Great War to Great Escape: The Two Wars of Flight Lieutenant Bernard 'Pop' Green MC

By Laurence Green

Bernard Green managed to survive both the First and Second World War – just. In the first global conflict of the Twentieth Century he endured mud, destruction and death in the trenches of the Western Front; suffering serious injury yet serving with distinction, earning the Military Cross. Twenty-one years later, with another European war imminent, Bernard signed up to fight Germany once more, this time from the air. However in July 1940 his Hampden bomber was blasted from the sky. He survived and was captured, though two of his crew were not so fortunate and lost their lives. For the remainder of the war Bernard languished behind barbed wire, although he did manage to breakout from Stalag Luft III as part of the famous ‘Great Escape’ in March 1944, the oldest man to do so. Bernard was recaptured and, again, was extremely lucky to survive. Fifty of his co-escapers were not so lucky, murdered on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.

Based on family archives and original letters Bernard Green’s grandson Laurence has pieced together his grandfather’s extraordinary story of survival. Great War to Great Escape tells of Bernard’s physical and mental struggles as he endures the appalling attrition of Ypres and the Somme during the Great War. Then there is the physical and psychological torment of years of captivity, for virtually all of the Second World War, with a focus on his involvement in the ‘Great Escape’. Bernard’s ordeal finally ends following a forced march in atrocious conditions as the European conflict draws to a close. Bernard Green’s story is quite exceptional; an extraordinary man confronting extremes of war, and surviving.

The vast majority of photographs, from both the First and Second World War, have never been published.

Provides further insight in to the infamous breakout from Stalag Luft III and is essential reading for anyone interested in the Great Escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fighting High Publishing
• Release date: Jul 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780957116382

Laurence Green

Laurence Green is a ghostwriter, novelist, poet, and biographer. He began writing after retiring from teaching; and enjoys living in the small Devon village he has lived in since the age of five. He is a historian, with a particular interest in the Great War and the American Civil War. Happily married for over fifty years, he enjoys travelling, gardening and dry stone walling; the poetry of Charles Causley and the music of George Butterworth. It took him seventy years before he saw his first ghost. He is a churchwarden and Street Pastor.

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Published in 2011 by Fighting High Ltd,

23 Hitchin Road, Stotfold, Hitchin, Herts, SG5 4HP

www.fightinghigh.com

Copyright © Fighting High Ltd, 2011

Copyright text © Laurence Green 2011

The rights of Laurence Green to be identified as the

author of this book is asserted in accordance with the

Copyright, Patents and Designs Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior

written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data.

A CIP record for this title is available from the

British Library.

ISBN 13: 978-0956269638

EPUB ISBN: 9780957116382

Designed and typeset in Monotype Baskerville 11/14pt

by Michael Lindley www.truthstudio.co.uk

Printed and bound by Toppan Printing Co. (UK) Ltd.

Front cover design by Michael Lindley incorporating

illustration by Steve Teasdale.

To Adrian Bernard Green (1919–2010)

and

740864 Sergeant E. L. Farrands RAF POW No. 136

Contents

Preface

Chronology

1. The Wild Rover No More

2. ‘Prepare for Crash-landing’

3. In the Bag

4. In the Trenches

5. Escape Plans

6. The Great Escape

7. The Black March

8. ‘There’s No Discharge in the War!’

Appendix 1 – Now It Can Be Told

Appendix 2 – Coincidences

Appendix 3 – Intelligence Summary: 1st Buckinghamshire (Excerpt)

Appendix 4 – Operations Record Book: No. 44 Squadron (Excerpt)

Appendix 5 – The Fifty Victims and the Escapees

Appendix 6 – ‘My Dear Adrian…’

Appendix 7 – Map

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Flight Lieutenant Bernard ‘Pop’ Green was my grandfather. He died when I was at university and unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to go to his funeral.

I didn’t know him very well; it would be true to say that nobody did, even the close members of his family. He was a reticent man who seldom pushed himself forward, except in support of his country in the event of war. I remember him as a background presence, hovering in a rather sinister homburg hat to press a florin into my childish hand. He was not a cold man but he wasn’t a great communicator. I’m sure that he would be most surprised that a book had been written about him.

I put his reticence down to his terrible experiences during the First World War. He must have experienced a lifetime of post-traumatic stress, making nothing of it but becoming, as a result, more and more quiet and withdrawn from everyone around him.

He was a highly intelligent and sensitive man who would have made a very successful career in the Army had he taken the opportunity to stay in after the First World War.

When I was 9 years old my parents took me up to his house in Chichester for a family visit. My father later told me that my grandfather was about to talk, for the first time, about his experiences at Stalag Luft III when I wandered into the room to ask some trivial question. As a result my grandfather’s train of thought was broken and the subject was never raised again.

Eventually he wrote five remarkable paragraphs about his recapture after ‘The Great Escape’. He called it ‘Now It Can Be Told’ (this is reproduced below as Appendix 1). His whole rather modest attitude to what he did comes out clearly in these five paragraphs, along with his keen sense of the ridiculous. It is a great pity that he did not write more.

I feel that now I can give a voice to a man who was voluntarily mute on the subject of what he did in both world wars. His story is a remarkable one, because he came close to death so many times on so many different occasions, dying at last peacefully at the age of 83 in Chichester.

So, in a way, I am repaying a debt that goes back to my boyhood, and I thank Steve Darlow of Fighting High Publishing for seeking me out and enabling this book to be published.

I would also like to thank Peter Watson for his editorial suggestions, advice and encouragement. Many thanks are due to Peter Love for advice on the procedures and language of wartime aircrews. Lyle Oswald gave me some valuable observations on the Handley Page Hampden. Neil Mullard gave me some very useful advice on the rough version of the manuscript and lent me a monitor when mine suffered a fatal haemorrhage. Jason Warr sent me some copies of unpublished photographs of my grandfather in various POW camps in Germany and Poland and answered all my questions. Ian Sayer and Tim Carroll sent me a lot of useful information and photos from Stalag Luft III.

Above all I wish to thank my late father, Adrian Green, for giving me, several years ago, my grandfather’s entire correspondence from the various POW camps in Germany and Poland in which he was an involuntary guest of the Third Reich. My father was also able to read through most of the rough version of the book and offered many corrections and suggestions.

Great thanks also to my Aunt Kitty, my father’s younger sister and my favourite aunt. She cast her rightfully critical eye over the manuscript and corrected many solecisms. Both my father and my aunt were invaluable sources of information on my grandfather’s rather enigmatic life.

This account could never have been written without the great help of Jennifer Green, my grandfather’s daughter from his second marriage. Jennifer took great trouble to put many of the unpublished photographs of my grandfather, taken in several camps over a four-year period, on a disk, which she sent to me. She also answered several important questions and sent me a colour photograph of his medals.

Tom Tulloch-Marshall did valuable research on my behalf and painstakingly pieced together my grandfather’s hair-raising service in the Ox. and Bucks Light Infantry and the Machine Gun Corps (the ‘Suicide Club’) from 1914 to 1918. I thank him for hard work under trying circumstances.

Last, but never least, my wife, Kathi, has been a great help and comfort, with many useful observations and suggestions and constant encouragement and support.

Laurence Green

October 2010

Chronology

1. The Wild Rover No More

The winter of 1943 was long and severe all over Europe. It was as if even the weather had closed down under the oppressive reign of the Nazis. Snow blanketed thousands of square miles of occupied territory. One of the coldest places in central Europe was German Silesia,¹ the flat, sandy area of pine forests south-east of Berlin, situated not far from the Polish border.

The town of Sagan² was an insignificant dot on the railway from Berlin to Breslau. Just outside the town limits, surrounded by repetitious pines, lay the sprawl of Stalag Luft III, soon to be enlarged yet again to accommodate the hundreds of American prisoners who were daily captured after being shot down in heavy daylight raids over Germany’s industrial cities.

Lines of huts marched to the barbed-wire horizon. They were drab, hastily built and badly insulated. Baking hot in summer and draughty in winter, they were home to hundreds of Allied airmen officers who had been monotonously informed by their captors that ‘escape is impossible’ and ‘for you the war is over’.

Some of the grim, dirty men dressed in an assortment of worn and shabby uniforms concurred with these clichés, making the most of their rations and preferring not to upset their guards. Others, indistinguishable in appearance from their fellows, lived for the day they would outwit their captors and shake the sandy dust of the compound from their worn shoes.

Such a man was Bernard Green. He had grown a thick beard and constantly wore a beret to keep his bald head out of the icy blast of the east wind. He wore a whipcord jacket with a lieutenant’s pips on the lower sleeve, a garment that had been common enough in the first two years of the First World War. It had been sent out to him by his wife in England and delivered by the Red Cross. Regimental insignia and collar dogs had been carefully removed and the Lieutenant Green of 1915 was transformed into Flight Lieutenant Green of 1943.

The jacket, although filthy and worn, was proving a lifesaver, standing in for the Polish greatcoat that Green had been promised a long time ago. Wrapped in a knitted muffler, Green would walk many times round the perimeter fence each day. He usually wore a pair of dark glasses to protect his light blue-eyes against the constant glare of the snow and, dressed in his motley items of outdoor uniform, he had the slightly bohemian air of an artist.

Walking was a way of being alone, of getting away from the fug of crowded huts. It had become an obsession as well as a form of meditation. Green was not an unfriendly man but he was a man who enjoyed his own company. He could not always think clearly in the noisy, smelly rooms surrounded by other men who often secretly shared the same obsession as he did.

Green rounded the corner of the camp, his shoes causing the compacted snow to creak. He was careful not to let his mind wander, as he had to ensure that he did not touch the low wire strung several yards in front of the barbed-wire fence. Any man touching or crossing this wire strand would become a target for the guards, muffled in their heavy greatcoats in the towers that loomed at intervals above the main fence. Green had already seen several men try to rush the wire only to be shot down with no warning. One officer had hung dead on the wire for several hours before being taken away under the cover of darkness.

To die in this way would be too easy. Green’s obsession with escape involved many of his brother officers. He thought about the two tunnels being dug in various directions under the snow and the hard-packed sandy soil of the compound. When several hundred of the best technical brains of many occupied countries were forced together in idleness in an unpleasant place, the inevitable result was a number of highly sophisticated schemes of escape. A determination to get home, to win the war and to confuse the Germans led to many attempts to break out of the camp. The dogged determination of many of the Allied officer prisoners kept the guards and camp staff constantly busy. In the war of nerves, tempers occasionally snapped, and men were regularly sent off to the cold and solitary misery of the cooler.³

Green trudged round the perimeter of the camp. Through the stands and coils of barbed wire he could just make out the shrouded shapes of the countless pine trees that stretched away in all directions from the compound. Thick snow gave the trees a hunched appearance and the illusion that even they were braced against the all-pervading cold. Today they would offer no shelter or comfort to a man outside the wire. Better to bide one’s time and continue to plan and prepare for the escape. Men were not like pine trees; they did not entirely stand alone, isolated from each other.

The biting cold kept Green walking. He had three more circuits to do before coming in from the cold. He knew that if you sat around all day you became soft and your will to endure would inevitably drain away. Men who habitually sat too close to the stove succumbed to boredom and began a long decline to death, as their will was gradually sapped. At 55 years old Green had endured more than most; he was determined not to give up at this point nor at any other stage of the war.

He thought of what he would do when he returned to the room he shared with Major John Dodge.⁴ He would knock the snow from his boots at the door, come quietly in, sit on his bunk and light a Woodbine. Smoking was not to be combined with exercise. It was a treat, a reward for effort and discipline. He would take out his Russian textbook and spend an hour or so memorising verb endings.

Russian was a difficult language, but it was not so bad when you had mastered the Cyrillic alphabet. Green had become quite good at reading Russian and could converse in a limited way with a few of the Polish officers who spoke Russian. He knew that it would be only a matter of time before the Red Army streamed across Poland to liberate the camp. It could be a long time, however, and a lot of things could happen in the meantime. Rumours had reached the camp about other camps,