The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (63 page)

The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III changed a great deal at Colditz, as it did in all the camps around the Third Reich. Previously, escaping had been, to an extent, regarded as an adventure. Of course the Germans would shoot at escapers, but usually with intent to wound rather than kill (the one fatality at Colditz came when a bullet ricocheted into Lieutenant Mike Sinclair’s heart). However, after it became clear that the Nazis were now regarding escape as punishable with death, the predilection of the officers to “have a go” was reined in. MI9, the branch of British military intelligence that assisted potential escapers, advised caution.

However, one plan was still being worked on in secret: the Colditz Cock, the brainchild of Flight Lieutenant Bill Goldfinch, who had been sent to Colditz from Stalag Luft III after tunnelling out, and Lieutenant Tony Rolt, a former racing driver. In the winter of 1943, Goldfinch was standing in a room overlooking Colditz town and observed the way in which the snow drifted up and over the top of the castle. It showed that there was a really smooth flow of air, which would be perfect to use in a glider. As he explained to a Channel 4 documentary in 2000, “All the other methods of escape had been attempted by somebody. This seemed much simpler to me – to stand on the roof and jump off.”

They would need to improvize a runway along the forty-foot ridge, and then use a counterweight to catapult themselves off the roof down towards a field on the other side of the River Mulde, about five hundred yards away. On the roof, they were out of the way of the searchlights, but they would need to build the glider in secret within the castle walls, and then get it into position. A bath filled with concrete would be fastened with a bed rope to the end of the glider. When it was dropped from the third floor of the chapel block, it would be enough to send two escapers on their way.

The escape committee gave their blessing to the attempt, reasoning, in part, that work on the glider would keep the officers focused. To his delight, Goldfinch found a two-volume book in the castle library entitled
Aircraft Design,
which explained exactly what was needed to build and fly a glider. A false wall was built in the attic above the chapel, which made the upper room seven feet shorter, but the POWs gambled on the Germans never measuring the rooms. A trapdoor in the ceiling allowed entrance to this new secret room, in which construction work began on 1 January 1944.

Sixteen men were directly involved with the work. The originators – Goldfinch, Rolt, RAF pilot Jack Best and Jeff Wardle – were assisted by twelve “apostles” building the glider, while forty others kept watch and diverted the Germans’ attention. Thirty-two ribs had to be made for the wings and the tailplane, all of which had to be exactly accurate or the glider wouldn’t fly. In the end, over 6,000 different pieces of wood were used, while electricity cable was repurposed for the control cables, and beds were taken apart for their bolts. Saws were created from the spring of an old gramophone. But the prisoners played fair: the Germans had allowed them to use tools for the flourishing theatre in the camp grounds so long as they weren’t used to help with an escape. Not one of these ever went into the workshop.

The skeleton of the glider was complete by the summer of 1944. Paillasse covers were then stretched over the top of the fuselage, and painted with what the POWs called “dope” to keep it tight – although none of it was waterproof, meaning that the glider’s sole flight would need to be on a dry night.

The glider never flew. It soon became clear that the tide of the war was turning against the Germans. The D-Day invasion in June 1944 saw the Allies start to march on Berlin, but those in the camps were unsure how their captors would react, particularly one group held at Colditz, the “Prominente”. These were relatives of key members of the Allied forces, such as Winston Churchill’s nephew by marriage, a nephew of King George VI, and the son of the American Ambassador to Britain. When the POWs learned that squads of SS soldiers were now stationed in Colditz town, probably with orders to exterminate the Prominente if necessary, it was decided to hold the glider as a potential lifeline to alert the outside world of an impending massacre.

The original glider was still in position when Colditz was liberated by the Americans in April 1945 – the only photograph of it was taken by one of the US soldiers. However, it was duplicated on three occasions. In 1993, a miniature version was constructed from Goldfinch’s original designs, which he had kept since the war, and launched from the castle roof. For a Channel 4 documentary in 2000, a full-size replica was built and launched at RAF Odiham: both Goldfinch and Jack Best witnessed their dreams become reality. On 17 March 2012, a further full-scale version of the glider flew from Colditz Castle, for all of fifteen seconds before crashing into the exact field that Bill Goldfinch had identified nearly seventy years previously. Sadly Goldfinch had died five years earlier, but as the youngest member of the reconstruction team, Jess Nyahoe told the
Radio Times,
“If we got it wrong, then the world would have thought that they got it wrong. For them and their memory we wanted to get it right.”

Sources:

Chancellor, Henry:
Colditz, The Definitive History
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)

Radio Times,
17 March 2012: “Colditz Castle glider escape plot realised more than 65 years after the war”

Daily Telegraph,
12 October 2007: “Obituary: Flight Lieutenant Bill Goldfinch”

PBS, 6 February 2001: “Nazi Prison Escape” (edited from the Channel 4
Escape from Colditz
series)

According to official US records, only three servicemen captured during the Korean War made it back across enemy lines. Of those, just one was captured and escaped twice, and had to contend with both ankles so badly fractured that the bones had come out of the side of his feet. Major Ward Malvern Millar bore the marks of his escape until his death in January 1999.

Millar had served in the United States Air Force during the Second World War, and after being demobbed, had gone to study nuclear physics at Reed College in Oregon. However, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950, and the USAF became active in the conflict assisting the United Nations, Millar was called back to active service, flying sorties over the North Korean lines.

In June 1951, during his thirtieth mission, his plane caught fire, and he had no option: he had to bail out over North Korean territory, knowing that he would be captured and held in one of their prisoner-of-war camps. His problems were compounded by his bad landing: it was very obvious to him that he had broken both his ankles, but his Chinese Army captors either didn’t understand him, or chose not to take any notice of his pleas. Instead they told him to march off to a nearby hut.

With guns pointing in his face, Millar didn’t think he had any option. He stood up, but as he did so, he could hear the bones of his ankle crunch. As a direct result of the pressure of his weight on them, he ended up with a compound fracture of the bones of his right ankle. When they saw this, even the Chinese realized that he was not going to be able to go any further. He was therefore permitted to crawl on his belly to the hut – at least until some American planes started to fly over. At that point, one of his captors picked him up and carried him on his back the remaining hundred yards.

Once he was finally in the hut, Millar was stripped of all of his possessions, although he was allowed to keep his service jacket and his “Mae West”, the inflatable lifejacket which USAF personnel were issued with as part of their flight gear, named after the buxom film star. Millar was pleased that they let him keep the Mae West: he figured that it would help him when he reached the coast after he escaped. And escape was what he intended to do, no matter what injuries he might have received.

Millar guessed that he was being kept not too far from the coast; if he could get there, he had a good chance of finding a boat which would take him to one of the US Navy ships. Before he could do any major planning, he was interrogated by the North Koreans, who alternately promised to release him, and then start preparations for his execution. Millar was determined that they weren’t going to break him; he was simply not going to give them that satisfaction. He stayed firm, and in the end was transferred to a small hospital in a nearby village, where his injured legs were put into a cast.

Although rations for prisoners of war weren’t particularly large, Millar started to stockpile a cache of food, ready for the long trek to the coast. He was aided by a seventeen-year-old South Korean boy, Ho, who was willing to go with him. Each night while the other patients slept, Millar practised crawling but he discovered that his toes were protruding from the end of the cast, and dragging painfully along the ground. He therefore developed some protection for his feet, by tying two boards to his legs to act as skids, then attached tin cans to his insteps so the boards wouldn’t cut into the top of his feet, and wrapped pieces of cloth around his toes. Unfortunately, before he could test this out very much, he had two pieces of bad luck: the teenager was taken away, and Millar’s cast, which had previously only extended up to his knee, was replaced with one that nearly reached up to his hips. The only upside was that this new cast meant that he was free of the lice which had crawled inside the old one and caused him almost intolerable itching. However, when he split the back of the cast down to the knee, he gained some manoeuvrability and on 27 July 1951, he started to crawl away from the hospital.

It took Millar three hours to crawl twenty-five yards. At that speed it would take him 211 hours – seventy-two days – to make the first mile. Reluctantly facing up to the reality of his plight, Millar turned back and made the equally painful and slow return trip. By sheer luck, his exploits weren’t noticed.

A week later, on 5 August, the medical team at Na-han-li hospital removed the cast from his leg. But whoever had placed it on his leg had no real idea what he was doing: instead of placing the bones at the correct angle so they would heal properly, they had been set in such a haphazard manner that his toes pointed downwards stiffly at a grotesque angle – when Miller stood up, his body tilted backwards. However, as far as the staff at the hospital and his Chinese guards were concerned, the treatment had been a success. At a suitable time in the near future, he would be transferred from there to a regular prisoner-of-war camp.

Millar wasn’t given any boots, despite asking for them, although his captors did allow him to use a couple of sticks as crutches, and for a time he had use of a pair of tennis shoes. Eventually he was provided with an old pair of galoshes which were designed to fit a shoe two sizes larger than Millar’s feet. Although he initially thought these would be useless, he came to realize that they might be exactly what he needed after all. There was enough room in them to build a false heel, which would allow him to walk better, and if he stuffed rags around the lower part of his legs, the upper part of the galoshes would fit comfortably, and provide a degree of ankle support. With that bolstering, the galoshes allowed Millar to get up a turn of speed that he had begun to believe would be impossible again.

The airman checked that his “escape kit” was ready: he had some rock salt, a few small pieces of soap; a piece of towelling; a tin can top bent over, which could be used as a crude knife; and 200 won inside the lining of his Mae West. In better spirits than he had been in some time, Millar waited for his chance to go. The evacuation to the prisoner-of-war camp had been delayed because heavy rains were preventing trucks from getting through to the hospital, but when those dried up on 14 August, Millar knew he had to chance it now, or risk being much further behind enemy lines. He managed to gain one extra night in the hospital by faking a bad cough, but was warned that he was being sent to Pyongyang the next day.

Millar knew that he would be checked up on around 11 p.m., and as soon as the Chinese nurse had done the inspection, he made himself ready, and at midnight, he hobbled out of the hut. Rather than head immediately for the UN lines to the south, Millar decided to head north, hoping that this would put his pursuers off the scent. He managed to get a few miles before collapsing into an exhausted sleep. Over the next few days, he realized that he was nowhere near the coast, as he had first thought: Ho had told him that they were being held in the centre of Korea, around seventy miles from the sea, but Millar had dismissed the boy as being illiterate.

Recognizing that there was nothing for it but to keep going, Millar headed west. He was wracked with dysentery, irritated by lice, and in perpetual pain from the chafing of the galoshes on his skin. He had one run-in with a Korean who found him, and tried to hand him in to the local authorities, but the man was mute, and was unable to make the Chinese understand what he was trying to tell them.

After eleven days hobbling across North Korea, Miller was finally captured, after another civilian spotted him and went to fetch soldiers. The North Korean military found him hiding in the bushes, but when their leader, Kim Chal Phail, started to search Millar, he discovered a tiny cross that the airman had created from a twig. He said three simple words to Millar which proved to be the American’s salvation: “Jesus, Mary, Christian?” Millar nodded: his faith and his love for his family had been all that had kept him going over the past week.

Kim carried Millar the four miles to his village on his back, and once they were alone, he explained that he too wanted to get away from the north. He hoped to defect to South Korea. Between them the two supposed enemies devised a plan of escape.

When Kim was ordered to transfer Millar up to a prison camp at Hwangju in the north a few days later, he drained fuel from the truck so that it would run out before they reached their destination. Kim took a circuitous route towards the camp, and, as he had planned, the fuel ran out when they were partway there. Finding a replacement supply would take some time, so Kim sent the four soldiers who had accompanied them off on a search, while he and Millar used a headlight and the truck’s battery to flash an SOS at passing US aircraft.