Chapter 49
‘Your mother shot you?’ Elisavet said, frowning over her coffee cup.
Cora set the flask down on the bridge wall. ‘She did.’
‘Still got the bumps, haven’t you?’ Gladdie said, stirring a saccharine in with her pencil.
‘Still got the bumps,’ Cora agreed cheerfully.
‘And all those Germans escaped through the tunnel?’
‘That’s right. Half of them got out after roll-call. They’d gone before anyone noticed.’
Elisavet stared at them and shook her head slowly in a disbelieving sort of way.
Cora didn’t blame her. It was a bad few days, that’s what she remembered. Awful. She couldn’t see forward to a time after that time. She was trapped, with no hope of any kind of happiness, just work and sleep and despair.
‘Dew, the excitement,’ Gladdie said, remembering it differently, ‘you’ve never seen anything like it!
People went out hunting for the Germans in the wood and in the sand dunes and there were reporters everywhere, all eager to hear our stories, asking us who’d been shot and what we’d seen, and Alva Liddell on the news, do you remember him, Megan?
Alva Liddell giving updates every evening on how many prisoners had been caught and how many were still at large, working out the tally. ’
The next time Elisavet came round, Cora called her upstairs.
She was on her hands and knees in the spare room, dragging a box out of the cupboard.
‘I’m not sure why I’ve kept them for all this time,’ she said to Elisavet.
‘On the other hand, when I imagine throwing them away, I think: keep them, Cora, because what difference will another year make! They might come in handy one of these days! And I was right,’ she ended modestly, smiling up at Elisavet.
The newspapers were broadsheets, old and yellowing, and they had a peculiar, acrid smell to them.
‘Let me,’ Elisavet said, picking the box up effortlessly.
‘Let’s put them on the bed. You’ll enjoy this,’ she promised.
‘The German Great Escape was very much the hot topic of the day, as you can imagine. Like a soap opera, it was, we couldn’t get enough of it.
And all the time I was hoping for news of Frank but the truth was, I wanted him to get away successfully and make it home somehow, all in one piece. Here. Help yourself.’
They sat either end of the bed with the box between them and started to read.
Monday, March 12th
News Chronicle
70 Nazi Prisoners Escape
Home Guards and planes in search
Seventy German prisoners of war escaped from a camp at Bridgend (Glam.) in the early hours yesterday.
At night thirty-six were still at large: thirty-four had been recaptured during the day at various places in the neighbourhood. There was some shooting and one prisoner and a woman civilian were slightly wounded.
Four stole a car and got into Gloucestershire where planes were used in the search.
Hundreds of the home guard living in Bridgend, which lies about midway between Cardiff and Swansea, at once volunteered to help in the search.
Warning in churches
Regular soldiers, police, civil defence workers and farmers were also out. At chapels and churches in the district, morning service was interrupted to read police warnings.
Tuesday, March 13th
Daily Worker
NAZIS DUG A 45-FT TUNNEL
Twenty-Seven Still at Large
The German prisoners of war who escaped from the camp at Bridgend, Glamorganshire, on Sunday, had planned their escape with elaborate care for many weeks.
They burrowed a tunnel 45 feet long and one and a half feet in diameter from inside a hut, under barbed wire, into a field. It was just large enough for a man to squeeze through. The horizontal portion was so large that men could walk about without stooping.
Tons of earth must have been removed. They carried it outside in haversacks and empty food tins when they went on parade and scattered it in small pieces.
Twenty-seven of the seventy who escaped were still at large last night.
Tuesday, March 13th
Daily Mirror
ATS girl grabbed fleeing Nazi
As soldiers, home guards, police, land girls, farm labourers and even schoolchildren searched the Welsh hills throughout daylight yesterday for the remainder of the seventy Nazi prisoners who escaped from their camp near Bridgend, Glamorgan, people in the district were hailing a brave ATS girl whose courage ended the escape bid of two of the men almost before it had begun.
The girl saw the men skulking across a field not far from the camp.
Without hesitation she grabbed hold of one and held him.
The other man with him surrendered and the girl in khaki handed them both over to the authorities.
A Welsh housewife out shopping yesterday set the pursuers on the track of three other prisoners.
She heard the sound of twigs snapping alongside the road on the outskirts of Bryntirion in Bridgend and saw three men, obviously Germans in uniform, in a field.
‘One of the men was on the side of the wall nearest me. He saw me looking towards him, jumped back over the wall and all three ducked out of sight.
‘I wasn’t unduly alarmed but I thought it wisest, being a woman, not to tackle them on my own.’ A cordon was immediately thrown around the area.
The men who escaped include rough, young, fanatical Nazis, including paratroopers and SS men, who have been causing trouble for many weeks. Residents have been complaining of their shouting and singing at all hours. Twenty prisoners were still at large at noon yesterday.
Many of the prisoners were thought to have found cover in the Welsh hills or sparsely populated parts of the valleys only a few miles from the camp.
Good cover too is available on the sand dunes and rocks and caves of the wild Glamorganshire coast 6 miles from Bridgend.
Dispatch riders patrolled all roads in Glamorgan and border counties, while soldiers in extended formation covered the countryside.
All aerodromes are guarded by soldiers with tommy guns.
Four men caught by the police were trying to escape in a car they had stolen.
Wednesday, March 14th
Daily Voice
GIRL’S HUNCH TRAPS NAZIS
Five found in copse where she played hide-and-seek
A hunch of a twenty-two-year-old girl led to the recapture yesterday of five more of the seventy German prisoners who, earlier this week, escaped from a camp near Bridgend.
Later tonight two more prisoners were picked up by special constables within 200 yards of Kenfig Hill police station, while three more were found by war reserve police near a Pencoed factory.
All so far captured have had good supplies tucked away in their knapsacks – German black bread and bully beef hoarded from their Red Cross parcels, as well as bits of food saved from meals at the camp before breakout.
None was armed and none had discarded his uniform. The patches torn off their camp clothes have been found on hedges and in ditches near the camp.
Army trained Alsatian dogs have been brought in to help in the search.
Soldiers and airmen men in the manhunt are armed with tommy guns or rifles, and arms have also been issued to members of the old home guard.
The Welsh committee of the Communist Party has protested at this laxity. ‘The Welsh people,’ Mr Idris Cox, secretary of the committee, told me, ‘are alarmed at the thought of Nazis roaming at large in their midst.
‘We demand stricter control in such camps and the suppression of Nazi influence in them.’
Home Guards refused petrol
The people here are also indignant at the slowness with which they allege the military authorities at Western command have tackled the job.
Local home guard officer told me that if they had had the necessary petrol, it would have been possible to throw a cordon of at least two thousand ex-home guards around the area within six hours.
Application was made to the Western command for the necessary petrol with the support of the local police.
But the application was refused and as a result valuable time has been lost.
Officers and men now engaged in the search are of the opinion that the escape plot was very well planned.
With the main object of ensuring the getaway of a small group of not more than half a dozen picked Nazi officers, it is believed that the rest were to serve as a cover for the selected few and draw the scent away from this group.
Sunday, March 18th
THE SUNDAY EXPRESS LONDON
Note to guard told of Nazi escape plan
First warning that mass escape was planned from the German war prisoners’ camp at Bridgend, Glamorgan, came in a note, apparently written by an anti-Nazi, and thrown through the barbed wire fence surrounding the compound.
The note was picked up by a sentry. Orders were given that guards should be doubled.
Sentries stood with rifles at the ready.
Flares were placed at intervals round the wire which surrounds the camp.
No signs of movement could be seen, but while the sentries stood in readiness, seventy Germans crawled through a tunnel that had been dug from inside the hut to a point outside the wire and disappeared silently into the darkness.
All but three of the escaped prisoners have now been recaptured.
Most of them were caught within a few miles of the camp, but a few were caught as far away as Southampton and Birmingham.
Camp split up
Investigation has shown that many inmates of the camp were aware of what was to happen, and as a measure of precaution the prisoners are to be split up and sent to different camps. The first party of thirty left yesterday.
Preparations for the escape had been in progress for some months.
Few sentries
British troops who guard the camp bitterly resent Press criticism accusing them of laxity.
British at the camp are fewer than 150 and the guard company is only about ninety strong.
There are some 2,300 – 1,700 officers, mostly Luftwaffe, SS and paratroops, and 600 other ranks.
Ten sentries guard nearly a mile of wire – approximately 176 yards to each man – and the men feel this is too few at night.
‘Interesting stories,’ Elisavet said as she was reading the copy of the Sunday Express.
She folded it in half. ‘Look at this, Cora! It says a note was thrown through the wire fence and picked up by a guard. But why?’ she demanded.
‘It makes no sense to throw it out of the camp. The prisoner could just hand it discreetly to the guard: here, take. More sensible, don’t you think? ’
Cora laughed, because there was a sparkle in Elisavet’s eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. ‘Absolutely,’ she said.
For a moment they looked at each other.
Elisavet tilted her head. ‘You know what I think? I think the note was from Frank to you.’
‘Well, that is sharp of you! The guard caught him throwing it. I felt guilty because it was obvious the guard would report it and the tunnel would be found. But it wasn’t. It was bittersweet, the night the alarm sounded. The note was Frank’s goodbye.’