Louis Massey: The Great Escape

At 11.15 am on Sunday 3 September 1939 the whole country were huddled around their radios waiting to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who gave a 5 minute broadcast on the BBC Home Service.

He said: ‘I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany’.

Thus War was declared on Nazi Germany and the Second World War began.

The following day the troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), began to move to France and Belgium. Over several months they dug in and waited. Then on the 10 May 1940 the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries. The battle raged with the Germans getting the upper hand, and on the night of 16/17 May the BEF were ordered to begin a retreat to Dunkirk. 

 

BEF troops being evacuated from Dunkirk (Unknown photographer)

The Navy and a flotilla of 850 small boats rescued 225,000 British and 125,000 French troops from the Dunkirk beaches in Operation Dynamo which lasted from 26 May to 4 June. 

As you can see, some of the troops waded up to their necks through the sea to get on to the ships.

 

Dunkirk evacuation (Bert Hardy, Getty Images)

Four Divisions were ordered to conduct a rear-guard operation with the advancing German troops to allow the retreat of the other units.

From this overall picture we now concentrate on the experience of one man, Louis Massey.

The Massey family lived at No.15 Burrard Road in West Hampstead. He had been born in St John’s Wood in 1907, the son of a coachman. As horses gave way to automobiles, Louis worked as a mechanical fitter in the motor trade, and with outbreak of War he joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a driver. He was in a unit trying to hold back the Germans when he was wounded in the arm and captured near Boulogne. Despite this, when there were too many casualties to fit in the ambulance, Louis volunteered to drive three injured men in a car which the Germans had commandeered. He was told to follow the ambulance to hospital. When the speeding ambulance outdistanced him, he took a chance and turned off and drove south hoping to reach the Allied lines. But the plan failed, and Louis was re-captured two weeks later at Le Touquet.

He was sent to the German prison of war camp Stalag XXA in Winduga, Poland. Here he and two other prisoners planned an escape. They stored some food and a map. Early on the morning of 2 December 1940 they got out of a window in the guard’s mess hut, crawled under the wire fence and got away. They trekked an astonishing 1,600 miles through bitter cold snow and ice across five countries, travelling by night to arrive in Russia. People shared food with the soldiers and hid them from the Nazis. Otherwise, they lived on grass and anything else they could find in the fields.

In Russia with no papers, they were suspected of being German spies and held in prison. In one, they were put into a room with 120 other prisoners, so crowded it was impossible to lie down. This was the start of six months of dreadful treatment and beatings. Then they were loaded into cattle trucks on a train which they believed was going to the Gulag camps in Siberia. Suddenly, all the British prisoners were ordered off the train and taken back to Moscow, where to their great surprise, they were put up in a hotel. What they did not know was that Hitler had torn up the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact and had invaded Russia on 21 June 1941. So, the Russians had joined the Allies against Germany and the British prisoners were no longer enemies but comrades. On the 6 July they were finally handed over to the British Embassy in Moscow where Massey stayed on to work as a transport officer. 

Louis Massey with a Russian soldier

Massey was reported as missing and his parents in Burrard Road, had no idea what had happened to their son. Then out of the blue, a Russian officer recently arrived in London, called at the house and told them Louis was safe and well in Moscow.

Later Louis left Moscow and travelled in a roundabout route through Persia, India, Africa, and home to West Hampstead. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal in 1941 and presented with it at Buckingham Palace by King George VI in May 1944. Following the ceremony Sergeant Massey told the press, ‘The King, who seemed very familiar with my adventures, congratulated me on my safe return’.

After the War Massey moved next door to No.17 Burrard Road, where he died in December 1982 aged 75.