The March on London: Covert operations in the Battle of the Bulge -December 1944 by Charles Whiting

Author:Charles Whiting [Whiting, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-05T23:00:00+00:00

THREE

Surprisingly enough it was the Italians at Doonfoot in Ayrshire who first broke out. They had been burrowing for weeks through the light soil of the area and on Friday, 15 December, they decided it was time to go. During the hours of darkness between Friday and Saturday, while on the other side of the Channel the German counter-attack began, ninety-seven Italian POWs scrambled out to freedom.

Immediately the escape was discovered on that Saturday morning, a news blackout was clamped on Scotland. After what had happened in Devizes that same day, the authorities were understandably anxious. They did not want to cause public alarm by announcing that nearly a hundred Italian soldiers were roaming Scotland, which was virtually devoid of troops. Indeed the authorities were so careful that they merely asked the police to keep a lookout for ‘an escaped prisoner', not informing them of the scale of the break-out.

Instead of the civil police, the authorities set the military police, who were armed, unlike the local bobbies, to look for the fugitives. All that cold snowy weekend, as more and more alarmist rumours flooded back to Britain from the fighting front on the Continent, the MPs searched Ayrshire, while local people prepared for Christmas totally unaware that ninety-seven desperate hungry men were at large in the county. As the diary writer of the Ayrshire Post would later comment:

There seemed some doubt on the part of the authorities which was the more serious menace, the German counter-attack in the Ardennes or the escaped prisoners from Doonfoot… Perhaps the break-out at Doonfoot was as serious as the break-through at Malmedy and since it was necessary not to let the German HQ know where they had got to, it was equally important not to let the prisoners know where they were.

What the diary writer did not know was that the authorities considered the Doonfoot break-out as just another part of the great counter-attack, for now POW camps throughout the country were seething with revolt, the prisoners truculent, aggressive and burning to escape. Through their illegal radios they were receiving news of the battle in Belgium from Dr Goebbels’ Deutschlandfunk. Although the ‘poison dwarf’ naturally exaggerated German successes — after all, he was the Minister of Propaganda — there was enough truth in his broadcasts to indicate that the Wehrmacht had shattered a whole US corps and had already driven a sixty-mile breach in the American front.

At Penkridge Camp on the main road between Stafford and Wolverhampton, as soon as the POWs’ illegal radio picked up the German newscast stating that the long-awaited break-through had been achieved, discipline almost broke down. Ignoring the threats of the guards, the prisoners assembled in the compound to be addressed by the senior officers. As they saw it, the new offensive signalled a welcome change in Germany’s fortunes. Those who were prepared to escape and cause trouble on the outside made their hasty last-minute preparations, based on the map that the young naval cadet Schweissmann had prepared for them.

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