Tales from the Special Forces Club. Sean Rayment
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After a few days in Athens, rumours began circulating that the POWs were to be transported to Germany, and Jimmy and Ron knew that the opportunities for escape would soon be limited.
‘We were put into cattle trucks with one kilogram of sour black bread and two small tins of Italian bully beef for a four-day journey. There were about 30 of us in each truck, the toilet was a bucket and one poor soul had dysentery, so you can imagine what it was like. As the train went through the villages and towns we were able to plot the route on a silk escape map which was sewn into my beret as part of my escape kit – most people in the LRDG had one. I also had a hacksaw blade sewn into the flies of my trousers and a small button compass hidden in the collar of my battledress tunic. There was no excuse for not at least trying to escape. I had managed to avoid being searched and the Germans never found my escape kit.
‘Inside the trucks there were little openings in the four corners of the carriage which were criss-crossed with barbed wire, so I began sawing away at the barbed wire and then Ron and I took it in turns. The train frequently stopped and we were allowed out to go to the toilet, but we had to do our business in front of all these civilians who were passengers on the train and the whole thing was quite humiliating.
‘The night before we planned our escape two LRDG men on the other truck kicked out some panels and managed to escape but they were later recaptured. The Jerry commander was furious and lined us all up in the morning and was walking up and down, bellowing at us, making all sorts of threats.
‘By now the train had entered Macedonia, and that night, on 6 November 1943, just after we left the town of Veles, 13 days after we were captured, I managed to saw through the barbed wire. Ron and I tossed a coin to see who would get out first and I won. We bent the wire back and I climbed out and was hanging on to the side of the train as we passed through a tunnel, at which point I saw Ron’s boots appearing through the opening and so I jumped. The train was moving at about 25mph but my parachute training helped break my fall and I landed safely.
‘The rest of the train passed and when I saw the red light on the back of the train disappearing into the distance I must say I felt pretty lonely. I didn’t regret getting out at all, I was delighted to be free, but there I was in the middle of occupied Europe all by myself at that stage – Ron still hadn’t jumped out. His jump was delayed and he was quite a little way from me. I walked up the track and found him hiding behind a telegraph pole because he thought I was a guard from the tunnel. Every tunnel and bridge we passed was guarded – but this one wasn’t, fortunately. I spotted Ron and said something like, “Hello Ron, are you OK?” But he’d hurt his leg when he landed. He’d twisted a muscle in his thigh and had taken a couple of chips out of his lower leg when he hit the track.
‘Ron and I used to speak quite openly about escaping and the extraordinary thing was that everyone in that truck could have got out, everyone, but they just didn’t. I think they were just resigned to the fact that they were POWs and that was how they were going to spend the rest of the war. I felt very disappointed that no one else attempted to escape.
‘Ron also had a map in his beret and he gave it to a couple of Scottish commandos who were with us in Y Patrol, but I don’t think they used it. I think it was the shock of capture, and a sort of inertia developed in some people, but not in me. I deeply resented that I was a prisoner and I wasn’t going to put up with it.
‘It was raining, dark and cold. All we had to eat was a few items from a Red Cross parcel we had been given and in front of us was a very long journey through the Macedonian mountains. I asked Ron if he could walk. He said yes, so off we went – into the mountains on a compass bearing – and that was how our escape began.
‘We figured that if we walked on a bearing slightly south of west we would eventually get to the Adriatic Sea, but that meant walking through the whole of Albania. The plan was to get to the Adriatic, steal a boat, row across the Adriatic and get to Italy, which was where the action was. What we wanted was to get back into the war.
‘We didn’t know what Albania was like but we soon found out that the country was really quite mountainous and swarming with enemy soldiers. We didn’t know what to expect so we started off walking at night so that we wouldn’t be spotted by the Germans, but poor old Ron’s leg was getting worse all the time.
‘The going was very rough, steep wooded hills and valleys made all the worse at night. One night we were on an open hillside, very rocky and blowing a gale. There was freezing rain, more like sleet, and we took it in turns with the compass to go on the right bearing. It was my turn to lead and I turned round to see how far behind Ron was and he wasn’t there. I went back to see where he was and he was sitting on a rock. “Sorry, old son,” he said, “I can’t go any further.” I believed him because he was a tough little bloke – quite small was Ron, about five foot six, but very tough. He’d seen active service in the tank regiment before the LRDG and had been injured when his tank was destroyed, so he knew what it was all about.
‘I looked round for somewhere to spend the rest of the night, to see if I could find a dry spot. I found an area where there was an overhanging rock with a dry place underneath it, but with just room for one, so I installed Ron and I went to look for somewhere for myself, which I found but it wasn’t as comfortable. By then I was very, very tired and went to sleep in spite of the conditions. I woke up at first light, freezing cold, and I couldn’t move – I suppose I was close to hypothermia. I started moving my fingers and eventually got movement back in my body and went to find Ron and he was OK, he’d managed to recover a bit, and then off we went again.
‘On about the fifth day it was clear that Ron’s leg wasn’t getting any better – we had virtually no food and so there was nothing for it but to get some help. We decided to enter a village called Belica in western Macedonia. It was a risk, but we thought that the locals might help us. I have to say that by that stage we were at a pretty low ebb; we were cold, exhausted and malnourished, and we needed some food and shelter.
‘When we arrived in the village there were lots of locals filling water buckets from the stream, so we went over and filled our water bottles. I think it was obvious to them that we were soldiers, and they looked astonished to see us. We waved and smiled and walked off and were heading in the direction of some houses when this character appeared, waving his arms at us and making it quite clear that we couldn’t go any further and that it was dangerous.
‘Ron looked up at this house and saw uniformed men walking about, and they must have been Bulgar soldiers. We took this individual at his word and left the road, pushed up into the hills as fast as we could and disappeared. Fortunately no one fired at us or followed us. We went on walking for the rest of the day and came to a river flowing roughly in the direction we wanted to go, so we continued to walk beside it along a towpath. We walked on until it started getting dark. Ron’s leg was getting no better so we continued until we came across this very primitive hut, which appeared to be occupied.
‘We approached the hut cautiously and using sign language we tried to make it clear to the people inside who we were and how we had jumped off the train. But it was also clear that they didn’t want us there. After a few minutes they got up and beckoned us to come with them; they led us outside and pointed up to a hill and just kept pointing. They wanted us to push off up the hill, so off we went, feeling very dejected. But after a few hundred yards it became apparent that the path wasn’t going anywhere, so we thought bugger this and went back to the hut, and when we banged on the door for a second time the two men seemed to have had a change of heart and invited us in.
‘It was the most primitive human habitation you could imagine. It had an earth floor, with a fire burning in the middle. The smoke rose up through the thatch – it was medieval.
‘There was a cooking pot hanging by a chain from one of the roof timbers, with some water boiling in it, and that seemed to be the sole means of cooking and heating. The dwelling itself was divided by a wall and on the other side were cattle. The only furniture was a couple of little three-legged stools, wonderful things cut out of the trunk of a fir tree at a place where there were three side branches, so that you could stand it up.
‘There were no cupboards,