 |
| Map of Colditz Castle - War 44 |
Continued from previous
post
Pat Reid’s plan after he exited the tunnel and climbed on to
the grass patch was to:
The two main problems were:
-
Getting past a sentry who was posted around 40 yards away
and would spot any movement.
-
Dealing with barbed wire on top of the castle park wall
quickly enough without being seen.
Reid decided that as Germans sometimes passed along the
sentry’s eye line after dark; any movement seen by the guard might not arouse immediate
suspicion. The barbed wire around the castle park could be dealt with,
providing there was ample time to carry out the work and the location had minimal
risk of being seen.
 |
| In the canteen - John Watton |
Work began on the tunnel under the canteen (positioned in
the south east corner of the castle yard) and the men worked for a short spell during
the night hours. Reid’s team had a lookout positioned in one of their rooms to
signal if anyone came into the vicinity of the canteen whilst work was in
progress. A stooge also watched the courtyard and lawn area from the canteen
window. When the shift ended and diggers came out of the tunnel, the drain
cover was always ‘sealed’ around the edges again to disguise any obvious traces
of removal.
During the excavations, an escape attempt by Polish Air
Force Lieutenants Waclaw. Gassowski and Waclaw Gorecki interfered with Reid’s
plans. It is likely that their Polish Senior Officer was not fully aware of what they
were doing. At that time in Colditz, the various nationalities of POW were not
working collectively. It is certain that some individuals or small groups planned their own breakout attempts with little or no consultation process. Efforts were made amongst the senior officers to adopt a more coordinated approach.
Reid’s team were not working on the night that the two Poles
gained access to the canteen and started to saw through bars on the outside of
the window. The work inevitably generated noise and the men had no lookout
system in place. They were soon caught. As a result, the Germans put an extra
padlock on the door and positioned a floodlight so it lit up the whole lawn and
all of the prison windows opening on to it. The Polish action had drawn unwelcome
attention to the canteen area.
A disturbance occurred on the night of 22 March 1941 which
further heightened the German’s state of vigilance. They had been holding a
party during the evening and the noise was keeping British orderlies (batmen to
the British officers) who slept nearby awake. Private Solly Goldman, the batman
to British Senior officer Lieutenant-Colonel Guy German, began barracking a
sentry through a window. A volley of shots came back and the result was a squad
of camp guards entering the British quarters. They discovered that some of the
officers were missing. Captains Dick Howe, Rupert Barry and Pat Reid were in
the tunnel whilst Lieutenants Peter Storie-Pugh and Geoffrey Wardle were in
the canteen above it acting as their lookouts.
 |
| Captains Rupert Barry 2nd left, Pat Reid & Dick Howe - strijbewski.nl |
An alert for the missing men went out, a general Appell for the whole camp was called. The
POWs lined up in the yard while lengthy searches were carried out. Around
2.00am Wardle barely had time to warn the tunnellers that a search party was
approaching before the Germans entered the canteen. He had dropped into the
shaft with Storie-Pugh just in time to avoid being seen. The searchers checked
the room and tried unsuccessfully to lift the manhole cover. Pat Reid was
hanging on to it from underneath, fingers wedged in a lip around the cover. The
guards moved on to other searches and the prisoners who were still lined up
outside were not dismissed until around 3.45am.
 |
Lt Peter
Storie-Pugh |
This was a close call and Reid (still with the others in the
tunnel) decided a false wall should be built immediately. Food, civilian
clothing, maps, rucksacks and other escape aids could be hidden behind it, in
addition to concealing any clues of work in progress. Reid described how they
did it:
‘In a few hours we had constructed a forbidding looking
false wall with stones from the original wall which had been demolished,
jointed with clay from under the lawn and coated with dust wherever the joints
showed.’
At 5am when the castle had quietened, the men sneaked back
to their beds unseen, securing padlocks and relocking doors on the way. During
the night, the Germans had carried out identity checks against the whole camp.
Howe, Reid, Barry, Storie-Pugh and Wardle were missing and recorded as
escaped. An OKW message was sent to
the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (supreme command of the Armed Forces) which
triggered procedures and searches for escaped POWs.
It was not difficult to predict the German reaction at
morning Appell when the ‘escaped’
officers were accounted for in the usual way and refused to say where they had
been. The OKW message had to be
withdrawn much to the embarrassment and frustration of the Camp Kommandant who
was reprimanded.
The manhole cover in the canteen was removed and the tunnel
searched. Nothing unusual was found. The ‘escapers’ were eventually charged
with ‘being absent from quarters and for attempting to tunnel out of the camp
from the church.’ (Tools and the
beginnings of a tunnel had been discovered in there) The sentence was seven
days solitary confinement (Stubenarrest)
 |
| Canteen Tunnel Entrance - War44 |
With the tunnel still undiscovered the escape was still
technically alive, despite a failed attempt by two Frenchmen Lieutenant Andre Boucheron
and Jacques Charve to cut through the bars on the canteen window in the same
way as the Polish effort. The next day, the Germans posted a sentry permanently
on a route which included the grass lawn by the canteen window. He passed by at
short intervals (around one minute) and often stood directly over the tunnel
without any idea of what was underneath.
All weak spots had been covered by the enemy. Work to
continue lengthening the tunnel would be discovered because the sentry’s beat
and positioning had been revised. In its current state, the project was now
high risk and little work was done during the time that a string of unrelated
escapes were attempted by other POW’s including Frenchman Alain le Ray who made
the first Home Run from Colditz (see previous posts).
The Germans had developed an obvious interest in the British
canteen. Hauptmann Reinhold Eggers (Lager (Duty) Officer 3 in Colditz) recorded:
‘…the British canteen at Colditz, still the object of our
suspicions and still the month of May.’
Just as the project appeared dead; an unexpected opportunity
arose. A German guard had been approached by a civilian prisoner Howard Gee*.
The guard agreed to look the other way for ten minutes on a specific night after
a prearranged signal. Gee was an excellent German speaker and had bribed him
before to smuggle provisions into the castle. The guard’s fee this time was 500
Reich marks, (100 in advance and 400 dropped out of a window at a notified
location an hour after the ten minutes had passed.) This was a significant of
money from the POW’s ‘bank’ previously built up by paper money hidden inside
items in aid parcels sent to POWs (see previous posts) and currency smuggled in
by incoming POWs.
*Gee was a civilian orderly in Colditz, but had experienced
an unusual route to capture as he was a civilian volunteer who joined the British
contingent who were to fight with the Finnish Army during the Russo-Finnish War
in Finland 1940. The British wore ammo boots and carried Lee Enfield rifles,
but were not an official military regiment. They never fired a shot as Finland
and Russia signed an armistice before they could join the Finns. Gee arrived in
Oslo two hours after the Germans had captured it and was later arrested along
with the rest of the contingent and treated as a POW.
 |
| Howard Gee |
May 29th was the date set for the escape after
evening Appell at 9pm. The first party of twelve men wore adapted ‘civilian’
clothes under their uniforms and had the required maps and home made compasses etc.
The tunnel shaft was ready, with little further distance added to the
overall length. Pat Reid had the collapsible tray he made, in position under the
grass surface of the lawn.
After Appell a lookout and the twelve men got into the
canteen. About an hour later the bribed sentry was seen in position and Reid gave him
the signal to turn the other way. He described what happened next:
‘I cut round the collapsible tray I had inserted above the
vertical shaft and then heaved it upwards, muddy water streaming on to my face.
The windows of the German Kommandantur (command) building loomed above me. The whole
area was brilliantly lit by a floodlight only ten yards away. I climbed out on
to the grass and Rupert Barry immediately behind me started to follow. My
shadow was cast on the wall…and at that moment I noticed a second shadow beside
my own. It held a revolver. I yelled to Rupert to get back as a voice behind me
shouted ‘hände hoch hände hoch.’ I turned to
face a German Officer levelling his pistol at me.’
 |
| Reid's Exit Point - war44 |
It is interesting to see the same course of events through a
German viewpoint. The tension and focus on both sides must have been electric. Reinhold
Eggers recorded that:
‘a sentry reported he’d been offered 700 marks to keep his
eyes shut some night to be specified while on duty at guard post no 9 outside
the canteen….700 marks was a lot of money. How on earth had the POWs got hold
of it? We held a security meeting. The money was obviously being smuggled in.
How, we found later.’ (amount of the bribe differs from Reid’s version)
The sentry was told to continue with the charade and report
developments. He did exactly this and the Germans made their preparations.
Although they had been tipped off, the precise details of
the escape were unknown. Eggers’ mind-set and worries are well illustrated in
his notes:
‘The canteen. Somewhere near there they were going to break
out, but where? From below? Impossible. The inside drain cover in the canteen
floor was sealed. From above? Not in the searchlights. Would they fuse the
lights and come down a rope in the dark. Would they get out of the canteen by
one of the windows? The guard had been assured that there would be no traces
after the escape, so he couldn’t possibly be suspected. How were they going to
get out? We thought and talked and felt very foolish. That we should have to
wait on the prisoners for a line of action.’
The Germans decided that the 29th May was the most likely night for the breakout because:
- The sentry had received 100 marks as the first part of his bribe
- It was the Thursday evening before Whitsun. Staff would be going on leave; there was a chance that things might unconsciously relax.
- On the 27th, the guard maintained that he had
been told ‘From now on keep your head down when on duty.’
After evening Appell, as darkness came, all Lager officers
and a posse of guards waited in a room in the Kommandantur building where the
north east corner backed on to the canteen corner in the prisoners’ yard.
Eggers described their next move:
‘The door on to the grass terrace outside this damned
canteen was on our side of the join in the two yards. We unlocked it quietly.
An NCO and ten men were held ready in the guardroom outside the prisoners’
gate, at the end of the approach yard. A phone call to our internal exchange
would rush them to any part of the castle we specified.’
 |
| Hauptmann Reinhold Eggers |
As Eggers recorded, ‘the stage was set’. The camp
floodlights came on and everyone watched and waited.
‘But what should we watch? Where to focus? We blinked at
every sound. Our eyes watered under the strain….Suddenly came a movement on the
grass…Now we could focus. A line appeared – a break. A patch of grass started
to move upward. Lager officer 1 made a sign, ‘wait!’ A square of turf rose
straight up out of the ground held by a wooden frame, with legs which now
showed themselves. Then a man’s hands and arms followed, pushing at the turf
and frame by the legs. Then the frame was stood aside and up came British
Captain Reid.’
A phone call followed and the guard occupied the canteen
immediately. Two Polish and ten British officers were caught in the tunnel,
including the British Senior Officer Guy German. It was an absolute steal for
the camp staff and their first big success. The foiled escapers had money,
civilian clothes, passes and 150lbs of provisions (Red Cross food of tins
chocolate and biscuits) which were all confiscated. The guard kept his 100 marks, received extra
leave and the War Service Cross.
 |
British Senior Officer
Colonel Guy German |
Security was tightened as a result, with sentries changed at
irregular times and not returned to the same post in order to break the rhythm.
This was ‘advantage Germany’, but the game was only just beginning.
Sources
Colditz the Full Story – Major P R Reid MBE MC
Colditz The German Viewpoint - Reinhold Eggers
(Both are recommended reads)
Author's Notes
IWM recorded interview with Howard Gee
©Keith Morley
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