In my dorm at
boarding school in the 1950s we got up to all sorts of forbidden
escapades, like climbing out, and midnight feasts. I particularly
remember our attempts to make toast by holding a slice of bread over a
candle flame. We got faintly warm dry bread covered with soot, and
burnt fingers.
We did these
things partly because they were against the rules, and partly because
we wanted to emulate our heroes, the wartime RAF crews. We read
fictional stories in comics – 64 action-packed pages for sixpence –
but even better were the true stories in books: The Dam Busters, Reach
for the Sky, The Wooden Horse, and The Colditz Story.
Colditz, a
forbidding castle deep in eastern Germany, was supposed to be
escape-proof, but the ingenuity of the PoWs was amazing. They made
uniforms from blankets dyed with boot polish, dressed as German
guards, and tried to walk out through the gates. They hid themselves
in straw mattresses, piles of rubbish, an air-raid shelter, and the
prison laundry; they shinned down ropes of bedsheets, and they crawled
through manholes into the sewers.
Most ambitious of
all, when most of the ground and underground routes had been blocked,
they actually built a glider, and planned to fly to freedom. After
creating a workshop by building a false wall in an attic above the
chapel, they used floorboards and bedslats to shape 5000 spars and
ribs; for the fabric they doped bedsheets with stewed millet; and they
stole electrical wiring for the controls.
To launch the
glider off the roof they planned to yank it with a rope running over a
pulley and tied to a bathtub full of concrete which would fall five
floors to the ground. The glider was to carry two men over the town
and the river, and would have been a superb morale-booster, but the
American army arrived before it was completed.
Would prisoners
today have the extraordinary ingenuity and drive to build a glider
from stolen rubbish? I would like to think so, but seat-of-the-pants
flying was in the blood in 1945, and might today be only a folk
memory. Altogether, in dozens of escape attempts, 130 men got out of
the castle, and 30 got clean away, but we schoolboys weren’t fussy;
even the chaps who never escaped were heroes of ours, and we were sure
they had somehow managed to make toast…
