The Welsh Great Escape

Disgrifiad

Many of you would have seen the film or read the book about “The Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III in March 1944 during World War 2 by British prisoners of war in Germany. Well you may be surprised to hear that a similar event took place in Bridgend exactly a year later in March 1945 which was the largest break out of German prisoners in the UK. You may also be surprised to know that our little village was also to play a part in that story.
Below I will set out the events leading up to the escape and the impact it had on our village and the local people involved.
Bridgend was an important site for the manufacture of bombs during WW2, with nearly 40,000 people working at the Waterton and Brackla Munitions factory, the largest employer in the UK at the time. Also in Bridgend was The Island Farm Camp, were the escape took place, was located on the outskirts of Bridgend namely the picturesque hamlet of Merthyr Mawr.
The camp was originally built to house many of the female workers who worked at the munition site, but the women preferred to travel home each evening to their family. Therefore the Camp remained empty until 1943 when it was used house American troops prior to the D Day landings. During this time Dwight Eisenhower visited the camp to rally the troops before disembarkation to the battlefields of Normandy on D Day.
Once the battle for Europe was being won by the Allies there was a great need for a POWs camp to house the captured soldiers and the Island Farm Camp was chosen to hold these prisoners, and was designated by the War Office as Camp 198. It originally held German and Italian troops but was then turned over to house German Officer class prisoners in November 1944.It is during this time in March of 1945, when it was housing the German Officer’s, that the story unfolds.
As is the want of most POW’s, no matter what their nationality, that their minds turn to escape, and to this end a plan was hatched to break out from the camp and try to get back to their homeland.
The story revolves around Hut 9 in the Island Farm camp, and the similarity between the British escape in 1944 and the escape of German POW’s in 1945 is very surprising. They both build tunnels, the tunnels were lit by electricity and had a rudimentary ventilation system. Both escapes had difficulty in removing and hiding the soil from the tunnel and both found a similar solution for disposing of the soil. Both escapes turned their hand to forging documents, making of maps of the area, making rudimentary compasses, and both the British and the Germans paid rigorous attention to secrecy around their escape planning.
So on the day/evening of 10-11 March 1945, 67 POW’s escaped through the tunnel they had prepared from Hut 9 at Island Farm camp. The tunnel was 60 foot long and came out in an adjacent field which had been recently ploughed by the farmer. The German escapee’s has formed small groups of 3 or 4 men and each had different plans on how they would make their way back to Germany, some tried to get away to Ireland, some wanted to get to the coast and steal a boat, while other’s planned on stealing a plane and flying to Germany.
As in the story of the “Great Escape” the tunnel was found before all the escapes could get through , so in total 67 German POWs escaped on the night. The hue and cry was not immediately started as the camp commander and guards on duty on the night thought that they had captured all the escapees, and even after a roll call they thought all prisoners were accounted for, the remaining prisoners just called out the names of the prisoners who had escaped, therefore fooling the guards. It was not until a few hours later when telephone calls started to come in from various police stations saying they had captured German POWs did the commander in charge of the camp realise that the escape was of a larger scale and many prisoners were unaccounted for.
There are many stories of how the POW’s were captured with many locals organisation involved in the rounding up operation, including local Army, Camp guards, Police, and unofficially the Home Guard which had been disbanded by then. There was even an instance when some Girl Guides reported seeing the POWs in Porthcawl. (I have included links below if anyone is interested in reading these escape accounts.)
The furthest anyone reached was the airport in Birmingham were 4 POW’s were captured on the 5th day of the escape, and another 2 POW’s making it to Southhampton where the hoped to steal a boat .
This leads us to what happened to some of the prisoners who made it to the Neath Valley.
Herbert Williams wrote in his book, “Comeout, Wherever You Are”, [1] The hard pressed local police, who were pretty thin on the ground, were on the lookout for a hardy bunch of Germans who they believed were heading in that direction after crossing the mountain from Cymmer.
He continues by explaining that these patrols consisted of 6 constables, special constables and war reservists and were coordinate by the Chief Inspector of Police in Glynneath, a Mr. Andrew Jones. More on the police involvement later in the story.
There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, some say there were 5 escapes, others only 4, the newspaper accounts and official police records of the day only account for 4 escapees, so I believe 4 escapees is the more reliable figure.
One story has the POWs first being spotted in the Aberpergwm colliery yard lurking amongst the trucks, on being spotted they split up with 2 of them making their way to Aberpergym house where they were seen in the Rhodedendrum bushes by the caretaker.
The Newspaper reports of the escape say, on the Tuesday of the14th March late in the evening, four escaped POW’s were seen “creeping along the hedge-rows”, by the driver of the works bus from Melincourt which was coming from Cwmgwrach, the driver was a Mr Gwyn E. Lewis of Bryn Terrace, Melincourt who was also a Glamorgan Special Constable.The bus driver quickly informed the three passengers on the bus, a Mr. Glyn Teague from Pentre street, Mr. Cyril Curtis of Mill Terrace and Mr. David J. Davies of Godfrey Avenue. These three men got off the bus and captured one man apiece,
These three POWs were placed on the bus and driven to Glynneath police station. By now the three POWs had been a large for three days and nights wondering through the inhospitable countryside, they were very fatigued, unkept, hungry and docile and seemed relieved that their escape to freedom was over.
At the station they were met by police Inspector Andrew Jones. In his book [1] “Come Out, Wherever You Are”, Herbert Williams recounts the story that Inspector Jones’s wife May, who was busy in the kitchen at the time, made them a cup of tea and, as can only happen in Wales, offered them some Dundee cake which she had recently baked. One of the prisoners (probably a SS soldier) refused and cake and was seen to be haranguing and bullying the other two prisoners. He was therefore placed in the cells until the military arrived. Once this man was removed the other two prisoners talked more freely.
One of the prisoners explained that he was familiar with this part of the country as prior to the war he had cycled through the area having taken part in races between Swansea and Brecon, and he therefore knew a lot about the hills and back roads of the parish. Another interesting fact was that the POWs were very thirsty and drank glass after glass of water, when Inspector Jones asked why, they explained that they had been told all the streams in Britain had been poisoned to stop them drinking it. Eventually the military arrived to interrogate them, the SS prisoner in the cells having a particularly hard time of it, and they where then returned to the Island Farm POW camp in Bridgend.
The fourth man who was part of this group of POWs escaped and jumped on a goods train on it’s way to Neath. Constable P.C Butler on duty at Aberdulais shone his torch on the train and saw the man clinging onto the train, he rung ahead to Neath who then informed the military and police who arrested the POW as the train stopped at the Neath and Brecon junction. A Mr. T Jones from Manselton a shunter for the G.W.R (Great Western Railway) who was present at the time, said when the prisoner was captured the prisoner said “ German prisoner, and asked “Is this Cardiff”. After a period of interrogation he was then returned to the POW camp at Island Farm, Bridgend.
These are the names of the German POWs who escaped and were captures in Cwmgwrach and Neath, this information is taken from the police record of the time, with the names of the escapees added at a later date.
Postscript:Eventually all 67 escaped prisoners were rounded up, and all 1,600 officer prisoners of the camp where then distributed to other campsites across Britain.
As for the camp itself, it was then turned over to a more elite class of German prisoner, about 2,000 of Hitlers Generals were held there and the camp changed names in the summer of 1945 from being Camp 198 to No. 11 (Special) German PW Base Camp.
The camp was to hold the likes of Field-Marshal Walther Brauchitsch, Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein and commander of the German forces in the West Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt along with many other high ranking commanders.
Sources:[1] Herbert Williams book, “Come Out, Wherever You Are” -The Great Escape in Wales,Published by Gomer, ISBN No. 1-84323-199-9[2} Newspaper clipping of the escape, (Newspaper titles not known). Courtesy of Glyn Davies.
Other interesting websites on the escape: http://www.islandfarm.wales https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15740773.2017.1357900
Video of escape tunnel: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6176795.v1
Multi-disciplinary investigations at PoW Camp 198, Bridgend, S. Wales: site of a mass escape in March 1945. Taylor & Francis. Rees-Hughes, L.; Pringle, J. K.; Russill, N.; Wisniewski, K. D.; Doyle, P..
BBC Radio announcement of the escape: http://www.islandfarm.wales/HOMEPAGE/BBC%20News%20Report%20Of%20Escape.mp3
Audio of the story about the escaped POW that were captured in Cwmgwrach.