A Pow's March From Hell To Freedom

A PoW's march from hell to freedom

Article reprinted from the Tronto Star www.thestar.com

WWII pilot recalls Stalag ordeal

'I felt it was my duty to escape'

by SCOTT SIMMIE

FEATURE WRITER

This is a quiet Victory in Europe story.

There are no townspeople singing anthems or throwing flowers; there is no dancing or champagne in the streets. But there is much gratitude.

It's the story of former prisoner of war Andrew G. Carswell, or ? as he prefers to be known ? Andy.

He hasn't told it that often, and never before to a journalist. He did, however, once put down a few thoughts about his wartime experiences.

"I wrote a book about it," he explains, sitting in his Yonge St. condominium with wife Dorothy, or Dot.

The 81-year-old's office is jammed; filled with paintings of aircraft, albums of black-and-white photos, memories. There's a laptop here, too. And on that laptop resides a 92,000-word manuscript about life as a PoW. Andy sent it out some years back, but didn't get any bites. Publishers told him there were already enough books like that around.

You have to wonder if they read it. Because Carswell's story of personal liberation in the dying days of World War II, and his harrowing bailout over Germany, reads like an epic. One that opens Jan. 17, 1943. The night the Lancaster Bomber he was piloting took a fatal hit on the starboard wing.

You're with him at 25,000 feet as the flames ? an angry orange glow through the frost-coated windshield ? eat closer to the fuel tank. You see the altimeter as it loops counter-clockwise, hear the engines whine as the dive sends the props spinning ever faster. You're there as the teenager from the Beaches, struggling with the bomber's controls, makes the reluctant call to bail.

"Paddy Hipson, our Irish bombardier, pulled the release pin on the forward escape hatch," he writes, "and the pad on which he had been lying minutes before, as well as the hatch, was ripped downward into the roaring darkness.

"The front cockpit of the Lancaster was now full of engine noise from the three remaining Rolls Royce Merlin 1,250-horsepower engines screaming above the roar of the wind, with papers, maps and debris being sucked into the dark void. Paddy hesitated, then stepped into the black hole, and disappeared."

It was a far cry from the James Cagney movie Captains of the Clouds Andy had recently seen. In that, a daring young bush pilot joins the Royal Canadian Air Force and basically wins the war single-handedly. But here he was, on only his fourth mission of the war, with a wounded plane hurtling toward the ground. One after another, the crew jumped into the night. The Lancaster was howling when Andy himself finally bailed ? his right hand gripping the D-ring, or ripcord, for his life. He wasn't going to make a fatal mistake.

"Being left-handed, I had listened to many a story about lefties who had panicked in just such situations and had hit the ground still clawing with their left hands at a non-existent D-ring," the manuscript explains.

It was about 9:30 p.m.; a freezing moonlit night, as he drifted down, down, down toward a distant pine forest. The Lancaster he'd left moments earlier exploded into the countryside.

"Seven- or ten-thousand feet up in the freezing night air, swinging from a parachute not far from Berlin, here was a 19-year-old boy, not long out of high school, floating down into the middle of enemy territory on a bitterly cold winter night, and wondering what in hell he was doing there," he writes.

His chute snagged a tree, and Andy was briefly suspended ? like a marionette ? above the snowy forest floor. He swung over to the trunk, clambered down and started walking in the brutal cold. By morning, exhausted and half-frozen, he knocked on a farmer's door.

"I gave myself up," he says, still sounding a little guilty about it.

"I had a choice between that and freezing to death."

That's how Andy became a prisoner of war, in the massive Stalag VIII-B camp (also known as Stalag 344), not far from Lamsdorf (now Lambinowice, Poland). It held 10,000 other prisoners ? and a lot of opportunities for escape. A popular scam was to "swap-over" or switch identities with another prisoner who was assigned to work on the outside. Andy would do it. Getting out, in his mind, was a way to "balance the books" for having surrendered.

"I felt it was my duty to escape," he says. And escape he would, both in 1943 and 1944. But he would also be captured twice (though he and his Welsh pal Bill McLean made a pretty good go of it on round two). His captors, however, were getting very serious about such matters.

`I gave myself up. I had a choice between that and freezing to death.'

Andrew Carswell, former PoW

"The Germans were putting up signs that said: `Notice to Prisoners: Escaping is no Longer a Sport.' And they told us they'd shoot us," Andy says.

Besides, by late 1944, news of the war (the prisoners had both a secret radio receiver and an excellent rumour mill) was growing more encouraging. The Third Reich would fall; it was only a matter of time. On New Year's Eve, Andy and others in Stalag VIII-B thought they heard Russian artillery in the distance. But for Andy and his mates, the hardest part of the ordeal was yet to come.

"Hitler or the high command ordered that all the prisoners in the east were to be moved west. And that included prisoners from concentration camps," he says. In late January, the evacuation order came for Stalag VIII-B. Thus begins the most painful chapter in Carswell's book, and his life. Thousands of PoWs, walking as far as 50 kilometres per day for weeks, in the middle of a harsh winter with nearly nothing to eat.

They'd sleep in barns, old brick factories, sheep pens. Clothes and socks would often be frozen by morning. The air was thick with sickness, starvation, vomit and human waste. Prisoners stricken with diarrhea would rush to drop their pants in time ? wherever they stood.

So famished were they that Andy used a prized possession, a book of cartoons he'd drawn of life at Stalag VIII-B, as fuel. Feeding the pages one at a time into a small burner, he cooked two half-rotten potatoes he'd found under some straw. It meant surviving one more day.

"We were a great mass of dirty, dishevelled, smelly, sick and demoralized humanity, putting one foot in front of the other, with no apparent destination," he writes.As the days turned into weeks, pneumonia, dysentery and dehydration took their toll. Prisoners were dying every day. It came to be known, by some, as "The Long March." Those who survived it (and many, including untold numbers from concentration camps, did not) know it as "The Death March." Andy came close.

"By the time we got halfway across Germany, I got sick with jaundice and diarrhea and everything you could think of," he says. "I was turning yellow and couldn't go on any farther." (He would later discover he had hepatitis, malnutrition and more.)

A German officer put Carswell, along with many other seriously ill PoWs, in a freight train car. But Royal Air Force Mustangs, which by now were regularly penetrating German airspace, soon had that target in their sights. Andy and the other sick prisoners scrambled for their lives as they heard the aircraft honing in. They were running in the fields as the attack began.

"I saw them, six RAF Mustang fighters, peeling off into a dive and coming straight at me. When I saw little white puffs appearing out of the front of the wings, I pushed my head down into the ground. Then the sound of cannon fire and the pinging of bullets hitting metal, like breaking piano wire," he writes.

About two dozen British PoWs lay dead, including the friend with whom he'd swapped identities for his first escape. The young man had "a jagged hole in his belly the size of a bowling ball." It hit Carswell like nothing he'd experienced.

"I felt suddenly sick in a different way from all the other sicknesses that had become part of me. Here was a man, whom I had known well, who had been a prisoner of war almost five years, killed by one of our own aircraft ... (just) before the war must surely end! I thought my nose was running, but it was tears that were running down my face, mixing with the dirt."

In mid-March, Andy arrived at Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel, in northwest Germany. The sound of air raids soon became a nightly affair; it was only a matter of time before the camp would fall. Finally, on April 16, it happened. A convoy of tanks heralded the arrival of the British 2nd Army.

"Inside the fence there was bedlam!" Carswell writes. "Wire cutters appeared, from where I'll never know, and the fence virtually disappeared in minutes. Men were cheering and yelling and laughing and crying and hugging the embarrassed soldiers who jumped off the tanks. All of the tanks going by now were throwing off boxes of rations, chocolate bars, and cigarettes."

Two hours later, a truck arrived with freshly baked bread. Andy still remembers it as the best meal he's ever had in his life. In a few days, the PoWs were taken by truck to an airstrip. There, one after another, DC-3 Dakotas took the former prisoners to England in a seemingly endless stream of aircraft that went like taxis all day long. Andy boarded the day's final flight. He'd somehow in his travels wound up wearing an old army uniform, but he'd sewn wings on the shoulders to show his RCAF heritage. The co-pilot noticed and invited him up to the cockpit. The pilot, who was impressed Andy had flown a Lancaster, offered him a headset to listen in on the radio. As the Dakota crossed the English Channel, on a perfect spring night, the sun was going down. Andy could see the white cliffs of Dover, then the glimmer of lights from homes and towns below. The blackouts were over.

In the warmth of those headphones, now switched over to the BBC, a song was playing. By providence or coincidence, it was the wartime classic "When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World."

Tears streamed down Andy's cheeks. Grateful, grateful tears he was relieved the growing darkness hid from the crew. Minutes later, he felt the runway's smooth embrace.

It was April 19, 1945 ? two years, three months and two days since he'd been shot down. For Andrew Carswell, the war had ended.

Soon, most of Europe would know a similar kind of joy.

Andy Carswell would again fly for the RCAF on missions that photographically mapped Canada's North. He participated in numerous search-and-rescue operations on the West Coast. In 1959, he was awarded the Air Force Cross by the Queen.