Dear Diary,
A lot has gone on since I last wrote in you because; my friends and I are planning an escape. We have managed to carve a hole in my cell wall and concealed this hole as a vent by covering the hole with a vent guard made from cardboard. We still need to manage a few final details at mealtimes. But then at night while the guards are happily sulking away in the corner, we have managed to tip toe onto the roof through a hole in the wall of our cell and cautiously climbed up a series of pipes onto the roof. And then to build a raft out of raincoats and solvent glue on the roof over a series of nights but so the guards don’t get suspicious we made dummies out of raincoats and straw. We plan to do this in the night but we still need to leave some room for sleep because we won’t get any slack from the work regime.
Dear Diary,
I am finding life even harder now I am building this raft at night. I have to work all day on a railway line. The tiredness is starting to take its toll on me; not only is it hard to find the energy to build this raft it is the problem of getting the materials. I mean we need fifty raincoats to build this raft and so far we have only managed to steal thirty of them and the guards are starting to get suspicious of the fact we are always breaking our raincoats and need new ones. We need to find some better excuses or we might not stay alive. We are trying to find energy to build it but we are building slower and slower as we get more and more worn out. As well as that we need to find some way of inflating this raft plus few more minor details.
Dear Diary
two out of ten men who are in on the plot got found out but that isn’t the worst thing, they made us all watch them be shot: it was a horrific experience and they said, “if we look away during the shooting then we will shoot you” and one of the Nazi generals held his arm up to my chin to make sure I couldn’t twitch or look away. As I looked back I saw all the men’s faces covered in sad smiles with all their tiny bodies sanding tall. One by one they both dropped: a chill went down the back of my spine. And to top it off if we get found out you can guarantee that something much much worse will happen to us if we get caught. So we have to be really stealthy now and keep the meetings and discussing it to a minimum and do all the thinking in silence with no other input but your own.
Dear Diary,
We are only a week from our escape and we are all excited and cannot wait for the day. We have now figured a way of pumping up our raft we are going to use an accordion with a 1 way valve it will take it a long time to pump it up and we are planning to set sail along the river at 23.30 and get to the river mouth at 3.00 and take about 3 hours to sail into England from there. We have been refining all the plans over the week and we are hoping to carry on refining the plans until we are ready to carry out our plan. Nobody else has been caught but the guards have been looking at us because we keep acting suspicious we keep getting this problem but it won’t go away so we are just going to work around it. Hopefully I will be able to get out alive and succeed in this plan.
Dear Diary,
I have just got to the mouth of the river and we have successfully got out of there. We have had a great escape and all went to plan, we got down to the river bed at 22.30 and spent an hour pumping up the boat with our converted accordion, then we placed the boat into the river bed and all climbed in and set sail, the current took us all the way down. It was great, we were swerving in and out of the all the rocks making a fine mess of all the guards in the camp. And we struggled down to the mouth of the river where we found a British army regiment and told them all our stories about being a prisoner of war and where the British army are struggling about seventy miles from Hamburg and the armed forces needed help there. They said we had done extremely well to escape and we didn’t need to sail in our raft. They offered to let us join their boat and sail back to England on a navy boat.
Dear Diary
I have now been reunited with my family and I have never been happier in my life. My wife is working in a steel factory and my two children are growing up to become wonderful children and will probably become wonderful Husbands and wives. However, it is not all good and well at home one of our family friend’s is staying in our home because of the Nazi’s bombs have brought down their homes. As well this is extremely surprising that one of the families staying with us, the father of that family who I escaped from the prisoner of war camp and had that struggle with me and now we are under the same roof. I am having a wonderful time and cannot wait until Christmas which is coming up in a few months. And I cannot wait to see all my children open their presents and celebrate Christmas together again after many Christmas’ apart. And yesterday I got a letter to say that I have been withdrawn from the armed forces and I will no longer need to fight, on top of that too I have got a Victoria Cross for sheer determination of leading 8 men out of their misery.
