The Grand Escape

by Neal Bascomb

  “A Parting Word,” the last statement from the Germans to their prisoners.

  Yet this farewell did not come any closer. Eventually, Stokes-Roberts commandeered a train to take the Holzminden men west. On the night of their departure, December 10, they piled tables, boxes, chairs, trunks, old clothes, and anything else they could find that might be combustible into the Spielplatz and lit a huge bonfire. The German soldiers tried to extinguish the flames, but the British poked holes in their fire hoses. Framed by the glow of the blaze, they assembled into four columns and marched out of the gates. In Holzminden town, the Germans lined the streets to watch them pass, a look of “awe, envy, and hate” on their faces, one officer wrote. The officers and orderlies boarded their train, making no separation for rank as they packed the carriages. With a jolt, they started down the rails, the bonfire at Holzminden growing fainter in the distance with each passing minute, until they could see it no more.

  Twenty years after the Holzminden escape, on the evening of July 23, 1938, Lieutenant Colonel David Gray, commanding officer of the 48th Pioneers, headed down London’s Fleet Street and ducked through the door of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, the pub that over the centuries had welcomed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens to drink under its dark vaulted ceilings. This night, it was hosting the twentieth anniversary of the Holzminden tunnel escape. Air Commodore Charles Rathborne chaired the dinner, and Jim Bennett was its organizer.

  Twentieth Anniversary dinner invitation and menu cover.

  The surviving breakout artists at the twentieth anniversary celebration, examining items and pictures from the escape.

  Sadly, Gray’s two closest friends from that time were not there. In early 1919, Cecil Blain had crashed and died while test-piloting a Sopwith Dolphin for the RAF. He had been writing a memoir about the Holzminden escape. Gray was stationed in Russia at the time, fighting the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, and could not return for the funeral. King George V had sent his condolences to the Blain family, recalling the “gallant and able Officer” he had met only months before. So too did Gray miss the burial of Caspar Kennard. After the war, Kennard had gone home to Argentina, where he married and became the manager of large ranch. In 1935, he was killed in a freak shooting accident. “Kennard was a stout fellow, a good pal,” his obituary concluded. “His untimely death will leave a feeling of great regret in the hearts of his fellow officers.”

  A letter from Buckingham Palace to Blain’s mother informing her of his tragic death.

  There were many others missing at the dinner, albeit because of distance rather than tragic circumstance. Dick Cash had returned to Australia to reunite with his family, and after the Armistice the Holzminden prisoners had spread out far and wide: from South Africa to New Zealand, to Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Barbados, Vancouver, and New York City. Those absent were recognized and remembered, but most of the evening was spent in laughter and conversation, recalling the moments both comic and horrifying they shared while tunneling to their freedom.

  The breakout artists still wondered about the fate of Karl Niemeyer. At the Versailles Peace Conference it had been agreed that certain “enemy officers” should be brought to justice for their crimes. Niemeyer made the list, particularly after the death of William Leefe Robinson from the privations he had suffered at Holzminden. However, Niemeyer was never found. One report had him committing suicide in Hanover; others said that he had escaped to South America. Whatever the truth, perhaps the best laugh of the evening came when a mocked-up telegram from one of their fellow prisoners was delivered to the pub from Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “I know damn all about you and your dinner [Stop] Charles Niemeyer [Stop].” The roars of laughter from Gray and others were heard into the night.

  Over the next few decades, the tunnelers and the other Holzminden prisoners—friends for life—would meet again for anniversaries. Gray, however, would not attend another of these dinners. When he had to leave the RAF in 1942, for reasons of age, he signed up for the Home Guard, a volunteer defense organization. That November, he died in a lorry accident—an inglorious end to an otherwise glorious and bravely led life.

  David “Munshi” Gray, “The Father of the Tunnel,” was buried with honors in Wonston, Hampshire. Most treasured among the items he left his wife, Violet, and their 19-year-old son were the escape kit, old maps, fake identification, and compass he had used in his home run from Holzminden POW camp.

  The Holzminden escape had an impact far beyond those involved in its success. During World War II, Jim Bennett worked for MI9, a newly founded, top secret organization within British military intelligence, the purpose of which was to teach principles of evasion and escape to Allied soldiers, airmen, and naval personnel. For this, it called upon the first-hand experiences of those who had escaped the Germans in World War I, of which Bennett as a Holzminden breakout artist was an ideal example. Bennett usually began his talks by saying that becoming a POW was “improbable but possible.” If taken prisoner, he advised the young men, “Your war effort is not finished.” Each and every one of them had a duty to escape: Britain needed them back in its ranks, and an escape would absorb men and resources that might otherwise be used on the front line. They might suffer mental and physical deprivation, but they were to remember that their war effort was by no means done.

  Bennett detailed escape routes from Germany and explained 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. Then he recounted his own experiences, his lack of preparation, the missed opportunities, the false starts, all before his final dash across the border. In his mistakes, and in those of his friends, there was much to learn. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he liked to conclude.

  Bennett played only a small part in the vast organization that coordinated escape and evasion across Europe and the Mediterranean, but he and his fellow breakout artists—Gray, Blain, Kennard, Rathborne, Leggatt, Medlicott, and so many others—were very much the inspiration for MI9 and its American counterpart, MIS-X. Their bravery and daring paved the way for their establishment. Given the Nazi penchant for torturing, and sometimes hanging, prisoners of war, these two organizations ended up saving many lives.

  By one historian’s estimate, there were 192,848 British and Empire POWs held in Germany during World War I. Among these, there were over 10,000 escape attempts, of which only 573 (54 officers, 519 other ranks) were successful. In contrast, before the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, 33,578 British, Commonwealth, and American POWs managed to return to Allied lines after finding themselves captured by the enemy. Some of the most daring escapes, including those from Colditz and Stalag Luft III, bear too many resemblances to the great escape from Holzminden to be a coincidence.

  Bennett never spoke much about his captivity or escape. His family had no idea about his subsequent service in World War II until they found a dusty folder with papers that included his speech notes and travel receipts after his death in 1983 at the ripe age of 91. Instead, he focused his life on building a business, being a good friend, investing in a happy marriage, and raising a son and daughter. He was there to ensure that his children, Graham and Laurie, followed his version of the Golden Rule—“Do as you would be done by”—and to teach them how to ride a bicycle and drive a car. The opportunity to do so in freedom, in his own country, was reward enough for his contribution to the greatest escape of the Great War.

  Bennett’s lecture notes during World War II for Allied soldiers. His final words: “Escape as soon as possible.”

  SUCCEEDED IN HOME RUN

  Jim Bennett

  Cecil Blain

  John Bousfield

  Peter Campbell-Martin

  David Gray

  Caspar Kennard

  Edward Leggatt

  Stanley Purves

  Charles Rathborne

  John Tullis

  RECAPTURED

  Douglas Birch

  Thomas B
urrill

  Walter Butler

  Andrew Clouston

  Frederick Illingworth

  William Langran

  Colin Laurence

  Bernard Luscombe

  Peter Lyon

  Neil Macleod

  Frederick Mardock

  Arthur Morris

  Jack Morrogh

  Robert Paddison

  Clifford Robertston

  Frank Sharpe

  Alan Shipwright

  Philip Smith

  David Wainright

  Years ago, in a more adventuresome lifetime, I took some flying lessons with a fellow author (and experienced pilot) Tom Casey. I still vividly remember the exhilaration—and heart-dropping fear—of swooping over the coastline of Long Island, then around the tip of Manhattan, and up the Hudson River corridor. The experience sparked an interest in aviation, pursued more safely within the confines of histories of the same. My most avid reading focused on the early days of the Royal Flying Corps, and daring Oxbridge sorts who made up its early ranks of pilots flying their wood, cloth, and wire contraptions. Among those volumes that inspired further reading were H. A. Jones’s magisterial The War in the Air, Cecil Lewis’s Sagittarius Rising, and Denis Winter’s The First of the Few.

  Besides a hasty path to death, these pilots also faced a good chance of being shot down behind enemy lines, particularly as their activities ramped up in advance of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Those who survived a crash landing were inevitably captured and imprisoned by the Germans. Rascals of the highest sort, many of these men attempted elaborate escapes that might well have been pulled straight from the pages of Boy’s Own adventures. Only the incurious could then resist picking up one of what became an oevre of World War I breakout memoirs. They are too many to name, but among my early favorites were Gerald Knight’s Brother Bosch, J. A. L. Caunter’s 13 Days, A. J. Evans’s Escaping Club, and J. L. Hardy’s I Escape. Time and again, these memoirs drew a line to what might best be described as the Alcatraz of Germany at the time: Holzminden.

  I quickly fell under the spell of the classic The Tunnelers of Holzminden by H. G. Durnford, who played a bit part in the extraordinary events that led to the greatest breakout of the Great War. Upon consuming his memoir, I was sure I had my next book project in hand. That said, Durnford recounted the events—and characters of those involved—with the kind of emotionless British reserve that left me unsure of who these men were and what drove them. Then I came across the delightfully introspective, quirky, and beautifully written Comrades in Captivity by poet and Holzminden survivor F. W. Harvey. He put flesh and bone on what it was to be a prisoner in the archipelago of German camps and the desperation that pushed some to risk everything to be free.

  All these books were inspiration—and great source material—but they were only the beginning on my journey to chronicle this narrative. One should always start with the low-hanging fruit, and I benefited from three earlier works on the Holzminden escape: Beyond the Tumult by Barry Winchester, Escape from Germany by Neil Hanson, and Jacqueline Cook’s The Real Great Escape. Each in their own way provided excellent guidance, same as the holistic study of British POWs in Germany by John Lewis-Stempel in The War Behind the War.

  Given these events occurred almost exactly a century before I started my research, I knew firsthand interviews were out, and I would need to depend on a rich and diverse range of primary documents. Fortunately, I struck gold early and often over the course of the project thanks to the wonderful archivists at the Imperial War Museum, RAF Museum, the British National Archives at Kew (a treasure almost unparalleled), the Bundesarchiv, and the Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds. They provided unpublished memoirs, oral history interviews, repatriated POW reports, letters, maps, and even artifacts from the escape by many of the key participants in these extraordinary events. Of particular note was a handwritten memoir by Cecil Blain at the Imperial War Museum. My front-line researcher for many of these finds was Claire Barrett. At the time, she was studying for her master’s in the History of War from King’s College, London. She proved tenacious and a quick study, and I owe a great debt to her for following up my leads—and generating quite a few on her own. In a word, she is top-notch. Thanks also to early research by Norma Bulman and Allmut Schoenfeld.

  I would also like to make a special callout to the F. W. Harvey Collection at the Gloucestershire Archives. They hold an absolute treasure trove of letters, scrapbooks, personal documents, notebooks, and other papers from the soldier-poet. If nothing else from this book, I am proud to have played a part in resurrecting the memoir of this incredible individual. I was ably assisted in accessing this collection by James Grant Repshire and Steve Cooper, representatives both from the F. W. Harvey Society. Thank you also to Mrs. Elaine Jackson of the Harvey family who gave me permission to quote from the collection. It is truly a window into the soul of these heroes.

  Where archives came up short, I depended on the kindness and generosity of the families of many of the principal individuals in this escape. After so many years, some were a challenge to track down across the world (online family trees and Facebook are a researcher’s new best friend!), but perseverance paid off in spades. Much of the incredible story of Royal Navy Air Service observer Leonard James Bennett had been lost to history, but thanks to his daughter Laurie Vaughan, I had access to his unpublished memoirs, notes from lectures, and page after page of letters he sent from Holzminden during his captivity. More important in some ways, Bennett verified the link between the breakout artists of World War I with the founding of MI9, the British escape and evasion service that saved so many lives during World War II. I would also like to thank Laurie’s granddaughter, Lily Peschardt, who collected many of these writings in her graduate school project Home This Afternoon.

  Many other families assisted with letters, unpublished memoirs, photos, and other bits of information. This book could not have been written without them. Thanks especially to Hugh Lowe, Brian Tullis, Keil Tullis, Brenda Merriman, Pete Clouston, Jane Gray, Diana Gillyatt, Kit Kennard, Margaret Pretorius, Mal Lyon, Tony Wheatley, and Julyan Peard. Although I could not tell each prisoner’s story in full, I hope the families know how instrumental their efforts were. Thank you also to Jacqueline Mallahan for her generosity in sharing her late husband Patrick’s vast archival collection and research into the RFC and POWs in World War I.

  Despite such a huge number of sources, there remained some mysteries, particularly as to the arrival and departure times of some of the prisoners to Holzminden—and their specific activities in the early foundation of the tunnel. The tremendous archive/tracking service of World War I POWs collected by the International Committee of the Red Cross was invaluable in solving some, but not all, of the prisoners’ movements in and out of camps. Still, there remained a few gaps. I have endeavored to draw as accurate a timeline as possible. Any errors or misinterpretations are mine alone.

  Much deserved, I would like to thank my publishing team. First to my former Scholastic editor Cheryl Klein who gave me that little extra nudge at a critical time to pursue this story, then to Nick Thomas who brought his wonderful insight—and editing skills—to help me craft this story for young readers. Second to my agent and friend, Eric Lupfer, who is always there with steady guidance and cheerful encouragement, this book could not have happened with him. Thanks too to my film agent on the project, Ashley Fox, as well as the great folks at WME, Simon Trewin and Raffaella De Angelis. I also benefited from an early read by World War I aviation expert James Streckfuss. As always, my appreciation to the support of all of Scholastic, including Cian O’Day and the great Arthur Levine.

  This book is dedicated to my long-time editor, Liz Hudson. We’ve been together now going on a decade and a half, and to be honest, I simply do not know how I’d do what I do without you at my side every step of the way. Thank you for your patience, insight, and crack-of-the-whip-but-with kindness. Sometimes I may not show it, but I know how lucky I am.


  Finally, to Diane and our girls (and Moses thrown in for good measure). Words couldn’t do justice in describing your impact in every part of my life!

  ARCHIVES

  Australian War Memorial, Australia

  British Library, UK

  Bundesarchiv, Germany

  Tasmanian State Archives, Australia

  F. W. Harvey Collection, Gloucestershire Archives, UK

  Archives and Special Collections, Hamilton Public Library, Canada

  Prisoners of the First World War, ICRC Historical Archives, Switzerland

  Imperial War Museum, UK

  Liddle Collection, University of Leeds Special Collections, UK

  Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, UK

  Sandwell Community History and Archives, UK

  National Archives, Kew, UK

  PERSONAL PAPERS

  Bennett, Leonard J. (courtesy of Laurie Vaughan)

  Blain, Cecil (courtesy of Hugh Lowe)

  Clouston, Andrew (courtesy of Pete Clouston)

  Dougall, Hector (courtesy of Brenda Merriman)

  Gray, David (courtesy of Jane Gray)

  Harvey, F. W. (courtesy of Gloucestershire Archives and the Harvey Family)

  Kennard, Caspar (courtesy of C.A. Kennard and Diana Gillyatt)

  Leggatt, E. W. (courtesy of Margaret Pretorius)

  Lyon, Peter (courtesy of Louise Lyon)

  Mallahan, Patrick (courtesy of Jacqueline Mallahan)

  Morrogh, John (courtesy of Julyan Peard and Tony Wheatley)