Facing Fearful Odds: Captivity, Escape & Resistance 1940-1945

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If Calais was the hinge on which Alec’s life turned, this was the moment of movement. Years later, he would tell the story of the few minutes that transformed his world view, his psychological wounds as open and bloody as on the day they were sustained: We had been taking an almighty pasting particularly from a machine gun somewhere out on the sand dunes. Brush called for volunteers to attack the machine gun nest, which was on high ground with a commanding view over the dunes. Chapman turned to the Queen Vics and said, ‘Come on you lot – fixed swords.’ The tradition in the rifle regiments is that you never fix swords, which everyone else calls bayonets, unless you are going to use them, and we went out to try and deal with this machine gun nest and deal with it we did.

This was warfare at its most basic. Making their way through the undergrowth, the mixed group of a dozen Greenjackets came to a clearing from which they could see five or six Germans. Taffy Mathias, like Alec, had vivid memories of the incident: They had not seen us and so when we broke out of our shelter they were completely surprised. The clearing was about 100 yards across and we raced across as fast as we could. Time seemed to stop and I was aware that we were all shouting and yelling. There was a young, blond German in front of me and then he was not there and it was all over . . . I had often wondered how I would react to such a situation. I found that it was all a sort of make-believe and a jumbled dream at the time.

‘In ten minutes I must have gone back 2,000 years,’ Alec recalled. ‘We were complete savages. Every bit of civilisation had gone from me. I was running like a dervish, running as fast as I could towards this machine-gun nest. We suffered a lot of casualties but we did put the machine-gun nest out of action.’

Thus Alec crossed a line to which few people come close, as they contemplate military morality from the comfort of their homes. This was war undiluted by distance. This was not killing with a rifle from hundreds of yards away, where the target is identified only by uniform and helmet. This was war as a desperate life-or-death struggle with a single opponent whom one has to kill to avoid being killed. ‘The minute it was all over something suddenly hit me. I realized what we’d been doing, which was killing people – not from a distance of 20,000 feet like a bomber crew or a distance of 600 yards like a sniper but from a few inches away. And I was quietly but very comprehensively sick. War is not a civilising influence.’

Despite such counter-attacks, the Germans pressed forward and shortly after 3.00pm broke through between the fort and the sea. With the fort surrounded, the British inside surrendered. Its thick walls provided a shield

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against ground fire but there was nothing inside to protect defenders against mortars. Some troops fought on in the trenches beyond but they too were soon surrounded.

The end came at about 3.30pm. Having captured the Bastion de l’Estran, the Germans mounted a machine gun at its gates facing Bastion One and aimed it at the tunnel beneath. At this point, they were already spraying bullets into the other end from Fort Risban. The tunnel was the Queen Vics’ regimental aid post and its side chambers housed wounded men being tended

by British medics and French nurses. The conditions were gruesome. As the battle raged, the Queen Vics’ medical officer improvised with a knife to carry out amputations. Then he found a hacksaw, sterilised it and put it into service.

Alongside the wounded, the tunnel became crowded with stragglers. Meanwhile, on the mound above, Queen Vics led by Captain John ‘Tarzan’ Palmer continued to fight, and Captain Monico organized reinforcements in the final minutes from men in the tunnel. ‘The adjutant called for all QVRs to come outside, which they all did at once,’ recalled Timpson. ‘They were sent to reinforce the firing line on top. The adjutant assembled the sergeants of other units and got them to collect small parties of their own men who were still in possession of firearms and in a fit state to fight and to take them up also into the firing-line.’

‘At the end we were very short,’ recalled Monico. ‘We could not have gone on – there was nothing left to fight with.’ He had scrounged ammo in the town but had the Queen Vics faced an infantry assault it would have been quickly exhausted. Now he asked himself whether the only alternative to being killed for the sake of being killed was surrender. In the tunnel below, Austin-Brown thought the troops ‘were in a peculiar state owing to lack of sleep and food and continual bombing and enemy fire’.

There was no final frontal charge, just intensive mortar and machine-gun fire. ‘The Germans decided to pound the troops to pieces. There was no point in trying to storm us,’ said Monico. Shells were landing on troops defending the bastion and at the tunnel entrances below. ‘The wounded were getting killed in the tunnels – the Germans did not know it was a makeshift hospital . . . the position was hopeless.’ Meanwhile, the men of Alec’s platoon whispered words of reassurance to the dying and tried to smile encouragingly.

From the Bastion de l’Estran a few hundred yards away, a captured officer, Second Lieutenant Richard Wood, appeared under escort at the tunnel with a white flag tied to his rifle to parlay with the defenders. Speaking first to Austin-Brown, he said the Bastion de l’Estran had surrendered and the Bastion One troops must cease firing too or face being shelled until no one was left standing. Austin-Brown said Bastion de l’Estran’s surrender did not necessarily involve the surrender of Bastion One, but Ellison-Macartney, by then with a bullet wound in his hand and quite groggy, overruled him, telling the Greenjackets remnants to lay down their arms. From his prison camp cell,

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he wrote, ‘The Germans held the fort which dominated the tunnel and could at any moment reopen fire and annihilate the defence. Nothing but useless slaughter was to be gained by further resistance.’ Austin-Brown told his wife: ‘As we were surrounded and there was no hope of escape, in order to avoid further bloodshed the CO surrendered.’

Alec described the denouement as bullets thudded into the earth around him: Gradually, yard by yard, cricket pitch by cricket pitch, we were pushed back into the area around the last fort and at around 3.30 in the afternoon when I had run out of Bren gun ammunition and all I had was six rounds in my revolver, the word was passed through that further resistance was useless and that the white flag was being run up. We were told to lay down our arms and the next thing I knew was there was a very large, very aggressive German soldier ripping away at my revolver, which was still on a lanyard round my neck, putting the muzzle within an inch of my nose and yelling, ‘Soll ich? Soll ich?’ which I jolly well knew was German for ‘Shall I? Shall I?’ Fortunately, he didn’t.

A few yards away, a D Company officer took out his white handkerchief, waved it and turned to his men saying, ‘Sorry fellows, it’s bloody hopeless.’

Not everyone stopped firing. On the top of the bastion, Sergeant Major Freddie Walter and Dennis Saaler saw unarmed British soldiers with their hands aloft being marched from the Bastion de l’Estran towards them and were told arrangements were being made to surrender Bastion One; but they refused to believe this until Ellison-Macartney arrived to deliver his bitter message. The position, he said, was that, as the last group holding out, they were surrounded, adding that if there was further resistance the enemy would open fire on the wounded in the tunnel below. He told Walter the enemy ‘could concentrate all his tanks, mortars and infantry on us, and already had them in position, and his Stukas would again be brought into action, against which we, on the top of the tunnel, had absolutely no protection’. Surrender terms had been concluded so the men had to drop their weapons. ‘This we reluctantly proceeded to do,’ said Walter, ‘breaking our arms until a German officer brandishing a pistol and looking exceedingly angry ordered us to desist.’

Even after Walter’s surrender, there was more shooting when twenty riflemen unaware of Bastion One’s surrender tried to establish a line of defence at a road junction nearby. The Germans had reached the junction, but troops led by Tony Rolt, the rally driver, charged forward, killing some and driving the others back. In this last act of defiance, Rolt used up the bullets in his two revolvers and only surrendered after he learned the Greenjackets in the Bastion had been overwhelmed.

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At this point, Airey Neave lay wounded in the tunnel. Of the fighting spirit he witnessed, he wrote: Few ordinary soldiers in the streets and sand-dunes had time to ponder the strategic importance of the battle. They were in a hand-to-hand fight – bayonets were used more than once – to prevent the capture of the town . . . They were fighting for their lives and never more boldly than after 1.00pm on the 26th . . . Many of the younger men of the Rifle Brigade and their officers, although tired, were still fighting as if this were the last stages of a football match. Shouts of encouragement, even laughter, came from the trenches in the sand-dunes.

For some Queen Vics, surrender felt inglorious. For others, it felt honourable – they fought hard; men who a few months previously had been civilians had confronted their fears. They had faced an onslaught from an overwhelmingly stronger enemy and had surrendered when encircled and having exhausted their ammunition. To Alec, it seemed like a modern-day replay of the Battle of Thermopylae in which a tiny Greek force held off a Persian army for seven days. Though the Persians triumphed at Thermopylae, the Greeks defeated their invasion after a year. For soldiers captured at Calais in 1940 victory would be five years in coming.

In London that day, Churchill’s War Cabinet began a three-day debate over whether to accede to France’s request that Benito Mussolini mediate an armistice that would have led to Britain disarming and abandoning parts of the Empire to the Axis Powers. Yet part of his mind was focussed on Calais: ‘It was the only time during the war that I couldn’t eat’, he told Boothby.

General ‘Pug’ Ismay, who was with him at the time, wrote: This decision affected us all very deeply, especially perhaps Churchill.

He was unusually silent during dinner that evening, and he ate and drank with evident distaste. As we rose from the table, he said, ‘I feel physically sick.’ He has quoted these words in his memoirs, but he does not mention how sad he looked as he uttered them. *

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Once resistance had ceased, the Germans herded the remnants of Bastion One’s defenders still standing – about 150 men – into the rubble-strewn area in front of the fort. With their faces pale and covered with stubble, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, their throats sore through breathing smoke and their tattered uniforms covered in mud, grease and dried blood, they learned the meaning of surrender. As they walked between two rows of Panzer Grenadiers sporting hand-held machine guns – a weapon Alec had not seen before – the humiliation sank in. Friends of years’ standing would not make eye contact for fear of seeing the hopelessness each one felt.

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Having been assembled, they were ordered to sit bunched against each other while a Panzer Grenadier colonel, whose smile revealed a mouth full of gold teeth, called for the senior British officer. As a regular, Alex Allan led the defence, but John Ellison-Macartney outranked him and thus stepped forward, his hand bandaged.

‘Our colonel called for anybody who could speak German,’ recalled Alec, also on his feet despite shrapnel wounds showing through torn battledress trousers. Armed with his Higher School Certificate in German, he stepped forward. ‘The Colonel then said to me: ‘‘Can you translate what this officer is saying to me?’’ And this German colonel looked at our colonel and then he looked at this sorry little band of those of us that were left behind and said: ‘‘Is this all there are of you?’’ And that’s the nearest thing to a compliment I ever got from a German.’

The two colonels shook hands and Ellison-Macartney turned to address the captives. They had, he said, fought a gallant fight against overwhelming forces; the surrender had been the only course left open but it was honourable. He then passed on Alec’s translation: the German commanding officer congratulated the British on their fierce resistance, expressed his surprise at their small numbers and lack of arms and assured them they would be well treated.

After this speech, a Wehrmacht Dolmetscher (interpreter) stepped forward and warned the captives they would be shot if they tried to escape and would be punished if they concealed weapons. They were then grouped by regiment and told to wait for ambulances to collect the wounded. German soldiers, meanwhile, amused themselves riding captured motorcycles round Bastion One. Andy Vincent thought the ceremony ridiculous, as if the Queen Vics were members of a defeated cricket team, hearing cries of ‘Bad luck, sir!’ before going in for tea and crumpets.

The Germans were genuinely surprised by the resistance. At the Citadel, a German officer asked a British captain where the heavy guns were. When the captain replied there were none, he said, ‘I cannot believe that men with only rifles held up my army.’ As Nicholson was led away to Fischer’s headquarters, his officer escort said in French, ‘You have fought very courageously.’

Why did Alec fight to his last Bren-gun bullet when the situation appeared hopeless? The ethics of surrender were not part of his training. During the Great War, soldiers surrendering without serious wounds were stigmatized.

Mass surrenders, such as those of the 80,000 men who capitulated in Singapore, were yet to happen. Most soldiers still thought only of victory or death.

Ellison-Macartney went to war ‘magnificently unprepared for anything’. He thought he might be killed or maimed but had never considered imprisonment until he was told on Calais’ sand-dunes he was to have ‘the honour of being a guest of the great German Reich’.

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from E606 on 10 July but were recaptured the next day by railway police at Klagenfurt in southern Austria, 20km from the Slovenian border.

Ahead of their break-out, Alec and Bob traded Red Cross food with locals in exchange for civilian clothes. Before setting off for work each day, Alec would secrete food and cigarettes in his uniform – armpits were best because then one’s uniform did not bulge too much – in preparation for trading.

Czechs would show their sympathies by surreptitiously flashing an English cigarette packet in their windows as he marched past.

A few days before the break, the men made a second trip to the photographic studio for portraits to send home. Alec, shorn of his moustache, sat in the front row of one group photo while Bob, in his newly-assumed khaki uniform, took part in another. On the back, he scribbled a cryptic message that confused his family: ‘I’m in the army, now.’

On the morning of the break, Alec and Bob put their civilian clothes on beneath their uniforms, stowed food in their haversacks and joined the line for Appell. Alec had studied the guards’ behaviour on the journey to work. He knew when it was best to slip away unnoticed, his departure masked by his muckers distracting the guards: ‘We made our initial break without any real hitches,’ he recalled. ‘On the way to work,’ said Les Birch, ‘we got together and staged a bit of a riot. The guards were not intelligent. They fixed their bayonets and rushed to see what was going on rather than looking to see if anyone had disappeared.’

Having slipped away, Alec and Bob doubled back into town. At the station, Alec asked the ticket office clerk in his best German for two tickets for Troppau, 24km south-east, from where express trains could be caught. Local trains were dangerous because anybody unusual would attract attention, and the pair had a nervous half hour avoiding eye contact as the train passed along the Opava river, marking the old Czech border. From Troppau, they planned to take express trains on a zigzag route through central Europe towards the Italian border. The first leg took them 340km west to Prague.

The journey was uneventful – a railway official and a military policeman looking for deserters asked for papers but both appeared satisfied. Prague’s main station was full of migrant workers and the pair slipped through the crowds.

The second leg took them to Vienna, a journey of a similar distance southeast. As the train pulled into town, Alec could see the air-raid damage. In Vienna, Alec’s language skills were put seriously to the test as the pair were about to start the third leg of their zigzag trip – the 480km journey southwest to Innsbruck. The moment of truth came when a platform policeman asked for their ID cards. Alec presented his papers, but the policeman, clearly unsatisfied, said: ‘You, wait here. I’m going to fetch my superior.’ Alec feared the worst: ‘This is it,’ he thought. ‘However good our forged papers are, they don’t stand up to really expert scrutiny.’

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His fears were justified. Each day, Berlin’s police headquarters would distribute alerts to stations across Germany. Mostly, these covered standard crimes, but as the war progressed they were increasingly taken up with information about deserters, saboteurs and escapers – in March 1944, the Great Escape merited a special edition. The problem for Alec was the newsletters contained examples of poorly-forged documents, with photos showing the forgers’ mistakes.

At that moment, Alec saw a man hovering nearby: ‘In any country in the world you would have written him down for a plain-clothes policeman.’ Alec felt he had nothing to lose. Either the policeman would declare the papers genuine or the pair would be arrested. Thus, Alec walked over to the policeman, shaking inside but acting confident, and said, ‘The railway policeman doesn’t think our papers are in order. Would you care to take a look at them?’

‘Ja, Ja,’ he replied and, after taking a quick look, declared, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with these.’ Then, the man did his bit for Czech-German relations and ‘took us and put us on the train, so that was brilliant’.

As the train left Vienna, Alec felt full of admiration for the Lamsdorf forgers’ work, and his spirits were high as it steamed into Innsbruck a few hours later, its rhythm seeming to say ‘Clickity-clack, I’m taking you home, Clickity-clack, I’m taking you home’. As in Vienna, he marvelled at the damage left by air-raids on the town, which had suffered a particularly heavy raid in June 1944.

Alec and Bob hoped Innsbruck would be the last checkpoint before the Italian border. They aimed to walk the final stretch, crossing over via the Brenner Pass, 70km to the south. Yet Innsbruck was where their luck ran out.

Their plan’s weakness was that Alec spoke little Czech, and ‘by some terrible misfortune’ the man who examined their papers was a Sudeten German ‘who prided himself on his knowledge of Czech’.

‘Oh, you’re Czechs, are you?’ said the policeman, reeling out ‘a great sort of yard and a half of Czech’. Alec’s jaw dropped as he stared uncomprehendingly, trying to decide his next move as the policeman reached for his revolver. This was the greatest moment of danger for escapers. If they fled, the policeman would shoot. If they tried to bluff, there were other dangers – in their civilian clothes they could be shot as spies. The sensible course was to admit defeat, which Alec did by pulling out his Lamsdorf ID tag from beneath his shirt.

‘Come with me!’ barked the policemen and led the pair away to be taken to Innsbruck’s Gestapo headquarters on Herrengasse, where they were put in separate cells. Under the Geneva Convention, Alec and Bob should have been held until a Wehrmacht guard arrived to escort them to Lamsdorf for punishment. But Innsbruck’s Gestapo wanted first to discover who had forged their papers. Alec knew torture was possible and his ability to take punishment was limited. Typically, torture victims held out for a couple of days. Sometimes

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POWs did not last that long; the mere threat of torture proved sufficient – and some men returned from the war plagued by guilt about civilian helpers to whose violent deaths they had contributed. If Alec and Bob were to avoid divulging anything, they needed a stratagem – something to ‘reveal’ under duress. ‘We needed something we could use as a get-out that would eventually stop whatever was happening,’ recalled Alec. ‘It would be an apparent breakdown.’

The solution came from ‘griff’ about an airman shot while gathering wood the wrong side of Lamsdorf’s trip-wire. POWs knew they would be shot at if they entered the ‘death strip’, and the airman was wounded in the leg. What happened next was unusual, because guards then killed him in cold blood.

The incident yielded Alec and Bob their ‘get-out’: ‘We agreed that if we were caught and interrogated we would take as much punishment as we could and would then break down and give the name of this dead airman and we would say he supplied us with our forged papers, our civilian clothes, our money and travel permits and all the various paraphernalia that go to make an organized escape.’

Alec was thrust into his cell and told to ‘await further developments’. When three men carrying rubber truncheons stepped in and demanded he reveal everything about his escape he knew those ‘developments’ would be ‘very unpleasant indeed’: ‘I got chucked around that blessed cell like a ping-pong ball. I took as much as I could and then I said, ‘‘Oh, alright, I’ll tell you’’ because it wasn’t exactly a pleasurable experience. I then gave them the name of this bloke, whereupon they, as it were, put up their truncheons, marched out of the cell and locked the door.’ Bob received a similar beating.

The pair were left in solitary confinement for two days pondering whether they would be ‘shot while trying to escape’. Then, they were brought before a Gestapo officer, who said the Lamsdorf airman had been executed thanks to their treachery. Alec felt relieved: the Germans were lying to make him feel bad. But the relief was fleeting. What happened next was the most frightening episode of his captivity. The officer signalled to his colleagues, who marched Alec and Bob into a yard near the cells and handed them two spades. ‘Dig!’ shouted one guard. ‘Dig a hole two metres long, a metre wide, a metre and a half deep.’ Alec and Bob dug until one of the half dozen guards standing around them said, ‘Right, that’s enough. Each of you stand at one end of the hole that you have dug.’

Alec was ‘in a state of very, very blue funk’ as he contemplated being shot and buried in an unmarked grave having survived four years’ captivity, but Bob saw the fear in his eyes and whispered: ‘This is it. You might just as well put a bloody good face on it. Let’s show them that Britons don’t care.’

The Germans formed a half circle as the pair stood at the ends of their ‘graves’ and waited for the sounds of rifles being raised. But no shots came.

Instead, they were thumped with rifle butts and sent tumbling into the holes

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they had just dug. As they lay floundering in the mud, a voice from above said, ‘Think yourself lucky because that is what has happened to your comrade, who you so blatantly and rottenly betrayed, and let that be a warning to you.’

Alec’s mind surged with relief. He had survived, he had not divulged any secrets and would soon be returned to the comparative safety and familiarity of the Lamsdorf Straflager. His hopes were fulfilled the next day when he was taken from his cell and presented to a soldier in field-grey uniform. He was a beautiful sight. There were ‘two Germanies’, thought Robert Kee, ‘the Wehrmacht Germany’, which ‘saluted when it passed you in the camp and allowed you to write home three times a month’, and ‘the SS Germany’, which ‘beat you in the stomach with lengths of hose pipe and shot you in the early morning’. The soldier’s arrival meant Alec was returning from ‘SS Germany’ to ‘Wehrmacht Germany’.

Other Lamsdorf inmates who broke out in late 1944 were not so lucky.

Bernie Dynes, the New Zealander Alec met at Ja¨gerndorf, escaped in December 1944 but was recaptured and taken to the Gestapo’s Prague prison, where 1,079 people were guillotined between 1943 and 1945, and then to Theresienstadt, a camp Adolf Eichmann, the Holocaust’s logistics head, had created in a Habsburg-era barracks on the river Ohrˇe 60km to the north.

To outsiders, Theresienstadt was a ‘model’ community for prominent Jews.

The reality was the camp was overcrowded, had little water and no electricity.

Some 33,000 people died there from ill-treatment, starvation or disease, Theresienstadt’s main purpose being to serve as a transit camp for Jews heading for Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Dynes was held in Theresienstadt’s ‘Small Fortress’, a Straflager for Jews, political prisoners and, during the war’s closing months, almost a hundred recaptured POWs. It was run by a group of SS and Gestapo torturers and murderers led by Heinrich Jo¨ckel and including Anton Malloth, an Innsbruck Nazi nicknamed ‘Der scho¨ne Toni’ (beautiful Toni). During his six-week incarceration, Dynes dug tank traps alongside Jews. As the prisoners toiled, SS guards would mingle while others stood guard with machine guns. ‘Two or three times a day on the Jewish section the guards would disperse and the guns would fire into their ranks,’ he wrote. Any Jew too slow to hit the ground was killed or wounded.

Dynes survived Theresienstadt to tell his story. Other escapers were not so lucky. Six months before the Great Escape massacre, two aristocratic Grenadier Guards officers, Lord Brabourne and Arnold Vivian, were captured by SS men in a German-speaking Alpine village and killed.