PREVIEW: ORDERS, DECORATIONS, MEDALS AND MILITARIA: 9 OCTOBER

One of the few officer P.O.W.s to make a successful escape from Colditz, Commander W. L. ‘Billie’ Stephens, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, went on to become a Deputy Lieutenant and High Sheriff of Co. Down, a Commissioner of Belfast Harbour and a Chairman of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board.

A handsome, fair-haired officer, with piercing blue eyes and Nelsonian nose, “he was a daredevil, and his main aim appeared to be to force his way into the German area of the camp and then hack his way out with a metaphorical cutlass”, wrote Major P. R. ‘Pat’ Reid, M.B.E., M.C., in The Colditz Story.

As Stephens’ Distinguished Service Cross and Bar group of seven comes to auction in this 9 October sale, the daring exploits during the amphibious attack on the Normandie dry dock in 1942 that eventually landed him at Colditz, and the story of his ‘home run’, come under the spotlight.

William Lawson Stephens (1911-97) was born in Holywood, Northern Ireland, the scion of a prominent Ulster family, and was educated at Shrewsbury before joining the family firm of shippers and timber merchants. Also a pre-war member of the ‘Wavy Navy’, in which he was appointed a Midshipman in April 1930, at H.M.S. Caroline, the Belfast base, he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant by the renewal of hostilities in September 1939, when he was posted to Hornet, the Coastal Forces base at Gosport.

By the time Combined Operations started to plan its daring raid against the Normandie dry-dock at St. Nazaire, Stephens had transferred to St. Christopher, the Coastal Forces base at Fort William, and it was from here, in early 1942, in the acting rank of Lieutenant-Commander, that he was ordered south to take up appointment as C.O. of M.Ls for the forthcoming enterprise, code named Operation ‘Chariot’.

‘It looked just like the rockets we used to fire on Guy Fawkes’ night’

On the night of 27-28 March 1942, he was embarked with his crew of 17 men in Motor Launch 192, together with Captain M. C. ‘Micky’ Burn, K.R.R.C., and 14 men of No. 6 Troop, No. 2 Commando.

As Stephens’ memoir recalled, they soon came under fire:

“I think it was a 40mm. In any case it was a tracer, a beautiful bright red colour and as it sailed towards us I couldn’t imagine that if it hit us it was going to harm us. It looked just like the rockets we used to fire on Guy Fawkes’ night in the days before the War.”

Continuing to make their way upriver, he saw a Morse lamp flickering from the M.G.B. ahead in an attempt to bluff the enemy into thinking that they were a German convoy. For a moment it seemed to work, but then the searchlights came on again and the guns started up ‘in real earnest’. Returning fire, they continued on course to their objective, about a mile and a half upstream, protected only by proceeding in the lea of the destroyer Campbeltown.

“Campbeltown was hit again and again and anything which missed her astern was passing mighty close to us! No praise can be too high for our gunners; I don’t mean particularly those in my boat, but all our gunners. They were magnificent and continued to fire quickly and with accuracy, and when one was killed or wounded, another stepped in, took his place and continued.”

Although hit several times, they remained seaworthy until two point-blank shots threw the boat hard-a-port as they came alongside the Old Mole. This allowed a few Commandos to climb up the wall and get ashore.

“My signalman also managed to get ashore, the idea being that we should put a line across to him and make fast. Unfortunately he was killed before he could do this and the boat, having hit the wall of the Mole very hard, immediately rebounded some 15 feet and we were left with neither engines nor steering and all the while being subjected to point-blank fire from a 20mm. gun ashore.”

The damage being ‘frightful’, they abandoned ship to continue upstream on the shore and rejoin their forces. Standing up in the bows before diving into the water, Stephens took out his flask for a last ‘quick one’ and inspected his surroundings.

“The scene was indescribable. We were burning furiously as were two other boats astern of us a little further out in the river. It was a very sad sight. Tracer was still flying in all directions and the whole scene was brilliantly illuminated by searchlights. After a very long pull at my flask (little did I realise when I should next taste whisky), I slid over the bows on a line and into the water and my God! It was cold!”

With the current carrying him fast downstream away from any possible landing place, he kicked off his flying boots – “something I was to regret bitterly later” – and swam hard for shore. He eventually reached a small slipway and lay there exhausted.

Only one of his men had not made it and so Stephens and the rest headed to rejoin their own forces. Unarmed and marching in threes, they were soon spotted and ran to hide, but were caught.

After facing ‘‘three of the enemy facing us in a very menacing way with their machine-guns at the ready’’, they were marched off to temporary incarceration at the port’s submarine pens, under blows from a German soldier’s rifle butt.

He climbed onto the carriage’s roof and clung on for dear life

Stephens’ first escape bid was from the P.O.W. camp at Marlag in early June 1942, but he was recaptured and put in the cells for a week, before being moved to Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf, where conditions were very poor, and thence, in early September, to Oflag IVC (Colditz), but not before launching a daring escape while en route by rail to his new destination.

Unseen by his guards, he escaped via a lavatory window, climbed onto the carriage’s roof and clung on for dear life until the train slowed as it approached a station. Jumping down to the carriage’s rear-footplate before running off over the tracks to the nearest cover, he climbed back on to the roof of another train, bound for Chemnitz, an hour later.

He was so cold by the time the train reached its destination he could barely move and although he tried to flee, he was soon grounded by “a large Hun on top of me”.

Arriving at Colditz a day or two later, and after having spent a week in the solitary for his latest escapade, Stephens quickly befriended another recent arrival, Major R. B. ‘Ronnie’ Litterdale, K.R.R.C., who had been captured at Calais.

The pair soon came up with an escape idea: squeezing through the kitchen window bars of the Kommandantur Building. The main challenge was avoiding the sentries as they crawled over the roof of a lean-to building below the window before dropping eight feet to the ground and crossing the road.

The whole area was brilliantly floodlit, but Litterdale was convinced that guards would never think of anyone trying such an escapade and so would not be alert.

“We used to take it in turns to watch them at nights and we found they spent most of their time stamping their feet to keep warm and furtively lighting cigarettes.”

The Escape Committee approved the plan after adding Captain P. R. “Pat’ Reid, R.A.S.C. – a skilled locksmith – and Flight Lieutenant H. D. “Hank’ Wardle, R.C.A.F to the team.

Armed with false papers and adopting the identities of French workmen returning home on leave by train, they “decided to go flat out to make Switzerland in three or four days”.

An ingenious plan involving a camp orchestra conducted by Douglas Bader boosted their chances. “Bader had a clear view of the sentry for the whole of his beat. The idea was to use the music for signalling: when they stopped playing it meant the escapers could cross his path,” Reid wrote later in his book.

“The orchestra was playing as arranged, but each time I started across on the cessation of the music, it started again. Then I heard German voices. It was an off duty officer on his rounds. Suspicious, he was questioning the sentry. Five minutes later the music stopped again, but this time I was caught napping, and dared not risk a late dash. I waited a long time and the music did not begin again. Obviously things had gone wrong for the orchestra. I decided to wait an hour, to let suspicions die down.

“In the hope that we could hide in that time from any passing Goon, I tried the handle of the door in the angle of the wall where we were hiding. It opened, and we entered warily. It was pitch-black inside. We went through a second door and took refuge in a room which seemed to contain no more than rubbish.”

There they had to strip naked to slide through an air-vent before bending back a bar and squeezing through the gap

At the appointed time, they crept out again, and moved to the end of the wall as the sentry’s footsteps indicated that he was turning on his beat. Tiptoeing across the pathway with their socks over their shoes, they hid in a small shrubbery near the entrance to the Kommandantur.

When, after an hour, Reid had failed to unlock the door through which they planned to escape, they felt their way along a tunnel near where they had been hiding they came to a cellar.

There they had to strip naked to slide through an air-vent before bending back a bar and squeezing through the gap, eventually escaping over the boundary wall having used sheets tied together to negotiate the moat wall first. The escape had taken all night.

The daring breakout led the Gestapo to publish a ‘wanted poster’ for the four of them several days later, but by then the team, split into two pairs, had already made good their escape.

Stephens and Litterdale walked into the nearby town of Rochlitz, reaching it at 0730 hours dressed in civilian clothes and carrying attaché cases. That evening they left the train for Chemnitz, arriving at 0920 hours, and then bought tickets for Stuttgart. Successfully negotiating questions from the railway police, they left 20 minutes later, changing at Hof and later catching the Danzig express for Nurenberg, where they slept in the station restaurant before taking the early fast train for Stuttgart.

“We had been told by a Polish officer in the camp that Stuttgart main station was strictly controlled, and to avoid booking from there to the frontier, so we went by train to the suburb of Esslingden, where we travelled by electric train to Plockingen, Reutlingen and Tubingen. From Tubingen we went to Tuttlingen. We took the wrong road out of Tuttlingen and had to spend the night of 16-17 October in a wood 6 k.m. S.E. of the town.”

Over the next two to three days, they made their way cross country, with the help of a small map and home-made compass. At one point they managed to convince a sentry that they had lost their way to Singen station. At another, they realised they really had lost their way as they approached the frontier. And when they finally approached it, they had to get past the challenge of a frontier sentry, before hiding until the moon went down so that they could cross to Switzerland in darkness.

Reid and Wardle had also made Switzerland the previous evening.

Stephens spent a period of special service in Switzerland and did not head home via France and Spain until the end of 1943. In common with many fellow escapers, he was again imprisoned on crossing the Pyrenees into Spain, but using his by now well-honed guile, he offered his wrist watch to a guard for a telephone call to the British Embassy in Madrid and was smuggled out in the boot of a large American car to Gibraltar and from there by air to the U.K., where he landed on 11 July 1944.

His final wartime appointment was as the Naval Representative in the British Delegation to the Black Sea port of Odessa, to witness the highly controversial return of unwilling Cossack P.O.Ws to the Soviets – an experience that left him deeply shocked.

Awarded ‘For great gallantry, daring and skill in the attack on the German naval base at St. Nazaire’, Stephens received his D.S.C. and Bar from H.M. the King at a special investiture held in the Great Hall, Stormont in July 1945, on which same occasion his mother, Mrs. Lilian Stephens, was invested with the M.B.E. Then, at the end of hostilities, he returned to Switzerland to marry Chouchou de Meyer, whom he had met there during the War.

As well as Stephens’ DSC (1942) and Bar (1943), his group of seven consignment includes his initialled cigarette case, and original documents including unique identity passes forged at Colditz.

An extremely fine lot, the estimate is £40,000-50,000.