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A “POW Rolex” Recalls the
Great Escape
Part 2
Clive Nutting’s POW
Stalag Luft III Watch” - lot 311
A Treasure of Unpublished
POW Mementoes
During his five-year
captivity, Clive “Nobby” Nutting kept a war log filled with drawings,
cartoons and photographs depicting life in World War II’s most famous
prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag Luft III — scene of the Great Escape.
He starts his scrapbook
book with a coloured drawing that sums up his time in action prior to his
capture on March 28, 1940, south of Dunkirk. It shows him clinging
desperately to a damaged telegraph pole, trying to establish
communications as bombs and shells rain down on a battle-torn landscape. A
“Stuka” dive-bomber hovers menacingly overhead.
Nutting had joined the
Royal Corps of Signals — the army’s communications engineers — in 1935, as
a part-time soldier in the reservist Territorial Army.
By April 1940, Corporal
Nutting was in France with the 44th Territorial division, part
of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) guarding the border with Belgium.
On March 10, the Germans attacked, splitting the French armies, encircling
the BEF, and forcing it in a tighter pocket around Dunkirk — the only port
of evacuation.
On March 28, the Germans
overwhelmed Nutting’s rearguard position near Cassel, a strategic
communications centre. That night, the remnants of his 44th
division managed to slip away. Some were among the 340,000 British and
French troops evacuated from Dunkirk.
A series of official
letters evokes the agony that Clive Nutting’s parents must have felt when
they discovered their son hadn’t got back from Dunkirk. First he’s posted
missing, and it’s not until September 12, 1940 that they know he’s a
prisoner-of-war.
We next see Nutting in a
press photograph published in an American men’s magazine. He’s a haggard
and exhausted prisoner on a cold, hungry march through Belgium and Germany
to captivity. German soldiers hold their rifles at the ready. A
contemporary handwritten account among his mementoes speaks of potato
fields being stripped bare as the prisoners march over them, and of POWs
being machine-gunned as they steal milk from a cow.
From June to September
1940, Nutting is incarcerated at Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf. Then he’s moved
to Stalag Luft I at Bart on the Baltic, where he stays until 1942. He
spent from 1942 to 1945 at Stalag Luft III in Upper Silesia, where he was
the camp shoemaker. At the end of January, he was evacuated ahead of the
advancing Russians across Germany to Westertimke on the North Sea, and
spent the remaining few weeks of his captivity at the Milag Nord camp for
captured merchant seamen.
The drawings and
watercolours of camp life are typical of the British serviceman’s humour-in-adversity:
we see Nutting distilling 100-octane hooch from marmalade, or wondering
whether to make potato substitute from bread or bread substitute from
potatoes. One accomplished artist contributed a cartoon of a young man
hurrying upstairs, a packet of ice-cream in one hand and dragging a
scantily clad lady in the other, and urging: “Hurry darling! Before it
gets soft!” But there’s also a grimly detailed pencil drawing of a camp
watchtower, and series of watercolours of the forced march out of Stalag
Luft III in midwinter 1945. First the POWs struggle through snow dragging
a sled. Then the snow melts and they have to carry their loads. A dramatic
drawing records an attack by a RAF Mosquito aircraft on February 22, 1945.
Apart from the unpublished
collection of POW art, there are a number of photographs with Nutting and
his fellow POWs behind barbed wire, standing next to their huts or at work
mending shoes. Nutting was in a way better off than many POWs. His job as
cobbler kept him occupied. In wartime, your boots are your best friends,
gold to the prisoners and their guards alike. He was undoubtedly popular,
judging from the contributions to his scrapbook, and his evident sense of
humour — natural in a Londoner — would have helped keep up the morale.
The Great Escape — A Game
Turned to Tragedy
Of all Clive Nutting’s mementoes of
prisoner-of-war life, none is more poignant than an illustrated poem
depicting the tragic escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944.
The verse was penned by an Australian
airman when the camp learned that the Nazis had murdered 50 of the
escapers. Accompanied by a detailed drawing of the tunnel beneath the
camp, it expresses the outrage and defiance of the POWs in typical Aussie
style.
“…Fifty fine fellows
With good stout intentions
Trusting no doubt in the Geneva Conventions
Reckoning not with he mind of the Hun
Fifty fine fellows — and now there are none.
“Will we forget — or
pardon this? Might we?
I’ll wager a bet — ‘Not bloody likely!’”
What became known as the Great Escape was
an ambitious plot launched in early 1943 to get up to 250 POWs out of
Stalag Luft III through tunnels beneath the wire. The mass breakout was
designed to tie up as much of the German resources as possible in hunting
the escapers.
Masterminded by Squadron Leader Roger
Bushell, a South African, it quickly grew to a massive undertaking,
employing more than 500 of the camp’s artisans in the production of escape
equipment — civilian clothes, German uniforms, compasses, rations and
hundreds of forged documents and maps.
The escape organisation built, stole or
extorted tools, ventilation and lighting equipment for the tunnel
engineers. The operation, under the noses of the Germans, required
elaborate security and a constant monitoring of guards and patrols.
As a shoemaker with well-equipped workshops
at his disposal, a specialist in signals and an experienced “Kriegie”
(POW), Nutting was part of the escape organisation from the start, making
civilian belts, shoes and briefcases for the escapers out of leather
stolen from his German clients.
Nutting had already been involved in the
ingenious “Wooden Horse” escape from Stalag Luft III in the summer of
1943. The POWs had started a tunnel from beneath a vaulting horse built
out of Red Cross cases. Every day they carried the horse, with a man
hidden inside it to the same spot in the prison compound near the
perimeter wire. While the prisoners vaulted, the man inside dug the
tunnel. Nutting was one of the “penguins” who dispersed the earth dug out
of the tunnel by dropping it out of bags inside his trousers. The three
escapers — F/Lt Eric Williams (who wrote a book about the escape), Lt
Michael Codner and F/Lt Oliver Philpot got home via Sweden.
After the war, Nutting acted as consultant
for both the 1950 Wooden Horse movie and the Great Escape of
1963.
The Wooden Horse
(1950)
Cast: Leo Genn ; David Tomlinson ; Anthony Steel ; David Greene ;
Peter Burton.
The Great Escape
(1963)
Cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James
Donald,
Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, and James Coburn.
The real Great Escape started with the
launch of three tunnels, “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry,” each starting in a
barrack hut, through the concrete foundations of the stove or shower
because the huts themselves were elevated on stilts. “Tom” was discovered,
and “Dick,” abandoned and used for hiding escape kits. All energies were
concentrated on “Harry,” dug 10 metres deep to avoid German tunnelling
detectors and more than 100 metres long to come out in the pine forest
beyond the wire.
The breakout through Harry was scheduled
for the moonless night of March 24, 1944. It started with the
disappointment at seeing the tunnel emerge well short of the pine forest
in an open snow-covered area patrolled by German sentries. Having to wait
for the sentries to pass, a power blackout and tunnel collapses slowed the
throughput to barely a dozen men an hour instead of the planned one a
minute.
By dawn 76 POWs had got out. The next man
emerged from the tunnel under the feet of the sentry.
All but three of the 76 were recaptured.
Hitler was so furious at the breakout that he ordered them all shot.
Eventually, Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and responsible for the
prisoners, persuaded him to limit the number to more than half. Thus 50
prisoners of war were handed over to the Gestapo and killed.
For the British, this had started out as a
game, as the verse commemorating the tragedy makes clear:
“Bloody fine fellows
To prove this was done
Set out for freedom,
And thought it was fun.”
That the Germans should not play the game
by the rules — in this case the Geneva Conventions — was deeply shocking
to the British, who made great efforts to bring the perpetrators to
justice after the war. The Royal Air Force Special Branch managed to track
down 18 of the murderers: 14 were sentenced to death and one escaped the
gallows by committing suicide.
The killing of the recaptured POWs was
embarrassing to the Luftwaffe, which had meticulously respected the
Geneva Conventions in the treatment of their British prisoners, mindful of
the fact that many of their downed airmen were in British camps. As a
gesture, the Luftwaffe allowed the Stalag Luft III POWs to build a
memorial to their murdered comrades.
Nutting’s scrapbook contains a sensitively
drawn post-card of the fine memorial to the 50 airmen, which still stands
at the camp site, now in Zagan, part of Poland.
Alan Downing
Antiquorum is proud to offer a second
“POW Rolex” recalling the Great Escape. The Rolex of Major R. J.
Henderson. R. J. Henderson, a Major in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was
a prisoner at Stalag Luft III, and is cited in the list of camp prisoners.
As such, he also took advantage of Rolex’s offer to furnish watches gratis
during the war.
Major R. J. Henderson’s
POW Stalag Luft III Watch
: Lot 312
Lot 312 “Major R. J. Henderson’s POW Stalag
Luft III Watch
Ref. 3525, So-Called Stainless Steel
“Monoblocco”
Rolex, “Oyster Chronograph, (Anti)magnetic”,
case No. 128409, Ref. 3525. Made circa 1940.
Very fine and rare, water-resistant,
stainless steel gentleman`s wristwatch with black dial, round button
chronograph, registers and a stainless steel Rolex buckle.
C. Two-body, polished, inclined bezel,
downturned lugs, dedicated screw-down back. D. Black with applied gold
baton indexes and Arabic 6 and 12, sunk guilloché subsidiary dials for the
seconds and 30-minute register, outer minute/seconds and 1/5th seconds
divisions with Arabic five-minute markers. Yellow gold “feuille” hands.
M. Cal. 13’’’, rhodium-plated, 17 jewels,
straight-line lever escapement, monometallic balance, Breguet balance
spring, index regulator.
Dial, case and movement signed.
Diam. 35 mm. Thickness 13 mm.
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