The Great Escape (2 page)

Prison camp life would not have been so bad if:

So we spent a lot of time trying to escape. It is a melancholy fact that escape is much harder in real life than in the movies, where only the heavy and second lead are killed. This time, after huge success, death came to some heroes. Later on, it caught up with some villains.

You learn to escape the hard way. It took us three years to become proficient — from the first primitive tunnels to the deep, long ones with underground railways, workshops and air pumps, forgery and compass factories, and so on. Above all we learned how to “destroy” sand and to hide everything in our little compound from the Germans constantly searching us.

The British had a start on the Americans because they were there first. Then the Yanks joined us and took to the escape business like duckxss to water.

One got used to living in a microscopic world where life lay in working patiently for that brooding genius, “Big X.” I suppose it is romantic now. It wasn’t then. Life was too real, grim and earnest.

They were all real — Rubberneck, the humorless and coldy efficient German; “Bix X,” the South African; Walenn, that charming Englishman; Ker-Ramsay, the dour Scot; Harsh, the rambunctious Yank; Sage, another Yank, also rambunctious; Floody, the Canadian who looked consumptive (and still does); Cornish, the baby-faced Australian; Pohé, the dark Maori; Minskewitz, the Pole with the Uncle Sam whiskers; Staubo, the handsome Norwegian; and all the others, too numerous to mention, even in the narrative that follows. No one ever noticed a nationality tag.

The Germans tried to play off the British against the Americans and vice versa, and in the end they took the Americans away and segregated them in another compound. We got along too damn well together.

Of my own part in the show — little enough to say. I am a sort of Boswell, not a hero. I was a cog in the machine, boss of a gang of “stooges” guarding the forgers, who had to work in an exposed position by windows to get enough light. Walenn, the chief forger, and I invented the “cloak and dagger” stooging system that gave them warning. It was rather complicated, but it never let us down — and that was the main thing. It just meant being on the job all the time, but there was nothing else to do anyway.

And when I finally drew a privileged position for the actual escape, “Big X” debarred me and three or four others on grounds of claustrophobia, a correct, if infuriating, decision. A few weeks later I was deeply grateful.

The maps and drawings printed throughout the text are by Ley Kenyon and were made from sketches Kenyon did at the camp as a diversion from his regular work as one of Tim Walenn’s star counterfeiters.

Since the war I’ve twice been back to Germany to dig deeper into the story, being lucky enough once to get into the forbidden Russian zone and fossick once more round the scene of the crime. After the hangman’s job was done in 1948 I went through several thousand pages of unpublished reports, getting all the German side of the affair as well as a lot more of our own. And then I searched out the important survivors and filled in the few gaps left.

So here it is, as nearly the way it happened as I can make it.

Paul Brickhill

Roger Bushell had just turned thirty when he reached Dulag Luft, the reception camp for Air Force prisoners. He was a big, tempestuous man with broad shoulders and the most chilling, pale-blue eyes I ever saw. In his early twenties he had been British ski champion, and once in an international race in Canada he had come swooping downhill like a bat out of hell and taken a bad spill over a boulder. The tip of one ski caught him in the inner corner of his right eye and gashed it wickedly. After it had been sewed up, the corner of his eye drooped permanently, and the effect on his look was strangely sinister and brooding.

It was on May 23, 1940, that he had led the twelve Spitfires of his squadron in over the coast between Dunkirk and Boulogne. Down below, men in sweaty battle dress were digging in on the beaches and spilling blood on the sand from the bombs. There weren’t many R.A.F. fighters about because there weren’t many R.A.F. fighters, and most of them were over on the rim of the battle trying to stop the dive-bombers from getting through.

Forty Messerschmitt 110’s had slid down toward the Spitfires and five of them picked on Bushell. He steep-turned and they overshot and pulled up. As he saw the last one sliding above, Bushell straightened out, pulled up, and was almost hanging on his propeller when his stream of bullets hit the German. Smoke poured out of the Messerschmitt’s port engine, and it turned on its back and went straight down.

Another Messerschmitt was coming at Bushell head-on. They were both firing; everything was red flashes, and then Bushell shot inches above the German and saw the German behind shoot steeply up, flick into a stall, and spin down, smoking. Bushell was on fire too, smoke pouring into his cockpit. His engine seized and the smoke cleared away.

Gliding down, he picked a field, and as he slid the Spitfire into it on its belly flame spurted under the engine cowlings. He had cracked his nose on the gunsight and scrambled out with blood pouring down his face. Watching the plane burn while he fished for a cigarette, he judged he was in British-held territory and with any luck would be back in his squadron in a couple of days.

A motorbike came pelting down a lane and turned in at the far end of the field. Bushell waited placidly for it, and then he saw that it wasn’t a crash helmet that the rider was wearing but a coal-scuttle helmet, and a moment later he saw the gun pointing at him.

If the Germans had realized what a troublesome man they had caught they would possibly have shot him then. It would have paid them.

Though he was a squadron leader in the R.A.F., Roger Bushell had been born near Johannesburg, and at the age of six he could swear fluently in English, Afrikaans, and Kaffir and spit an incredible distance. Later he acquired public-school polish by being educated in England at Wellington. His housemaster when he first went there summed him up very neatly in a letter to his mother: “Don’t worry about him. He has already organized the other new boys. I know the type well. He will be beaten fairly often but he will be well liked.”

At Dulag Luft the Germans put him hopefully in solitary confinement to soften him up for interrogation, but that was not an enormous help because Bushell had been a barrister with a talent for suave belligerence, and they got nothing out of him except a rather acid charm. They turned him loose then in the compound, a bare patch of earth a hundred yards square with three long, low huts surrounded by mountains of barbed wire, searchlights, and machine guns, and inhabited by an unhappy band of men trained to fight but shut up behind barbed wire while their country awaited invasion.

The senior man, Wing Commander Harry Day, had been shot down five weeks after the war started, flying a Blenheim on a suicidal, lonely daylight reconnaisance over Kaiserslautern. He’d flown as a youngster in the first war, and now he was graying, a tall, stringy, vital man with a lean face (the type they call “ravaged”) and a hooked nose. There was a wild streak in him, and prison camp didn’t help it. He was capable of a sort of austere introspection, and then it would vanish in a mood of turbulent gaiety. He could be steely and frightening, and then sometimes that wry mouth of his would relax in a gentle smile.

“The Artful Dodger,” Major Johnny Dodge, had been born an American (his mother, Mrs. Charles Stuart Dodge, was a daughter of John Bigelow, U. S. Minister to France under Abraham Lincoln). In the first week of the 1914 war, the Dodger, a smooth-cheeked youngster of twenty, sailed to England to get into the fight as soon as possible. Five years later he was a colonel with the D.S.O. and M.C. When things started again in 1939 the Dodger’s friend and family kinsman, Winston Churchill, soon had him back in the army and the Dodger was trapped a few months later with the B.E.F. in France, down the coast from Dunkirk.

Now, in his forties, he swam miles out into the channel to intercept a ship, missed it, swam back, was caught, escaped, then was caught again by the Luftwaffe and always thereafter stayed in Air Force prison camps (when he wasn’t escaping). Tall and courtly, the Dodger had an incredibly charitable nature and a strange insulation from fear. I don’t say that extravagantly. I think fear didn’t bother him. Bushell was like that and so was Wings Day.

So was Peter Fanshawe, a Fleet Air Arm lieutenant-commander, regular R.N. in character as well as fact — fair-haired Fanshawe, whom you couldn’t call Peter because he was so Royal Navy, but very sound and hard to get to know. Jimmy Buckley was also a Fleet Air Arm lieutenant-commander, more hard-boiled than Fanshawe. There were the dependable Mike Casey, Paddy Byrne, and a lot of others. In the subtle hierarchy of character, independent of rank, Bushell was soon one of the leaders in the common ambition to escape. He, Wings Day, and a dozen others started digging tunnels. They had a lot to learn about it. The first one they started under Paddy Byrne’s bed, cutting a trap door in the floor. The Germans had a lot to learn about finding tunnels too, so they got away with a lot they shouldn’t have, burrowing into the wet earth with their hands, hauling the dirt back in basins, and dumping it under the hut. It was pitch-black down in the rat hole, and they did it all by touch, working in long woolen underclothes so that dirt stains on their uniforms wouldn’t give them away.

The first tunnel was just under the wire with about eight feet to go to freedom when they ran into a spring and water gushed up and flooded them out. They started another tunnel in another direction. The Germans found it. Winter closed in and the escape season was temporarily over. You can’t hike two hundred miles over snow without much food and no shelter to a friendly border.

As spring softened the country they started a fresh tunnel under a bed in Wings Day’s room, and this time there were no serious hitches. By July it was eighty feet long, under and past the wire with only a couple of feet to dig up. And after all that, Roger got away the night before they made the break.

The prisoners were taken into an adjoining field for exercise, and in a corner of this field a goat lived in a tumble-down shed. A mock bullfight between the goat and the prisoners drew the guards’ eyes (as is was meant to), and Roger crawled into the shed. There had been a lot of debate as to how he would get on in the shed. Buckley started the old gag by saying, “What about the smell?” and Paddy gave the stock reply, “Oh, the goat won’t mind that.” And, as it happened, the goat didn’t mind at all. There was no fuss and after nightfall Roger crawled out and was away across the fields.