The biggest World War II Prisoner of War (POW) escape in Britain occurred on the 10 March 1945 when 70 German POWs tunneled their way to freedom. The 1963 movie “The Great Escape” made famous the British POW escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. But a year later, in 1945 was the largest break out of German prisoners in the UK at POW Camp 198 in Bridgend, Wales. It was called “The German Great Escape” yet today it is all but lost in history. How did the Germans manage their daring escape?
Bridgend was an important Welsh site for the manufacture of bombs during WWII. Nearly 40,000 people worked at the Waterton & Brackla Munitions Factory, then the largest munitions plant and largest employer in the UK. Also in Bridgend was the Island Farm Camp, located on the outskirts of town.
Island Farm was requisitioned by the War Office at the start of the war. In 1938, it served as accommodations for women munitions workers. In 1943, the camp became barracks for US troops training for D Day. General Dwight Eisenhower visited the camp to rally the troops before heading to the English coast. After the Normandy Invasion, as the Allies pushed into Nazi-occupied Europe, thousands of German POW soldiers were being captured. Island Farm Camp was converted to a POW camp and re-designated Camp 198.
It originally held German and Italian troops, but then switched to house German Nazi officers in November 1944. At its peak, Camp 198 housed more than 1,600 POWs in its 15 barracks/huts. As is the case of most POWs, their minds immediately focused on escape. The German officers hatched a daring plan to break out from the camp.
Concerns of escapes were raised by worried local residents, even before any attempts had been made. The thought of enemy troops running about in the Welsh countryside and within a short distance of a major ordnance factory, left many folks sleepless at night.
The locals’ fears were not unfounded as the prisoners had indeed begun plotting their try at freedom. Much like the Allied troops behind the famous ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III a year earlier, the German officers chose to dig a tunnel leading from one hut to the other side of the barbed wire-topped perimeter fence.
Those with prior mining experience were quickly set to work on a design.
From the start, its construction was a challenge. The Welsh landscape was a heavy clay soil. Digging implements were slowly fashioned from metal bars and wooden benches, with the tunnel roof propped up with bed legs. They were the same length so guards would not notice the difference in height between the bunks. The sound of digging was drowned out by the camp’s very own prisoner choir, which rehearsed conveniently in the hut nearby.
They removed the excavated clay soil on a sledge and rolled it into small balls. To hide the evidence, the men first stowed handfuls of dirt in their kit bags, before depositing it in one of the camp’s garden plots. Later, they dropped the dirt behind a false wall, ingeniously built at the back of the hut.
The resulting 60 foot tunnel was surprisingly advanced. To confirm that the tunnel had made it outside of the fence, a POW pushed an iron rod from inside the tunnel up through the tunnel roof to the outside, and then blew cigarette smoke through the hole. POWs above ground, inside the hut would then look for the traces of cigarette smoke.
Tin condensed milk cans were slotted together to form a ventilation tube, which was fed with fresh air from a hand-operated bellows in the hut. The tunnel was illuminated with bulbs wired into the camp’s electricity supply! It not only lit the passageway, but also functioned as a warning light system that could be flashed three times if guards were approaching.
In January 1945, the camp’s guards uncovered the entrance to an unfinished tunnel inside Hut 16.
The camp’s commandant Lt. Colonel Edwin Darling, warned his guards that escape tunnels often came in pairs, with one an easily discoverable decoy. The guards searched, but failed to find any others. In fact, the ‘real’ tunnel was cleverly concealed beneath a bunk bed inside Hut 9. The German POWs were able to continue their digging.
By March 1945, it was ready for their daring escape attempt during the next New Moon. Though only a small proportion of the POW officers would escape, every one of them was involved in the building or the distraction. The tunnel came out in an adjacent farm field which had been recently ploughed by a local farmer.
On the day of the escape, the POWs sprinkled curry powder near the perimeter fence to throw the camp guard dogs off the scent. The escapees were also aided by the camp’s poor design. Island Farm lacked both sentry towers and adequate spot-lighting around its long perimeter fence. Once prisoners had made it through the tunnel, they would be nearly invisible under cover of a moonless night. The plan involved forged papers, with the men posing as Norwegian allies to explain their accents and poor English.
Around 10 pm on Saturday, March 10th, some of their fellow captives were staging a loud and raucous theater performance in a hut next door as a distraction. The first of the escapees made their way down through the floor of Hut 9, crawled through tunnel on their hand and knees, and slipped up into the moonless night. It was a nerve wracking and agonizingly slow process.
During the early hours of Sunday, March 11th, as the last group of escapees exited the tunnel, they were finally spotted by the camp guards. Shots were fired, alarms sirens sounded, and the guards swarmed the perimeter. Overall, 70 POWs had made it through their ingenious tunnel. However, when the alarm was raised, 14 were quickly recaptured within yards of the camp fence, hiding in the bushes.
A countryside search was not immediately ordered however.
The camp commander, Colonel Darling, thought they had captured all the escapees, even after a roll call. The remaining prisoners just cleverly called out the names of the prisoners who had escaped, temporarily fooling the guards. A few hours later, a shocking telephone call came in from the Bridgend police station saying they had captured two German POWs! Only then did the commander realize that dozens of prisoners were unaccounted for.
The similarity between the British Great Escape in 1944 and the German Great Escape in 1945 is amazing. They both built tunnels lit by electricity with rudimentary ventilation. Both escapes had to remove and hide the soil from the tunnel using a similar solution. Both escapes had forged documents, maps of the area, rudimentary compasses, and paid rigorous attention to secrecy around their escape plans. Both escapes were interrupted before completion.
The German escapees formed small groups of 3 to 4 men. Each had different plans on how they would scatter and make their way back to German territory. Some tried to get away to Ireland, fled to the coast, and steal a boat. Others planned on stealing a plane and flying to Germany across the channel.
Four of the men had eyed a local doctor’s car as an escape vehicle. But to their dismay, the engine would not start. To make matters worse, they had attracted the attention of several camp guards who were wandering through Bridgend.
Fortunately for the escapees, the guards failed to realize the men were Germans. They even gave them a ‘push start’ to get the car going. The fugitives then drove off, eventually boarding a train when the car ran out of gas. They made it to Castle Bromwich at Solihull on the outskirts near Birmingham, 110 miles from Bridgend.
“This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for today, Sunday 11 March 1945. Seventy Germans escaped from a prisoner of war camp at Bridgend, Glamorgan, last night.”
These words first alerted the public to the largest escape by German POWs in Britain during the war. By the time the bulletin went out, only 23 had been recaptured. It was not comforting news for those Welsh families living nearby.
Thus began one of the largest manhunts in UK history, with alerts put out across mainland Britain. Soldiers, policemen, the Home Guard, and hundreds of civilians volunteers took part in the search. Even some Girl Guides reported seeing some escapees in Porthcawl.
The POWs were first spotted in the Aberpergwm colliery hiding amongst the trucks. On being seen, they split up. Two made their way to Aberpergym house where they were spotted hiding in the rhododendron bushes by the caretaker who called the police. The local constables were also on the lookout for a bunch of Germans they believed heading to the Neath Valley after crossing the mountain from Cymmer.
On Tuesday the 14th, late in the evening, four escaped POW’s were seen creeping along the hedge-rows by the driver of the Melincourt works bus. The driver also happened to be a Glamorgan Special Constable. He quickly informed the three male passengers on the bus to get off and capture one man apiece! The POWs were caught, placed on the bus and driven to Glynneath police station. By now, the three POWs had been at large for three days and nights, wandering through the unfriendly countryside.
The escapees were tired, shabby, hungry, and seemed resigned when captured.
At the station, they were met by police Inspector Andrew Jones. The inspector’s wife made them cups of hot tea and offered them some freshly baked Dundee cake. One of the SS prisoners refused the cake and bullied the other two into not accepting. He was placed in the cells until the military arrived. Once this man was removed, the other two prisoners talked freely.
One explained he was familiar with this part of Wales. Prior to the war, he had cycled through the area in races. He knew a lot about the hills and back roads of the parish. The POWs were very thirsty and drank glass after glass of water. They explained they had been told all the streams in Britain had been poisoned to dissuade escape.
The fourth man of the group had jumped on a goods train on it’s way to Neath. The constable on duty at Aberdulais shone his lantern on the train and saw the man clinging precariously to the side. He rung ahead to Neath station, who informed the police, who captured the POW as the train stopped.
Four more POWs were captured on the 5th day of the escape. Two Germans eluded the authorities for nearly a week. After fleeing the camp, the men had stowed away in the back of truck. They intended to escape on a boat from Southampton, before eventually being apprehended. One group was caught in Swansea in search of a ship out of Wales, while another was found in Southampton after stowing away on a freight train.
The majority were rounded up over the following week, although some did make it an impressive distance. By Saturday 17 March, all 70 escapees had been recovered. Unarmed, they offered little resistance once caught. It has been claimed that a small number of the fugitives were never actually found. A trio of escapees were apparently later sighted in the Canterbury or Kent area. True or not, it may have been buried by the British military for propaganda reasons.
The War Office emptied Island Farm Camp of all 1,600 officers, sending them to other POW camps.
Following the Great Escape, it took in a more elite class of German prisoner. About 200 Nazis Generals were held there, with the camp changing names to Special German POW Base Camp 11. After the war, the site was later used to imprison some of the most high-profile Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg. The camp held the likes of Field-Marshals Walther Brauchitsch, Erich von Manstein, and Gerd von Rundstedt along with many other high ranking commanders.
The War Office abandoned the camp in 1948 and left it to the harsh Wales elements, and ultimately to vandalism. The huts became home to a colony of bats rather than POW. The army leveled the camp, but a group of locals came together to save a famous piece of Island Farm. All that’s left of the camp now is Hut 9, from where the POWs dug themselves out, and the tunnel itself.
Today, 80 years on from the breakout, visitors can get a rare chance to view what’s left of Island Farm Camp 198 in Bridgend. The tunnel was opened for the first time in 58 years in 2003. German graffiti is still visible on the walls of Hut 9. Unfortunately, during a second opening in 2013, part of the tunnel collapsed, and it’s been sealed off ever since. Gradual interest in its historical significance during WWII has grown over the years. The daring German Great Escape should be remembered as much as the British one, and not lost in history.