1
THE FIRST AMERICAN TO ESCAPE FROM SCHUBIN
Skinny, gaunt twenty-five-year-old William “Bill” Ash from Dallas, Texas, strolled up to the wooden shed that housed the prisoner-of-war camp’s communal latrine block—the Abort, the Germans called it. A fellow POW lounging against the wall by the door gave Ash a nod. This guy was a “stooge,” standing lookout, and the nod indicated the “all clear.” With that knowledge, Ash passed through the doorway into the Abort building.
It was Wednesday, March 3, 1943, a bleak winter’s day. And this toilet block was the main ablutions facility in the Wehrmacht’s Offizierslager XXI-B prisoner-of-war camp, built on the western outskirts of the town of Schubin, Poland, or Altburgund, as the Nazis had renamed it in 1941. South of the German Baltic city of Danzig (Polish Gdansk) and west of the Polish capital of Warsaw (Warszawa), Schubin lay near the Vistula River bend in the prewar Polish Corridor. Here, the Second World War’s largest Anglo-American POW escape to date would soon go forward.
Inside the latrine building, two rows of eighteen boxed-in toilet seats extended down each wall, side by side.1 The ancient Romans had devised this form of communal lavatory. Just as human plumbing had remained unchanged, nothing much had changed in latrine design in 2,000 years. A relatively comfortable seat, Mother Nature, gravity, and a basic sewage removal system; that’s all it took. Every day, from first light, a long line of prisoners snaked away from the Abort entrance, with POWs awaiting their turn to use the toilets. Later in the morning, as now, the Abort was almost empty. Just two toilets, at the far end, were occupied as Ash walked toward them. Both occupants were “kriegies,” as POWs called themselves, from Kriegsgefangener—German for prisoner of war. And both kriegies were expecting Ash, or “Tex,” as he was known among the British.
The two men rose up. Turning to the last toilet on the left, the previous occupant reached down and lifted the round wooden seat away, revealing an opening just large enough for a man to squeeze down through. As the trio looked down into the bowels of the latrine, the revolting stink of human waste wafted up from below, hitting them in the face and filling their nostrils. It was enough to make the eyes water, the head spin, and the stomach heave. After three months of working in this gross environment, Bill Ash was still not immune to the smell. Nonetheless, in wartime, a desperate man will do things he would never even contemplate in peacetime. There was only one plus—this same revolting stink was enough to repel their German guards and disguise one of history’s most disgustingly brilliant escape schemes.
With his hands on the wooden surround, Ash lifted his legs from the ground and eased them down into the hole. Letting go, he slid down through and dropped into a large underground sump, splashing into a concrete channel that carried urine and feces to an exit hole in the brick wall. Via that hole, the excrement fell into a massive sewage pit beside the sump.
With a grunt, another of the POWs dropped down to join Ash. Above, the third man replaced the toilet seat. Through the dirty window in the far wall, the stay-behind could see a POW in a brown greatcoat standing, hands deep in pockets, beside the recreation ground outside the Abort, watching others kicking a soccer ball around. If that man in the greatcoat blew his nose, the stooge in the Abort knew to warn those below that a “goon,” or guard, was approaching, and all work below would cease until the goon had gone. The man in the Abort would remain on watch until the underground shift ended.
Bill Ash’s companion in the sump was long-faced Quebec native Eddy Asselin. Just twenty-one, Asselin, like Ash, was painfully thin from a lack of nutritious food. The previous April, at Warburg, Asselin had been one of five men to successfully tunnel out of Oflag 6-B. All had been recaptured, with Asselin out only a few days before being caught. This time, he’d vowed, his preparations would be painstaking, and he would make a “home run” to England. The tunnel they were digging from the Abort had been code-named Asselin, after the Canadian, because this ingenious escape bid had been his idea. Participants in the escape had several nicknames for his tunnel, including Eddy’s Exit and the SHJ (Shit House Job).
Ash and Asselin were two of three North Americans participating in the escape. The third was Johnny Dodge, a forty-six-year-old major from New York City and a cousin by marriage of Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. Most of the rest of the members of X Organization, the compound’s Royal Air Force escape fraternity, were British, or from Britain’s former colonies around the globe. Others were Irish, Polish, Danish, Czech. One was a German-born Jew who had changed his name to Stevens. Most had flown with the RAF. Ash and Asselin had trained with the Royal Canadian Air Force before piloting Spitfire fighters for the RAF and being shot down in combat. Since the previous October, there had also been United States Army Air Force prisoners in the camp, although they tended to keep to themselves and had little to do with Ash, Asselin and the other X Organization operatives.
Asselin now joined Ash in sliding aside a wooden cover disguising an opening burrowed into the back of the sump’s brick wall. Clambering through to a chamber dug from the earth on the other side, the pair carefully replaced the dummy wall behind them. This was in case an inquisitive German plucked up the gumption to stick his head, and a flashlight, down a toilet and inspect the sump below.
Close friends Ash and Asselin were now in a cavern they’d helped hollow from the earth beside the stinking sump. In candlelight, they joined three other waiting POWs of their team who were hunched in the cramped space and began to strip down to their long johns. Including the three stooges on watch above, their group numbered eight men. This was the digging team, the first crew of the day. One man was already seated at a bellows made from old leather kit bags, ready to repeatedly push a wooden handle in and out to pump air into a low tunnel that disappeared to the west. The other three would remain at the tunnel entrance to retrieve the soil the day’s dig produced and to be ready to dive into the tunnel and dig out comrades caught in a cave-in.
After their shift, the digging team would be followed by the eight-man dispersal team, which would dispose of the earth produced by the digging team, filling seven-pound jam tins and emptying them into the vast sewage pit. One POW had the unenviable job of reaching into the pit with a broom handle and stirring the earth into the lake of urine and feces. Once a week, the contents of the pit, including soil from the tunnel, were hand-pumped into a horse-drawn “honey wagon” and removed from the camp.
The honey wagon’s Polish driver, Franciszek Lewandowski, was a local pig farmer who’d won the sewage removal contract from the German authorities. He used the waste as fertilizer on his farm. Just as Lewandowski was about to complain that his sewage was being adulterated by soil, a leading X Organization member had whispered in his ear and let him in on the kriegies’ secret.
That X Organization representative was Józef Bryks, a live-wire young Czech who had enlisted in the RAF under the name Joe Ricks. He was one of the four tunnelers who had made the Warburg break with Eddy Asselin in 1942. Bryks’ information had brought a smile to the face of the honey wagon driver. Not only did Lewandowski keep his mouth shut and cart away the soil from the tunnel, he developed a firm friendship with Bryks that was soon to pay even greater dividends for Schubin’s POWs.
The third Asselin tunnel team of the day would be made up of the “engineers,” men who went into the tunnel to repair and shore up the walls and ceiling in the wake of the diggers’ progress, and to extend the air pipe beneath the tunnel floor, ready for the next day’s digging team. That air pipe was made from used Klim powdered milk cans from Red Cross parcels, fitted end to end—the catchy brand name Klim was “milk” backward. The air now being pushed to the tunnel face by the pump came from the sump and was thick and putrid. But it contained enough oxygen to keep men in the tunnel alive.
As the pump began to wheeze, Bill Ash entered the darkened tunnel. At its deepest, it sank to seventeen feet below ground to avoid German seismic detectors buried around the camp to pick up the sounds of digging. The tunnel was two feet six inches high and the same across. Coffin-size. These dimensions were dictated by the length of three-foot bed boards taken from camp barracks to shore up tunnel walls and ceiling. Ash had personally donated every single bed board from his bunk, replacing them with a lattice of string that was concealed from prowling guards’ eyes by his mattress.
On elbows and knees, pushing a flickering homemade candle ahead of him, Ash slowly worked his way along the earthen tunnel floor. The candle consisted of a bootlace wick floating in margarine in a sardine tin. It, too, stank to high heaven. Every few yards, Ash stopped to light more candles sitting on small wall ledges. Asselin came close behind, trailing a length of rope after him. All the while, the ears of the pair were pricked for sounds of moving earth above their heads that would herald an impending cave-in. This fragile tunnel, source of so much hope, was also a catalyst for nightmares in which tunnelers were buried alive.
“Each trip down it required a little more courage,” Ash would later say.2
Once they’d crawled to a small halfway chamber, seventy-five feet into the tunnel, Asselin halted. Ash kept going, playing out another length of rope as he went. From beginning to end, it took half an hour to crawl to the tunnel face, which was now 150 feet from the entrance. According to escapers’ calculations, the tunnel, growing at a rate of two to three feet a day, had passed beneath the pair of high barbed wire fences that surrounded the camp. After that, the tunnel had begun to angle gently upward, and, several days earlier, had arrived directly beneath their target, an irrigation ditch in a potato patch outside the wire. The last few shifts had been digging vertically, aiming for the surface.
A wall of earth and brown and yellow clay loomed up in front of Ash. A scoop fashioned from a Klim can lay waiting, along with a large cloth bag, left by the last digging crew. Taking up the scoop, Ash pulled himself to a standing position inside the shaft that rose up toward the potato patch. With his candle to one side, he began to hack into the earth above his head, allowing the material he freed to fall to the shaft’s floor. After digging for a while, Ash dropped to his knees and pushed the dislodged material into the bag. Once he’d filled the bag, he tied it to the end of the rope he’d run out behind him, then sharply tugged the rope twice.
From the halfway chamber came an answering pair of tugs before the bag began to trail off into the gloom as Asselin hauled it in. When Asselin had the bag, he attached it to the rope he’d played out from the entrance. Giving that rope two tugs, he received a reply, and the bag slid away toward the entrance. Later, a man from the entrance cavern would crawl to Asselin with the end of the rope, then back out again, and Asselin would similarly deliver the end of his rope to digger Ash.
This slow, laborious method of earth removal was not as sophisticated as the system of railroad tracks and trolleys that would be employed in the famous Great Escape tunnels at Stalag Luft 3 outside Sagan a year later. But, in virtually every other way, methods employed in that later escape were pioneered here at Schubin, below ground and above.
In preparation for the breakout, a team of POW tailors under John Paget was secretly creating civilian clothes for escapees. This X Organization department was code-named Gieves, after Gieves Limited of Old Bond Street in London, England’s most famous military tailors, who had made the uniforms of the Duke of Wellington, Admiral Nelson and Winston Churchill. The team preparing and dying the cloth for the tailors, using blankets and old uniforms, was Pullers of Perth, named for a Scottish dry-cleaning business. A team tasked with creating high-energy escape food high in fat and sugar was Lyons, named for England’s omnipresent Lyons’ Corner House tea shops. Gammages, a London department store, gave its name to the supply department. Skilled cartographers making escape maps and forgers under Eric Shaw, who created escape documents, were Cook’s Tours, a reference to the noted British travel firm Thomas Cook.
Superconfident Joe Bryks had secured a camera so that Cook’s Tours could take essential ID photos of escapers for use on their forged identity papers. The path to that camera had been a dangerous one, for Bryks and others. First, Bryks had wangled his way onto a detail occasionally taken under armed escort to a Schubin produce store at 4 Hermann-Göring-Strasse, owned by German Günther Jeschke. There, the detail purchased a few “luxuries” for the kriegies, using a fund set up from the paltry sums paid to the prisoners by the German government under the Geneva Convention.
A Polish teenager named Stefania Maludzinska was serving in that produce store, and she soon fell for Joe Bryks’ charms. Before long, Stefania was writing to Bryks’ parents in Czechoslovakia. Joe hadn’t dared write to them using the camp’s mail system, as this would have alerted the Germans to his true identity and brought repercussions down on family members. Once this secret correspondence began, Bryks’ parents wrote to Stefania, and she smuggled the replies to Bryks when he came into the store.
The cheeky Czech’s friends in camp were soon ribbing him about his Polish “girlfriend” beyond the wire, little knowing that he was grooming Stefania for even more hazardous work. After a while, Bryks had taken the risk of confiding to Stefania that he and his comrades were planning an escape from the camp and sought her help. At Bryks’ urging, Stefania asked friends working at the town hall to steal Nazi government forms, which she passed on to the Czech for copying by X Organization forgers.
Then came the most fraught task of all. Stefania acquired a small camera and film from Alfons Jachalski, formerly a teacher at the Polish boys’ reform school that had occupied the camp’s main buildings before the war, who was now forced by the Germans to toil on the roads. The plucky Polish girl arranged for camera and film to be smuggled into the camp by seventeen-year-old Henryk Szalczynski, a Pole who worked in the town’s German bakery and delivered the kriegies’ black bread ration. Szalczynski also developed the film in the kitchen and basement of his parents’ tiny apartment. “Mug shots” of escapers found their way back into the camp in bread deliveries and were affixed to forged identity papers by Cook’s Tours. Stefania and her helpers Jachalski and Szalczynski would have been executed had their activities been discovered by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, X Organization’s security team watched over all escape activities. With the weather improving and the frozen ground thawing, seven tunnels were now being burrowed by industrious inmates. These were all team digs, as opposed to earlier solo efforts such as a tunnel dug from the vegetable garden by Tom Calnan that had collapsed onto him. Guards watched, amused, as Calnan was hauled free by comrades. He was promptly marched off to the “Cooler,” the oflag’s solitary confinement cellblock, which at Oflag XXI-B was behind the guard barrack, across the street from the camp. The Germans subsequently made the garden where Calnan had been tunneling off-limits to prisoners.
Now, apart from Asselin, one tunnel headed south from the senior officers’ quarters. From Block 1, another headed north. Two tunnels also went north from beneath a stone washbasin and a wastewater trough in the Block 3 and 4 washhouses. Another had been started in the chapel, behind the altar. Work had also recently recommenced on a tunnel dug south from the cookhouse, which, because of groundwater flooding, had been abandoned beneath the Russian compound. Now dried out, it was the most advanced dig after Asselin.
Asselin was X Organization’s gem. Not only had it gone the farthest, it stood the best chance of avoiding detection. Its starting place, the reeking communal latrine, was the last place the Germans could be expected to look for an escape tunnel entrance. Not even the Germans believed that men could be so desperate to escape that they would immerse themselves in human waste for months on end.
As Ash hacked away at the roof of the tunnel’s exit shaft, he had time to think, and to wonder why he was doing this, digging in this wretched hole in the ground, breathing the foul air, and reeking of crap. Better still, what had led an American to join the Canadian air force and fly Spitfires for the British, only to be shot down by the Germans over France? Ash could only put it down to idealism mixed with a yearning for adventure. Besides, he was compulsive by nature, a jump-in-and-ask-questions-later kind of guy. It would also transpire that he was a compulsive escaper, someone who couldn’t bear being cooped up for long. Some of his numerous escape attempts had been spur-of-the-moment affairs and were ill conceived.
Like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape movie, Ash frequently spent time in the Cooler. While there, he dreamed of far-fetched escapes. Sometimes, he fantasized about a giant catapult flinging him over the wire. Other times, he was flying to freedom with wings attached to his arms. This Asselin tunnel project was the most planned, structured, and prepared escape bid he would ever be involved with. His buddy Eddy Asselin deserved credit for that. The down-to-earth Canadian thought things through. And, Ash had to concede, this tunnel, and the many aspects of its preparation, constituted a work of genius.
There was positive proof that it was possible to break out of this camp. Just before Christmas, an English Spitfire pilot, Sergeant Philip Wareing, had managed the first successful escape from Schubin. Senior officer prisoners were allowed personal orderlies—“batmen,” the British called them. And the Germans had permitted a group of enlisted men including Wareing to be transferred to Schubin to be the personal servants of Oflag XXI-B’s officers. Schubin’s senior British officer, or SBO, Wing Commander Harry “Wings” Day, an old-fashioned officer in some ways, had expected these batmen to be all spit and polish, and to do as they were told. Wareing had other ideas.
In those days orderlies had occasionally been allowed out of camp, unsupervised by the Germans, to collect extra allowances of food and coal for the officers. On one such outing to collect coal, on December 16, Wareing hadn’t returned. Stealing a bicycle, he’d ridden north to the Baltic port of Danzig, today’s Gdansk, where he’d stowed away on a ship bound for Halmstad in neutral Sweden. Ironically, it was a coal ship. From Sweden, Wareing had returned to England by air, and he was now lecturing aircrew on what to expect if they were shot down and captured.
The Germans had tightened camp security after that and terminated unescorted outings. But Bill Ash knew that a calculated and carefully planned mass tunnel escape like Asselin could succeed. Wings Day had himself been one of seventeen RAF prisoners to successfully tunnel out of the Dulag Luft reception and interrogation camp near Frankfurt the previous year. All those escapees had been recaptured, but that hadn’t dulled their ambition to be free. And it had shown that a cunningly located tunnel could avoid detection.
Now, after digging for an hour, Ash calculated that the exit shaft had approximately two feet to go before emerging into the potato patch. To prove his theory, he poked a long stick into the earth above. For approximately two feet, he felt resistance. After that, the stick moved easily. It was time to stop work. When they came to dig that last twenty-four inches of earth away, it would be the day of the break. An X Organization meeting would decide the timing of that break. After sending his latest bag of tunnel spoil back via the agency of Eddy Asselin, the Texan slowly, wearily retreated along the tunnel on his stomach, dousing candles as he went. The poor diet in camp, which was low on protein and vegetables, meant that he was already weak. This effort underground taxed his strength all the more.
Dirty and haggard-faced, looking like refugees from the Underworld and smelling like nothing on Earth, Ash and Asselin emerged into the cavern beside the sump. Back on the surface, digging team members would wash themselves as thoroughly as possible after their shift, but the stink of the latrines would never entirely leave them. Fellow prisoners in their ninety-six-man barrack block had learned not to complain about the reeking tunnelers, knowing they were “digging for victory.” Some bunkmates declared they would have a party once the tunnelers made their break—more to celebrate the departure of the stinky ones than the escapers’ victory over camp security.
Diggers meanwhile did their best to keep away from guards. With little soap and no hot water for bathing, most prisoners were on the nose anyway. At the twice-a-day outdoor Appells, or prisoner assemblies, called for head counts by the Wehrmacht’s camp security officer, Hauptmann Simms, diggers’ aromas blended in with those of their neighbors as guards moved through their ranks, counting them.
Now, with a weary grin, Ash informed his colleagues in the cavern that they had just two feet to go, vertically, to reach freedom. The next dig would be the last.
* * *
“COME ON, WILLIAMS!” urged Wings Day, one of the men clustered at the end of the Abort. Day, six feet four inches tall, angular and long-faced, wore an impatient scowl. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, I’ve been cooking,” panted thirty-one-year-old Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams, a Briton, who’d come rushing from the camp cookhouse for the 3:00 p.m. start of Asselin’s engineering shift.3
Williams was keen to be a part of the Asselin escape, but, having arrived at the camp in late December, he’d joined the crew well into the dig, and was therefore assigned stooge duties. This afternoon, he was to be the stooge stationed inside the Abort. He watched as the other five men slipped down through the hole into the sump, then replaced the toilet seat once they’d all disappeared below. Pushing his nose up against the grimy glass of the window, he sighed as he made out the stooge in the brown greatcoat, on whom he was supposed to keep an eye open for warning signals. Williams had a feeling that he was going to miss out on this Asselin break. That was why he and his best friend, Michael Codner, had also joined the cookhouse tunnelers. At least down in that tunnel they were allowed to dig. But the cookhouse tunnel was still short of its destination. Asselin, Williams gathered, was close to its target.
From below came the faint clack and wheeze of the air pump going into action, signaling that the engineering crew was crawling into the tunnel to do their work. Unbeknown to Williams, this would be the last shift in Asselin. The engineers would shore up the section of exit shaft dug by Bill Ash that morning, repair bulging shoring along the length of the tunnel and refresh its candles, then withdraw, leaving Asselin ready for breakout day. Already bored, Williams began the wait for the shift to end.
At 4:30, the men of the final shift duly emerged from below. One of the tunnelers, Englishman Robert Kee, always felt the same when he came up from the Abort tunnel: as if he had spent the afternoon on another planet. Before long, he would visit that planet one last time.4
* * *
THE CAMP’S MOST conspicuous structure was a large building that had an H-shaped footprint and consisted of two main floors plus a basement and an attic. It was known as the White House—not because it resembled the executive mansion in Washington, DC, but because its exterior stucco walls were covered in whitewash. The Germans seemed to have coined the building’s name. It had been built in the 1880s when the region was under Prussian rule as part of West Prussia and was initially used as the county infirmary. Before the war, when this camp had been a reform school, the White House was the institution’s main dormitory building. Now it housed offices, a library and a hall used by the prisoners for theatrical shows they themselves produced. Here in the hall, in the early evening of March 3, X Organization’s executive met with Asselin’s main protagonists, including Asselin and Ash, and SBO Day.
There was always the fear that the “ferrets,” English-speaking German guards on the prowl for suspicious activity, might have hidden themselves away to overhear meetings such as this. So stooges had cleared the hall and adjoining rooms, and one stood at every window and door to warn of the approach of Germans. In this secure environment, the breezy but efficient chief of the camp’s X Organization, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Buckley of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, aka Big X, chaired the meeting. The man behind the Asselin tunnel, Eddy Asselin, told his comrades what they all knew by now, that Asselin was ready to go. Escape clothes, maps and documents were also ready. All that was required was a date for the break.
Wings Day now spoke up, advising that, through coded messages from MI9, the British intelligence agency dedicated to helping POWs escape, he had learned that the Germans planned to soon transfer all British and American air force personnel currently at Schubin to Stalag Luft 3, Sagan. It was crucial, he said, that if Asselin was to be used, it happen very soon, before that transfer took place. To help avoid detection, the break would have to be made on a relatively moonless night. According to the meteorological experts among them, the best option was two days away, March 5, and those at the meeting unanimously agreed to break out on that night.
Next, they had to decide how many men would go out, and their identities. After some discussion it was agreed that the men making the break should be concealed down the tunnel in the early evening, immediately following the 5:00 p.m. Appell, and wait down there until lockup at 9:00 p.m. when the goons closed up the barrack blocks and the night guard came on duty. To ensure that a ferret didn’t stumble on the escapers, the entry via the Abort would be sealed up once the escapers were in the tunnel. Therefore, the number of men going out would be dictated by the number of men who could survive in the tunnel until the exit was dug.
A mathematician among them calculated that twenty-three men lying head to toe along the tunnel’s length and another ten crammed into the entrance cavern could survive on the available air. Several of those present voiced concerns that this was too many, that men would suffocate as they lay waiting. But the “experts” were confident there would be enough oxygen for thirty-three men for six hours, and thirty-three was the number finally agreed upon.
Eddy Asselin, as the originator of the scheme, had the right to be the first man out, and he chose Ash as his wingman. Those who had participated in digging the tunnel were chosen next, followed by leading lights in the X Organization. Johnny Dodge was one of the latter, as was X Organization’s security chief, or Big S, Aiden Crawley. Among escape candidates excluded were Eric Williams and Michael Codner, latecomers who, it was agreed, should instead be put well up on the cookhouse tunnel’s escape list. Wings Day now surprised his colleagues by declaring that he wished to be one of the men to go out of Asselin.
“As I’m going to be thrown in the Cooler for presiding over the escape anyway, I might as well at least give them a run for their money,” Day reasoned.5
Some among his colleagues might have reckoned that, as SBO, it was Day’s responsibility to remain behind and look after the welfare of all 600 men in his charge. But, as none of them voiced that view, and as Wings was their superior, no one opposed him. Day sealed his inclusion by volunteering to be the last man out, giving himself the least opportunity of avoiding recapture. The first few men out would have the most time in which to put distance between themselves and the camp.
It was also suggested that ten volunteers hide in the White House’s attic while the break went down. Their disappearance would boost the apparent number of escapees and the Nazis’ alarm. Food would be smuggled to these “ghost escapees” to allow them to hide out for as long as possible. And, to cover the mass movement of escapers to the Abort on breakout day, it was agreed that a rugby match would be organized for the late afternoon of March 5 and that it would end at twilight.
The game would be England versus Australia, always a heated contest in any sport in which the mother country and her former colony competed, made all the more heated by Australia’s frequent victories. Englishmen well outnumbered Aussies in camp, but fifteen Australians would gladly kit up to go head-to-head with the “old enemy” and help cover the biggest escape yet attempted from any Anglo-American POW camp in the Reich.
With the details agreed upon, the meeting broke up, and men hurried away to make their preparations.
* * *
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 5, the guards counted the POWs as they stood in ranks on the recreation ground for Appell, then reported to squat little Hauptmann Simms that all prisoners were present. Simms, a Czech Nazi serving in the Wehrmacht, informed the British adjutant that he could dismiss the prisoners. Once they’d been dismissed, most of the 800 men flooded to the cramped recreation ground’s perimeter, talking animatedly among themselves. A rugby ball was produced, and thirty players and several “officials” stripped down to shorts.
Even the camp’s 130 USAAF men joined the crowd. Wings Day had asked the senior American officer (SAO), redheaded Colonel Charles “Rojo” Goodrich of the 12th Bombardment Group, a native of Augusta, Georgia, to get his men to join the RAF spectators and create as much noise and movement as possible to help cover an escape. American airmen had shown little interest in cooperating with the British and their formal X Organization structure. Several Americans had already ended up in the Cooler for ill-conceived ad hoc solo escape attempts. But Rojo Goodrich and his men had no problem with a little inter-Allied cooperation in this case, especially as it had the potential to cause the Krauts plenty of grief.
One of the USAAF men in that crowd was Bob Rivers of Santa Maria, California. He’d been piloting a Spitfire with the USAAF’s 4th Fighter Squadron, 52nd Fighter Group, when he was shot down in North Africa in January 1943. Rivers had been sent to Schubin in February and, being that rarity—a downed American Spitfire pilot—had been lumped in with the RAF men even though he was USAAF.
Unlike Bill Ash, Rivers had kept to himself and had little to do with the Brits, quickly embracing fellow USAAF aircrew when they began arriving in camp—men who spoke his cultural and sporting language. Just the same, Rivers would be thrilled and proud when he learned the next day what Bill Ash and his Asselin comrades had been up to. For now, Rivers, hands thrust deep in coat pockets, would get into the mood of the rugby game, yelling support for the Aussies.
Bill Ash was at that moment mingling with the crowd, and chafing to get on with the break. This was not a time to be searched by guards. His escape clothes were concealed under a greatcoat, its pockets stuffed with four-ounce cans of “the Mixture,” a high-energy escape food produced by the Lyons team based on formulas created by an English prisoner, prewar nutritionist Eric Lubbock. The Mixture came in two versions: Fudge and Goo. While it looked far from appetizing, this “cake” would sustain a man on the run for a few days. In Ash’s civilianized clothes, too, were his forged German papers, an accurate map of the region produced by Cook’s Tours, and a homemade escape compass.
Ash looked to the heavens. Heavy gray clouds were massing overhead, and gusts of wind blew into the camp from the west, setting the fence wire humming. German guards on duty in the goon towers on the western side of the camp had turned their backs to the wind, pulling up the collars of their greatcoats, stuffing their hands in their pockets and hunching their backs. Eric Williams, also among the rugby spectators, thought to himself that it was perfect weather for an escape; courtesy of the wind, the guards had their backs to the potato patch where Asselin would emerge.
Williams had overcome the disappointment of being excluded from Asselin’s escape list and now pinned his hopes on getting out via the cookhouse tunnel within a few weeks—as long as the rumored transfer to Sagan didn’t occur beforehand. In the meantime, Williams had volunteered to help the Asselin escapers aboveground. Later, he would saunter to the Abort to help close up the tunnel from the outside once all the men involved in the break had submerged.
The other escapers salted themselves among the spectators on the western edge of the recreation ground and awaited their turn to visit the latrines. Like Ash, they were clad in greatcoats covering their escape rigs. Some even toted small suitcases and haversacks to enhance their traveler status in the eyes of German police or troops who might see them on streets or trains. In the closely packed crowd, these accoutrements were invisible to the tower guards. Bill Ash purposely avoided eye contact with his fellow escapers. Instead, with a wry smile, he watched Americans in the crowd enthusiastically laying bets on who would win the rugby game.
Ash thought back to his childhood years at James Bowie School in a tough part of Dallas. Some schoolmates’ favorite recreation had been forcing other kids to fight, wagering on who would win. One day, the big kids had kidnapped seven-year-old Billy Ash’s best friend, George, telling Billy he had to fight George to secure his freedom. Billy had been put in the gladiatorial ring, surrounded by yelling boys, and faced George, who’d burst into tears. On the “go,” instead of fighting George, Billy had turned on the leader of the big kids, and laid him flat with a curling right to the jaw. Inspired by Billy, George had swung at another of their captors. The big kids had proceeded to pound Billy and George to a pulp, but at least the pair had had the satisfaction of defying the bullies. It was the same sort of satisfaction that Ash was deriving from participating in the Asselin escape.
At the sound of a whistle, the rugby game got under way. The ball flew downfield. Aussies and Limeys ran at each other like maniacs. The crowd roared. Eddy Asselin eased in behind Ash and tapped him gently on the shoulder. Without a word, Ash followed the Canadian as he casually made his way toward the nearby Abort. The stooge at the Abort door nodded to indicate there were no goons inside, and the pair passed in through the doorway. Volunteer X Organization helpers waited at the last toilet seat on the left, which was now lifted. As Ash and Asselin removed their greatcoats, Ash, although excited by the prospect of escape, wasn’t looking forward to going down into the filth yet again.
“Let’s pray this will be the last time we do this,” Ash said to Asselin, who nodded, then slid down through the toilet hole to the sump below.6
Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Dando-Collins
