The Florida Times-Union - Shorelines
The battle of saving Frank - Many risked lives to help Stalag 17 escapee
Caren Burmeister, Shorelines staff writer
Every morning at dawn, Frank Grey, the only World War II prisoner to escape
alive from Germany's notorious Stalag 17, walks out his front door in
Jacksonville Beach and salutes the American flag. Then one day last month,
the flag was gone.
Once known as "Grey Ghost" for his sharp mind and deft maneuvers that helped
him escape from the Nazis, the 88-year-old Grey couldn't grasp why someone
would steal his flag.
"My God, how can anybody do that to me?" he asked. "They didn't realize who
they were stealing it from. I didn't sleep for five days."
Nobody outside Grey's family knew of his incredible history at Stalag 17,
the POW camp in Austria made famous by the 1953 Oscar- winning movie Stalag
17 and the 1965 television comedy Hogan's Heroes.
For six decades, Grey has kept it to himself.
"I've told nobody else but my relatives," Grey said. "I felt that I still had a price on my head."The movie was a fictionalized account of the American prisoners' time in Stalag 17. Actor William Holden played Sgt. J.J. Sefton, an imaginary character modeled in part after Grey. While the film and Hogan's Heroes took great liberties with real events, they captured the prisoners' spirit of hope, camaraderie, imagination and resourcefulness. Grey's American flag and POW flag have since been returned. Based on information from a neighbor, police found the flags still mounted on their pole in the kitchen of a Seagate Avenue apartment.
Jacksonville Beach Police detective Lee Amonette returned the flags to Grey a few weeks ago, then came back with a drill to bolt the flagpole to the ground. "After hearing about what he'd been through, God, that's the least I could do," Amonette said.
Grey's accounts of his harrowing years as a POW are confirmed by relatives and other POWs, including comrade Ned Handy, whose autobiography of his five seasons at Stalag 17, The Flame Keepers, was released on June 6, D-Day. In an interview at his home, Grey rubbed his POW medal with his thumb as he recalled pieces of his story. The memories haunt Grey, so he can't think
about them for too long without changing the subject.
Saving Frank
Staff Sgt. Grey's B-17, nicknamed the "Kansas City Killer," was shot down Aug. 12, 1943, over Gelsenkirchen on its 12th mission over Germany. Grey, the tail gunner, bailed out with a parachute when the engines and intercom were blown out and he couldn't contact his crew mates.
"The Nazis were waiting for me," Grey said.
A German police officer loaded Grey onto a motorcycle and took him to a jail. The SS, the German military security service, took Grey to its headquarters and then to Stalag 7-A, about 85 miles north of Berlin, where he spent 98 days in a hole in the ground.
Over the next year, Grey escaped seven times from his Nazi captors. His elusiveness and sabotage became a great source of humiliation for the Nazis.
After one escape, Grey sabotaged a German freight train headed to the Russian front. He got on a flatbed car carrying anti-aircraft guns, disabled the equipment and threw it out in the fields. Another time, Grey socked a German officer in the face, knocking him to the ground while guards were taking him from the Yugoslavian border to Stalag 17.
"Your escape days are over," the Nazi guards told Grey. "We're taking you to Buchenwald, where you will get the gas."
Two guards loaded Grey onto a train for the two-day trip to the concentration camp known for extraordinarily cruel treatment, forced labor and murders. With strict orders not to let Grey out of their sight, the guards stopped for a night of rest at Stalag 17, a prison camp run by the German Luftwaffe air force along the Danube River.
Within 20 minutes, Grey, whom Handy described as a "master at thinking fast," slipped into the camp's barracks, found the elected leader and sought his help.
About an hour later, the German guards realized their mistake. They started a surprise roll call to flush out the extra man. The prisoners hid Grey in a one-hole latrine in the barracks.
The next day, the leader of Barracks 2-A approached Handy, the crew chief of a tunnel digging project, and gave him 20 minutes to state whether he could hide Grey and three Russian soldiers in the tunnel under the barracks. Word had spread that the Gestapo military police and their dogs were coming the next day to find Grey.
Handy recalled the enormity of the barracks leader's request in his book, The Flame Keepers:
"All hell is going to break loose tomorrow, Handy. These barracks are going to crawl with ferrets, guards and dogs. They'll tear the place to pieces. I don't know what it is about our friend Grey here, but he's hot and they want him. If these guys are found, they're dead, and the ones who hid them could end up the same way. So good luck."
In a recent phone interview from his Massachusetts home, Handy described the request as "the biggest 20 minutes in our lives."
A comrade who collected coffee-can-sized milk cans for the tunnel project said he could build air vents in the tunnel to accommodate the wanted men. He received the go-ahead and installed the air vents in five hours. Handy awoke in a cold sweat that night, worried the Gestapo's dogs could smell the men in the tunnel. On the advice of a bunk mate, Handy spread lime from the latrine around the tunnel's hatch to mask their scent. The Gestapo arrived before dawn the next day and roused the men from their
barracks. The prisoners' stomachs were in knots as they stood in the compound, trying to keep their cool as the Gestapo tore up their bunks, tapped the floors with steel rods and sent the dogs into the crawl space under the barracks. The search continued for three days. "They never found them," Handy said. "Saving Frank was the greatest moment of our lives."
Debt between buddies
Decades later, in a POW reunion, Grey apologized to his comrades for the episode, saying he felt bad about turning their lives upside- down and that the Nazis stole their rations and personal possessions. Handy told Grey not to worry.
"It meant a lot to us to be able to save his life," Handy said in the phone interview. "We have great respect for him. The Grey Ghost is a revered guy."
About 4,300 American airmen were kept in four barracks at Stalag 17, each with barbed-wire fences and a guard tower. The men slept on flea-ridden mattresses on wooden bunks without any heating. They lived on bread thickened with sawdust and thin watery soup that occasionally contained a piece of horse meat. The prisoners relied on the American Red Cross parcels of canned foods and cigarettes to keep them
alive.
As Allied bombings moved closer to the camp, Grey told Handy that it was time for him to escape.
Under international law, POWs were entitled to escape. But the Germans followed a bullet decree to execute any escapees.
Grey came up with a plan and invited Handy to join him.
Grey arranged to bribe a guard and swap places and dog tags with Ray Bernie, a New Zealand POW who lived in a separate compound at Stalag 17. As Bernie, he could volunteer for a work camp that could get him near the Yugoslavian border. Bernie would take on the identity of someone in Grey's barracks. Under the plan, Handy was supposed to swap tags and places with a British prisoner of war.
During an intense snowstorm that obscured the watchtower guard's view, Grey slipped through the double gate that separated American POWs from the other prisoners and exchanged places with Bernie.
But something had gone awry. A group of comrades were hanging out by the fence and some of them had made it through to the other compound. Handy hesitated. The plan was blown.
Grey waited 30 days for another heavy snowstorm that would let Handy cross over to the other compound. But Handy knew that the longer Grey waited, the tougher it would be for Grey to get out.
In his book, Handy explains how in January 1945, he urged Grey to go on without him.
"Frank. Listen to me very carefully, and do as I say. Go. . . . It's the biggest thing you can do for me. We'll meet again in better days." Since Handy failed to escape, the real Bernie took Handy's tags and Handy took on Grey's identity, forcing him to hide out during roll call and other occasions when guards might have noticed Grey. With Bernie's tags, Grey joined a work camp in Gratz, Austria. Eventually, he encountered a general who commanded the Yugoslavian armed forces that resisted the enemy that occupied Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1944.
The general asked Grey to drive his truck and equipment to Yugoslavia. "We'll get you out of Germany," Grey said the general promised him. Grey fought alongside the Yugoslavian resistance forces until the war ended. He returned to the United States and in 1937, Grey married his sweetheart, Dorothy, whom he had met years before at her father's grocery store. Grey stayed in the Air Force, fought in Korea and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He retired with 23 years military service.
Better days
The Greys have been married 58 years and have three children, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Over the decades, Grey and Handy lost touch with each other. They didn't meet again until 58 years later, at a Stalag 17 reunion. Handy recalled that he was nervous as he anticipated the meeting: "I walked up and said, 'Frank,' and he turned around and a great big smile came across his face and he said, 'Handy.' "
Handy was reminded of Grey's firm handshake. Later that night, Handy said Grey told him, "You're my best friend in the world."
In his introduction to The Flame Keepers, Handy states why he was compelled to write his book:
"In the six decades since leaving that camp, I have learned that the past can be unforgiving when unshared and that some memories, when suffered alone, weaken the spirit."
He said it has saddened him that Grey has never written or told his story. Of all the POWs with great stories to tell, Grey has one of the most compelling, he said.
"Everyone needs to see their lives as significant," Handy said.