Part 2 Prisoners of War
By Tony Storey
This article was published in the April 2025 edition of Soul Search, the Journal of The Sole Society
We continue our article on the Mosquito navigator Peter Sewell who had been ditched into English Chanel following a raid in Germany. They had been captured by the Germans and taken into captivity.
As they walked into captivity, Peter Sewell and his pilot, Francis Brinsden, knew that they faced several days or weeks of questioning. The Germans needed to obtain as much knowledge as possible about Allied plans and would expect a Royal Air Force officer to know much more than the average army squaddie. What the two airmen dreaded most was the thought that they might encounter the Gestapo or the SS, who had a reputation for torturing their prisoners.
The Gestapo, short for Geheime Staatspolizei, was the secret state police. The SS was the Schutzstaffel or Security Squad.
To their great relief the men were taken to a Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe, Dulag Luft for short, a transit camp for the air force, near Frankfurt.
After a week of interrogation and assessment in the transit camp, the two men were transferred to a main camp, Stalag Luft III, which was then in Nazi Germany, but is now in Poland. Their new prison had only recently been completed and had been designed to make any attempt at escape, particularly by tunnelling, as difficult as possible. For example, the soil was dark grey but the site had a very sandy subsoil which would be clearly visible if exposed by any excavation. The loose sand would make it difficult to prevent any tunnel collapsing and concealed seismograph microphones surrounded the site with the intention of detecting the sound of digging.
In 1963 what happened at Stalag Luft III in 1943/1944 became the basis of a feature film, The Great Escape. In short Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, who ran the escape committee, planned to liberate 200 prisoners by building three tunnels, codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry. The project was authorised by the senior British officer, Group Captain Herbert Massey and work began in March 1943. The Nazis eventually discovered the first tunnel, ‘Tom’, and filled it in. The Germans celebrated their success, unaware that there were two other underground passages that they hadn’t found. The prisoners decided to use ‘Dick’ as a storage space and put all their efforts into completing ‘Harry’ by the spring of 1944. More than 600 men were involved in the construction work, but no more than 200 could escape in one night, so a ballot was held for the available places. Many, including Peter Sewell, were disappointed.
On the moonless night of 24 March 1944, RAF bomber pilot Johnny Bull became the first person to reach the end of the tunnel, only to discover that it had stopped several feet short of the surrounding forest and in full view of any patrolling guards. Rather than postpone the escape attempt it was agreed to add an extra stage to the process. It would be necessary to place one man in the forest who would give the ‘all clear‘ signal with a tug on the rope, so that the next man could emerge from the tunnel and reach the cover of the trees.
The process was already slow as one by one each prisoner, in civilian clothes and with forged documents, had to lie on the wooden trolley and be pulled through the tunnel to his escape. Fewer than a dozen men made it through every hour, and a partial tunnel collapse and a one-hour blackout during an air raid slowed the operation further. It became clear that breaking out 200 men would be impossible. At about 5 a.m., a German patrol almost fell into the tunnel exit and the escape attempt was over. The prisoners in the tunnel managed to scramble back to their hut and set about burning any incriminating documents, such as forged travel passes and identity papers.
The German guards held a roll call and discovered that 76 prisoners were missing from their supposedly escape-proof camp. The names of Sewell and Brinsden did not appear on the list of escapees. The Germans mobilized a massive manhunt, erecting roadblocks, increasing border patrols and searching hotels and farms. Within two weeks, the Germans had recaptured 73 of the escapees. Only three men successfully fled to safety; two Norwegians stowed away on a freighter to Sweden and a Dutchman made it to Gibraltar by rail and on foot.
There was mutual respect between British and German airmen, which stretched back to the first conflict in 1914. Both the RAF and the Luftwaffe recognised the skill and courage of the other and a kind of sportsmanship existed, even in what was ultimately a fight to the death. In this spirit it was expected that prisoners of war should attempt to escape and guards should try to prevent them doing so. A Stalag Luft, as the name suggests, was under the control of the Luftwaffe and the two sides played the game accordingly.
But this was no longer a game to the Nazis in Berlin. They felt humiliated by the failure of their prison and retribution was swift and merciless. Control of the camp was given to the SS and the Gestapo. A furious Adolf Hitler personally ordered the execution of 50 of the escapees as a warning to other prisoners. In a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war Gestapo agents drove the recaptured airmen, including Bushell and Bull, to remote locations and murdered them.
After the war some of those responsible would answer for their crimes at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
To be continued