by Neal Bascomb
In early May Jim Bennett was hacking away at a section of earth. He lifted up slightly on his knees and elbows to bring a pillow case filled with his shift’s diggings up alongside his body. Every additional foot of tunnel seemed to bring another obstacle. In an earlier shift, he had misread the compass they used to keep on a straight line, and the sap took an unnecessary twist that had to be course-corrected. Water was beginning to seep into the tunnel—not enough to require channeling it out, but the walls were collapsing in parts, and a half-buried tunneler had to be dragged loose by his feet. Then there was the difficulty of hauling out the excavated dirt and stone. The relay system with the basin and rope became impossible. The rope got abraded on rocks and kept snapping, and the basin upended on the sap’s many twists and turns. Now the digger filled a sack at the tunnel face and dragged it out with him.
Already exhausted, and anxious for some fresh air, Bennett began his long journey back in the half darkness. He squirmed a few inches backward, set his candle down by his chin, then pulled the cumbersome pillowcase of dirt and stone after him. Squirm. Set candle. Pull. Squirm. Set candle. Pull. He had to make sure not to knock down any of the braces, nor to disturb the tin-can snake that provided precious oxygen to the tunnel, nor to snuff out the light that kept any grip on sanity possible. A half hour—more—passed before he finally reached the chamber under the stairs.
Despite all the challenges, the tunnel now measured roughly forty yards. They were almost underneath the farmland adjacent to the prison. Twenty more yards of digging and they would reach the rye field where they intended to exit. The tall rye would provide cover from the guard stationed outside the fence on the night of the escape.
Bennett’s kit was almost ready. Every week more parcels came from his mother—and his erstwhile partner Roy Fitzgerald. He was as fit as could be expected. The tunnel was hard work, but it kept him active. So too did the soccer matches Niemeyer now allowed on the Spielplatz. Finally, Niemeyer had relented on the onerous demands Hänisch had placed on allowing parole walks outside the walls. These strolls gave them some insight into the hillsides—and the breadth of the river Weser, which they would have to cross on their first night out.
Although Holzminden was becoming overcrowded with the deluge of prisoners from the now-stalled March offense, life there had reached a kind of equilibrium. Niemeyer still ranted and raved, charged outrageous prices at the canteen, and sentenced men to solitary confinement for the slightest offense. The prisoners struck back in their own ways. They charmed Niemeyer’s precious dog with treats, sending the commandant into paroxysms of rage when his hound would not go to him when called. They refused to frequent the canteen until prices were lowered. They held parties, concerts, and theater productions in the barracks as if they had not a care in the world. As Bennett wrote his mother, “I am in very good health and quite fit to put up with any bad times the Germans take it up in their heads to give us.” Despite this conviction, he was eager as ever to be free—and certain that he soon would be, thanks to the tunnel.
Then a run of bad luck and imprudence put everything in jeopardy. First, rumors of the scheme began to filter throughout the camp. With roughly two dozen individuals in the know, and the strange movements of officers in and out of their quarters, keeping their activities secret was unlikely. But it was one thing to hear a rumor and another thing altogether to receive useful intelligence on the tunnel plot. Then an orderly known to spy for Niemeyer in exchange for gifts of wine began asking around camp about where the tunnel’s entrance was hidden. Betrayal was too great a risk for the tunnelers, and one night, while drunk, the orderly “accidentally” tumbled down the steps in Block B and cracked his skull. He never made another inquiry.
This risk averted, a greater one followed. In mid-May, on orders from Hänisch, Niemeyer instituted campwide reprisal measures in response to those put in place against German officers in Britain. Parole walks were suspended. All theater productions, concerts, and outdoor games were canceled. Worst of all for the tunnelers, a new schedule of roll calls began. Instead of twice a day at 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., the prisoners were now forced to gather on the Spielplatz at 9:00 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 3:30 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. These frequent assemblies cut straight into the middle of the four-hour tunnel shifts.
The tunnelers tried standing in for those on shift. When the names of the working crew were called, their mates answered for them, then moved down the line to respond to their own names. They pulled it off for a few days but were sure that continuing the charade day after day would surely see them caught. Instead, they began to rush to and from their digging sessions between the 11:30 and 3:30 roll calls, the only time of the day when most guards were away from Block B due to lunch. Roll calls took at least a half hour and, even hurrying, the teams of three had less than two hours underground.
Their recklessness quickly cost them. One day, after finishing a shift, a working party was rushing out of the east door of Block B without taking the usual precautions, and one of the officers was recognized by a passing guard. The guard tried to stop him, but the officer fled into the barracks through his own entrance. Niemeyer was informed of the incident, and a search of Block B followed, but the guard could not identify the specific officer.
Niemeyer ordered all prisoners onto the Spielplatz. An exhaustive inspection of the orderlies’ barracks began. The tunnelers waited for the fateful moment when their secret door would be found. They imagined Niemeyer parading out of the barracks, a victorious grin on his face showing his delight at foiling another escape. Interrogations and punishments were sure to follow. After a long time, the prisoners were ordered back into their barracks. Once again, the secret door had eluded discovery. The tunnelers breathed easy at last.
Incensed that nothing had been found, Niemeyer vented his spleen on the guard who had failed to identify the officer in the orderly uniform by sending him to solitary for eight days. He also closed off the attic floor in Block B’s officer section and posted a permanent guard on the steps outside the orderlies’ door to check anyone who went in or came out. With this, the tunnelers lost their access point. It was a devastating blow.
The POW camp at Bad Colberg was almost two hundred miles due south of Holzminden. It was housed in a former sanatorium famous for its thermal springs. Will Harvey could not have asked for better surroundings. A villa. A nice room. Open windows. Tennis courts. Pine-covered hillsides with wildflowers and butterflies to enjoy on walks. Freshly shaven and looking years younger than he had the previous dark winter, he could almost forgive the camp commandant, a stubborn, dim-witted fool called Kröner, and his adjutant, Captain Beetz, to whom he gave a free hand, for spoiling the whole atmosphere.
Harvey had suffered from some ill-tempered jailers over the course of his long captivity, and he considered Beetz “the worst man in Germany.” In the past, under such a hard regime Harvey would have retreated into himself, but Holzminden had changed him. He labored over his poetry, and he gave lectures, including one on the causes and effects of, and remedies to, war, in which he argued, “What, when all is said and done, is war but that same old savage, stupid mode of settling differences which was abolished and replaced by law in the case of the individual.”
Harvey also made it his duty to resist oppression at every turn. One day in early May, guards stopped an attempt to cut through the wire fence. In their subsequent search of the prison, they found escape contraband in three rooms. Harvey was an occupant of one of the rooms, which he shared with Harold Medlicott and Joseph Walter. The two incurable “jug-breakers” had been sent to the camp by Niemeyer after their failed run from Holzminden. On their arrival at Bad Colberg, the commandant had warned them that if they managed to break out again, “They would never get back alive.”
Beetz ordered that the officers in those three rooms report to his office for questioning all day, every day, until the owners of the contraband confessed. Given that the Hague Conventions forbade collective punishment, Harvey and the oth
ers decided not to show up. The following morning, Kröner lined them up, demanding an admittance of disobedience that would result in their court-martial. When Kröner demanded to know why the officers had refused to report, Harvey answered for them.
“Herr Commandant,” he said. “I am a lawyer. I have read much law, but never yet have I discovered any civilized people punishing prisoners without telling them what they were being punished for. I have not been told.” If the order to report daily was not rescinded, Harvey said, he would send a complaint about the collective punishment to the Dutch ambassador in Berlin. Harvey won a reprieve for himself, but the others were court-martialed. Despite his defense of his fellow officers and submission of evidence of collective punishment, the judges ruled against them and ordered a sentence of months of solitary at another prison fortress.
No threat from Kröner would stop Medlicott and Walter. Prior to their removal, on May 18, they escaped. They were caught on the run, and on the morning of May 21, Beetz ordered eight of his most fearsome guards to retrieve them at the local train station. Before leaving, one of them was overheard saying, “Yes, they are two very brave men, but they will be shot.”
Later that afternoon, the guards returned to the camp with two stretchers covered in dark sheets—clearly the bodies of Medlicott and Walter. According to Kröner, they had been shot in the Pfaffenholz forest after a “sudden dash for freedom” from the station. The senior British officer at Bad Colberg demanded to see the bodies. If they had been killed in the manner reported, the nature of their wounds would match the story. Kröner refused any such examination. While the guards watching over the bodies were distracted by several British officers, another officer rushed up and threw aside the sheets. Medlicott’s and Walter’s bodies were riddled with over a dozen bullets and several bayonet wounds. It was evident they had been murdered; Kröner’s story was a patent lie.
The bodies were buried, and Kröner refused an investigation. The Germans reported that Medlicott had proven himself “one of the most dangerous characters in the country,” and he and his partner were simply shot while trying to escape. Heartbroken over their deaths, Harvey vowed to never forget what the Germans had done and to fight as best he could for all his comrades in captivity.
Seventeen
At the eastern end of Block B’s ground floor, Cecil Blain sat in the doorway of Room 34 in a deck chair, book in hand. He was not really reading; his job was to watch out for approaching guards. After a guard was positioned in front of the orderlies’ entrance, the tunnelers had halted their activities for a week. The Germans were on alert, and anything out of the ordinary was sure to raise suspicion. During that time, news of the deaths of Medlicott and Walter reached Holzminden via the Poldhu. There was little doubt the tunnelers might face the same end if they too were caught escaping. Niemeyer had proved himself time and again to be willing to use force—either by bayonet or firearm—to make a statement. But the prisoners were undaunted.
Eager to return to their work, they decided on a path that Colquhoun and the Pink Toes had originally discounted when searching for access to the stairwell. At the time, given how long the tunnel might take to dig, the Pink Toes had decided that even the most carefully disguised access point in an officer’s room posed too great a detection risk. But now, with only a month’s digging left before they reached the terminus at the rye field, the team was willing to gamble. They could not afford to take the time to find a more secure path to the chamber: reports that the harvest was coming early that year, in mid-July, compelled them to accept the risk.
By knocking a hole through Room 34’s eastern wall, they would be able to reach their chamber under the stairwell. Although working in Room 34 required them to expand the number of officers who knew about the tunnel, they accepted that risk as necessary. While Blain sat lookout, two officers chipped away at the eastern wall. First they broke through the plaster, then they started into the concrete behind. Over a number of shifts, over a number of days, their work continued. At the end of each session, they cleaned up, then covered the hole with a panel painted the same color as the wall. Bennett was a master at creating these illusions.
After a week, they had made little advance through the thick concrete. Had they been equipped with a sledgehammer, with the freedom to make as much noise as necessary, they could have made quick progress. But using a chisel and hammer, and doing so without alerting the guards to their scheme, was gaining them no ground. The team voted to abandon this avenue.
At the start of June, a storm hit Holzminden with gusting winds and rains. The tunnelers surveyed the barracks and grounds again, looking for a way down to their sap. Proposals were raised and dashed as the men brainstormed their options. More investigations were made. The focus turned to the attic floor of Block B. One idea piggybacked upon another, or was bettered, until an ingenious plan fell into place.
Niemeyer had maintained his ban on officers occupying the attic floor in Block B, closing off any approach from the western stairwell by securing the double swing doors with a metal chain looped between the steel handles and a heavy padlock. Picking the padlock would be too time-consuming, the tunnelers decided, but the handles themselves were fastened to the door by only six screws. Remove the screws, take off one handle, and voilà, they were inside. Replace the screws and handle behind them and nobody would be the wiser.
In the attic, they found a way to bypass the barricade wall that separated their quarters from those of the orderlies: the eaves. These ran the length of the barracks like a corridor under the steeply sloped roof. If they cut a panel in one of the rooms, the eaves were theirs to use to reach the eastern side. As nobody lived in the officer section of the attic, the Germans were unlikely to inspect any of those rooms too closely. To be safe, the team planned on making the opening behind a bed appear seamless with the wall using some mortar and distemper paint.
They also discovered a small door at the eastern end of the eaves that opened into an attic room where some of the orderlies slept. No doubt the original builders put the door there to access the space. The team could—after an orderly scouted the area for Germans—descend the stairs and reach their underground chamber. Not only did this solution give them access to the tunnel, it was a far superior approach. They would no longer need to risk masquerading as orderlies to get past the guards. More important, apart from showing up for roll calls, they could dig day and night. And so they began, quickly making up for lost time.
A lunatic who had escaped from an insane asylum. This was the role Gray wanted Kennard to play on their journey to the border. He could rant and blubber as he pleased, tear his hair out, convulse on the ground, speak in tongues or stay mute and wild-eyed—never would he need to utter a word of intelligible German, nor would he be expected to answer questions. Gray and Blain would pose as the attendants escorting him back to the asylum.
Finally, Gray had revealed his plan, and from his answers to Blain’s and Kennard’s questions, it was clear he had carefully thought out every detail.
What insane asylum? There was an institution in the town of Vechta, roughly forty-five miles east of the Dutch border. It was north of the most direct route to the Netherlands, but the extra miles were worth it if the route lent credence to their ruse.
What if they were stopped by the police or other officials? Gray would act as the senior attendant, making any explanations in German. If the questioning got dicey, or if Blain was asked to respond to any inquiries, Kennard, the “patient,” would provide the perfect distraction. He could stage a psychotic episode, wrestling against their restraints, shaking, foaming at the mouth. They would need to constrain him, perhaps even force a tranquilizer into his mouth. Anyone attempting to detain the men would want to be rid of them quickly.
What kind of tranquilizer? Simple aspirin. Nobody would know the difference.
How would they explain traveling by foot and not train? Kennard was too dangerous to be trusted around civilians. This would also explain t
he rumpled, dirty state of their clothes. After all, the lunatic had been on the run, Gray and Blain had tracked him down, and they were now in the process of returning him to the asylum.
What would they wear, exactly? According to what Gray had learned from his inquiries, patients at Vechta wore simple gray shirts and pants with peaked caps. As attendants, he and Blain would wear plain civilian suits. All could be easily crafted at Holzminden. And their passes? The Vechta chief of police was named Günther. For added authenticity, they would forge the appropriate papers under his name.
It was clear to Blain and Kennard that Gray had covered all bases. Of all the disguises they had known their fellow escape artists to use, it was by far the most original. Gray would be Franz Vogel, senior attendant at Vechta Asylum. Blain: Carl Holzmann, junior attendant. Kennard: Kurt Grau, the lunatic. Kennard took the name of the German interpreter who had assisted Gray in gathering the information he needed to pull off the ruse. Satisfied with the plan, the three set out to prepare the clothes and passes they would need.
The others in the breakout team were also almost set with their border-run plans. Jim Bennett would go with Peter Campbell-Martin, the twenty-two-year-old fellow observer he had befriended since coming to Holzminden. Their kits were almost ready; Bennett was only in need of some good boots. Through a friend who had been transferred to Holland, he had sent his mother a letter asking if she could send them soon. “I hope you quite understand that it’s impossible to do anything here without a decent pair of Boots when we are 150 miles from the frontier.”
Rathborne intended to go by train again, this time alone. Needing only to look like a respectable businessman on a cross-country journey, he had little to prepare. He obtained two civilian suits and a leather satchel that held some food, a razor, soap, a towel, a hairbrush, and a hand mirror. To top off his look, he purchased a felt hat accented by a feather (in “true German style,” he explained) and borrowed some spectacles from a roommate.