Best of British

Most books are confined to the straitjacket of their own generation, shackled and bonded to those who first bought them, read them, loved them and spread the word. It is a rare book that transcends its own time: a four-leaf clover, a repentant politician, a virgin queen. But I like to think that P. R. Reid’s three books on the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp, devoured by those of us who rejoice in being baby-boomers, will still be read by future generations.

Patrick Robert Reid, MBE, MC was a child of empire, born in Ranchi in 1910 to an Irishman serving in the Indian Civil Service and his wife, Alice Daniell. As was the custom, he was sent home from the Subcontinent to be lettered. Educated variously in Ireland and England, he graduated from King’s College, London, and then trained as a civil engineer. He joined the Territorials in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany. Mobilized in the 2nd Infantry Division RASC just before war broke out, he was promoted captain and posted to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. On 27 May 1940, during the Battle of France, he was captured near Cassel. This was just as the first bedraggled infantrymen of the BEF were being evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. Thenceforward, Reid’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war are set out in The Colditz Story (1952). He was dispatched to an officers’ camp or Oflag in Laufen, Bavaria, from which, on 5 September 1940, he escaped with a handful of companions, only to be recaptured a few days later. He was then sent to Colditz, a small town in Saxony, where Oflag 1V-C had been established in a castle perched on a rocky outcrop. The German High Command thought it an admirable high-security prison for recidivist escapers, for it lay in the heart of the Reich, more than 400 miles from friendly territory. Built as a Schloss, it was intended to keep people out. With steep drops on three sides and a moat on the fourth, the complex had few entrances or exits, and its walls were as solid as those of Troy. It was equally good at keeping people in. During the Great War, when it had also been a POW camp, the castle had proved proof against escape. After several unsuccessful attempts of his own at escape, Reid became Escape Officer, overseeing all British attempts at shrugging off the cold embrace of the castle. Eventually, with three other officers, he finally got away on 15 October 1942 and reached neutral Switzerland four days later. ‘Under the first lamppost in the village street, Hank and I shook hands in silence . . .’ With this moving scene the book closes. Such was the success of The Colditz Story that Reid immediately set to work on a sequel. This tells the remainder of the story of Oflag 1V-C until its liberation by American troops on 15 April 1945. It was published in 1953 with the ringing biblical title of The Latter Days. In the Old Testament, it was in these times that swords would be beaten into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and that nation would eschew lifting up sword unto nation. In 1984 came Colditz: The Full Story. This revisitation was for completists, a more detailed and notably more serious account of the camp, but it was the first two books that captivated the imaginations of teenagers such as myself, snuggled under the bedclothes and reading by torchlight after lights out. Allied soldiers, sailors and aviators captured in 1940 faced what a John Buchan hero might call a giddy prospect. The Wehrmacht Blitzkrieg had proved devastatingly effective. The Nazis now ruled most of Europe and faced little effective resistance other than from Churchill’s embattled Britain. The Allied cause seemed virtually lost. While the war persisted, there was no hope of repatriation and a return to life, love and home fires. Here is Reid on first seeing Colditz:

It was the real fairy-castle of childhood’s story-books. What ogres there might live within! I thought of the dungeons and of all the stories I had ever heard of prisoners in chains, pining away their lives, of rats and tortures, and of unspeakable cruelties and abominations.

His account of what followed almost entirely confounded that first impression. Reid was buoyed by the camaraderie of the five other escapees from Laufen, by other British and Commonwealth officers who had also made bids for freedom from other camps, by the Poles who welcomed him to Colditz on that first day, and soon by Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutch, Yugoslavs and, eventually, Americans. Most of these men were determined to escape, were united in the Allied cause, and were admirably disrespectful of their master-race captors. The Germans were far from inhuman, and they were constrained by the protocols of the Geneva Convention. To this the Wehrmacht conformed with regard to all the Allied nationalities except the Soviets. The successive Colditz Kommandants permitted amateur dramatics, Red Cross food parcels, academic courses, board games and cards, the purchase and practice of musical instruments, and a version of the Eton Wall Game called Stoolball which gained something in translation to Colditz. The inmates allowed themselves a brewery, a distillery and any amount of raillery against the garrison. Though Reid is candid about the obvious privations, and about the depression he and plenty of other prisoners suffered, life was bearable. It was made the more so by the prospect and business of escape. Wrote Reid:

I can think of no sport which is the peer of escape, where freedom, life and loved ones are the prize of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.

Escape was Reid’s principal preoccupation both as an inmate and as Escape Officer. It was the same for those whose stories he recounted in The Latter Days after his own escape. To get out of the camp was to become a ‘gone away’. To reach neutral territory or Allied lines, to make a ‘home run’. According to Reid, of these there were a remarkable thirty-one from the supposedly ‘escape-proof’ camp. This was the other side. Here the trumpets sounded. Reid’s is a story of escapades that are breathtaking in their ingenuity, imagination, initiative, persistence and sheer audacity. At Colditz the prisoners learned to pick locks, forge German identity documents, conjure up typewriters, sewing-machines and lathes, manufacture German uniforms and weapons that would pass in daylight for the real thing, dig tunnels through granite-hard walls for months on end, and repeatedly cover the absence of escaped officers at the rollcalls, of which several were held every day. Often the escape attempts depended on the minutest observation of the habits of their gaolers to identify the tiniest window in time – perhaps a minute – in a 24-hour period in which escape might be possible. A French officer very nearly managed to escape disguised as a woman. One of the bravest of the British disguised himself as a senior German garrison officer, an escape foiled only by the appearance of his doppelgänger. Later, the same man was involved in an attempt in which he was shot out of a window high above the castle courtyard, relying on a home-made rope of knotted bedsheets to break his fall. My favourite anecdote concerns the dismemberment of a lorry delivering a barber’s chair, culminating in the theft of the contractor’s hat. ‘Mein Hut! Mein Hut! ’ cried the contractor. Perhaps the best of all the conceits was the glider constructed behind a brilliantly camouflaged false wall. This went undiscovered, despite halving the size of the original room. A glider in a prison – imagine! Built from whatever the prisoners could scavenge, it was to have been launched from a runway on the castle’s eaves, out of line of sight of the sentries below. The castle was liberated not long after the glider was completed. Such was the books’ popularity that in 1955 they were made into a film. Starring John Mills and Eric Portman, The Colditz Story was directed by Guy Hamilton (later to shoot Goldfinger). It was one of the biggest grossing films of that year. Almost twenty years later came a BBC TV production, twenty-eight episodes which ran for two years. Skip another generation to 2001 and there appeared a new book, simply titled Colditz, by Henry Chancellor, which was televised by ITV in 2005 and starred Damian Lewis, Timothy West and James Fox. And only two years ago there appeared Ben Macintyre’s Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle. The appeal of the story in the years immediately after the war is not surprising. Reid’s was a struggle for personal freedom within a reassuringly monochrome moral universe, and a battle crowned with victory. Two other castle inmates who also made ‘home runs’ were the submariners ‘Wally’ Hammond and ‘Tubby’ Lister. Reid calls them ‘the quintessence of everything for which our island stands’. Theirs was the tale of the nation’s finest hour writ small and played out with zest on the stage of the tiny, cobbled courtyard of Colditz. Still, it is intriguing that, seventy years after Reid’s books were first published, we still want to dance to those old songs. Perhaps we do so because the latter days – oddly enough – have yet to come to pass. Nation persists in lifting sword unto nation, and swords have yet to be beaten into ploughshares. The story of Colditz has become a golden thread in the tapestry of our national myth.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Jim Ring 2025