Great Escapes (22 page)

The plan was to take Bruno to Lyon and hand him over to the American Consulate who was handling British affairs in Vichy France. Boarding the train the two men found themselves in an empty carriage which enabled them to converse in English. Travelling slowly through the countryside, Bruno found it hard to believe that there was a war on. They stopped at the town of Tours, where they broke their journey and were the guests of a Roman Catholic priest for dinner. They continued their journey later that evening to a little town close to the demarcation line between occupied France and Vichy France. There they got off and spent the night at a farm a short distance from the station.

The following morning a young girl arrived to take Bruno over the border. He said his goodbyes to the doctor and set off across fields and along hedgerows to a country road, where a car was waiting to take him to the town of La Haye-Descartes. It was here that he met Dr Vorch who would take him on the next stage of his journey.

Because it was a weekend, there was very little travelling and so it was decided to wait until the Monday morning before setting off. The pair had an uninterrupted journey on the next stage to Montluçon, where Dr Vorch was to hand over his ward to another courier. But on reaching their destination, no one was to be seen, so it was left to the doctor to take him on to Lyon. This was to be a long journey and so the doctor bought sufficient food for them both. It was now that the knife given to him by the Comtesse was to prove its worth. Coached by the doctor, Bruno learned to cut up bread and cheese and transfer the food to his mouth using the blade of the knife. This was a method used by all French farm labourers and one, if not done properly, would be spotted by Vichy French officials who maintained a very close watch on all travellers.

Twice their papers were inspected and after travelling all day the train pulled into Lyon. Dr Vorch took Bruno straight to the American Consulate where the vice-Consul George Whittinghill welcomed them. As soon as he was safely inside the Consulate, Dr Vorch said goodbye and was gone. This was one of the problems Bruno had to face constantly and he felt embarrassed not be able to say a proper thank you to all those people who had helped him along the way.

The first thing the vice-Consul did was to send a cable on Bruno’s behalf, advising Bruno’s wife that he was alive and well. He was then sent to the address of a Polish couple where he was to stay until such time that arrangements could be made to get him over the Pyrenees and into Spain.

There were problems within the escape lines as the Gestapo had penetrated the organisation and many of the key players had been captured and tortured. Then one morning, Bruno was invited to the American Consulate and introduced to a smart, elegant-looking man. The man, a secret agent, came straight to the point and asked Bruno if he would be prepared to use his skills as a trained wireless operator on behalf of the Resistance. If he agreed, they would contact London and have him reassigned. Shocked for a moment, Bruno told him that his war was in the air, not on the ground behind enemy lines. Besides he didn’t speak the language and the kind of wireless operation that they required had not been part of his training.

Disappointed, the man left. The Consulate then told Bruno that arrangements had been made to get him to Marseilles and that he would be picked up that very afternoon. The man who had asked him to become a spy turned out to be his guide and this was to be his first dealings with the O’Leary Line. As they left the train in Marseilles, a nondescript man, with piercing eyes and a strong face, walked up to his companion and greeted him with a hug. Bruno was then introduced to the man and this was his first meeting with the legendary Pat O’Leary or Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse, to give him his real name.

Bruno Wright was taken to an apartment close to the docks. This was the home of Louis Nouveau and his wife and was, as he was to find out later, the assembly point of escapees and evaders trying to get to Spain. The bravery of these people cannot be emphasised enough, every hour of every day, they put their lives on the line without hesitation for the allies. At the end of the war, Louis Nouveau was awarded the George Medal by the British government.

That evening Bruno was treated to a dinner of steak and kidney pudding, a real taste of Britain. The following day another evader arrived, a Polish WAG (Wireless Air Gunner), followed the same evening by a British pilot. The next morning two more arrived, a Yugoslav major and his batman. The group was complete when a British sergeant by the name of Pendergast joined them. This last man that was to become the cause of some concern for Pat O’Leary because of his accent. At first they were suspicious of him but the British members of the group identified his accent as being a thick northern Irish brogue.

That evening, working in pairs, they went to a coin-operated photograph booth and obtained the necessary photographs for their forged permits and travel passes. Bruno became a Czech industrial worker and prepared for the trip to the Pyrenees. They would travel in pairs to the foothills of the Pyrenean Mountains, where they would be met by two guides who would take the party over the mountains. They were warned that this was to be the most arduous part of their journey and to be prepared for it.

Bruno Wright teamed up with the Irishman Paddy Pendergast and headed towards Toulouse. The pair booked into a small hotel near the railway station to await the remainder of their party. The group suddenly expanded when two young Belgians arrived, then two more RAF escapees. Their number now totalled thirteen, a large group to guide over the mountains. They arrived at the small farmhouse at the foothills where the guides were waiting. The guides were Basques; one of them was the legendary Florentino, who had no love for the Spanish authorities.

Despite it being the middle of June, with warm days, the nights were decidedly cold. For the next two nights the party threaded its way through the foothills, their thin clothes giving them almost no protection against the biting winds that whistled through the rocky gorges. During the day they tried to sleep and rest, but managed very little of both. Their guides rested some distance from them because in the event of the group being discovered and captured the escapees would probably be sent to a prison camp but the guides would be shot.

Then they reached the point at the bottom of the mountains, where they were to start their climb. Water was becoming a problem, or to be more precise, the lack of it. The torturous climb took its toll as some of the less fit of the party struggled to keep up. This meant the group had to move at the pace of the slowest man. Eventually after three days they started the descent into Spain. The Spanish Civil Guard had long since ceased to patrol the mountains because it was futile as there were so many places to hide. Instead they realised that any escapees or evaders coming over the mountains would be desperate to head for the nearest town or railway, so they set up a 10-mile exclusion zone around the towns and railway stations in the area.

Their guides sat them all down and coached them in the sentences in Spanish that they would need to enable them to purchase railway tickets. They also suggested that they split into pairs and make their own way to the railway station at Gerona. Bruno Wright set off with the Yugoslav captain and together they made their way to the station and purchased tickets to Barcelona. On the way they had passed a number of Civil Guards patrolling the area but, ignoring them, they had just kept walking at a steady pace, their hearts thumping every time they approached the guards.

As they left the station, they were stunned to see two of their party under arrest by the Civil Guard. It appeared that one of the two escapees, a Frenchman, had approached a local man and asked for directions. The man had become suspicious and had called the Civil Guard. Bruno and his companion immediately headed for a small wood and hid. One hour later, their two guides appeared with more bad news, Barker and Pendergast had also been picked up. They had been caught because Pendergast had picked up one of the mountaineering backpacks hidden by one of the guides. The guide had hidden the backpack because it would have been a dead giveaway to anyone walking along the border, but Pendergast thought it wrong to discard such expensive equipment.

They had been joined at this point by the remainder of the party. When the train arrived they split into pairs once again and made their way onto the train. After a few stops, the train was suddenly filled with Civil Guards examining everyone’s travel and identity documents. They became suspicious of the party of escapees, mainly because they were, according to their papers, all Czechs. They were all arrested and placed in one compartment and their position was finally compromised when one of the young Belgians, fearful that he was going to be shot, blurted out who they were. He then pointed to Bruno and told their captors that Bruno was carrying escape equipment. Bruno was immediately searched and his tiny compass and hacksaw blade was found.

On arrival in Barcelona the group were placed in cells whilst the authorities decided what to do with them. The problem lay in the Geneva Convention that stated that if someone had escaped from a prison camp and crossed into Spain, then that person was able to claim Diplomatic Asylum and be released into the custody of the British Consul. On the other hand if they had evaded capture and crossed the border into Spain, they were deemed to have been a combatant who had crossed the border into a neutral country and as such could be interned for the duration of the war.

These situations were notoriously long-winded, and so Bruno was placed in a regular prison
Carcel Modello
(Model Prison), where his head was shaved and he was placed among hundreds of other prisoners, many of whom were Spanish Republicans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.

The unsanitary conditions and the very basic food made the prison more of a hellhole than a ‘Model Prison’, but food from the British Consul helped supplement the meagre rations. Then Bruno was transferred to an interrogation camp at Irun where he knew he would have to convince the authorities that he was an escapee. Prior to leaving France, the Resistance had briefed him on this and prepared him with a story.

Once at the camp he was placed in a cell with a young German who claimed that he was under the sentence of death for refusing to serve in the German army. He claimed that he had been born in the United States and was trying to get back there when he was caught. Bruno felt sorry for him, until he started asking pointed questions about the help he had received during his escape. There were questions about how much help he had received from the American Consulate in Lyon, who had hidden him along the way. Bruno quickly realised that the man was a Gestapo ‘plant’ and avoided him like the plague after that. It also showed that the Gestapo had a very long arm and were being allowed to operate in a neutral country.

The Spanish authorities questioned him for several hours then told him that they were satisfied that he was an escapee and ordered his detention at a concentration camp at Miranda de Ebro. On his arrival he was pleasantly surprised to find six of the original party amongst the hundreds of detainees, the majority of whom were refugees from all over Europe.

The delivery of Red Cross parcels was the highlight of the week. The British Consul visited on a regular basis and on one such visit brought Bruno a photograph of his wife and baby, and news that he had been promoted to Flight Sergeant. He also brought news concerning the way negotiations were developing regarding the repatriation of the military prisoners.

Then on 23 September news came through that Bruno was to be released into the custody of the British Consul. After leaving the camp, he and two others were taken to Madrid and, after stopping at the embassy for a while, they were taken to the border with Gibraltar. There they were handed over to the military authorities, and one week later stepped aboard the Royal Navy’s battleship HMS
Malaya.

Their arrival in Greenock was almost secret and all the escapees were bedded down on mattresses in a deserted warehouse and kept under guard. However the years of confinement and the skills they acquired stood them in good stead, as they slipped out under the noses of the guards to visit the dockside pubs. After hours of interrogation Bruno was given three weeks leave and sent home to his wife and baby.

Bruno Wright returned to the RAF and started flight training as a pilot. Then, just before the war ended, he heard that the Comtesse de Poulpiquet was alive and well, but the Comte de Poulpiquet had died. Bruno received a bundle of notes and letters from the Comtesse, in which she recounted the time when allied airmen and soldiers were hiding at her home. She remembered smiling at the German cars as they sped past her chateau, and thinking, ‘If only they knew who is at my house’.

James Langley was born in Wolverhampton in March 1916. His father had joined the South Staffordshire Regiment to fight in the First World War during which he was wounded. After recovering, he was made Assistant Military Attaché in Berne, Switzerland. Some years later, James Langley discovered that this was in fact a cover for his father’s work in British Intelligence. This was a role he himself was to become familiar with during the Second World War.

After being educated at Uppingham School and Cambridge University where he read history and economics, James Langley decided to join the army when it became apparent that war was imminent. His father, who was the typical Victorian patriarch, decided that his son would join the Coldstream Guards and took measures to see that he was interviewed by the regiment’s commanding officer, Col. Arthur Smith. Initially James Langley was accepted on a temporary commission and it was to be at least three months before he would be posted to a battalion.

Ordered to report to the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards at Windsor Barracks, James Langley quickly settled down to the life of a guards’ officer. Then on 2 September 1939 the code word ‘Mussolini’ came signifying that Britain was at war with Germany. Lt James Langley (promoted to Lt-Col. later in his career) was given command of No. 15 Platoon and ordered to make ready to move. Two weeks later the battalion was on the move to France and landed at Cherbourg. The battalion then moved up to the Franco-Belgian border and established defence positions. All was quiet until the morning of the 10 May when word came down that the Germans had invaded Belgium, France and Holland at dawn. The next two night marches were no different to the manoeuvres that the platoon had experienced during training, but this was not to last. Belgian soldiers retreating from the front line were shouting ‘Gas! Gas!’ as they drove through the small town of Leefdael. This was the cause of some concern to the advancing British, but fortunately it was later proved to be unfounded. The following morning the British troops, now consolidated on the outskirts of the town, watched a convoy of trucks full of soldiers retreating towards Brussels. At 11 p.m. that night, the order came for No. 15 Platoon of the 1st Battalion to retreat as they came under increasing heavy artillery fire. The platoon marched back until they reached the village of Pecq, where they were ordered to take command of the bridge over the Escaut River. James Langley’s orders were to take control of the bridge until all members of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) were over, to search all civilian personnel and their wagons and, if and when the Germans arrived, to blow the bridge up. At 1 a.m. the following morning, with traffic over the bridge reduced to a dribble, Langley ordered the bridge to be blown up.