The Last Escaper - Hardcover

Tunstall, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468310550 ISBN 13: 9781468310559

Publisher: Abrams Press, 2015

Synopsis

The product of a lifetime’s reflection, The Last Escaper is Peter Tunstall’s unforgettable memoir of his days in the British Royal Air Force and as one of the most celebrated British POWs of World War II. Tunstall was an infamous tormentor of his German captors. Dubbed the “cooler king” on account of his long spells in solitary, he once dropped a water “bomb” directly in the lap of a high-ranking German officer. He also devised an ingenious method for smuggling coded messages back to London. But above all he was a highly skilled pilot, loyal friend, and trusted colleague.  Without false pride or bitterness, Tunstall recounts the hijinks of training to be a pilot, terrifying bombing raids, and elaborate escape attempts at once hilarious and deadly serious―all part of a poignant and human war story superbly told by a natural raconteur. The Last Escaper is a captivating final testament by the “last man standing” from the Greatest Generation.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Turnstall joined the RAF in 1937 and flew numerous combat missions before his capture off the Dutch coast. He died in 2014 at the age of 95. This is his first and only book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Peter Tunstall, portrait by John Mansel
(see page 109).

Copyright

Foreword

My great friend Dick Morgan—later to be my best man—and I succeeded in escaping from Spangenberg Castle, only to be recaptured a fortnight later and sent to Colditz after a term of solitary confinement. We were marched from Colditz railway station to the Schloss. My first view of this ancient castle was from the bridge over the river, and there it loomed above us. It was to house us for nearly two years. To my surprise I could hear the sound of cheering and pieces of material were being waved from the windows—which, as we drew nearer, I could see were barred. The noise grew louder and by the time we entered the cobbled courtyard it had grown to pandemonium, sounding like a first-class riot.

The Germans had two tables in the yard, each placed against the wall below the windows, and German officers sat there to take our particulars, photograph us and so on. To my amazement, water bombs rained onto the tables, and then a blazing palliasse was thrown down out of an upper window. Grinning faces looked down, roaring insults at our captors. Eventually a riot squad doubled in, wearing coal-scuttle helmets and carrying weapons. The Germans pointed their rifles up at the prisoners above and the proceedings were then completed in comparative quiet. Until that time we had only seen the well-behaved officer prisoners at Westertimke, a naval officers’ camp near Bremen, and at Spangenberg. Clearly, morale at Colditz was terrific and the prisoners were men to be reckoned with and respected accordingly by their captors.

Eventually the German guards left and the inmates of Oflag IVC poured down into the courtyard. “I’m Jack Keats,” said a smiling officer with glasses. “Come and join our mess in the Belgian Quarters.” Dick and I were taken up a spiral staircase with open doors off it through which we could see ablutions and lavatories, to a top floor and along it to an end room. This contained a number of double-tier bunks, plus some wooden tables and benches, and chairs made from Red Cross crates.

“How do you do? I am Peter Tunstall.” A well-built RAF officer with a moustache gave me a warm handshake. I learned that Peter Tunstall had just masterminded the near-riot that had only quietened down since the arrival of the armed German guards. Also that he was a fine shot with a water bomb and the result of his barrage on the tables on which the Germans had laid out the documents was chaotic and very effective.

Peter Tunstall obviously hated the Nazi system and he made this quite clear. When I got to know him better, he told me that before taking part in one of his first bombing raids, an official from the Air Ministry, who was lecturing him and his crew on how to behave if captured, told him that his first duty was to escape and his second was to be as big a bloody nuisance as possible. He was doing his best to achieve both and had already clocked up a record score of days in solitary confinement. Peter also told me that his Air Gunner, Sgt Joyce, an Irishman, was a cousin of William Joyce—Lord Haw-Haw—who was later executed for treason and whose body Sgt Joyce managed to get buried in Ireland after the war.

Peter Tunstall’s book is an easy and interesting read, which certainly describes what it felt like to plan and actually carry out an escape; to be tired, hungry and thirsty in an enemy country, trying to avoid contact with the local population.

After the war Peter served in the Royal Air Force until 1958, and later settled in South Africa. A brave, charismatic and resourceful officer whose name will always be associated with Oflag IVC in Colditz Castle. This is his story.

Major-General Corran Purdon, C.B.E., M.C., C.P.M.

Introduction

“Another escaping book?” you’re asking. Haven’t we done all that already? Surely by this time we know everything we need to know about British escapers in the Second World War. Indeed, hasn’t it become a bit of a cliché? With the theme to The Great Escape being played by fans at every England international football match; with the cardboard cut-out figures of the dashing POW and the dim-witted Hun having become, for the British, the nearest things to symbols of their respective nations; with the name Colditz instantly recognisable—aren’t we in danger of stereotyping the Second World War, or even caricaturing it, as little more than a jolly good lark?

Well, yes—and that’s the point.

I too have read a great many of these escape stories. Some are classics of war literature and their accounts of life behind the wire ring very true to me. Others, to put it kindly, tell us more about the fantasy lives of their authors. But all of them, or nearly all, were written and published at a time very close to the events they describe. Their authors were still young men, with a young man’s perspective on experiences still fresh and vivid in their minds. They were also producing their accounts at a moment when readers expected a certain kind of narrative about the war: one that played up the notion of the victory having been won because of the Allies’ (especially the British) superiority, rather than, as we now know, because of good fortune and the viciousness and short-sightedness of our enemies. Book-buyers weren’t interested in hearing about hunger, pain, loneliness or fear. They wanted tales of excitement and adventure, of derring-do and ultimate success. And that, by and large, is what they got. It’s hardly surprising that escape books became a distinct genre. Nor is it accidental that the most famous ones—Pat Reid’s The Colditz Story, Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse, Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits—were accounts of the rare break-outs in which the protagonists made it back to Britain, rather than the more typical ones where the would-be escapers were recaptured, or their attempts were foiled after months of difficult and dangerous work, sometimes before they’d even got outside the wire.

This book is different. There are three reasons why I’ve written it. The first is that it is the very last of its kind that will ever appear. To the best of my knowledge, there are fewer than half a dozen of us still alive who were in Colditz during the Second World War. The book you hold in your hands is the final testimony that will ever be given by those who experienced these things for themselves.

The second is that this is not a Boy’s Own Story. The subject matter is too serious for that. It’s often forgotten that for us, the war was not a game. At the age of twenty, a time when the most that young people usually have to worry about is their exams, or what to do at the weekend, my friends and I were thrown into a grim battle for national survival, under circumstances that made it all but certain that we ourselves would not survive.

The figures tell their own story. For every one hundred bomber airmen who flew on operations during the war, fifty-one died in action, nine were killed in flying accidents, twelve became prisoners of war. Others were seriously injured and never flew again. Less than a quarter survived undamaged, physically at least, to see the end of the war. For those like me, who were in it from the very beginning, the odds were far worse. To put it another way, the number of officers from Bomber Command killed during the Second World War was higher than the total number of officers in the British Army killed during the First.

If we didn’t see the war as a lark, still less did we consider our captivity in that light. The experience of becoming a POW was a devastating one, especially for those captured at the early stages of their operational career who felt they hadn’t had a good swipe at the enemy. There were a lot of people in that category: forty percent of all losses occurred during a bomber crew’s first five missions. Rightly or wrongly, many who were captured believed they’d failed in some way. We felt our sense of duty very strongly in those days, and one of the things that drove hard-core escapers forward was an overwhelming sense of urgency to get back in the fight. For just the chance to do so, we paid a high price. Escaping was a dangerous business. We were constantly warned that we could be shot while trying to get out of Germany, and some were. For my seven escape attempts, I was court-martialled by the Germans five times; spent a grand total of 415 days in solitary confinement (an all-comers’ record among British POWs); and was placed by my captors on the exclusive list of Deutschfeindlich (irredeemably anti-German) prisoners. Rumour had it that if Germany lost the war, the people whose names appeared on that list would not be permitted to survive. When fifty recaptured British prisoners were murdered after the Great Escape of spring 1944, that rumour seemed a great deal more credible.

But the third, and most important, reason for this book is that it’s the product of a lifetime of reflection. Had I written it fifty or sixty years ago, it would, perhaps, have had the immediacy and fine detail of recent memory and experience. But it could not have included the sense of perspective or quality of judgment that only comes with age and distance from the events of one’s own life. What you’re reading, then, is not just a reminiscence of vanished youth. For whatever reason, it appears that I am, quite literally, the last man standing from an entire generation who lived and experienced these things. In the pages that follow, you will find his final report, containing the information about his times that he hopes will be of most value to the generations that follow.

Chapter One

Mission impossible

I’m not psychic, so I can’t say that I knew on that summer evening, as the aircraft lifted above the boundary fence and began a climbing turn toward Germany, that none of us would be coming back. But I wouldn’t have bet against it.

August 1940 was not a good time to be a bomber pilot. France had fallen. It looked very much as though Great Britain was next. Most of the British Army had been pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk, but they had had to leave nearly all their weapons and equipment behind. The losses would take years to replace and we simply didn’t have that long. The Germans were massing on the Channel coast to follow up their conquest of France with a quick invasion of Britain. If they got across, it was hard to see what could stop them. Our troops had little more than small arms with which to defend themselves, and not much more than haystacks to shelter behind. Every morning and afternoon immense swarms of German bombers roamed across the southeast of England, seeking out airfields, factories and ports, clearing a way for the ground forces that were to follow. RAF fighters were desperately fending them off, but God alone knew for how long that could go on.

In all this darkness there was only one faint gleam of hope. The British bomber force still remained, the only weapon that could directly affect Germany’s war-making capacity. We knew that Germany had few natural resources of her own. In particular she was highly dependent on imported oil. She must already have used up most of her existing stocks in the campaign against France and the Low Countries. If bombing could destroy Germany’s remaining oil plants, her entire intricate war machine might grind to a halt. That, of course, couldn’t win the war for us. No doubt she would respond by building new refineries in places we couldn’t easily hit. But it would buy us precious time, at least until the autumn gales set in and made a sea-borne invasion an impossibility until the following spring.

Such, at any rate, was the theory. In reality my comrades and I were being handed a Mission Impossible. We had begun the war believing that we would be able to fly into Germany in daylight, and that formations of bombers would be able to defend themselves against fighter attacks. Our first few raids disabused us of that notion. Loss rates approached fifty percent, with the survivors being so badly mauled that they had little or no chance of hitting their targets. So we turned to night attacks. The darkness gave us some prospect of living long enough to be able to reach our objectives. But it also increased the difficulty of the task exponentially. For one thing, none of us knew very much about flying after dark. When I began my operational career, I had precisely two hours and ten minutes’ worth of experience as a pilot in command of a bomber at night.

Nor was that all. A bomber aircraft faces three challenges: navigation, target identification, and bomb aiming. With the miserably inadequate technology available at the time, all three largely defeated us. Unable to see the ground in the dark and lacking any radio-navigational aids, we found our way by what was officially known as dead reckoning (more honestly described as “by guess and by God”), that is, flying a compass course for a specified time and hoping that we would somehow wind up in the same province as our intended destination. The best of us navigated in much the same manner as Columbus had done when sailing to America in 1492—by using a mariner’s sextant to sight the moon or stars and measuring their altitude above the horizon. A skilled navigator using these methods could tell you, to within a radius of around twenty miles, where you had been fifteen minutes ago. That assumes, of course, that high clouds didn’t make it impossible to see the sky clearly. But this wouldn’t have been of any help to my crew. None of us had had any training in astral navigation.

Even if one did find the target area, identifying a black building against a black landscape was usually impossible. Often, the only time we knew we were in the vicinity of something valuable to the enemy was when his anti-aircraft guns started shooting at us. Our bomb-sighting equipment was also primitive, producing errors of hundreds of yards even in skilled hands. And the bombs themselves were too small, carried too weak a charge of explosive, and in a shockingly high proportion of cases failed to go off.

Lastly, there were innumerable problems with our new aircraft, the Handley Page Hampden. This was a twin-engine bomber with a crew of four. It was about the same size as one of the smaller commuter turboprops used today for short hops between regional airports and the big hubs. But in 1940 it represented the last word in British bomber technology. Although it was quite a robust aircraft and pleasant to fly, many of the technical issues had not been worked out when we started using it in operations against Germany. The mechanics, no less than the aircrews, were learning on the job, and breakdowns were frequent. Hardly a single flight took place without some critical component—engines, compasses, radios—giving up the ghost. But in a world war, it’s not possible to spend months or years in testing and development, especially when the war is going as badly as ours was. So we were simply thrown in at the deep end and left to figure out a way to cope with all these challenges by ourselves. Those who didn’t manage, never came back. It was as simple and as brutal as that.

These sombre reflections were much in my mind when, on the afternoon of 26 August, ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1468310550
• ISBN 13: 9781468310559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368