Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
In 1942 two British Pows made a daring escape from Stalag XXA in Poland. After a hazardous 250-mile journey across Germany they had reached the Swiss border when one was captured. The other was crossing the frontier but then made a selfless decision that
My mission to find grave and honour a hero
ved wife Peggy. Antony was the son well-to-do family and had graduated h a first in Modern Languages from ord. He was on a reconnaissance sion in Amiens, France, in 1940 when was captured. hey both found themselves in Stalag A in Thorn, Poland, and struck up a ndship. Fred had laughed about how ony’s mastery of German slang ned him the nickname “Professor”. nd while they were very different, y had one thing in common – their ger to escape. So they spent two s developing a meticulous plan.
The idea was for them to try to pass as German businessmen once outside the camp and get to the Swiss border. So Antony an teaching Fred German... but there a flaw in the plan.
Day by day, week by week, the pieces he jigsaw slotted into place. But by -June 1942, there was still one that n’t fit properly,” the book reveals. Fred’s German. During those 15 nths of blood, sweat and tears, he had ome highly proficient in both vocabry and grammar. But, despite ony’s best efforts, his accent was poor. Fred could not suppress his strong Nottinghamshire vowels. Any native German hearing Fred might do a double take and wonder where he came from.”
So they eventually came up with a solution. “It was decided Fred would play the part of a German-speaking Hungarian,” the books says.
“They would just have to pray any German person he spoke to had never gone on holiday to Budapest.”
For the next part of the plan, Fred became editor of the camp newspaper to access a typewriter with German characters and forge ID cards. Then they stole letterheaded paper a n d wrote letters claiming to be two marketing men.
The final pieces were two suits, made by members of the Polish resistance. With the group’s help, the pair walked out of a hole cut in the fence of Stalag XXA in August 1942 and dashed to the nearest train station.
They then zig-zagged across Poland and Germany towards the Swiss border, a journey full of close shaves. On the train, they gave Heil Hitler salutes to a carriage full of German soldiers on leave and only barely avoided detection in Berlin after a suspicious granny reported them to a Gestapo detective. Finally, they made it to the banks of Lake Constance.
But after Antony was waved through by the border guards, Fred was stopped, as his ID didn’t look quite right. Antony came back, hoping his fluent German could help but it was too late. Arrested at gunpoint, they were taken to Gestapo headquarters, beaten and held for days without food before being separated. “For my dad, it had been his soldier’s duty to escape but it was also about his deep love to get back to my mother,” says Steve, of Horton Heath, Hants. “I never knew the scale of what he and Antony attempted, and the cost it had.”
Fred was taken to Stalag 383 in Bavaria. He made another escape but didn’t get as close as in 1942. But he did survive the war and got home to Peggy. He later heard of Antony’s fate in a letter from Antony’s mother, Dorothy. It read: “My son, or ‘The Professor’ from Stalag XXA, perished on his way home on one of those torture marches from Poland.
“I believe you were the co-escapee with my son to the Swiss border... and from what I have heard he made the fatal mistake of returning to help you at the last moment. And now he is gone, perished miserably and unnecessarily.”
Steve, a retired Navy commander, has since discovered Antony had tried in vain to escape again.
“He tried to escape a further eight times. One time he and another prisoner managed to board a ship due to leave Gdansk but they were betrayed by an Italian sailor.”
As the German army collapsed, camp guards began the Forced March in freezing temperatures, a brutal and needless crime that killed an estimated 100,000 Pows.
Stricken with dysentery and weak from sharing his food with other prisoners, Antony died after being made to march into the icy waters of the Elbe, ANTONY’S grave was lost for almost 70 years until Steve discovered dad Fred’s letters and set out to find it.
After hearing Antony died during the Forced March of 1945, he scoured the National Archives and came across an account of the march by Staff Sergeant Thomas Aitken. It said Antony had died at Kaltenhof, Lower Saxony.
Steve tracked down Antony’s niece, Barbara Willoughby-thomas, who flew over from Australia to meet him in Germany. And after making an appeal for witnesses in the local paper, they found the barn where
Antony died.
Steve then had to convince the
MOD. He says: “I was so lucky I had found the man who had found the body, we’d had the documentation and I put together a paper trail that was convincing.”
In July 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the marches, Steve heard Antony’s unmarked grave would be rededicated. “It felt like I had finally done something which needed to be done,” he said.
Steve has since found the grave of Private GH Thompson, who died on the same march, and is planning to track down the remaining men. aged 27. Fred built a career at the family’s builders’ merchant and became Mayor of Grantham, Lincs, in 1957. He knew Margaret Thatcher and her father Alf Roberts, and died in 1990, aged 75.
“My father didn’t share stories of the war,” says Steve. “I knew it was difficult for him, for all the men of that generation to talk about. I was always proud of my father but finding out the whole story has given me a huge admiration for what he did.”
Steve remembers one day in 1986 when Fred circled the name of a modern language prize in the guide for his grandson’s school: “Antony Coulthard”.
He said only: “It’s an old friend from the war.”
Now, Steve knows just how much that friend meant to his father – and to him.
Buy The Soldier Who Came Back in hardback for £11.99 plus P&P, saving £5 on the RRP of £16.99, by calling 0845 143 0001 or visiting mirrorbooks.co.uk