The Second World War is full of fascinating stories and amazing people, from Winston Churchill, who was known for occasionally wandering through his country house of Chartwell completely naked, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who required leg-braces and a pair of walking-sticks to stand up, from the Blitz, to the V2-rocket that blew up the police-station down the road from the Stewart family home in Highgate, London, when a newborn boy named Roderick came into the world.

But these stories, fascinating as they are, probably couldn’t hold a candle to the story of two men. One with an amazingly good brain, and one with balls of solid brass: Sir Barnes Neville Wallis and Wing Commander Guy P. Gibson (who had so many military decorations after his name that I shan’t list them here!).

Between the two of them, Wallis and Gibson, they solved one of the biggest problems and carried out one of the most famous aerial attacks on Germany during the entire Second World War which became a massive morale-booster to the Allies and a huge loss to the Germans. This mission of theirs, the rather appropriately-named “Operation Chastise” aimed to destroy the German hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr Valley, thereby cutting electrical power to the steel-production plants in the area and severely crippling the German war-effort.

This is the story of the Dam Busters and the famous Bouncing Bomb.

Target: The Ruhr Valley

During the Second World War, the Ruhr Valley was the heartland of the German war-machine. The valley area was dammed by the Germans and vast amounts of hydroelectricity was generated there, which was used to power the factories that manufactured shells, tanks, bombs, high explosives and airplanes with which the Germans were fighting their war of occupation and oppression against the rest of Europe.

The munitions factories in the Ruhr Valley area were a huge headache to the Allies. Despite repeated raids on the Valley, they had failed to put the factories out of action; the main method of aerial attack: Saturation carpet-bombing, just wasn’t accurate enough to destroy the factories. The Allies desperately needed to find another way to try and stab at the heart of the German military production-area.

Instead of attacking the factories, the Allies considered attacking the huge hydroelectric dams in the area. If they could successfully destroy the dams, the loss of electrical power would delay German munitions production for months, not to mention that the huge waves of water released from theh collapsing dams would probably wipe out every single factory in the immediate area. Unfortunately, with conventional bombing and all other conventional methods of attack, this was quite hopeless. The dams were protected by anti-aircraft guns, huge floating booms and underwater torpedo nets that made destroying the dams nearly impossible. The booms prevented the possibility of floating a sea-mine against the dam walls, the torpedo-nets meant that attacking the dams with torpedo-planes was a waste of time and the sheer inaccuracy of carpet-bombing meant that it was useless to try and destroy the dams by pounding them into submission by aerial bombardment. They needed a whole new and ingenious way to destroy the dams.

Enter Sir Barnes Wallis.

Barnes Wallis and the Bouncing Bomb

Enter Sir Barnes Wallis. Or Dr. Wallis, as he was called then. Barnes Wallis fitted almost all the stereotypes of your perfect mad scientist. By the 1940s he was already in his fifties. He was a brilliant scientist, engineer and a fantastical inventor, which is just as well, because this article wouldn’t be here without one of his most wonderful inventions: The Bouncing Bomb.

Wallis’s contributions to the Second World War were considerable. Before the Bouncing Bomb, Wallis was famous for helping to design the legendary Wellington Bomber.

The Wellington was one of the Allies most famous bomber-planes and they were used for bombing-raids with varying frequency throughout the entire duration of the Second World War. But it pales into insignificance, some might say, when compared to Wallis’s most daring and some might say, outrageous invention ever.

In studying the huge German hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr Valley, Dr. Wallis determined that to destroy the dams with conventional bombing, they would require bombs so powerful that no heavy bomber then in use would ever be able to transport them to Germany. It was a waste of time to even try. Wallis determined that if a regular bomb was detonated right against the base of the dam, the force of the blast would rip the dam apart. But many people thought that Wallis was dreaming. And maybe he was. Because to many people, this seemed a total impossibility; bombing-accuracy had not yet reached such a level that they could drop one regular-sized bomb with such a nicety that it would land right against the dam wall, sink and then detonate under water to destroy the dams. If Wallis wanted this hare-brained idea of his to work, he would have to figure out a way of delivering the bomb right up against the dam, something that nobody had figured out yet, but Wallis was determined to try.

Inventing the Bouncing Bomb

The challenges facing Dr. Wallis were immense. Although he had proven that a current-production high-explosive bomb detonated at the base of the dam walls would be sufficient to breech the dam and cause significant damage to the German industrial Ruhr Valley, he had to find a way to deliver the bomb to the dam in such a precise way so that the bomb would explode right against the wall of the dam. A distance-error of even a few feet would mean that the entire mission would fail, because when the bomb detonated, any cushion of water between the explosion and the dam would absorb the shock of the blast, rendering the bomb harmless and the entire mission a waste of time.

Eventually, Wallis got the idea that he could get a bomb right up against the wall of a dam if he skipped it across the lake behind the dam, like an enormous, high-explosive pebble. Such a technique was used by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, whereby gun-crews would fire their cannonballs at the waterline and watch them skip across the surface of the sea, a technique that vastly increased the range of their cannonfire before the balls finally hit the enemy ships, smashing into their hulls close to the waterline, causing them to sink. Using a similar technique, Wallis hoped that he could smash a hole through the German dams. Although he had now hit upon a possible method for getting the bombs close enough to the dams to destroy them, he still had to figure out how to get the bombs to bounce across the water like skipping-stones.

It was 1941 when Dr. Wallis started working on his new bomb. It took a lot of trial and error and countless hours of experimentation, measurements and testing. There were a huge number of obstacles to overcome. And if you don’t believe me, here they are:

– The bomb had to skip across the water. Not easy for a chunk of metal that weighs several tons.
– The bomb had to dropped from a precise height above the water from a precise distance from the target. Difficult when GPS hadn’t been invented.
– The bomb had to hit the dam wall at exactly the right time. If the bomb fell short, it would detonate in the water and prove useless. If it missed the target, it would explode on top of the dam and kill everyone in the bomber flying overhead.

The first of these great challenges was how to make the bomb skip across the water. Eventually, Wallis came up with the idea that the bomb would have to be a large cylinder suspended under the belly of the aircraft and provided with a means of producing backspin before the bomb hit the water, to prevent it from going where the bomber-crews didn’t want it to.

One of the actual ‘bouncing bombs’

Apart from figuring out the right shape of the bomb so that it would skip across the water and giving it backspin so that the bomb would bounce along the water and give it the height it needed to complete its journey, Dr. Wallis still had to figure out how high off the water the bomb had to be dropped and how far away from the dams they had to be released. Amazingly, these two problems weren’t solved by Dr. Wallis, but by the other man in this story.

A fellow named Guy Gibson. Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force. Gibson was an intelligent, brave and courageous fellow. If you don’t believe me, let’s have a look at his awards:

Victoria Cross.
Distinguished Service Order + Bar.
Distinguished Flying Cross + Bar.
Legion of Merit.

He didn’t win all those medals for nothing.

Gibson and his men were trying to figure out how to determine the height of their planes above the water before they dropped their bombs. The problem was, they had to be just sixty feet above the water. Their altimeters (the instruments that determined a plane’s altitude) just didn’t function at such low levels. Their solution came, reportedly, when they were out on the town. While the airmen were watching a theater-performance, they noticed how a pair of spotlights at either end of the stage met at a specific point on the stage-platform. They figured out that if they fixed two spotlamps on the noses and tails of their planes and angled them correctly, the lights would meet at the precise moment that the plane was sixty feet above the water.

The boys also figured out how to determine the distance from the dam using a similar method.

Each of the German dams had tall towers at each end. By using a cheap, homemade bomb-sight, the bomber could hold the bomb-sight in front of his eyes and keep them trained on two little upright sticks at the end of the sight. When the two sticks lined up with the two towers on each of the dams, they knew that they were dropping-distance from the dam and could release their bombs and then fly away.

Preparing for Battle

The attack on the German dams in the Ruhr Valley was called “Operation Chastise”, probably because by successful completion of this mission, the Allies hoped to severely cripple Germany’s muntions productivity. But the whole mission was almost scuttled before it began.

It took Barnes Wallis months to figure out how to get everything just right for his new bombs to work. And even then a lot of the success was totally up to luck. The bombs would only be as accurate as the crews that launched them. If everything worked perfectly, then the bombs would be dropped into the lakes. They would skip across the water like huge pebbles, bouncing over the torpedo-nets and the floating booms and then strike the side of the dam walls. Here, they would sink right down to the bottom of the dam. Each bouncing bomb was fitted with a hydrostatic charge which went off when the bombs were under a specific depth of water (the same charges are used to detonate naval depth-charges for destroying submarines). The force of the explosions would bounce off the water and be directed completely towards the dam walls. The shockwaves would cause the walls to crumble and for the dams to be breeched, crippling their hydroelectrical generating abilities. But this was only if everything went perfectly.

While Wallis tackled with these problems, RAF Bomber Command realised that they would need a really spectacular bomber squadron to carry out this insane mission. Training just any old squadron to execute this mission wasn’t deemed sufficient enough. A whole new squadron would have to be formed; a squadron manned by the best of the best of the best bomber pilots, navigators, wireless-transmitters, gunners and bombers in the entire Royal Air Force. Commanding this squadron was Wing Commander Guy Gibson.

The squadron, #617, was made up of men who were all specifically chosen for their particular skills, whether it was low flying, navigation, defensive gunnery, bomb-aiming or communications. The squadron was formed on the 21st of March, 1943 and was made up of airmen from almost every allied airforce imaginable. The RAF, the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force), RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force) and the RNZAF (Royal New Zealand Air Force). Rather appropriately, the squadron’s motto is “After me, the flood”, alluding to what they hoped to do to the Germans.

The Story of Nigger

Up to now, I have mentioned everything. The men, the machines, the technology, the mission and its aims. I haven’t, however, mentioned Nigger.

‘Nigger’ was the mascot of 617 Squadron. He was a labrador (hence the name ‘Nigger’) and the pet of Wing Commander Gibson. Beloved by Gibson and his fellow pilots, he was sadly killed on the evening before the raid. He was run over by a car at the airbase. He was buried outside of Gibson’s office on the night of the raid.

The men of 617 Squadron with Nigger. His owner and the sqaudron’s commanding officer, Guy Gibson, is first on the right on the bottom row, with the pipe in his mouth

On the night of the raid, ‘Nigger’ was one of the code-words used to signal a successful breech of one of the dams. Below is a photograph of Nigger’s grave:

“NIGGER – The grave of a black labrador dog; mascot of 617 Squadron, owned by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC. Nigger was killed by a car on the 16th of May 1943. Buried at midnight as his owner was leading his squadron on the attack against the Mohne and Eder Dams”

Busting the Dams

Despite the death of their mascot and favourite pup, the men of 617 Squadron were determined to go through with the mission. It would take more than a careless driver running over their pet pooch to stop these men.

The dam busters took off on the night of the 16th-17th of May, 1943. May was the month when the height of water in the dams was at its highest and destroying the dams would have the most devastating effect on the Germans. The Squadron was divided into three groups or formations. The first formation had nine planes and the second and third formations had five planes each. They flew southeast towards Germany, doing their best to avoid known German anti-aircraft gun-batteries.

The mission was almost a failure. The three formations encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire on their ways to and from their targets; and the dams themselves were heavily defended by anit-aircraft guns. Of the three main dams that were to be breeched, the Mohne, the Eder and the Sorpe, only the Mohne and Eder were successfully destroyed.

The Mohne Dam after the attack

Attempts to destroy the Sorpe Dam were unsuccessful, and the squadron was already encountering heavy anti-aircraft fire and were unable to hang around and try again. Three attempts in all were made to destroy it but even though the bouncing bombs hit the dam, they didn’t manage to destroy it.

The Eder Dam after the attack

After the Attacks

Although the mission was called a ‘success’, it was one that was paid for with a heavy price. Eight of the nineteen planes were shot down or crashed during the mission. The emotional toll on Barnes Wallis was immense and after the war, he became increasingly interested in remote-controlled aircraft, hoping that aerial wars of the future could be fought without the need for young pilots to die in combat. The effect of the destruction of the dams was immense. If nothing else, their destruction was a huge morale boost to the Allies. The water released from the two destroyed dams flooded out dozens of factories, storage-houses, munitions plants, it distrupted electrical generation and even destroyed German food-production, by flooding farmlands and ruining their crops!

Despite the destruction and death and the disruption caused by the breeching of the dams, the military aims of the dam-busters raid were barely fulfilled. It was hoped that knocking out the dams would cripple the Germans for months. Instead, they were out of action for only a few weeks. The dams were repaired, the factories were put back into operation and soon it was as if nothing had happened. Although a disappointment to the Allied top brass, the morale-boost it gave to the British was something that the Germans couldn’t try and modify.

Sir Barnes Wallis died on the 30th of October, 1979. He was ninety-two.

Wing Commander Guy Gibson was killed in action on the 19th of September, 1944. He was twenty-six years old.

What do I like about history? Is it all the fancy old stuff? Is it the facts and figures? Is it the new inventions that were popping up all over the place?

Yes. Of course. But if I had to pick one reason for loving history, it’s because of all the stories that you get to hear about and learn about and pass on to others.

Like the story within this article.

This article will cover one of the lesser-known stories of the Second World War. Everyone knows all the big stories. The Blitz, the Battle of Normandy, the Invasion of Russia, the Fall of France, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the Dam Busters and the heroics of Oskar Schindler, but in and amongst all these wonderful and amazing stories are the ones that people forget about, or which they can’t imagine ever happened, because they just seem too weird and strange and out-of-place.

This is one of those stories.

This is a story about the Jews. It’s about the Jews and the Second World War. It’s also about a city. In fact, it’s about one of the very few cities in the world which helped to save Jews from Nazi persecution during the years leading up to the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939, taking in thousands of refugees from the hell of Europe when no other city in the world would bother to open its gates. This city is not London, New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Belfast or Boston. It’s not Sydney or Tokyo or Havana. In fact it’s none of the cities that you would ever imagine that persecuted German Jews would ever think of going to.

In English, its name literally means “On the Sea”. In its native tongue, this city is called…

Shanghai.

“The Bund” on the waterfront of Shanghai’s International Settlement Zone, Shanghai, China. 1928

Escaping the Nazis

Of all the places in the world to flee to, so as to escape from oppression, hardship and persecution, one of the last places on earth that you’d think the Jews would pick is China. Not because it wasn’t welcoming or accepting of Western Jews or because of language-barriers or cultural clashes or anything else, but simply because it was such a different place from any other country in the world at the time. Why on earth would escaping European Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria and France (among other European countries) wish to flee to China, a country that was so incredibly alien to them?

The truth was, they had no choice.

In 1933, Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. Although at first things seemed normal, by 1935, life for German Jews became increasingly restricted and more dangerous, with the passing of the “Nuremberg Laws“, that controlled, prohibited and monitored an increasing number of Jewish activities and freedoms. Everything from where Jews could shop, where they could go in public, what they could own, when they could go out, whether or not they could use public transport, whether they could travel, use public institutions such as swimming-pools, cinemas and theatres and even what kinds of jobs they could have. Jews were banned from legal occupations, educational occupations and military occupations. Jewish lawyers, teachers, university lecturers and soldiers were all kicked out of the German companies or organisations that they worked for.

Life for Jews in Germany became more and more dangerous as the 1930s progressed and while some believed that this was a passing thing and that sooner or later all this antisemitic fervor would die down, others saw the writing on the wall. They were convinced that it was not safe for them to remain in Germany anymore, and that they had to get out.

But leaving Germany was not easy. You needed passports, money, travel-permits, tickets and visas to move around. If you were patient or resourceful or rich enough to beg, borrow, bribe, buy or steal these documents, you might be able to escape to another country such as France or Poland or Italy. However, other people were so scared that they wanted to leave Europe altogether.

Leaving Europe in the 1930s was fraught with all kinds of diplomatic and foreign-policy nightmares. In the 1920s and 30s, many countries had ‘immigration quotas’. A country would only allow…so many Jews…so many Chinese…so many English…so many Americans…so many Germans…to migrate to their shores each year. And once that quota was met, the gates were closed and all ships were turned away. The quotas were often deliberately kept small. Only a few thousand people from each category were allowed in. For those who were lucky enough, they could book a steamship passage from Germany to England or to America or even Australia and take comfort in that in a few weeks, they would be out of the reach of the Nazis.

But those were only the people who were lucky enough to find themselves within the government immigration-quotas. What was to become of the hundreds of thousands of other Jews who were desperate to escape from Nazi Germany? There was almost nowhere else to go. Once the quotas were full, German Jews would have to wait a whole year before they could get another bid at sailing to England, America, Australia or any other country of safety again. And by then, it might be too late.

In sheer desperation, German Jews looked to the East. To Asia. To countries in the Pacific which would take them and accept them and give them at least a chance of escaping from the Nazis. One of the few places that opened its gates was the Chinese port city…of Shanghai.

China in the 1930s

Perhaps one reason why people might not think of China as a safe port for persecuted German Jews in the 1930s is because of the fact that at the time, China was fighting its own war with Japan. Not the Second World War, but the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted from July, 1937 until September of 1945. In time, Japan would become an ally of Germany. So why go there?

The reason for wanting to go to China was because the Japanese were there.

In comparison to the super-restrictive world of Nazi Germany, where travel-permits and other essential documents were almost impossible to find, in China, travel-documents were practically ignored. Passport-control in the port city of Shanghai was non-existent, partially because of the huge, diplomatic mess that already existed in Shanghai at the time.

During the 19th century, China had been rocked by foreign wars. The Opium Wars had forced China to open its gates to the Western powers, something that China was very reluctant to do. The Chinese Imperial Government saw itself as being the head of a country which was the head of the Asian world and which would answer to no other power. However, the British, French, American and other European powers wanted in on China. They wanted Chinese resources and they wanted Chinese products. This resulted in the Treaty of Nanking. The Treaty covered many things, but the main thing it covered was international trade. Foreign Powers (mostly the British) wanted the Chinese government to open up their port cities and give the British the power to trade within China and do business with whoever they wished.

One of these port cities…was Shanghai.

A map of what Shanghai looked like in 1931

Although the reigning Qing Government was opposed to this, by the early 20th century when Imperial China had collapsed, to be replaced by a capitalist, republican Chinese government, the city of Shanghai was booming.

In accordance with the Treaty of Nanking, within Shanghai were various sectors in which foreign powers could trade. There was the Chinese Sector (Old Shanghai), there was the French Sector, American Sector, British, German and even the Japanese sector. In July of 1937, the Chinese lost the authority of passport control for people entering Shanghai due to the Japanese invasion of China and the occupation of Shanghai. The foreign powers didn’t want to control passports because if the Western powers could control passports, then the invading Japanese would fight for the ability to take over passport control, if that happened, then all hell would break loose. As a result, no country or organisation at all controlled passports into Shanghai. With such a collapse of travel-regulations…

It was the perfect place for German Jews to try and escape to.

Escaping to Shanghai

With almost every other major port city in the world shutting its gates to German Jewish refugees in the 1930s, Shanghai was the last place on earth (almost literally) that persecuted Jews could hope to receive any kind of welcome at all. The chaos of the Second Sino-Japanese War meant that the conventional regulations that controlled immigration to the city of Shanghai had all but disappeared. With passports for Jews being either confiscated or almost impossible to obtain, the lack of any passport control at all made Shanghai the perfect destination for those trying to escape Nazi persecution.

Of course, the journey to Shanghai wasn’t all smooth sailing. Jews still had to get out of Germany! Those that were lucky enough managed to catch trains or drove or even walked from Germany south to Italy. From there, they would board Asian ocean-liners bound for the Far East. The voyage to China was a long one. From Italy across the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean and then northeast into the Pacific and then West to the Port of Shanghai, a journey that took a month by steamship. Perhaps ironically, the Jews escaped Germany on ships operated by the eventual German ally, Japan. Two of the ships were the S.S. Hakusan Maru and the S.S. Kashima Maru.

The S.S. Hakusan Maru

The S.S. Kashima Maru

With all other ports closed to them, Jews began to realise just what a golden opportunity Shanghai had become. It was probably the biggest stroke of good luck they ever had before the War. It was gold that they would have to dig for and good luck that they would have to grab they horns, but it was there for them nonetheless. If they could get there in time, that is. But a surprising number of Jewish refugees did catch onto this opportunity and the sheer number of Jews that actually managed to make it to Shanghai is quite staggering. Between 1937 and December of 1941, over twenty thousand Jews, mostly from Germany, managed to book passages on Shanghai-bound ships and sail out of the reach of the clutches of the Nazis to the relative safety of China. The majority of them managed to get Visas from anti-Nazi consular officials and underground resistence-fighters. Ships sailed regularly from Italy to China, ferrying thousands of Jews to the safety of the Port of Shanghai.

Arriving and Surviving in China

Any Jews arriving in China and expecting a fanfare welcome were to be sorely disappointed. Although the disruption caused by the Japanese meant that it was much easier to get to Shanghai and therefore, safety, once they were there, the German Jewish refugees were more or less on their own.

The City of Shanghai was divided into sectors centered around the Huangpu River. To the west of the river where it turned 90-degrees and headed towards the East China Sea, was Old Shanghai, the Chinese sector, and the French Sector. North of the French sector and the north bank of the Huangpu River was the International Settlement Zone. The Jews were dreaming if they could flee from Germany and settle in these busier, more affluent parts of the “Oriental Paris” as Shanghai was called. In fact, the Jews were forced to live in a run-down, working-class part of Shanghai, east of the International Settlement Zone, a desperate slum called Hongkew (“Hongkou” in Chinese).

Life in Shanghai was incredibly hard. Food was scarce, jobs were hard to come by and sanitation and comfortable housing were mere pipe-dreams. But the Jews survived. Despite living in the Hongkew sector of Shanghai, they survived. By pulling together and working together and supporting each other, they survived.

While some Jewish refugees did manage to find work in Shanghai and were therefore able to survive and in some cases, make life relatively comfortable for themselves and their families, the majority of the twenty thousand Jews were reliant on the charity provided by wealthy Jewish families already well-established in Shanghai, or from American Jewish aid agencies. The most prominent of these was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (commonly called the JDC). Despite the disruptions of the Japanese, wealthier Jews supported the poorer Jews and aid organisations helped those who were unable to help themselves. In one way or another, they survived.

The impact of the Jews on the Chinese population was probably negligable. The Chinese, already driven into hardship by the Japanese already, barely noticed the Jews. But when they did, relations were tolerant and polite. Perhaps because the Chinese were already suffering, they sympathised with the Jews. They did business with the Jews and the Jews did business with the Chinese. For a few years, although life was hard…things seemed to be going alright.

The Shanghai Ghetto

Although life was very hard for the Jewish refugees living in Shanghai, even though they had to put up with shortages of food, money, clothing, proper housing, even though they had to worry about the Huangpu River flooding every time it rained, even though they were disgusted by the lack of indoor sanitation, even though the Hongkew Sector was patrolled regularly by Japanese soldiers, they survived. And they also considered themselves damn fortunate to be in China. By 1939, war had broken out in Europe and further transports of escaping Jews from Europe to China pretty much dried up overnight. The Jews living in Shanghai knew that they were lucky to be living there and were lucky to be running and living their own lives. If only they’d known what was happening to their relatives in Europe, they would’ve thought themselves luckier still.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing in Shanghai, either. From 1937 to 1941, life in the Shanghai slums was filthy, depressing and riddled with disease and hunger…but at least the Jews were safe. That was all about to change.

In December of 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Within days, Great Britain and America had declared war on Japan. In Shanghai, the Jewish situation went from bad to worse.

Already struggling to get by and just keeping their heads above the water, the Jews were dealt an even harder blow. Jews living in Shanghai who were British subjects were now considered enemies. They were rounded up and sent to concentration-camps. These British Jews were the ones with all the money. With them went all their charitable contributions to the refugee Jews of Europe. But with the declarations of war against Japan, American Jews in Shanghai also became the enemy. The JDC almost ceased operation altogether, if not for a stroke of luck. Because America was now an official enemy of Japan, the JDC could no longer rely on American funds and donations coming from the United States to keep it operating. With the wealthy Shanghai Jews, those who were British subjects, now incacerated, the JDC turned to Shanghai’s other pre-war Jewish community, a collection of Russian Jews who fled to Shanghai during the Russian Revolution of 1917, for donations and funds. Although Shanghai’s Russian Jewish community was not as wealthy or as prominent as the British Jewish community, they did nevertheless, manage to keep the JDC running so that it could continue is charitable work.

Excerpt from the Shanghai Herald newspaper, dated February 18th, stating that all “Stateless Refugees” (which included Jews) had to move to their own sector within the Shanghai distict of Hongkew, by the 18th of May, 1943

Just like in Europe, though, the Jews in Shanghai were forced into a ghetto. Officially, it was called the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees”, but over time, people just called it the “Shanghai Ghetto”. It was a tiny place just a square mile in area, into which twenty thousand Jews were crammed in.

The Shanghai Ghetto, 1943

As unpleasant as this was, the Shanghai Ghetto differed from comparable European Jewish World-War-Two ghettos in many ways. To begin with, the JDC continued to provide charity to the poorest of their community. The Ghetto was not walled in like those in Poland and Germany, and the Chinese already resident in the area of Hongkew designated as the ghetto did not bother to leave. So the Jews were not totally isolated as they were in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Because the Ghetto was not walled, the Jews were able, more or less, to go where they wanted. They required special passes and permits to do this (issued by the Japanese), but they could still travel outside the ghetto, but only for work. Some Jews would take the opporunity of their out-of-ghetto trips to buy essential supplies for their families, or to buy things that they could sell for a profit (meagre as it was) in the ghetto and get some more money to feed their families.

Life in the ghetto grew increasingly harsh as the years wore on. A lack of coal and wood meant that there was a real risk of freezing to death in winter. Food was always scarce and what food there was usually had to be cleaned and prepared specially before you could eat it, since it was often the worst, cheapest food available.

The United States Army Air Force started air-raids on Shanghai in 1944. For the past few years they had been driving the Japanese back through their Pacific island-hopping campaign and they were now determined to flush the Japanese out of China. Shanghai was hit heavily during the raids, especially on the 17th of July, 1945, when American B-29 bombers attacked Hongkew specifically. A number of Jews and Chinese were injured or killed during this and subsequent raids on Shanghai, although the number of Chinese casualties was almost always significantly larger than those of the Jewish community.

Leaving Shanghai

Liberation for the Jews came in September of 1945 when the Japanese surrendered and Chinese forces entered the city and declared it safe. Soon after, aid agencies such as the International Red Cross entered the city to give aid to civilians, including the Jewish refugees. Desperate to know what happened to their families back in Europe, many Jews turned to the Red Cross. The Red Cross had come to Shanghai bearing news of the Holocaust, but they also brought survivor-lists for the Shanghai Jews to read, information that probably helped them make up their minds pretty quickly about what they wanted to do with their lives. Many Jews living in Shanghai during the War felt a significant level of survivor-guilt at the end of the conflict, wondering why they had managed to survive the holocaust in the relative safety of Shanghai, while entire families, all their friends and all their relatives had been killed.

Compared with the ghettos of Europe, the concentration-camps, the death-camps, the roundups, the starvation, the gassings and the horrible uncertainty that nothing was certain at all…Shanghai was like paradise. In the years to come, the Chinese Civil War would drive many Jews away. Thankful to have survived the War, the roughly twenty thousand Jews who had called Shanghai their home between 1937 and 1945 boarded ships for Western countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States.

By the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 there were only about a hundred Jews still living in Shanghai, however for the roughly 19,000 Jews that survived the War thanks to the ability to take refuge in this Oriental Paris, Shanghai would always hold a special place in their hearts, and indeed, in the hearts of Jewish people all over the world.

Most people think of the Wooden Horse as the famous Wooden Horse of Troy or the Trojan Horse, with which the ancient Greeks tricked the Trojans into bringing about their own downfall. Hidden inside an enormous wooden model of a horse were thirty Greek soldiers who after gaining access to the city, opened the gates to let in the rest of the Greek army who laid waste to the city and finally defeated the Trojans, ending a ten year siege-war.

Just as famous, and perhaps just as forgettable, is the other Wooden Horse with which its builders didn’t break into, but rather, broke out of a fortified complex.

This article is about the Wooden Horse of Stalag Luft III, the famous German prisoner-of-war camp for Allied airmen during the Second World War. It will detail how the horse was made and how it facilitated the escape of the three men who dug this tunnel to freedom. The facts and figures in this article are supplied chiefly by my first-edition copy of “The Wooden Horse”, written by the escaper Eric Williams in 1949.

Stalag Luft III – Sagan, Poland – 1943

RAF Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams was shot down over Germany in December of 1942. While in a POW camp, he met and became friends with Lt. Richard Michael Codner. When they escaped from the camp where they were captives, they were hunted down and recaptured. As a punishment, both men were sent to Stalag Luft III near the town of Sagan in Poland. Considered escape-proof, Stalag Luft III was the most secure Allied airman POW camp in all of German-occupied Europe. The security-measures in place meant that it was virtually impossible to get out. There was barbed wire, fences, watchtowers, searchlights, armed guards, microphones buried into the ground to listen for tunnelling and a dusty grey topsoil and an annoyingly pale yellow sandy subsoil that made tunnelling (but more importantly, disposing of the excavated sand) especially hard.

The problem with the Germans’ logic was that they built the most secure camp to house their most troublesome and escape-hungry POWs. To them, this made sense. To the Allies, it merely served as a challenge to find out just how escape-proof this camp really was. And they put the Germans to test countless times. Tunnels were being dug out of the camp on an almost around-the-clock basis. But the problem was that the tunnels had to be aggravatingly long before they were the slightest bit of use to the POWs as a means of escaping.

Between the prisoner sleeping-quarters (large huts or barracks built on stilts about a foot off the ground) and the perimeter fences, were several yards of open ground. And between the perimeter fences and the safety of the woods were even more stretches of barren, empty, treeless, stumpless, hillless and bumpless ground. Even digging from the huts nearest to the fences, tunnels were well over a hundred or more feet long before they reached the trees, and the soil that had to be excavated for such a long tunnel was a constant headache to the POW escape-committee, a group of POWs whose job it was to fund and assist all escape-attempts within the camp.

Overcoming an Obstacle

Williams and Codner were quick to realise the problems associated with tunnelling out of the camp, but the problem was that this was the only way to escape. When Williams saw how hard and long a struggle it would be to dig a conventional tunnel from a building to the edge of the outlying woods, he knew he had to come up with a solution. When Codner mentioned an attempt by POWs to dig a tunnel right out in the middle of the ‘No-Man’s Land’ between the huts and the fences by digging the hole with their hands and hiding the sand in their pockets and covering the hole with bed-slats and sand, Williams was inspired to try and find a way to disguise a tunnel’s trapdoor out in the open, in plain view of the guards while the tunnel was dug underneath. Codner considered the idea stupid, it was impossible to disguise a trapdoor thoroughly enough that the “Goons” (the German sentries) wouldn’t notice it at once. But Williams persisted that there had to be a way.

He struck on the idea when he thought of the vaulting-horses that they used to have in school gymnasiums. Such horses, used for gymnastics, were about three feet high and about two feet wide at the base, hollow inside and with solid sides. Prisoners could put the vaulting-horse in the middle of the space between the huts and the fence and vault over it all day long while inside the horse and under the ground, a prisoner (transported inside the horse) could dig a tunnel. At the end of each tunnelling session, the prisoner climbed out of the tunnel, attached bags full of sand to the underside of the horse and held onto the inside of the horse while men carried it away to a safe place where the sand could be dispersed. The trapdoor to the tunnel would be covered with excess sand and the grey topsoil could be sprinkled on top. This would make the ground under the horse (once it had been carried away) look completely untampered with.

This still from the 1950 film “The Wooden Horse” shows a faithful reproduction of the actual horse used in the 1943 prison-camp escape

The third man in the escape, Oliver Philpot, a Canadian RAF pilot, acted as the ‘behind-the-scenes’ man during the escape. While Williams and Codner did most of the digging, Philpot helped with disposing of the excavated sand and organising the horse and the vaulters necessary to create the illusion of harmless exercise, to fool the German guards. In return for all his help, Codner and Williams promised him a spot in the escape.

Digging the Tunnel

Digging of the tunnel did not start right away. For the first few weeks all the vaulting-horse was used for was…vaulting. It was necessary to vault over the horse every single day for several weeks so that the German guards would get used to the sight of it…so used to it that they would pay absolutely no attention to it when it came time to dig the tunnel underneath it. There was always at least one vaulter in the group who acted as a total klutz. He would foul up his jumps and knock the horse over…deliberately…to show the Germans that there was nothing hidden inside. The Germans themselves took no chances – Within the first few days of the horse being built and used, it was scrutinised minutely by the guards to make sure there was nothing abnormal about it…which there wasn’t. It was a vaulting horse and that was all that it was meant to be. To the Germans, at least.

Once the Germans had gotten used to the sight of the horse, it was time to start digging. The plan was simple.

On every vaulting day, a man (either Williams or Codner) would hide inside the horse, holding onto the framework inside while men carried the horse out of the hut where it was stored. To carry the horse, they had a pair of long shafts which could be slid through two pairs of holes on the sides of the horse. Apart from making the horse easier to carry, the four holes also served as air-holes inside the horse.

The area where the tunnel was to start was marked by two pits in the ground which were eventually created by the constant scraping and landing of the feet of the vaulters over several weeks. By putting the horse between these two dents in the sand, it was easy to correctly access the tunnel mouth every single time.

Working alternatively, it took Williams and Codner four days to sink the shaft for the tunnel. It was to be two feet and six inches square and five feet deep. The shaft and the start of the tunnel were shored up with bricks and planks of wood. The trapdoor was set eighteen inches below the surface and was covered by a foot and a half of topsoil. This would prevent any German guard who walked over the top of the shaft to hear any hollow echoes underneath.

The first seven feet of the tunnel itself was shored up with wooden bedboards all around: bottom, roof and sides. This was a necessary precaution: the initial few feet of the tunnel were directly below the landing-area of the vaulters. Without sufficient shoring, the constant force of men landing on top of the tunnel would cause it to collapse. This was the only part of the tunnel, with the exception of the shaft, that was shored up. Because the tunnel was so near the surface, the weight of the sand above was not so great that cave-ins would be a likely possibility.

The conditions in the tunnel were terrible. Fresh air was almost nonexistent. The men dug with trowels or crude spades fashioned from food-cans. Their only source of light came from candles. They often worked naked or stripped to their waists because of the warmth in the tunnel, but also to prevent the German guards from seeing yellow subsoil (a telltale sign of a tunnel-in-progress) on their clothing. The tunnel was also extremely cramped. It averaged only two and a half feet by two and a half feet, giving the men barely any room to move. At the end of forty feet (a distance that took them eight weeks to dig), the men had almost given up. The lack of fresh air in the tunnel was chronic and the physical toll on both the tunnellers and the vaulters who covered for them, was beginning to show.

Tunnelling was not without risks. Cave-ins were a serious and constant problem. In the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III (In 1944), tunnels that were thirty feet below the ground required solid wood shoring and supports all the way along the tunnel to prevent cave-ins. This tunnel, just five feet below the surface with barely any shoring at all, was in just as much danger of a cave-in as one that was six times deeper under ground.

Miraculously, though, cave-ins on this tunnel were few. In fact there was only one major one to speak of, when Codner was in the tunnel. Some of the roof gave way, burying him alive. The cave-in was so severe that the surface of the sand was broken, opening a hole into the tunnel. A vaulter jumping over the horse spotted the hole and deliberately tripped when he landed, falling over the hole and covering it with his body. He laid there, pretending he’d twisted his ankle, while below, Codner managed to scoop away the fallen sand and shore up the cave-in with planks taken from the tunnel-shaft.

Eventually, though, the exertion of the digging and the sheer fetid nature of the air in the tunnel began to seriously effect the mens’ health. Williams was suffering severely from exhaustion brought on by the strain of the work and the lack of fresh oxygen. He was so ill that he was confined to the camp hospital for nearly a week. Although the tunnel didn’t progress very far in the meantime, his convalesence did give him a chance to pump other patients in the hospital for news about the outside world and what his chances were for escape.

Preparing for Escape

Provided your tunnel wasn’t discovered and it didn’t collapse, getting out of a prisoner-of-war camp in German-occupied Europe was pretty easy. The real problem in escaping was the struggle that many prisoners faced after getting beyond the wire. To get across occupied Europe, anyone who wished to travel anywhere at any time at all, required a whole armful of passes, letters, certificates, passports, identification-cards and travel-permits. All these things had to be forged by forgers inside the prison-camp for use by the potential escapee.

Apart from the paperwork, prisoners also required civilian clothing. All prisoners were put into camps wearing their military uniforms. To make it through occupied Europe, they had to have civilian clothes so that they didn’t stand out as the enemy. Tailors inside the camp would churn out suits, waistcoats, overcoats, shirts, jackets, shorts, jumpers and any other article of clothing that might be needed to dress a prisoner-of-war up as an everyday civilian. They used everything from bedsheets, blankets, curtains and any old and discarded uniforms that they could find, to make new clothing.

Escaping prisoners also needed cover-stories. All potential escapees had to clear every stage of their escape-plan with the ‘Escape Committee’, the group of prisoners whose job it was to oversee all escape-attempts within the camp. This wasn’t just a formality – the Escape Committee had control over the forged papers, money, passports, stockpiles of clothing, food, equipment, maps and anything else that an escapee might need during his bid to freedom. But he could only get these if the plan that he had for his escape was considered feasible.

All three escapees, Eric Williams, Richard Codner and Oliver Philpot, had their cover-stories that they would be French labourers. To this end, they were supplied with money, tools, working-class outfits and work-permits and passports in French. When they escaped, Oliver would go his own way while Williams and Codner would go as a pair, Codner spoke fluent French and so was able to liase with any friendly French workmen that they might find and through them, contact any local resistance-movements.

The Breakout

With the distance between the tunnel mouth and the safety of the forest around the camp greatly reduced by their ingenuity, Williams, Codner and Philpot finished their tunnel at the end of October. At six o’clock at night on the 29th of October, 1943, the three men made their escape.

Codner had been left in the tunnel all day to dig the last few feet towards the safety of the woods. He survived in the dark with the help of a candle and a length of metal pipe, which he stuck up through the soil every few feet to create air-holes to ventiliate the tunnel and compensate for the increasingly oxygen-deprived air below the ground.

Shortly after five o’clock, Codner and Williams, together with a third man, were transported towards the tunnel inside the horse, where Codner and Williams made their way down, with the third man left above ground to seal the entrance of the tunnel and obliterate all evidence of its existence. The three escapees stayed below ground in the interim period, preparing for the escape by continuing to dig and handing each person their allotted escape-materials – food, money, equipment, necessary identity and travel-papers and their outfits of civilian clothing.

At six o’clock, the tunnel was broken open, safely within the cover of the forest and the three men climbed out. With the guards in the camp concentrating on the prisoners within the wire, they paid no attention to the three men who were making their getaway outside the wire.

The Escape

Oliver Philpot, the Canadian, headed off alone. He thought that having a partner would slow him up. Williams and Codner stuck together, travelling as a pair of French labourers. Codner spoke fluent French and this helped them bridge any language-barriers and gave them a chance of contacting any local resistance movements. Williams, who spoke nothing but English, was advised by the members of the Escape Committee to just play dumb, or at best, to merely say the words: “Ich bin auslander, nicht verstehen”, or: “I am a foreigner. I don’t understand”.

Williams and Codner travelled by train, hopping from city to city, heading northwest. They saw this as the best way to put as much distance between themselves and the camp and travelled by rail as far as the Polish port city of Stettin. Here, they managed to contact French labourers and dockworkers who were part of the local underground movement. After interrogation to ensure that they were who they claimed to be, the French agreed to try and help.

It took several days, but eventually, Williams and Codner managed to secure passage (that is to say, they would be smuggled aboard) a ship leaving Stettin for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Although the two officers believed that this was a waste of time (Denmark being occupied by Germany), their contacts assured them that it would be easier to get to Sweden from Poland via Denmark than from Poland to Sweden directly, since the quantity of ship-traffic between Denmark and Sweden was much greater.

The journey was a very unplesant one. The ship was searched by S.S. officers with sniffer-dogs before it was allowed to leave port. The captain plied the Germans with schnapps to distract them from their work and peppered the dogs’ noses to prevent them from smelling his hidden ‘cargo’. To keep well out of the reach of the Germans, Williams and Codner were confined to the chain-locker in the ship’s bilge. Despite being provided with blankets, the journey was uncomfortable at best.

In Denmark, their initial plans for escaping to Sweden were foiled by resistance-activity. Acts of sabotage had caused an increase of guards around important parts of Copenhagen such as the docks, which made escape by a large ship impossible. Instead, Williams and Codner were taken to Sweden in a small fishing-boat by one of their resistance contacts.

By the next morning, the two men had reached the Swedish city of Goteburg where they managed to contact the British Consulate. To their surprise, Oliver Philpot had also made a successful escape to Goteburg, taking a train to Danzig and then a boat from there directly to Goteburg, beating his fellow escapees by a full week! After spending another week and a bit in Sweden, they were flown back to England and eventual safety.

Eric Williams died on Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1983. He was seventy-two.
Oliver Philpot died on the 6th of May, 1993. He was eighty.

Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find any birth and death records of Flight Lt. Richard Michael Clinton Codner.

Left to Right: Richard M. Codner, Eric Williams, Oliver Philpot