Charles Clarke was in the camp that gave us The Great Escape. Since then, he's been a champion of ex-POWs and a campaigner for Bomber Command. Richard Nye meets the Richmond veteran
Truth, to paraphrase Aeschylus, is always the first casualty of war. Little wonder then that so many war films are, if not quite mendacious, then tinged with a subtly deceptive hue.
It’s 70 years since 76 Allied prisoners-of-war tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III near Zagan, now in Poland, en route to what for most would prove a brief taste of freedom – and immortality on the big screen. The Great Escape: Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner; Oxford accents and stiff upper lips; cavalier heroics and derring-do.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t like that at all. Ask Charles Clarke – or Air Commodore Charles Clarke OBE, to give him rank and recognition – Richmond’s nonagenarian survivor of Stalag Luft III. Imprisoned in 1944, the 17-year-old from 619 Squadron, Bomber Command was among those who stayed behind while the real-life Attenboroughs and McQueens made their escape. As such, he knew the men behind the myth and experienced the brutal postscript to an adventure gone wrong.
“You read so much rubbish about the escape,” reflects Charles, shuttling back and forth across a drawing room awash with reminders of his wartime past. “If all the people who subsequently claimed to have been involved had really been there, the camp wouldn’t have been big enough to hold them!
“The film was very boy scoutish. To hear the accents, you’d think that all POWs were officers, when actually 75% of them were not. Still, without the film, who would remember the 50 who died?”
Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough in the Great Escape, a far cry from reality. Image Credit: Everett Collection/REX
Apart, that is, from those like Charles himself who were there when the camp commandant gave them the news: 73 of the escapees had been recaptured, 50 of them shot – murdered, if you will – by order of Berlin.
“Things were different at the camp after that,” muses Charles. “Until then the Germans had pretty much played it by the book. This was the first time they’d sunk to that level.”
Seven decades have failed to dim his recollections, or to curb his prolific storytelling powers. He proceeds by anecdote: every question is answered by reference to some event or acquaintance, so that his responses have a crablike quality, moving sideways towards their goal. They are also liberally sprinkled with a stealthy, deadpan irony that tends to catch one unawares.
“I should explain that I was a highly trained parachutist,” he informs me, reflecting on the night his Lancaster was shot down. “I had once jumped off a very tall ladder into a bale of straw.”
His frame of reference is wide indeed, encompassing not merely World War II, but an RAF career that continued until 1978 – to say nothing of his distinguished contributions since then. President of the Royal Air Forces ex-Prisoners of War Association and Chairman of the Bomber Command Association, he remains, at 90, much in demand as a speaker.
Last night he was with other veterans and the Prime Minister at Downing Street, and this month he is to receive an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Soldiering On Through Life Trust, which fosters pride in the British Armed Forces by honouring those deserving special recognition.
“The Trust does such a fantastic job,” says Charles. “People don’t realise just how much they put into it.”
It was 18 operations into his RAF career – which had already included raids on Berlin, Stuttgart and Leipzig – that Charles Clarke’s elaborate parachute training was called into play. Returning from Schweinfurt, in Bavaria, his plane met a German fighter and came down in the snow. Three of the crew were killed, the rest scattered.
“I set off to look for help, but kept falling into snowdrifts. I thought I would die out there and be found in the spring. There were these footprints too, which I attributed to wolves. Actually they were from mountain goats, but I didn’t discover that for another 10 years. After a couple of days, I came down from the mountains to a river and the Germans were there. While I was deciding what to do, they decided that my war was over.”
After a short time in Frankfurt, where some of the prison guards were later prosecuted for overheating the cells, Charles found himself in Stalag Luft III. Then, early in 1945, with the outcome of the war inevitable and the Russians closing in from the east, the Germans made a desperate decision: Allied POWs would be moved back deep into Germany, thereby delaying their liberation.
The motives for this are disputed. What is certain, however, is that more than 80,000 prisoners were forced to trudge west across the wintry wastes of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany, many succumbing to starvation and death. Stalag Luft III was among the camps to be abandoned. It was January 28, it was 2am and it was almost -30°C. Welcome to what history would come to record as Europe’s very own Long March.
“It was the coldest winter in living memory and we walked the first 36 hours without shelter. Even when we did stop, in a barn, you couldn’t take your boots off without getting frostbite. When we reached Germany they shoved us into cattle trucks for four days, with just one bucket between us. We were worried sick about the Allied bombing. Then we got to a camp, but the previous occupants had smashed it up, so there was no shelter.”
What there was, however, was dysentery. Charles caught it and passed out. Eventually the camp was shot up by the Allies and the prisoners were moved again, across the Elbe towards typhoid-ridden Lubeck. Finally, in a farm outside the city, they were liberated by the Allies. Spring dawned late and lovely: the ordeal had lasted three months.
“The uncertainty was the worst bit; not knowing for all that time what would happen to us,” recalls Charles. “We really thought the Germans might turn on us.”
This month the Air Commodore will be back in Zagan for the anniversary of the real-life escape. He often returns and, until recently, took part in reconstructions of the Long March. Age has not withered his respect for the memory of the past.
The beautiful, long-awaited memorial to Bomber Command in London’s Green Park, opened by HM The Queen in 2012, is another project with his imprint upon it. The Chairman of the Bomber Command Association remains indignant at the postwar ostracism of the RAF’s heavyweight arm; the shameless political expedience that saw its chief, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, shuffled quietly to the side of the stage. Even so, he concedes, the clouds of controversy had a silver lining.
“If we’d got the memorial in 1945, people would have forgotten us by now. In a way, the delay helped to perpetuate the memory of what we did.”
Does he have any qualms about the bombing of German cities that so set liberal consciences aquiver?
“None at all,” he insists. “And I get cross with those who even question it. People wring their hands about Dresden, for example, but at least we were aiming at a target – not like the German V2s in London. Nor, actually, was it Harris’s decision to bomb, so why did he get all the opprobrium? He was single-minded, certainly, but somebody had to be.
“I know that politicians have difficult decisions to make, but it’s regrettable that Churchill should have distanced himself from the bombing and left Harris to carry the can. Right up to the eleventh hour he was praising us!”
With Germany, Charles long ago made his peace, no deeply embedded antipathy lingering on to pollute a happy life of service and, for 65 years, marriage to his late wife, Eileen.
“No, I’ve had no problems with Germans for years. I used to meet some who were scared to come to England for fear of anti-German sentiment, but I always found that incredible.
“Mind you,” he adds, indulging his taste for poker-faced mischief, “whenever I’ve been over there – and I go a lot – I’ve never met anyone who was in the SS. No one. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
It is, of course, an earlier war to his that is dominating debate in 2014: the one fought to end all others; but which, having failed spectacularly so to do, left Charles and his generation to star in the explosive sequel. There was to be no great escape from the cul-de-sac of the interwar years; just a long march into the abyss. How does Charles think we should commemorate the centenary of 1914?
“Look, you can’t rewrite history. We fought the battles, we should honour the men. Just so long as we don’t gloat.”
A diplomatic response. And then, as I’m about to leave, he dons another of his hats: President of the Air Training Corps, Middlesex Wing. Each year, he explains, the organisation presents a trophy to its most promising cadet.
“And you know,” he announces with unaffected humility, “I’m always so impressed by the candidates. They almost give me an inferiority complex.”
Forget the Kaiser and the Führer; never mind The Great Escape and Long March. At the vernal age of 90, Charles Clarke has the future on his mind.
You can find out more about the Soldiering On Trust Awards on their website
To contribute to the ongoing Bomber Command Memorial fund, contact the Bomber Command Association at the RAF Museum, Hendon. Tel: (020) 8358 6401
