The Great Escape (6 page)

Roger first settled the question of the drainage pipes. Within an hour a willing bunch of prisoners gathered for an open-air meeting as a diversion, and in the middle of them someone whipped off a manhole noted on the stolen drainage chart and Shag Rees, a nuggety little Welshman, slipped into it. He was up again in a minute with a dirt-streaked face.

“The bastards,” he said. “You couldn’t pull a greasy piglet through them.” He indicated with his hands a circumference of about six inches, and there was a low moan. Roger cut it short.

“Can’t expect the Goons to be stupid all the time,” he said. “Let’s get on with the other things.”

There were a few hungry Russian prisoners still in the compound under guard clearing away the last of the spindly pine trees they’d cut down, and trucks loaded high over the cab were taking the branches and foliage away. The road out went past three of the huts, and before you could say “Hitler is a
Schweinhund
,” furtive shapes were crawling up on the roofs of those huts under cover of the near-by trees. As the trucks rolled past, shapes hurtled through the air and crashed down out of sight into the loaded branches. There were so many trying it that a man about to jump had to look carefully to see there wasn’t already a man who had jumped from the previous hut looking up from the branches, making frantic signs for him to wait for the next truck and not brain him with his boots as he came down.

But every truck was searched at the gates, and one by one the prisoners were winkled out, and with much show of jovial regret from the Germans locked in the cooler for the traditional two weeks’ solitary. A couple, however, burrowed deep into the branches and got away (to be caught soon after). The Goons took to probing the branches with pitchforks, and when a would be escaper caught a couple of prongs in the bottom, the rest turned to other methods.

Ian Cross climbed
under
one of the trucks and hung on to the chassis. A few moments later, the chief German ferret,
Oberfeldwebel
(staff sergeant) Glemnitz, had a word with the driver, and the truck shot off like a rocket across a patch of the compound studded with tree stumps. We held our breath waiting for Cross to be mashed to pulp, and then the truck stopped and Glemnitz walked up and leaned under.

“You can come out now, Mr. Cross,” he called. “We have your room ready in the cooler.”

“You see,” said Roger, watching Cross marching lugubriously off, “how bloody careful we’ve got to be. Secrecy is the key.”

Glemnitz was the archenemy. We didn’t exactly like him, but we certainly respected him. He was a droll fellow in a sardonic way, with a leathery face you could crack rocks on. He didn’t wear overalls like the other ferrets but was always in uniform complete with peaked cap and the dignity of rank. A good soldier, Glemnitz, efficient and incorruptible, too good for our liking.

Griese, his second in charge, was the other dangerous ferret, a lean
Unteroffizier
(corporal), with a long thin neck and known, naturally, as “Rubberneck.” He was smart but he didn’t have Glemnitz’s sense of humor.

“Cherub” Cornish, an angelic little Australian, didn’t shave for two days, borrowed an old Polish greatcoat that reached to the ground, rubbed dirt into his face, and slipped among the last group of Russian prisoners leaving the camp. At the gate a bovine guard counted them and scratched his head. Fifteen had come in and sixteen were going out. He reported this phenomenon to the Herr
Hauptmann
(captain), and Pieber, more in sorrow than in anger, plucked Cherub from the tattered ranks despite the truthless but virtuous vows of a gaunt Russian who claimed that Cornish was an old pal from Smolensk.

As the cooler door closed on Cornish, the escape fever was over and the organization settled down to the real stuff.

Roger appointed a “Little X” and “Little S” in every block to co-ordinate the work in their blocks. Conk Canton, built like a pocket battleship with a great aggressive jaw, became Roger’s adjutant; Crump, Johnny Marshall, and Johnny Bull were the tunnel committee under Floody. Fanshawe was sand dispersal chief. George Harsh had charge of tunnel security. They all met in conference nearly every day.

One tunnel, Roger had decided, was to go from Block 123 out under the western wire to the woods beyond — and obvious choice as it was as near the wire as any hut. It was also on the far side of the compound to the German camp and the farthest hut from the gate, which meant more seclusion and more warning of any snap search. It also meant it was going to be a hut the German would suspect, but you can’t have everything.

“We’re going to call this one ‘Tom,’” Roger told the attentive committee. “They’re all to be known by their names, and by their names only. If any bastard in this camp ever utters the word tunnel carelessly I’ll have him court-martialed.”

The second tunnel was to go from 122 because it was an inside hut and not likely to be so much suspected. It was to be known as “Dick.” The third one was to go from Hut 104 by the northern wire. This meant an extra hundred feet to go under the second boundary wire, but that also meant the Germans wouldn’t regard it as a likely site. Roger named it “Harry.”

Roger, Floody, and the other tunnel kings surveyed the three huts to find sites for the trap doors, a most important part of the business because it was usually the traps that gave tunnels away. So the traps had to be perfect, and this was a headache because the Germans had built the hut floors about two feet above the ground so they could crawl underneath to see if anyone was tampering with the soil of the Fatherland. They made one mistake, though, because they made solid brick and concrete foundation walls right around under the washrooms in the huts and also under a little square of each living room where the stove stood. The ferrets couldn’t crawl into these areas, so they were the logical spots for the traps.

By April 11, Roger and Floody had picked all trap sites. “Tom” was to be in a dark corner of the concrete floor by a chimney of 123. “Dick” was to start from the washroom of 122, and “Harry” was to drop under a stove in one of the end big rooms of 104.

Minskewitz, who was the trap expert, was a short, wiry little Polish officer in the R.A.F., with a little gray goatee beard which he was always tugging lovingly. The German workmen had left some cement in the compound, and Minskewitz used some to cast a concrete slab about two feet square in a wooden mold. He reinforced it with bits of barbed wire left lying around and sank a couple of lugs in the sides, almost flush but protruding just enough for a couple of pieces of fine wire to be looped around them. He hid it under a paillasse to dry while he chipped a slab out of the concrete floor of 123, exactly the same size as the slab he’d made.

Stooges kept watch for ferrets outside while he handled his chisel like a surgeon and, when he’d finished, his home-made slab fitted the hole perfectly and could be lifted on and off with the wires on the lugs. The wires themselves folded down into the cracks when the trap was in position, but you could fish them up in a moment with a knife blade. In position, the slab rested on a padded frame beneath, and the cracks all around were lined with cement paste and dusted with dirt.

It was such an extraordinary precision job that Roger and Floody took Massey over to see the site for “Tom” and Massey examined the corner and said, “Seems a good spot, Bushell, but how are you going to camouflage it when you’ve chipped a hole there?”

“We have, Sir,” Roger said, and Massey got down, holding his game foot out, and peering hard could just see the outline. He shook his head in wonder.

“It’s just extraordinary,” he said.

I wouldn’t have believed it possible myself if I hadn’t been taken in the same way.

Minskewitz, tugging on his beard, said cautiously, “I seenk it will do.”

For “Dick,” Minskewitz devised one of the most cunning traps doors in the history of prison camps. In the middle of the concrete floor of 122 block’s washroom was an iron grating about eighteen inches square through which overflow water ran into a concrete well about three feet deep. A foot up from the bottom a pipe led off to carry the water away so there was always a foot of water in the well up to the ege of the pipe.

Minskewitz took off the iron grating while the stooges watched outside, bailed out the water, and mopped the well dry with old rags. He chipped away one wall of the concrete well laying bare the soft earth behind just ripe for tunneling. He cast a new slab to fit where the broken wall had been, slipped it in, sealed the cracks with soap and sand, put the grating back on top, and sioshed water down till the well was again full to the outlet pipe. The ferrets didn’t have a hope of finding “Dick” unless they had second sight, and they didn’t have that.

With practice it took only a minute or two to take the grating off bail out the well and lift out the slab. Later on, when the shaft was dug beneath, the diggers would vanish into it, the slab and grating would be replaced, and water poured into the well so they could work happily below for hours without a stooge on top.

Floody, Canton, Crump, and Marshall had already started to sink the shaft under “Tom’s” trap. It was to go straight down for thirty feet so that when the tunnel was burrowed out at the bottom it would be out of range of the sound detectors around the wire.

Then Crump started “Harry’s” trap. In Room 23 of Block 104, he heaved the stove off the square of tiles on which it stood, took up the tiles one by one, and recemented them on a wooden frame that Travis’ carpenters had made. He hinged this on as a trap door in place of the former solid tile foundation.

Under it he found solid brick and concrete to get through to reach the earth. Someone had souvenired an old pick head which the Russian workmen had used, and Crump fitted a baseball bat in it for a handle and bashed into the brick and concrete. It kicked up a hell of a ringing noise, exactly like a pick biting into brick and concrete, and it was obvious Glemnitz and Rubberneck and every ferret within half a mile would be galloping up inquisitively at any moment.

Half a dozen diversionists gathered outside the window hammering at bits of tin and wood making innocent things like baking dishes as noisily as they could for a couple of days while Crump sweated with the pick until he had cleared a way to the earth. Crump was a good man with a pick, a wiry stocky character with a square red face and red hair.

Half a dozen of the tiles on the trap had been cracked, and it wasn’t good enough for him.

“It looks to suspicious,” he said at a meeting of the committee, and they searched the camp till they found some spare tiles in the kitchen block and replaced the cracked ones. To muffle some of the hollow sound if the ferrets should tap on the trap, he fitted a removable grill that covered the top of the shaft just underneath and piled blankets in the little space. Minskewitz put the same sort of grill under “Tom’s” trap and, as “Tom’s” concrete slab sounded more hollow than “Harry,” he made little bags of sand to stow on the grill.

It was a good moment when Floody reported to Roger that the last of the traps was finished. It had been the riskiest part of the scheme because if he’d seen chunks of flooring torn up, even Dopey, the dimmest of the ferrets, would have guessed that something was wrong. When Crump was making “Harry’s” trap, the floor was up for about ten days and covered with spare paillasse when a ferret wandered near by. It would never have passed undetected in later days, but in the first weeks of the north camp occupation the ferrets were not well organized and the gamble came off.

Only a few dozen people in the whole camp knew where the trap doors were. A lot of the rest didn’t even know what huts they were in. That was how good the security was. Yet nearly everyone was working in some way on the X organization. A couple of days after we moved into the compound, blank sheets of paper had been pinned up in all huts with such headings as “Volunteers for cricket or softball teams will please put their names down here.” Little X in every block went around interviewing everyone who signed to see if he had any useful skill, from languages to mining and needlework.

Anyone who could sew went to join Tommy Guest’s tailoring section. Artists went to Tim Walenn’s forgery factory, miners into the tunnels, engineers to Johnny Travis’ department, and so on. The rest became stooges or penguins, the penguins being the people who dispersed the sand from the tunnels. Most, of course, became stooges, doomed to hour after hour of skulking and spying on ferrets and warning of their approach to any danger area.

Junior Clark had the compound divided into two sections, “D” for danger zone and “S” for safe. “S” was the east half of the camp where the gate was. The rest was “D” zone, where the tunnels and factories were. As soon as a ferret penetrated into “D,” he was tailed, and if he got within fifty yards of an exposed tunnel or factory, work was packed up right away till he wandered off again.