blain moved his Sopwith onto the runway. Following a quick look over his shoulder to check that Griffiths was ready, he directed the biplane forward. Its red, white, and blue roundels stood in
sharp relief to the mud-green fuselage. Throttle full open now, engine buzzing, the Sopwith picked up momentum. Blain fought against the crosswinds buffeting the wings and the inclination of the biplane’s nose to lift up too early. Of the many accidents these rudimentary machines suffered, takeoffs accounted for almost half. Finally at flying speed, Blain pulled back the control stick and the Sopwith’s wheels lifted gently free from the ground. Banking eastward, they soon left behind their tented camp, in an orchard next to the aerodrome, then the bundle of thirty ramshackle cottages and the simple church that constituted Fienvillers.
Once assembled in a V formation, the five Sopwiths set off eastward, the sky emblazoned bright orange ahead. Their mission was reconnaissance of Maubeuge, deep behind German enemy lines, to locate some munitions factories and an airship base housing Zeppelins. For a limited spell, Blain and Griffiths could enjoy the thrill of soaring through the open air. The horizons stretched out in every direction. Mist clung to the low hollows of the hills, and chimney smoke rose from the surrounding villages. Compared to their maps—main roads clearly delineated in red, railways in black, forests in green—the French countryside was an endless patchwork of colored fields threaded with gray lines and shadowed by clouds. In such a setting, pilots often found themselves as bewildered as a hiker in a dense forest, wandering in circles, trying to find a landmark.
But as they approached the trenches of the Western Front, there was no mistaking their position. “It looks from the air as if the gods had made a gigantic steam roller, 40 miles wide and run it from the coast to Switzerland, leaving its spike holes behind as it went,” wrote one airman of the field of battle. Another described it thus: “Open for us to inspect were all the secrets of this waste of tortured soil, a barrier along which millions of armed men crouched in foul trenches . . . Below us lay displayed the zigzagging entrenchments, the wriggling communications to the rear, the untidy belts of rusty wire.” Few accounts told of the innumerable dead soldiers rotting in no-man’s-land, but they would have been visible to pilots that passed over the cratered chalk soil.