Eric Williams (writer)

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Eric Williams is an English author specializing in writing about prisoner of war escapes. He experienced POW life during World War II after his capture by Germany.

RAF Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams was shot down on a bombing raid over Germany in 1942 and after evading capture for three days, was caught and sent to Oflag XXIB Schubin in Poland. From there he and Michael Codnor escaped through a tunnel, but were recaptured and sent to Stalag III Sagan in Germany (now Żagań in Poland). It was at Sagan that he and Codnor began the tunnel made famous in the book The Wooden Horse and the subsequent film. They constructed a vaulting horse from wooden beams stolen from an unfinished shower block with plywood from Canadian Red Cross parcels. Other POWs would then carry this horse to a site near the wire with one of the two men slung underneath. While a group were vaulting over the horse, the man inside would dig the tunnel, carrying away the spoil in bags made from cut-off trouser legs. A major advantage of the vaulting was that the vibration from the jumping men meant that the German seismographs could not pick up any noise from the tunnelling.

The strain of digging and poor rations in the camp caused Williams to have lie up in the camp hospital for several days, where he found more ideas for how to evade recapture once they had had broken out from some Australians who had escaped a few days previously and were wounded in the attempt. The speed the tunnel progressed at was limited by the amount of sand that could be carried back in the horse. Williams and Codner enlisted the help of another POW, Oliver Philpot, and changed the method of tunnelling so that more bags were brought out for less time spent digging.

After four months, they three men escaped with Williams and Codner going to the German post of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland) and Philpot making his way alone to Danzig, all with the intention of boarding a neutral Swedish ship. Williams and Codner spent some time in Stettin trying to make contacts to help them from the French forced labourers in the city, while Philpot quickly found a ship and successfully made it to Sweden. Eventually, a member of the Danish Resistance helped them aboard his ship and the proceeded to Denmark, where they helped the Danish Resistance with repairing weapons salvaged from a crashed RAF bomber that were then used to free the head of the organisation who had been captured the previous day. Williams and Codner then were taken from Copenhagen to a small island and Williams was forced to kill a German sentry on the bridge to the island. Fromt the island, they were taken eventually to Gothenburg, Sweden where they met again with Philpot, and from there after a short delay to Britain.

At the end of the war, Williams wrote a short novel based on his experiences, with many details omitted or changed under the title of Goon In The Block before rewriting it as a narrative story under the title The Wooden Horse. In this book (as in The Tunnel), Williams goes by the pseudonym 'Peter Howard', while Michael Codner was 'John Clinton' and Oliver Philpot was 'Philip Rowe'.

His Second book The Tunnel described Williams and Codner's escape from Oflag XXIB. Williams amassed a substantial collection of escape literature and published several anthologies of excerpts from this collection.

Eric Williams was born in 1911 died in 1984.

[edit] Bibliography

Goon In The Block, Collins, 1945.
The Wooden Horse, Collins, 1949.
The Tunnel, Collins, 1951.
The Escapers- A Chronicle of Escape in Many Wars with Eighteen First-hand Accounts, Collins, 1953.
More Escapers - in War and Peace with eighteen first-hand accounts, Eric Williams, Fontana, 1968.