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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Many of the most famous escapes in history took place during the Second World War. These daring flights from Nazi-occupied Europe would never have been possible but for the assistance of a hitherto secret British service: MI9. This small, dedicated and endlessly inventive team gave hope to the men who had fallen into enemy hands, and aid to resistance fighters in occupied territory. It sent money, maps, clothes, compasses, even hacksaws – and in return coded letters from the prisoner-of-war camps and provided invaluable news of what was happening in the enemy's homeland. Understaffed and under-resourced, MI9 nonetheless made a terrific contribution to the Allied war effort. First published in 1979, this book tells the full, inside story of an extraordinary organisation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Escape pack, final form
Escape knife
‘Burgandy’ line diagram
Ideal Camp Organisation
Maps
Main evasion routes in Western Europe
Near East
Germany: camps mentioned in text
Central Mediterranean
Far East
Foreword
BY
FIELD-MARSHAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER, KG
Escaping and evading are ancient arts of war. In this field as in so many others modern technology has enabled new and harder edges to be put on old weapons. The story of how MI 9, the British escape service and MIS-X its later American equivalent protected and encouraged the activities of escapers and evaders has never before been told in full, nor have these secret departments’ own papers hitherto been explored.
Though I was lucky enough never to be taken prisoner, perhaps I had the escape side of the business in my blood. My maternal uncle, Maurice Johnston of the Royal Artillery, was taken in Kut-el-Amara in 1915 and got away from Yozgad in Anatolia in 1918, an adventure he describes in his book 450 Miles to Freedom; and my cousin Claude Templer of the Gloucestershire Regiment who was taken, unconscious, in December 1914 escaped successfully at his thirteenth attempt, only to be killed a few days before the Armistice.
I am proud to have been partially responsible for the setting up of MI 9, and delighted to find that the supposition I shared with others, that prisoners of war had considerable military potential, turned out correct. I am glad also to see that these secret services’ successes and rare failures, and the highly efficient example they provided of Anglo-American accord, are set out by men who were involved in the struggle at the time and understand it from within.
The authors have steadfastly refused to seek sensation at the expense of truth, in contrast to far too many books of wartime viiiadventure. Joint authorship has also helped to eliminate the personal bias that so often mars war autobiographies and the lives of individual sailors, soldiers and airmen. Moreover they have taken care, startling though many of their stories are, not to say anything that might endanger servicemen in the future.
I knew some of the early staff of MI 9, and am in no doubt that a tribute to them and to their American colleagues is long overdue.
I would also like to join the authors in recalling with pride and sorrow the prisoners who died in enemy hands, and the thousands upon thousands of men, women and children who gave their lives in enemy-occupied territory for freedom’s sake. There are many heroes and heroines in this book. This is the first time that a proper tribute has been paid to that splendid soldier, Norman Crockatt, who made so many of their gallant deeds possible.
Authors’ Note
How one of us first heard of the other is best explained from War Office files:
Room 900
london
7th November, 1944.
Dear Jimmy,
We have just had a visit from Brigadier Foot, who has been to Brittany to explore the possibilities of exchanging a German P/W for his son, Captain Michael Foot, who has been very helpful to us in the past and whom SAS are very anxious to recover.
Captain Foot is, as far as we know, in prison together with a Warrant Officer Hill, R.A.F., an American 2nd Lieut, and a French Dr. in some building on the East side of the Transatlantic dockyard at St. Nazaire. Captain Foot has, we understand, already made four unsuccessful attempts to escape.
Would it be possible for one of your officers to reconnoitre the position with a view to freeing these P/Ws, and possibly infiltrating some Frenchman into St. Nazaire to help them to escape?
Brigadier Foot says that Mr. Haegler, the Civil Affairs Officer at Nantes, situated in Place Louis XVI, has dealt with all the French personnel evacuated from Nantes and would be able to give first hand information as to the situation and he would probably be able to indicate one or two people who xwould know exactly where the P/Ws are and what the best chances are of securing their release.
Yours ever,
John Bankes
Lt. Col. J. M. Langley, m.b.e., m.c.,
I.S.9 (wea)
G-2 s.h.a.e.f.
Nearly a fortnight later, this reply was sent to Langley’s superior:
secret
IS9WEA/B/2/I1408
From: Lt. Col. J. M. Langley
I.S.9 (WEA)
c/o G.S.I. (x)
H.Q. 21 Army Group
20 November, 1944
My dear Cecil,
As I am at the moment in Brussels, I have instructed Major MacCALLUM to arrange with the Americans to despatch an officer in an endeavour to rescue Captain M. R. D. FOOT. He will keep you informed as to the progress, if any, of this operation. I am rather dubious as to the possibilities of success, and also whether we are justified in making special efforts to rescue one officer.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy
Lt. Col. C. M. Rait, m.c.1
xiOn the day when this second letter was written Foot was taken to a German hospital at La Baule, unconscious after the treatment he had received from the peasant inhabitants of a farm chosen, deep in the previous night, on what he had believed to be Langley’s instructions for a sound refuge during an escape, as he had picked them up at a lecture a year before.
We are glad to say that we have since got on to less distant terms. Of our personal adventures we do not propose to say much more in these pages, for, working on the real giants of secret staff work and the real heroes of clandestine escape and evasion, we know that our own careers are by comparison small beer.
This book is in no sense definitive. It simply serves to illuminate a hitherto obscure corner of the world war effort against the Axis powers, and to show various directions in which further effort, by younger and brighter historians, may illuminate a perpetually interesting subject: courage in adversity.
There are several people and authorities to whom we are glad to express our thanks. We owe a large debt of gratitude to Sir Martin Lindsay of Dowhill, whose pertinacity led him and us to the rediscovery of MI 9’s main archive. Each of us had been positively assured that these files had been destroyed. In fact they had been put away so safely that their existence had been all but forgotten.
We are indebted to the Keeper of the Public Record Office for leave to quote extensively from British official files, which remain Crown copyright. A detailed note on our sources will be found at the end of the book, since references page by page are no longer feasible.
We have had a great deal of help from Gordon Lee of The Economist, who brought us together, sharpened our style, sorted out some of our muddles, and has been a staunch friend throughout. We are grateful also to Leslie Atkinson, Andrew Boyd, Richard Broad, Susan Broomhall, John Buist, George C. Chalou, Dick Crockatt, the late Donald Darling, Sam Derry, xiiDonald E. Emerson, ‘Pat’ Guérisse, Gerald E. Hasselwander, Mabel Howat, W. Stull Holt, Sir Ian Jacob, Joey Jackman, Charles Lamb, Jock McKee, Ron Mogg, Richard Natkiel (who drew the maps and diagrams), Airey Neave, Cecil Rait, the late Sir Leslie Ride, Grismond Davies-Scourfield, Charles Shaughnessy, Bill Kennedy Shaw, Tony Simonds, Michael Sissons, Leslie Veress, Dr A. Selby Wright and many other friends and acquaintances who have shared recollections and information with us. The staffs of the British Library, the Ministry of Defence and the Public Record Office in England, and of the National Archives and the Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center in the United States, have gone out of their way to help us, though we owe it to all of them to emphasise that this book is in no way officially sponsored or subvented. Unattributed translations are our own. The usual caveat applies: any errors that remain are the responsibility of our two selves alone.
Our greatest debt, which we owe jointly with the rest of the free world, is almost too large to fit into print. It is owed not only to those who attempted escapes and evasions, and thus made the Axis powers’ attempt to control the world more troublesome to the Axis; but also to those uncounted thousands of people, ordinary in appearance, extraordinary in courage and devotion, who made the work of the escape networks feasible. They were of many nationalities, of all ages; of both sexes, of all classes; rich and poor, learned and plain, Christian and Jew, Marxist and mystic. Without the work they did, for which a large proportion of them paid with their lives, the world today would be a meaner place; and we write this book lest they be quite forgotten.
MRDF
JML
28 July 1978
1Both letters are in the Public Record Office, War Office papers (hereafter simply WO), WO 208/3422, escapers and evaders in hiding; items 116D and 55A.
Prologue
Many nations are proud of their tales of escape; none perhaps quite so proud as the English-speaking ones. Even in their heroes’ lifetimes, the tales of the three men who escaped from the great camp at Sagan in Silesia through a wooden jumping horse, and the men who walked out of Colditz castle prison in Saxony under their guards’ unsuspecting noses, have seeped into national legend. So has the tale of the party of Americans, each told he would be shot if any of his companions escaped, who broke away as an entire group in the Philippines, and survived. Many relatives of the fifty air force officers who were illegally shot dead by the Gestapo, on recapture after a mass escape from Sagan in March 1944, are still alive. The Sagan murders raised a justified furore; they were not unique. For instance, a naval sub-lieutenant, captured in uniform on a legitimate operation, was refused the status of prisoner of war, and spent many months in a concentration camp with his crew on forced marches to test boots for the German army. As they were led out to be shot he wrested a pistol from the guard commander and shot him dead, a few seconds before his own execution. He deserves to be remembered; as does the young man who, having slipped out of a large prisoner of war camp, travelled from Bremen to Stettin impeccably turned out as the lieutenant, RNVR, he was, bearing forged papers in the name of Lieutenant I. Bagerov of the Royal Bulgarian Navy. So does the man who got out of an air force NCOs’ camp by swapping identities with a Palestinian Jewish pioneer private, and survived till autumn 1977 to run a travel agency off Piccadilly.
Though most of the cases just cited are British, of course the 2British had no monopoly in escaping or in evading. The difference between these two activities must be made clear at once: an escaper is someone who, having been captured, gets away; an evader was never in enemy hands. American, British and Commonwealth sailors, soldiers and airmen often found themselves in friendly rivalry in these fields of war with Belgians, Chinamen, Czechs, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Greeks, Malays, Norwegians, Poles, Slovaks, Yugoslavs and others. Yet the escapers and evaders from the forces of the British Empire and, later, of the United States of America had one enormous advantage over the rest: effective government help, supplied through secret channels.
Most secrets become less secret with the passage of time. Enough of the papers are now available from the two small and efficient secret departments concerned – the British MI 9 and the American MIS-X – for a connected account to be given of what they did. Their aims were to aid escapers, by tools and training, to escape; to train potential evaders to evade; to encourage secret routes along which either could travel; and to glean such intelligence as was to be found in prisoner of war camps. The directing genius of Norman Crockatt, founder of MI 9 and its head for most of the 1939–45 war, can be traced – even if only indirectly – behind almost all of the mid-century adventures this book recalls.
Crockatt and his staff felt they were innovators, as indeed on some technical points they were, but escape and evasion were by no means new; they are quite as old as war. Odysseus’ flight from Calypso is a legend some three thousand years old. St Joseph – the patron saint of evaders? – organised the Flight into Egypt from Herod with his wife and the infant Jesus. The Empress Matilda did a model midwinter passage through her enemies’ lines round Oxford castle in 1142, wrapped in a sheet to hide herself in the snow. A tower of the castle still stands near Oxford station, seldom noticed by tourists hurrying to the city centre. The escape of Hugo Grotius, the inventor of international 3 law, from Loevestein castle in 1621 during the Dutch war of independence, hidden in a box thought by his guards to contain books, is as authentic as Matilda’s, or as Charles II’s flight after defeat at Worcester in 1651 – this memorable evasion is still commemorated in scores of English inns called the Royal Oak. Captain O’Brien, RN, escaped from the French in fact, and Captain Hornblower, RN, in fiction, during the wars against Napoleon I, who himself escaped from Elba in 1815 on his way to Waterloo. The future Napoleon III escaped from a fortress in peacetime, after six years’ confinement, in 1846. Gambetta, who proclaimed his fall in 1870, got out of invested Paris a few weeks later by balloon: the first recorded airborne evasion. Winston Churchill first became famous in his own country by his escape from Pretoria in 1899.
In the American civil war of 1861–5, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, and the world war of 1914–18, masses of prisoners were taken, and escaping and evading capture became common, though never commonplace, activities. The English have not forgotten Edith Cavell, shot after trial by the German occupation forces in Brussels in 1915 for having helped some 600 British soldiers, wounded or cut off during the retreat from Mons, to get away to Holland. A. J. Evans’s The Escaping Club, which inspired so many people who had read it to escape next time round, provides the best known, but by no means the only account of escapes from the prisoner of war camps of those days.1 The national museum in Dublin shows a padlock, 4unlocked with almost miraculous ease by Eamonn de Valera when he escaped from Lincoln jail in February 1919 to take charge of the Irish revolution. Charles de Gaulle thrice escaped from German camps in 1916–17, and was thrice recaptured – experiences that helped to steel him for his skilled evasion from his Vichyste enemies at Bordeaux on 17 June 1940.
By that midsummer of 1940 the normal pattern of war, in flux for centuries, had changed yet again. One of its few constants since Charlemagne’s day had been the concept that there was something dishonourable about personal surrender: capture was usually regarded as disgraceful, or nearly so, for the captive. Elaborate care was taken, for example, by the commanders of besieged cities, even in strategically hopeless cases, to put up a tactically decent defence, so that when they had to give in they could do so ‘with the honours of war’, and might be allowed to march out their surviving garrisons with drums beating and colours flying, the officers retaining their swords. The officer class in all European countries had long attached significance to such points; and at the close of the American civil war, a chivalrous opponent took care so to phrase the surrender that Lee could keep his sword at Appomattox. By the early 1940s these points were all but obsolete, though in Asia honour still counted for something in 1945.
Just as the use of high explosive artillery shell removed the stigma from wounds in the back, the development of air and armoured warfare transformed the fact of being captured from a personal disgrace into something more like an accident. The growth of air power was still accompanied by the myriad troubles of flight; in particular, engines might fail over enemy territory. The collapse, under the impact of armoured breakthrough and encirclement, of the fixed fortified ‘front’, that had dominated so much military thinking earlier in the century, ensured that capture now became a more normal incident of battle. It had lost much of its overtone of shame in 1917–18, when hundreds of thousands of men underwent it; in 1939–40 it lost more. By 51942 it was generally accepted, outside Soviet police circles and the Japanese nation, that it might happen to anyone.
Indeed it did happen in the course of the last world war to something like fifteen million people, among whom this book only deals with a tiny minority. We deal principally with the 35,000-odd members of the British, Commonwealth and American armed forces who had been taken prisoner, or had been shot down or otherwise cut off in enemy-held territory, and who yet managed to regain the Allied lines before the end of the war. The escapers among them, some 23,000, were only one in 650 – say 0.15 per cent – of the world total of prisoners of war, and the evaders were less than half as many.2 Not many of the people of whom we write brought off their feat of escape or evasion alone; most of the escapers had had large backing among their friends in the camps they left, and most of the evaders depended to a terrifying extent on the folk who sheltered and supplied them on their way. The size of this army of helpers, many of them anonymous, cannot even be guessed at; yet without their devotion, there would be few anti-Axis travellers’ tales to tell.
Even these helpers, numerous as they were, constituted a small minority among their more conformist fellows. Like escapers and evaders, they formed an elite before the word acquired its current pejorative undertone. None of the three groups was any the less interesting, or the less reputable, or the less worth historians’ attention, for being out of the ordinary.
Moving from one country to another, for good, became only too common in this new dark age: an ethnic upheaval such as had hardly been seen – if at all – since the previous dark age, the Völkerwanderung of the fifth to the ninth centuries ad from which the basic structure of modern Europe derives. The New Cambridge Modern History estimates the number of Europeans resettled, evacuated, or expelled between 1944 and 61952 at over 30,000,000. Such a figure – which excludes the 6,000,000 who died in transit, or as a direct result of forced migration – bears comparison with the total number killed in the 1939–45 war; again a figure not exactly known, but about 45,000,000, of whom 5,000,000 at least died in concentration camps. It is certainly much larger than the total of immigrants into the United States in the nineteenth century, which was under 20,000,000. These figures emphasise again that this book deals with a shift of people that is statistically slender, however personally agonising.
Yet personal agony was one thing that prisoners of war, at least, were supposed to be spared, under the rather oddly-named rules of war. Since the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907, they had a distinct status in international law. This status was governed, as far as American and Western and Central European citizens were concerned, by the international convention signed at Geneva on 27 July 1929. This document, concluded in the period of euphoria that followed the universally adopted Kellogg Pact of the previous year that outlawed war, began with a statement of pious intention: that it was the duty of every belligerent to lighten the lot of prisoners of war. The essentials of the Convention can be condensed into a paragraph.3
Prisoners were to be treated humanely; no constraint was to be applied to those who refused to give any information beyond their own name and rank, or their service number. (The tag familiar to British and American serving men, ‘Name, rank and number’, was convenient to remember, and useful for administrators; it went beyond the letter of the law.) They were to keep all their clothes, including metal helmet and gas mask if carried, and private possessions, though surrendering arms, horses, equipment and service papers. They were to be placed in fixed camps away from the battle area, which were to be dry, clean, 7warm, and no less sanitary than the holding power’s normal barracks. They had the right to correspond with their families and to practise any religion they chose. Their rations were to be no worse than those of their captors’ depot troops; if insufficiently clad they were to be clothed by the holding power. Each camp was to include a hospital. Officer prisoners were to salute their equals and seniors in their enemy’s forces. Pay appropriate to rank was to be provided by the holding power, and extra pay at the rate for the job to be provided for extra work – payable at the end of the war. Officers could not be required to work at all, and warrant and non-commissioned officers were only to be employed in tasks of supervision. No prisoner could be put to warlike, or unhealthy, or dangerous work, nor be made to work for excessively long hours. Inward post could include food, clothes and books. Prisoners were subject to the laws of the holding power; but might not receive corporal punishment, nor excessive penalties, nor be placed in noisome cells. The maximum disciplinary penalty any prisoner could receive, even for escaping, was thirty days’ solitary confinement, though prisoners might also render themselves liable to judicial penalties, for such crimes as theft or assault. Concluding sections laid down means by which belligerents could communicate with each other about the prisoners they held, and a role for the International Red Cross; and invited any countries not among the original forty-seven signatories to notify their adhesion to the Convention by a note to the Swiss federal council.
Russia did not sign. In 1929 Russia was still an international pariah, not a member of the League of Nations and not in diplomatic relations with many countries, including the United States. The Russians’ excuse for not joining was that they also had no relations with the Swiss, and were therefore debarred from doing so. In any case, so propaganda ran, soldiers of the Red Army did not surrender; so the question of protecting them was not going to arise. The Hague conventions, which arose from the last Tsar’s initiative, they had repudiated already, along 8with all other Tsarist obligations. Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa and the United States (also not a member of the League of Nations) were all among the original signatories, though some took several years to ratify. The Germans for instance did not do so till 21 February 1934, more than a year after the Nazis came to power; the French, not till 21 August 1935. The Convention applied throughout Europe, west of the Russian frontier; but in the Far East, the Japanese never ratified at all. This series of engagements, it later became clear, was one that the imperial Japanese government had appeared to favour, since they signed it originally, but did not intend to keep; like the Washington treaty of 1922 for the limiting of naval armaments. And all the signatories held that operational necessity, an elastic phrase, might absolve them from exact compliance.
There is one further international lawyer’s point that needs to be made, which is also a matter of operational necessity, differently construed. Evaders who entered neutral territory were supposed to be interned till the end of the war; while escapers were free to move on, if they could, to their own country and to continue the war. An escaper in the hands of a neutral police force, who stressed that he had escaped, was usually allowed to make touch with the relevant Allied military attaché; a process that took minutes in Switzerland, hours in Sweden, weeks or even months in Spain. An evader who gave himself up as an evader thus secured for himself a quiet billet for the rest of the war. Most evaders preferred to invent a tale of capture and escape, however sketchy; an offence against morals, but in their view a lesser offence than opting out of the war their comrades were continuing to fight.
Their special status under international law did not absolve prisoners either from respect for the law of the land in which they were held, or from the grip of the laws that bound them up to the moment of capture. All remained notionally subject 9to the regulations of their own service, though sensible senior officer prisoners did not insist on conventional marks of respect from their junior companions in misfortune. No one attempted to enforce those niceties of turn-out that are such a preoccupation in peacetime armed forces, and dress was usually miscellaneous and informal. Except in a few vilelyrun and ill-disciplined camps, by common consent prisoners did not let their appearance degenerate to the point where it depressed their fellow-prisoners’ morale. Courts martial were not held by those in captivity. Unofficial trials, and unofficial punishments, were another matter; even of these there were not many. In a large camp, prisoners who could not get on with each other could be shifted to separate messes; in a small one, the age-old remedy of sending to Coventry could apply. Collusion with the enemy, to the point of scandal or treason, was noted and reported to the proper authorities at the end of the war.
Evaders were simply fugitives. Like other fugitives, they had to eat; and, after a few days, stealing or begging were likely to be their only sources of food, unless they were taken in hand by some local inhabitant who managed to put them in touch with an organised resistance movement – best of all, with an escape line. To eat regularly in occupied territory it was virtually indispensable to have friends, or at least ration cards; preferably both. And to move about, through the innumerable police controls that proliferated in Axis dictatorships, a whole pocketful of official forms might be needed – real or forged. A few evaders managed on their own; only a few. Their most probable fate was to be discovered by the local police, or some auxiliary body. Evaders and escapers alike suffered from central European forest guards; from the painfully ubiquitous Hitlerjugend in Germany itself, as troublesome as boy scouts had been in the previous struggle; and from inquisitive neighbours out to curry favour with the current regime, also ubiquitous early in Hitler’s war. If captured during an evasion, evaders were supposed only 10to have to declare their service identity to be treated as prisoners of war; and recaptured escapers could do the same.
Production of an identity disc should have been all that they needed. However, this was not the case with civilians who helped them. If detected, they could expect no mercy, and received little. They would be tried by a military court; acquittals were unknown. The sentence [in Europe] was invariably deportation to Germany, or death at once; a great many of those deported did not come back. It posed an extra problem for an escaper or evader, if he had to have help to get away: was this the sort of danger he could reasonably ask someone else’s family to run?
Another difficulty for captured evaders or recaptured escapers was that they might not be believed, identity disc or no. Their frightened and excited captors, rear area troops or police or members of para-military bodies remote from direct personal contact with their enemy, could easily fancy they had caught a spy. If the man they had seized was no longer in uniform, and was carrying any coded material at all, or notes in plain language about military installations he had seen, or anything else that seemed to ignorant captors suspicious, a firing squad – with or without a summary trial first – was an imminent prospect. Hence MI 9’s rule: by all means remember points of military importance noticed while on enemy soil, but on no account write them down outside the wire. Inside the wire there were surprising opportunities for passing such points on, if proper precautions were taken.
An even nastier fate than a firing squad might await airmen: a lynching from the infuriated relatives of air raid victims. This illegal yet not utterly unmerited fate befell a certain number of men – how many, it will never be possible to ascertain, because those who set out to wreak their vengeance in this way usually took care to cover their tracks; not least from their own side’s security authorities, who wanted prisoners for interrogation. Equally, only the recording angel will ever know how many 11prisoners on all sides in the war were dispatched forthwith by their captors, who could not be bothered to keep them alive. For long periods on the eastern front SS units took no prisoners at all, by order. As a man from one of the units captured in Italy remarked, this made the fighting in North Africa seem more like a strenuous game than war.
If a shot-down airman landed far from vengeful crowds, and so avoided a lynching, he was not necessarily sure to embark on an evasion. A great many people were so unnerved by the loss of their aircraft, and by their first parachute descent, that they had not the moral stamina to try it, and docilely gave themselves up. Among prisoners, again, Mr Faintheart was as common a type as Mr Valiant. Enthusiasm for, even interest in, escape varied widely between different times, places and personalities.
The time of year naturally affected escapers’ prospects. Midwinter snow showed tracks, midwinter temperatures militated against long exposure out of doors. In spring and autumn mud, especially the fearsome mud of eastern Europe, was bound to make vile the appearance of those who had to cross much of it; thus reducing escapers to the single cover of tramps, lowering their chances of finding help and raising those of police hostility. So from late spring through summer till early autumn was the main escaping season, and during this time there might be some prospect of picking up a living from raw vegetables and fruit – nuts as well, in autumn – stolen on the way: guard dogs, that escapers’ and evaders’ bane, permitting. The time of war mattered also. When a campaign seemed near its close, some fighting men were more ready to be taken prisoner, and less inclined to encounter the risks – never small – of evasion or escape, than they were at a period when imprisonment seemed likely to last for months or even years.
Place also necessarily hemmed in men’s chances. Bomber crews shot down after a six or seven hours’ outward flight from base had farther to go than fighter pilots shot down on tactical sweeps close to their own side’s lines. Some types of country 12were far more easy to cross for those on the run than others. A city-bred airman could feel his way round western Europe much more readily than over the Carpathians or the Balkans, let alone the jungle terrain of south-east Asia.
In the Pacific the role of luck, always large, was preponderant, and usually told against the shot-down airman or shipwrecked sailor. Air-sea rescue, heroic though its stories are, falls outside our field. Moreover, the Japanese had lately developed a loathing and contempt for prisoners of war so intense that the Asian war was different, in kind as well as in degree of ferocity, from the war in the Atlantic, on the southern coasts of the Mediterranean, or in Europe. The Gestapo slew western prisoners of war by the score, Slav ones by the thousand. The Kempeitai slew them by the thousand without regard for race, provided they were of European stock; and held most of them meanwhile in conditions in which no north-western European or North American farmer would want, or be allowed, to keep pigs.
Of the east African front we have found nothing to record. North Africa will play some part; and western and southern Europe will be more prominent than eastern, for quite different reasons. It must never be forgotten that for four years, from June 1941 to May 1945, the bulk of the German army was concentrated on the eastern front, at grips with the army of the USSR; and that the fate of the free world hinged on the titanic contest between the German and the Russian dictatorships. But as the Russians had never signed the Geneva Convention, the millions of prisoners they lost suffered abominable fates; which no one in the West has the data to describe, though everyone can join in lamenting. Out of some six-and-a-quarter million prisoners taken from the Red Army and the Soviet air force, nearly five million were slaughtered at once, or died later in enemy hands: a sombre debt, not quickly forgotten. This book deals with what the available British and American archives cover: the services set up to provide such help as was possible for 13escapers and evaders, and to glean intelligence from prisoners still held in camps.
Everyone in the Allied forces was taught that it was his duty to escape, if captured, and that the Germans’ favourite parrot-cry to every new prisoner, ‘For you the war is over’, was false; that if all else failed, prisoners could hope to divert a perceptible proportion of enemy manpower into guarding themselves. Duty apart, there is a simple point worth making early: people from free societies can hardly bear to be cooped up. Men from the Australian outback, or Texas, or Alberta – men who would not hesitate to drive 200 miles to have a drink with a friend – were seldom prepared to put up indefinitely with a regime that confined them to a compound 200 yards square. Even townsmen from industrial England or Wales, used to an ugly and a narrow round, could find the meanness of a prison camp more than they meant to endure.
Nevertheless, reluctance to re-engage in the war could, and often did, apply quite as much to those already made prisoner as to those who had failed to seize a chance, however slender, to evade: prisoners were by no means all enthusiasts for escape. Docile obedience, their captors’ first demand, was rendered willingly enough by the timid and by the weary. It was also the counsel of prudence. Some prison camp commandants readily adopted the terrorist tone of their regime. Luckily for the great bulk of prisoners of war in German hands, most of the worst German sadists had gravitated down to the concentration camp guards of the SS; and nearly all prisoners of war were kept out of these inner circles of hell. In Italy, and still more in Japan, real brutes were to be found in charge of prisoners of war; and the Germans retained a few as well, mixed in with the courteous elderly officers called out of retirement, who were usually in the commandant’s chair.
How were brutes going to react to escapes? The Geneva Convention implied the legality of escaping, but brutes do not care much for law, and the Japanese cared nothing in practice 14for the Convention. An important, though hitherto little recognised, achievement by Norman Crockatt and the staffs who worked with him arose from the careful watch they kept on enemy reactions to escape work of all kinds. There were not many precedents to follow. In the 1914–18 war, German and Austro-Hungarian authorities who discovered escape kit, whether in transit or during camp searches, or on the persons of recaptured escapers, had simply confiscated it. In 1939–45 the Germans did the same again: possession of such kit was not as a rule regarded as being an offence in itself.
Crockatt foresaw trouble about the bulk dispatch of aids from government sources, and rightly appreciated that wherever this was tried, it would probably soon be discovered. He expected that when evaders were caught in plain clothes, carrying aids to evasion which were clearly not home-made, they would be treated as spies; tried if they were lucky; and probably shot. To his equal surprise and delight, here he was proved wrong. The fate of those who helped evaders, and were caught, was as bad as anything that had been foreseen, but as a rule the evaders themselves survived.
Their moral struggles were not quite over when they became prisoners of war. Problems in ethics as well as tactics beset those who wanted to escape. Ought one, for example, to try to escape from a prison hospital? The Germans held that, once your enemy has spared your life in accepting your surrender – ‘giving quarter’, in the phrase of the old wars – you have no right to make any attempt to fight again; and that you compound your offence if you make your attempt from a hospital, where your enemy has had the courtesy to put you for your health’s sake. Crockatt, like Holt of MIS-X, had a firm reply to all this: a fighting man remains a fighting man, whether in enemy hands or not, and his duty to continue fighting overrides everything else.
A gloss needed to be put on this doctrine at once, where techniques of escape were concerned. Killing, maiming, or even 15striking a sentry, an official, even a civilian who stood in the way of an escape, was a crime, against the civil law as well as the laws of war; and special stress was laid, in lectures on escape, on warning potential prisoners against any such action, which was liable to bring reprisals as well as individual penalties.
A less dangerous but more complex difficulty arose over parole. German and Italian captors often invited Allied prisoners to give their parole – their promise that they would not attempt to escape. Stringent orders reminded the Allied forces that they were not entitled to give their parole at all, unless for some limited time and specific useful purpose – a visit, say, to a dentist or a bath-house. If a prisoner gave his parole for the purpose of being taken for a country walk near his camp, and used the walk to reconnoitre routes for possible escapes, was he behaving honourably or rightly? Most prisoners interested in escaping took the robust view that their legs were on parole not to run away, while their eyes and their minds remained free.
One other relevant point needs mention here. Crockatt set his face like flint against ever inserting escape aids in Red Cross parcels, or in medical supplies. His object was to ensure that the Axis high commands had no excuse for confiscating food or medical parcels, or for refusing to accept and distribute them. This policy undoubtedly saved a great many prisoners’ lives; they would otherwise have perished of malnutrition, as so many prisoners from the Red Army did.
In general, the work of MI 9 and MIS-X sought to avoid, or at all events to deprecate, any action which so incensed the enemy that it imperilled the lives or damaged the health of prisoners of war. In the Far East conditions were, as a rule, a great deal worse than in Europe and there was not much captives there could do but endure.
A particular frame of mind was needed to make men abandon the ignoble safety of captivity for the changes and chances of life on the run. Men who were contrary, enterprising, adventurous, quick-witted by nature usually did better than plodders, 16though they almost always needed plodders to help them in the meticulous tasks of fabricating disguises, forging passes and copying maps.
Once a man had made up his mind to escape, and had help enough from less adventurous spirits if he needed it, what other characteristics did he require? Bodily strength would seem an obvious need, and yet Douglas Bader got out of a German prison hospital – as he had managed to pilot a fighter aircraft – when he had two artificial legs; and one of the present writers got from Dunkirk to England, by way of Marseilles, just after he had lost an arm. Bodily strength, in fact, was useful, but health was far more so, and strength of mind was more vital still. A paradoxical, and not perfectly common, combination of qualities was called for. Foresight was needed, but not too much of it. The best fighters are those who have most carefully, but not over-carefully, foreseen the emergencies that may arise in combat, and have retained the capacity to improvise. Time spent meditating about possible difficulties might result in spotting ways round or through them. On the other hand, the meticulous planner might be so appalled at the size of the task ahead that he gave up. As A. J. Evans put it in The Escaping Club, ‘Anyone who lets his mind dwell too much on what may happen will never escape from any prison in Germany’.
Acting ability was a help, to substantiate whatever false personality the escaper or evader took on, such as German NCO, housewife or electrician, Norwegian commercial traveller or French forced labourer. Language provided a comparatively slight obstacle, so long as one did not pretend to be an enemy among enemies. The Third Reich – the Third and Last, as prisoners liked to call it – was so full of foreign labourers and other sorts of displaced persons that tram conductors and booking-office clerks no longer much noticed rough accents or an imperfect command of German grammar and vocabulary, unless there happened to be an escape scare in force in the 17neighbourhood. Deep in the countryside, a foreign accent or appearance might attract attention, as anything foreign – that is, from more than a few miles away – always does there; a reason why prisoners sought, when they could, the anonymity of crowded towns. One rapidly got used to the sight, shocking at first, of people in German uniform riding in trams, or going into shops; it was harder to get rid of the idea that every stranger, and particularly every official, was staring at one and regarded one’s appearance as odd. The more one could adopt an actor’s insouciance in the presence of strangers, the better.
Courage, and plenty of it, was needed far more than acting skill; and courage of a cold-blooded and lonely rather than a hot-blooded sort. The courage that moved an escaper or evader, and the courage that moved the helpers of either, may have been the same in kind, but certainly differed in degree. Of the two groups, the helpers ran much the graver risks; they needed therefore to be even braver. Those who were brave, original, adaptable and nimble – both in body and in mind – and could display all these qualities at once, did best: if they were decisive. Promptness was really vital: indecision could be quite as fatal during an escape as during a traffic accident.
One other attribute needs to be mentioned, next to the power of quick decision and hardly less important: luck. Unlucky escapers never got out of camps, unlucky evaders fell at the first fence of a chance control from a passer-by in a country lane, or even at the ticket-office of a railway station. Lucky ones soared through difficulties that ought to have kept them pent: the sentry was asleep, or simply looking the other way; the wire fence had been inefficiently put up; the train control never reached their carriage; the people to whom they appealed for help knew how to keep their mouths shut. Men and women involved in clandestine work could, and often did, push their luck too far. The feeling ‘If I can get away with that, I can get away with anything’, could too easily visit them when they had a lucky break; unless they remembered constantly to be 18suspicious, unless they took unremitting care, rashness resulting from good luck might readily lead to bad. This was not quite the case with escapers and evaders. They had less need to be obsessed with security, and might be floated clear through to safety on one huge wave of luck, if they were buoyant enough to trust themselves to it.
Luck helped, in any case, with the significant business of keeping up one’s own morale in the course of an escape or an evasion. Much meticulous planning might have to go into an actual escape, and much into providing clothes and documents adequate to sustain a disguise; almost all evasions were necessarily conducted on the spur of the moment, and many escapes had to be run likewise, whenever anything unforeseen happened – as it might at any moment, and usually did.
One of the feelings uppermost in an escaper’s mind, at that instant of keen elation when he passed the wire and was again, for however short a time, his own master, was the sense that he had regained the initiative from his captors. As Cyril Rofe the future travel agent put it in Against the Wind of an early breakfast in some Bohemian bushes after his first escape, ‘As we lay there watching the sun rise, our cocoa tasted like nectar. We might have been gods on Olympus, only we felt happier… No other day was ever like it.’ The fact that one had actually got out was an enormous stimulant to morale; it did not always last through to the end of an escaper’s journey.
Moreover, the closing stage of an escape or an evasion – traversing the battle front, or crossing into neutral territory, or hiding in a neutral ship – was often as difficult as the original break out of a camp, or abrupt dissociation from a wrecked ship or aircraft; and this final stage, when physical and emotional exhaustion were at their most intense, was a real test both of endurance and of fieldcraft. Many, too many, attempts foundered just when success was in sight. This above all was the moment when a prisoner needed a sense of humour and a sense of proportion; needed not to take himself and his fate too tragically; 19and to be able, if he was hardheaded enough, to observe what errors he had made and how he might do better next time.
A number of escapers believed, with Kipling, that ‘he travels the fastest who travels alone’; though they were advised to travel in pairs, to keep each other’s spirits up. The combination of a plodder with a man of more mercurial temper was sometimes a help, but it was far more important that the pair should know, like, and rely on each other thoroughly. The old Anglo-Indian phrase about ‘a good man to go tiger shooting with’ was acutely in point; the risks of an escape were hardly worth running with a stranger, who might let one down in a crisis.
Yet if escapers or evaders were going to make any serious progress across occupied territory, outside the lands of the Axis proper – Germany or Italy or Japan – in all of which till September 1943, and in Germany and Japan thereafter as well, the hostility of the locals was to be taken for granted – did they not have to trust themselves to total strangers, whose reliability out tiger-shooting must be largely a matter of guesswork? It was part of the function of MI 9 and MIS-X, the secret services with which this book deals, to cope precisely with this risk.
There was another function that they fulfilled, if it is not attributed to them by what the Germans call Hineininterpretierung – interpretation backwards from the present to the past, not the same as hindsight. The present writers believe that Crockatt, the head of MI 9, had insight into the state of mind of prisoners of war, an insight based on reading, reflection and discussion with many people qualified to know. He did not only appreciate that forlorn feeling of being fed up and far from home that visited almost everyone in the first few days of captivity. He appreciated also that frenzy, amounting almost to mania, which could set in later – years later – when it seemed as if imprisonment was going to last for years more yet, perhaps forever and a day. ‘Stir-crazy’ is the modern convicts’ term for the affliction. In the wars of 1939–45, some people suffered from stir-craziness in Italy, Burma or Java, many in Germany and Japan. Crockatt 20thought it might lessen the sharpness of their pain if they were aware that a distant staff cared intensely about their plight, and was hard at work to relieve them.
Problems of security made it impossible for the men most in need of assurances on this point, the wildest and least disciplined of prisoners of war, to be told much if anything even of the existence of MI 9 and MIS-X; but a great many others found the dreariness and the monotony of life in a prisoner of war camp made at least a shade more bearable by the knowledge that a reasonably competent body of men, some very ingenious and some very brave, was busy trying to get in touch with them and to bring them safely out of enemy hands. This psychological safety net could calm the nerves of those at work on the high trapeze of tunnelling, pass forging, or escape planning.
In the violence and muddle of war, common sense often has to go out of the window. It is the task of the commander of insight, and of the staff officer of real capacity, to mitigate that effect: to bring some sense of purpose, and some hope, into the chaos of fighting and of waiting about – much more waiting about than fighting – of which war consists. One of the main functions of the escape services was to provide hope and a sense of purpose for those to whom the war might otherwise become quite pointless: those fastened in the greyness of a prisoner of war camp where nothing seemed worthwhile any more.
1It was first published in 1921 and has often been reprinted. Other classical stories worth mentioning are M. C. C. Harrison and H. A. Cartwright, Within Four Walls; E. H. Jones, The Road to En-Dor; and H. G. Durnford, The Tunnellers of Holzminden. Sir J. C. Masterman, On the Chariot Wheel, 95–113, covers the parallel case of a civil internment camp; of interest because of Masterman’s important secret role in the next world war, but really outside the subject matter of this book.
2Statistical summary in Appendix 1.
3For full text see Cmd 3941 (1931), 41 – 80, in Parliamentary Papers 1930/31, XXXVI, 471ff.
Approach March
To enable the reader to make proper sense of the rest of the book, a brief sketch is needed of the staff network in which the escape services worked.
Thanks to the age-old tradition that capture meant disgrace, no official encouragement or support for escape was provided by any general staff until well on in the 1914–18 war. By 1917 British intelligence chiefs had realised that prisoners of war, both friend and foe, constituted valuable sources for them, hitherto untapped. In that year a small new sub-branch of the War Office intelligence directorate was set up, called MI IA, to look into this and, in particular, to secure from German prisoners in camps in the United Kingdom specialised knowledge which they had not revealed at their primary interrogation in France. MI IA was to handle also anything that could be secured from British prisoners in Germany. It set about organising secret communication with officer camps by coded letter. No startling results were obtained, but enough was done to suggest that the still rudimentary system might be worth following up, should ‘the war to end wars’ turn out to have failed in that object.
For most of the 1920s, few British or American civilians thought another great war at all likely. Even in the service departments in Whitehall, up to 1933 none was expected for ten years at least; and the subject of prisoners of war slumbered. On the continent of Europe there was slightly more interest. The French instituted in 1926 a retrospective award, an escapers’ medal for successful, or even well attempted, escapes from Germany. One French general, P. G. Dupont, a corps commander at Verdun, had had an enterprising idea. He had trained his men to be 22ready, if they fell into enemy hands, not only to seize any chance they could to escape, but also to look out for every possible opportunity to commit sabotage, notably when out on working parties in farms or factories. General von Brauchitsch, later German commander-in-chief in the West, lectured on Dupont’s idea at Munich in 1937, when the Germans were getting ready for the next round. His lecture text reached England, and was studied with interest at the War Office.
By the autumn of the following year, war was visibly nearer. In November 1938, a few weeks after the Munich agreement, two staff officers in separate branches of the War Office began to work – quite independently, and unknown to each other – towards the same end, the re-creating of some such body as the old MI 1a, modernised to suit the current forms and phases of war. One of them had served in the original branch; the other, from a less conventional career, had secured a more influential post.
A. R. Rawlinson, the father of a future Tory solicitor-general, had been a young intelligence officer (IO) in MI 1a in 1917–18 and therefore had some experience in the problems of reinterrogating prisoners and of promoting escape and evasion. As a reserve officer, he had been called up for a few months’ service after the Munich crisis, and was remobilised in August 1939 into a revived MI 1a, as a captain, a GSO 3 on the War Office’s establishment.1 The other was J. C. F. Holland, the lonely originator of the commandos as well as the deception services and the special operations executive (SOE). He was an unusually modest and self-effacing member of a traditionally self-effacing caste, a regular officer from the Celtic fringe with Indian civil service, clerical, and academic forebears. Too ill to take up a regimental command in the Royal Engineers when at last due 23for one late in 1938, he was posted as a major to GS (R), a tiny research branch of the War Office – the only other member of it was his typist – and told to research on any subject he chose. His predecessor had worked on army education. Holland, having won a DFC as a pilot and worked with Lawrence in Arabia, chose irregular warfare, a subject on which his mind had preyed continuously since 1917; all the more keenly, after he had fought in the British army on the losing side, and been badly wounded, in the Troubles of 1919–21 in Ireland. According to his friend and colleague Joan Bright Astley, ‘He had an independent mind, an acute brain, a loving and poetic heart; he was quick, imaginative, and of a fiery temper.’
During the winter of 1938–9 irregular warfare became a subject topical enough to engage the interest of the chiefs of staff. Holland’s branch was renamed MI R, and he brought in a friend to join him – Major, later Major-General Sir Colin, Gubbins who became a leading personality in the SOE. Gubbins was a gunner; he and Holland had been officer cadets together. Holland’s lively mind continued to play over the possibilities of work on and over the borders of normal fighting, while Gubbins prepared a series of pamphlets destined to be widely distributed during the impending world war, on sabotage, ambush and other guerrilla activity.
Holland and Gubbins were each the son of a don who had served in the East and been a protégé of Lord Curzon’s. Both were original thinkers, who yet kept their originality within the bounds of common sense and practicability. Both foresaw that there might be hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the next war, each of whom might be turned into a small thorn in the enemy’s side; and that there might well be hundreds or even thousands of evaders as well, loose in the enemy’s rear areas and in need of guidance. Who was to be their guide?
Rawlinson’s superior in MI 1a, then a brevet lieutenant-colonel, a future DMI, later Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, was posted to the Expeditionary Force in France at the beginning 24of the war, before Rawlinson had had time to do more than formulate some outline plans and while Holland had much else besides escaping on his mind. Templer’s initiative – possibly stemming in turn from a hint from Holland, with whom and Gubbins he had discussed the subject already – brought it to the point of decision.
On 28 September 1939, with the full agreement of Major-General (Sir) Noel Mason-Macfarlane, his superior in France, Templer wrote to Major-General Beaumont-Nesbitt, the director of military intelligence, to propose prearrangement of code communications with German camps. About the very day on which he received Templer’s letter, Beaumont-Nesbitt was called on by M. C. C. Harrison, one of the authors of Within Four Walls. Harrison followed up his call with a long letter on the value of an interservice department to help prisoners of war to escape by providing them secretly with maps, compasses and money. Holland was called in to advise, and on 13 October put up a substantial paper on the ‘very thorough organisation’ that was going to be needed. Among the advantages he foresaw was the siphoning off of enemy manpower into non-productive channels. He observed that the Admiralty and the Air Ministry would also of course be involved; and his paper was accordingly referred to the Joint Intelligence Committee.
That committee’s papers are still unavailable to public inspection, but it undoubtedly approved Holland’s paper in principle. A short, sharp exchange of letters followed between Beaumont-Nesbitt and his opposite number at the Air Ministry, Air Commodore K. C. Buss, about which of the three services should form and control the new organisation. Beaumont-Nesbitt was prepared to accept responsibility for army and navy prisoners, but thought that the RAF, with its superior knowledge of navigation, would need different training and treatment. Buss felt strongly that the interests of all three services would best be served by a single organisation under the War Office, with liaison officers from the navy and the air force. He 25
