The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 45

  After that, the Germans discovered the tunnel location suspiciously quickly, though they did not breach the false wall. The presence of a German spy, or stooge, in their midst had to be considered, and security grew tighter.

  The camp population increased in 1941. Around 250 French officers arrived, then 60 Dutch and 2 Yugoslavs. In addition to those, the escape committees now included Irishmen, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Jews, and an Indian doctor. They were united by a common enemy and had to keep one another informed so that one escape attempt did not ruin another.

  Some of the British contingent found a guard who was amenable to a trade in contraband goods. They bribed him to look the other way for a crucial ten minutes of sentry duty. Eight Britons and four Poles prepared to use the still-undiscovered first tunnel they had dug in the drains. Cutting a square of earth from below, Reid was the first out into the courtyard, but a floodlight came on instantly. He was surrounded by armed Germans—tipped off by the guard they thought they had bribed to silence.

  Other attempts followed. French laborers carried a British officer, Peter Allan, in a straw mattress being taken to soldiers’ quarters in a local village. A fluent German-speaker, Allan made it to Vienna and even spent part of the journey with an SS officer who gave him a lift. In Vienna he was refused help by the American consulate, with the United States at that point not in the war. Exhaustion and starvation saw him taken to a local hospital, where he was arrested and sent back to Colditz for solitary confinement.

  Around the same time, a French officer, Mairesse-Lebrun, made it to the local station before being apprehended. Mairesse-Lebrun was an athletic and determined escaper, however. In July 1941, during his exercise period, he leaped the outer wire with the help of a friend who made his hands into a stirrup. Mairesse-Lebrun then climbed the wire from the outside and used it to get over the outer wall. He stole a local bicycle and cycled between sixty and a hundred miles a day, posing as an Italian officer. He avoided capture and crossed to Switzerland seven days after his escape. From there he made it to the Pyrenees before he was taken prisoner by the Fascist Spanish and broke his back jumping from a window. Crippled, Mairesse-Lebrun survived the war. His belongings in Colditz were later received at his French home in the parcel he had made and addressed before his escape.

  Two Polish officers tried the perilous climb down the outer cliff but were discovered and captured by a German who heard the noise and opened a window right by their rope of tied sheets. In his excitement, he shouted for them to put their hands up, which they couldn’t do without letting go of the rope.

  Meanwhile, the British prisoners had begun another tunnel. They had homemade compasses, copied maps, rucksacks, and some rare German money, smuggled into the castle with new arrivals. They created civilian clothing by altering RAF uniforms. Twelve men were to escape, but that too failed when the Germans discovered them.

  The Dutch contingent was more successful in 1941, managing to smuggle six men over the outer wall and wire in pairs on successive Sundays. Four out of six reached Switzerland safely. The other two were sent back to Colditz.

  Winston Churchill’s nephew Giles Romilly was sent to Colditz toward the end of 1941. He was closely guarded, though at one point he almost escaped, disguised as a French coal worker unloading supplies. Toward the end of the war, when Germany was losing badly, the prominente, or famous prisoners, were moved to a prison camp at Tittmoning, with the intention of using them as hostages. Romilly and two others escaped Tittmoning with the help of Dutchmen he had known in Colditz. One of the three was recaptured, but Romilly eventually made it back to England after the fall of Germany.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  By December 1941, the inhabitants of Colditz had managed to get hold of some yeast and began brewing beer from anything organic, sitting on the jars and bottles for hours on end to promote fermentation. After that, they created a still and made “firewater” that the Poles called vodka, of a sort. With Christmas on the way, they had quite a good collection of vintages.

  As a trained engineer, Pat Reid had become the official “escape officer” for the British contingent. He noticed that the theater stage overlapped a floor below that led to the Germanguard house. He approached Airey Neave and J. Hyde-Thompson to take part in a new plan. Neave said that only the Dutch could make realistic German uniforms, so two Dutch officers were brought in for the attempt. They made uniform buttons, eagles, and swastikas by pouring molten lead into intricately carved molds, then attached them to adapted Dutch greatcoats, which were similar to the German ones. Leather belts and holsters were cut from linoleum, and they carried well-forged German identity documents.

  Reid and a Canadian, Hank Wardle, cut through the ceiling of the room under the stage, camouflaging and repainting a removable hatch with great care. They were experienced lock pickers, and the doors beyond gave them no trouble. It went like a charm. Neave and the Dutchman Tony Luteyn went first, with Hyde-Thompson and the second Dutchman following the next night. As escape officer, Reid could not go himself—his skills were too valuable. The Germans discovered that they were missing four men and began to search the castle.

  Neave and Luteyn crossed to Switzerland, making Neave the first Briton to escape from Colditz successfully. He went on to become a Conservative MP in 1953 and later served as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s opposition government. Tragically, after surviving so many perils, he was killed in a car bomb planted by Irish Republicans a few months before the 1979 election. His book describing the Colditz escape, They Have Their Exits, is a great read. Hyde-Thompson and his companion were caught and returned to Colditz.

  The Germans discovered the stage hatch with the help of a Polish informer whom they controlled by blackmail. The Poles discovered his identity, and their senior officer gave the commandant a day to remove him before they hanged him themselves.

  As 1942 crept by, the French contingent worked on a tunnel that had its entrance in the clock tower. They also sent out one Lieutenant Boulé, dressed as a beautiful blond woman. The disguise was discovered when “she” dropped her watch and a guard returned it. The Dutch tried one large man sitting on the grass, hiding a smaller man beneath his coat while he dug a shallow grave. Dogs found him before he was missed.

  By that time, there were sixty British in Colditz. One of the best known, RAF fighter pilot Douglas Bader, arrived during 1942. Morale was dropping with the number of failed attempts and so few successes. Two officers went insane and had to be restrained from committing suicide. Another feigned madness in an attempt to get himself sent to Switzerland. Bader’s presence helped morale no end. For a man with artificial legs, he was irrepressible and announced that he was ready to join an escape over the roof of the castle.

  Squadron leader Brian Paddon was removed from Colditz around this time to be court-martialed at another prison camp. He escaped his guards and was the second Briton to reach England. Other attempts were less successful, but they went on continuously. Pat Reid planned an escape through the commandant’s own office, with the help of a Dutch watchmaker who could get through the more complex locks. Reid began a tunnel under the commandant’s desk, working at night. When the time came, eight men assembled in the office and six broke through to a storeroom, leaving Reid and Lieutenant Derek Gill to hide the route. They were all dressed as German soldiers, and their “sergeant” was saluted by the guards as they walked out the following morning. Of the six, four were recaptured, but two made it to Switzerland by September 1942.

  Pat Reid’s final escape plan came when Dick Howe took over as escape officer and he could make a try for himself. Reid joined Ronnie Littledale, William Stephens, and Hank Wardle in a run over the roofs. Split-second timing was the key as they had only instants to cross a courtyard when the patrolling guard turned. The noise of their run was covered by an orchestra practice, which Douglas Bader conducted. Bader could see the vital sentry, and the plan was for him to stop the music whenever it was safe to
run. However, the Germans became suspicious and stopped the practice halfway through. The escapers reached the outer buildings safely but were then unable to go farther when a prepared key failed to open a vital lock. Reid found an unused basement with a very narrow, barred chimney to the outside. To get up it, they had to strip naked, then pass up their kits and re-dress on the other side. They crossed the moat, barbed wire, and outer wall with sheet ropes, then set off in pairs. Reid and Wardle covered the four hundred miles in four days of train journeys and walking. All four made it to Switzerland safely.

  In the four years of Colditz’s use as a prison camp, more than three hundred escape plans were attempted, and of those, thirty-one ended in a “home run.” The German habit of returning escapers to the same place meant that as often as they lost a potential route out, they learned from the experience of those who made it farthest. Vitally, the repeated attempts also tied up German soldiers and resources that would otherwise have been used fighting the Allies.

  After fierce fighting, the castle was liberated by American soldiers on April 15, 1945. One of the last British plans was revealed behind a false wall in the attic—a working wooden glider with a wing span of thirty-three feet.

  Recommended

  The Colditz Story and The Latter Days at Colditz by P. R. Reid

  Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill

  They Have Their Exits by Airey Neave

  The Unknown Warrior

  It is evening on the western front. The year, 1916; halfway through the mud and carnage that is the Great War. An army padre serving in France returns to his billet.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  “I came back from the line at dusk. We had just laid to rest the mortal remains of a comrade. I went to a billet in front of Erkingham, near Armentières. At the back of the billet was a small garden, and in the garden, only six paces from the house, there was a grave. At the head of the grave there stood a rough cross of white wood. On the cross was written, in deep black-penciled letters ‘An Unknown British Soldier’ and in brackets underneath ‘of the Black Watch.’ It was dusk and no-one was near except some officers of the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting. How that grave caused me to think.”

  The Reverend David Railton wrote to the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig. He proposed that the body of a soldier be removed from the western front to Britain for burial: one soldier to represent all the dead of the British Empire and Commonwealth, to help “ease the pain of father, mother, brother, sister, sweetheart, wife and friend.” Understandably, in the middle of a four-year war, there was no reply, but the concept of the Unknown Warrior had begun.

  Railton survived the war and in 1919 was appointed vicar of Saint John the Baptist in Margate, Kent. He left the army with the Military Cross and the memory of that evening in France. He’d thought further that such an unknown soldier should be buried only inside Westminster Abbey, because that great abbey—first dedicated in 1065—was the “Parish Church of the Empire,” of a third of the world. In August 1920 he resubmitted the idea to the dean of Westminster, Dr. Herbert Ryle. He in turn approached the king, the prime minister, and the British army, writing: “There are thousands of graves…of ‘Tommies’ who fell at the front—names not known. My idea is that one such body (name not known) should be exhumed and interred in Westminster Abbey, in the nave.”

  King George V was at first doubtful, suggesting that almost two years after the end of the war such a funeral “now might be regarded as belated.” However, he was persuaded that the idea would work, and on October 18, the dean received a letter informing him of His Majesty’s approval and of the suggestion that the burial indeed take place on the next Armistice Day, November 11, 1920. From that day BBC radio and newspapers throughout the empire, commonwealth, and the world carried regular reports of the project.

  How was the Unknown Warrior to be selected from the more than one and a half million dead British and empire soldiers, sailors, and airmen? How would he reach Westminster Abbey?

  The desperately sad process of locating, identifying, transporting to war cemeteries, and reburying the British and empire dead along all battlefronts is carried out by the Imperial War Graves Commission, then under the command of Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt. He gave orders that on November 7, 1920, the bodies of four servicemen be exhumed from the four great British battlefields of the western front; one from the Somme, one from Ypres, one from Arras, and one from the Aisne. Each must be from a grave marked UNKNOWN BRITISH SOLDIER, each must be wearing a British uniform, and all must be placed in identical bags.

  Four unknown servicemen were brought that evening by field ambulances to the Saint-Pol headquarters and there taken into the chapel. Each of the ambulance parties left immediately and returned to their base. At midnight Brigadier General Wyatt and Colonel Gell entered the dim, lamp-lit chapel. Wyatt wrote later:

  The four soldiers lay on stretchers, each covered with a Union flag; in front of the altar was the shell of a coffin which had been sent from England to receive the remains. I selected one and, with the assistance of Col. Gell, placed it in the shell and screwed down the lid. The other bodies were removed and re-buried in the military cemetery outside my headquarters at St. Pol. I had no idea even of the area from which the body I had selected had come; and no-one else can know it.

  Thus the soldier or sailor or airman was selected at random. The name of the man, his age, his regiment, his rank, where he died—all were and shall remain forever unknown.

  In Britain, meanwhile, a special coffin was commissioned. It was made of oak from a tree on the grounds of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace. Around the coffin were forged wrought-iron bands, and secured to the lid was the sword of a knight of the Crusades, selected by the king from the Tower of London. Carved into the lid was the inscription:

  A BRITISH WARRIOR WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 1914–18 FOR KING AND COUNTRY

  In Westminster Abbey the nave was prepared. Flagstones were raised and a grave dug in the center of the aisle, in pride of place, directly inside the Great West Door.

  A quiet service was held in the Saint-Pol chapel by chaplains from the Church of England, the Nonconformist churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. On November 9, the coffin shell of pine was carried by field ambulance and escort to the Chapelle Ardente in Boulogne, where it was placed inside the oaken coffin brought from Britain. There the Unknown Warrior rested overnight with an honor guard of British and Dominion soldiers. Brigadier General Wyatt also sent six barrels of earth from the western front with which to cover the coffin in its Westminster grave, so that the Unknown Warrior “should rest in the soil on which so many of our troops gave up their lives.”

  On the morning of the tenth the coffin was carried to HMS Verdun, berthed at Gambetta Quay, for the channel crossing. Lieutenant General Sir George Macdonogh represented the king; Marshal Foch represented the French government.

  The procession following the coffin was more than a mile long, made up of French infantry, cavalry, disabled soldiers, and children. More people lined the roadsides to the quay. The destroyer Verdun, launched in 1917, was chosen because she was named after the battle of Verdun of 1916.

  Halfway across the English Channel, as the Verdun entered British waters, six Royal Navy destroyers met and escorted her into Dover. Unbidden, gathering slowly during the day and waiting in silence, thousands of people lined the quaysides of the ancient port. A nineteen-gun salute was fired—a field marshal’s salute, the highest military honor—and a band played. The coffin was transferred into the same railway carriage that in 1919 had carried home the body of Edith Cavell, and borne to London.

  During the war some 25 million wounded soldiers, sailors, and airmen had passed that way, but the passage of that serviceman was particularly poignant. The Daily Mail wrote of the journey through Kent:

  The train thundered through the dark, wet, moonless night. At the
platforms by which it rushed could be seen groups of women watching and silent, many dressed in deep mourning. Many an upper window was open and against the golden square of light was silhouetted clear cut and black the head and shoulders of some faithful watcher…. In the London suburbs there were scores of homes with back doors flung wide, light flooding out and in the gardens figures of men, women and children gazing at the great lighted train rushing past.

  This serviceman returning might just be their missing serviceman—their brother, father, son, or friend.

  The bridges over the line were also packed with silent watchers, the steam and smoke from the engine shrouding them as the marked carriage passed beneath. When the train drew into Victoria Station, more people thronged the platforms and concourses. There the Unknown Warrior remained overnight with an honor guard of the King’s Company, Grenadier Guards.

  On the morning of November 11, 1920, at 0915, the Unknown Warrior was carried to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. Draped over his coffin was a very special Union Jack on which were placed a British helmet and sidearms. The flag was the property of the Reverend Railton, and it, too, had seen action. It was the flag that Railton had used as an altar cloth for makeshift services and for the celebration of Holy Communion along the western front.

  From Hyde Park, the Royal Artillery fired a nineteen-gun salute. Twelve of the highest-ranking officers—led by Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig—attended as pallbearers. Following the carriage were the mourners, including four hundred ex-servicemen of all ranks. All that had been arranged.