Colditz (26 page)

The delousing shed was a temporary structure in the courtyard built to house the portable ovens, which looked like huge boilers and into which clothing was put and baked in order to kill lice and other pests. The sudden arrival of the Russians necessitated the use of these portable ovens, and Rupert and I were caught red-handed. The boilers were hardly used once in six months. It was unfortunate the Russians arrived just during British working hours!

The incident, however, enabled the British to make the first contact ever with Russian soldiers, who were to be housed in the town. They were a sight of which the Germans should have been ashamed. Living skeletons, they dragged their fleshless feet along the ground in a decrepit slouch. These scarecrows were the survivors of a batch ten times their number which had started from the Eastern front. They were treated like animals, given no food and put out into the fields to find fodder amidst the grass and roots. Their trek into Germany took weeks.

With tunnels discovered, the “do or die” attempt appeared the only way—or so it did to Flight-Lieutenant “Bag” Dickinson. Because there were so many POWs doing “solitary” confinement sentences, the Germans had to supplement the seven prison cells in the Castle precinct by hiring more in the town—as I have explained in
Chapter 8
. The normal Castle cell was about ten feet by six feet, and two to a cell was nowadays the norm. So Colditz could only house fourteen POWs at a time doing prison sentences of anything from five to twenty-eight days. The waiting queue was getting longer and longer. The old town jail provided the answer. It was not in use, but on the first floor were ten “good,” old-fashioned cells and a guardroom. There was a small exercise yard. It was ten minutes' walk from the Castle. On 18 August after an hour of “exercise” in the diminutive yard, with a sentry in front and one at the rear with revolvers in their holsters, a procession of ten POWs walked back through the prison door. The sentry in front proceeded to mount the stairs. This was Bag's moment. From the middle of the procession, he ran a few yards to a side wall with a locked door in it. The lock handle gave him a foothold. He leaped and grabbed the top of the eight-foot wall. He swung over and dropped into an orchard beyond. Over another wall and out on to a street. He grabbed a bicycle—miraculously unlocked—and was away like greased lightning. The second sentry had hesitated to shoot because the prison was surrounded by houses with windows close by. He was also slow on the draw.

Unfortunately “Bag” was not properly equipped for his escape. The Germans issued their codeword “
Mäusefalle
” (“Mousetrap”) to all police stations up to 100 miles around. Dickinson was caught by the police that evening in Chemnitz about forty miles away.

Wing Commander Douglas Bader (WingCo) had arrived on 16 August.

On 20 August the French Lieutenant Delarue, dressed as a German painter, unsuccessfully tried to bluff his way out of the garrison yard after side-stepping from the park walk. He did not possess the correct pass. On 25 August Flight-Lieutenant Forbes and Lieutenant Lee tried a “break-away” from their guards in the streets of Leipzig.

In England Paddon, after a short leave and promotion to wing commander, was sent off on a tour of operational units to give advice to the many aircrews soon to face the possibility of capture. One day late in August he was called up by MI9. An alleged Belgian was being held in custody under grave suspicion of being a spy. The man was claiming to have escaped from Colditz. He had swum to a British ship off the coast of Algeçiras and stowed away. On arrival in England he was handed over and had been in prison a month. Would Paddon be prepared to see this man and identify him?

Paddon entered the man's cell and faced none other than his Belgian friend Lieutenant Louis Rémy who had been the one to get away, when he, Paddon and Just had made the escape bid from a Colditz hospital visit in April of that year, 1942.

At his own request, Paddon returned to an operational unit, but was not allowed to fly over enemy-held territory for fear of torture and perhaps death if the Gestapo got him. He commanded several airfields, was again promoted, and as Group Captain Paddon controlled the great Coastal Command base at Thornaby, Yorkshire.

Later he wrote his autobiography of the war years. His memoirs make fascinating reading and it is sad that permission for their publication has not been granted by his widow. Hopefully she will soon relent.
*

On 1 September, “the Navy” arrived in Colditz from Stalag VIIIB, Lamsdorf, in Silesia, where they had got to know Douglas Bader. The group consisted of sixteen when they set out and fifteen when they arrived. Lieutenant-Commander W. L. (Billie) Stephens, who had been captured during the St. Nazaire raid in March 1942, was missing. He had climbed on to the roof of the train they had changed from at Gross Bothen. This train took off in another direction. But Stephens was caught later, still on the train roof. Among them were three ERAs (Engine-Room Artificers), Lister, Hammond and Johnson, who as chief petty officers should not have been in Colditz at all. But at Lamsdorf they had simply been promoted in order to increase their chances of staying with the officers they had befriended.

Mike Moran recalls the following story about Bader, whom he first met in Lamsdorf, where Douglas had been sent for medical treatment. Characteristically, he was determined to escape, despite his obvious disadvantages. Shortly after his arrival at Lamsdorf, however, luck seemed to come his way when a working party was required for a job alongside a
Luftwaffe
air base.

The working party was selected and the
modus operandi
planned with infinite care. But the difficulties were all too obvious—not least among them Bader's “fame” in Germany. When news got round that he was in Lamsdorf, the
Kommandant
was deluged with requests from local bigwigs who wanted a chance to see him. Clearly Douglas wouldn't be away long before his absence was discovered.

The sick bay was the second hut in from the main gate; the first was a guard hut, where outgoing working parties were checked. Before daylight the air-field party went through the usual routine at the guard hut: an argument was started
and became a free for all. Bader slipped out of the sick bay; his replacement slipped in. The party marched off to the station and reached it and the hut at the air field without incident. Douglas was to be the “duty-room stooge” while others spied out the land.

About mid-day a staff car pulled up outside. Two
Luftwaffe
officers entered the hut, bade Douglas “
Wilkommen
,” and took him to their mess, where he was wined and dined, enjoying every minute of it. Lamsdorf was informed by telephone. The
Luftwaffe
refused to return him until the next day. “He's ours until tomorrow!” He got his spell in cells, of course.

Bader arrived in Colditz a fortnight before “the Navy.” Mike Moran remembers well the shouts of welcome from the windows of the French, “
Vive le Royal Navy!
,” and the bugles blowing through the iron bars of the windows in the British quarters. He wondered what sort of a bedlam he had entered.

At 8 a.m. next day they wearily descended the eighty-eight stone steps to the courtyard for morning
Appell
. When the count was over the German duty officer read out the names of those who had arrived the previous evening. Everyone back to their rooms, except them.

Into the courtyard came a civilian with a camera, guards carrying a small table, fingerprint equipment and other items, and a
Hauptmann
with a large folder. In a corner of the courtyard, between the chapel and the entrance to the British quarters, the equipment was set up. Mike was the first to be dealt with. For the photograph, he stood behind the stand which already held a card with his number—110599. He wasn't asked to smile!

Through the window bars the other prisoners were looking down. As the photographer pressed the button on his camera—
crash!
Two water bombs landed on the fingerprint table, breaking the glass slab, sending cards and ink-pad flying. More water bombs came down, one hitting the photographer, another one of the guards. From the windows came shouts and cat-calls. The guards shouldered their rifles, pointing them at the windows. The German officer shouted the usual threat, “
Von den Fenster zurück, oder ich schiesse!
” It was ignored—the cat-calls continued. The order came to shoot. Two or three shots were fired at the windows, but by then they were empty.

Mike was still standing behind the number board, wondering for the umpteenth time since the previous evening what sort of place he had arrived at. Guards were placed at the entrance doors to the prisoners' quarters. The naval contingent were hustled through the gate to the German courtyard. There the remaining identity photographs were taken.

That was his introduction to
Oflag
IVC. But it had not yet finished.

The Colditz “old lags” decided to have some fun at the new boys' expense. Howard Gee, who spoke German perfectly, was togged out in the best pieces of home-made German officer's uniform, converted from a Dutch uniform for the occasion (and removed from its hiding place). He was accoutered as the German camp doctor, complete with stethoscope, accompanied by his medical orderly, alias Dominic Bruce, in white overalls, carrying a large bowl of blue woad—mainly theater paint—and a paintbrush. No sooner were the fifteen new arrivals let loose in the British day quarters than Gee and Bruce entered. Gee, in a stentorian voice, demanded that the newcomers parade before him. He inspected them, condemned them as lice-ridden, bellowed at them to remove their trousers, condemned them again in insulting language as being ridden with crabs and indicated to his orderly that their offending body areas and other excrescences be generously painted with the blue liquid, permeated with high-smelling lavatory disinfectant. The “Navy” seethed with suppressed indignation—but were covertly informed by the crowd of onlookers that what was being done to them had to be endured because any resistance, not to mention defiance, would bring diabolical retribution on everybody.

To be fair to the newcomers, they had by this time divested the “doctor” of his stethoscope and they were about to smash it to smithereens when they were alerted to the horrors of immediate German revenge. The stethoscope happened to belong to the British camp doctor—and was the only one in the region. The fake camp doctor then retired from the scene with his orderly, leaving the Navy standing at ease with their trousers down, but not before he had harangued them once more in the most insulting language his German vocabulary could rise to.

The Polish Lieutenant Żelaźniewicz escaped on 2 September from the park walk but was recaptured near Podelwitz, a local village.

On 8 September, Colditz was inspected by a senior German officer, General Wolff, who was in charge of prisoners of war in Army District No. 4, Dresden. He inspected the camp and found everything to his satisfaction and the German staff efficient and in control. Fortunately for everybody, when he was driven away his back was turned to the Castle wall beside the moat bridge. If he had turned his head, he would have seen a sixty-foot length of blue and white checked (bedsack) rope dangling from a remote window high up in a
Kommandantur
attic. It was seen by a housewife from the village, who reported it to the duty officer.

The day before, following upon an earlier order issued from General Wolff's office, the
Kommandant
had instituted a reduction of surplus prisoners' baggage. The British POWs had accumulated a substantial horde of private belongings
which tended to clutter up the dormitories and also impede German searches. They were told to pack unwanted gear in large tea-chest-sized boxes, ex–Canadian Red Cross. These boxes were to be carefully labelled and stored until required. Some of the boxes contained books and were correspondingly heavy. Flight-Lieutenant Dominic Bruce, always known as the medium-sized man, fulfilled the role of a consignment of books complete with blue-check bedsack rope and equipment for an escape. All the boxes were duly carted away and manhandled by orderlies up a spiral staircase into an attic in the
Kommandantur
buildings. The doors were locked and Bruce was left to his own devices. During the night, he escaped, but not before he had inscribed on the empty box: “
Die Luft in Colditz gefällt mir nicht mehr. Auf Wiedersehen!
[The Colditz air no longer pleases me. Au revoir!]”

Bruce reached Danzig and tried to board a ship, as Paddon had done. He wasn't caught until a week later, near the harbor basin at Danzig. He had made use of one of those silk maps from the cover of a book from the Lisbon “agent.” His story there was that he had jumped from a British plane over Bremen and had arrived in Danzig on a stolen bicycle. His bicycle, unluckily, had a local number on it. He was, however, sent to the RAF camp at Dulag Luft near Oberursel. There he was recognized by members of the German staff and for the second time he left for Colditz. It was perhaps artless of Bruce to write “
Auf Wiedersehen
” on the box when he really had “Goodbye” in mind. It was tempting fate.

Things were hotting up for the new
Kommandant
. On 9 September, ten officers were found to be missing after the morning roll-call had been delayed—the count fudged, the parade recounted, dismissed and recalled—while Hauptmann Priem raged up and down the ranks. An identity check of all the POWs had to be instituted to confirm who exactly had got away. This took several hours. The “confusion” ploy was used because there was no way of properly concealing a number of absentees at one time.

The escape plan had arisen one hot day in August 1942. Captain “Lulu” Lawton complained to me that a half-starved rat couldn't find a hole big enough to squeeze through to escape from Colditz. If only, he lamented, he could think of a way. I told him to look for the enemy's weakest point. Thinking aloud, I said, “I should say it's Gephard's own office. Nobody will ever look for an escape attempt being hatched in the German RSM's office.”