Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

52 subversion demanded organisation and discipline to hide tunnels and maintain networks of ‘stooges’ to monitor the movements of guards, known universally as ‘goons’. Many of these ingredients of camp life remained during Keith’s imprisonment. But there were many differences, partly because the war was clearly coming to an end, making escape seem less urgent and even less advisable into a landscape under intense attack from the air and imminent turmoil from the movement of great armies from both east and west. Equally important was the recent history of Stalag Luft III, its memorable escapes by ingenious tunnellers soon celebrated in books turned into movies, starting in 1950 with Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse . Originally for captured RAF officers, by 1944 the camp had almost 11,000 inmates. Although three-quarters were American, none participated in the real events that inspired the movie version of Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape , starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Charles Bronson. The mass breakout that led Hitler to order the execution of 50 of 73 recaptured escapees had occurred on the night of 24/25 March. By the time Keith arrived, there was no threat of renewed atrocities because the likely Allied victory promised swift retribution. The location had also changed. A brief pause to be photographed on arrival allowed Pearson to identify the site of the mass escape as a ‘flat, sandy, desolate looking place in a pine forest.’ But soon he, Keith and the others were marched five kilometres to the section known as Belaria ‘atop a hill with a pleasant outlook’: Keith and I entered it in mid-summer. The inmates were sun- tanned, many wearing only shorts as they pursued various activities and there were thriving vegetable gardens. At first glance it could have been a holiday camp. The reality of course proved different. * * * * * * * The absence from Docking’s account of so many details recorded at the time by Keith doesn’t mean the two were separated on their eastward journey. On arrival at Belaria, both were given special rations to offset their weakness. Prescribing ‘10 days Vitamin “B” injection’ for Keith, a German doctor advised him ‘to leave flak under left eye until arrive back in England.’ That consultation and the recommendation that he rest for five days, because of discomfort ‘caused through flak in right leg and lack of vitamins’, is further evidence he’d suffered more in the splashdown on 13 June than Docking realised – or remembered 55 years after the Prisoner of War