After the war Reid was a diplomat and administrator before eventually returning to his prewar career in civil engineering. He also wrote about his experiences in two best-selling books, which became the basis of a film, TV series and board game.
Within days of his arrival, Reid was planning an escape, determined to return home by Christmas. After seven weeks digging Reid and a group of prisoners completed a tunnel, 24 feet (7.3 m) long, from the prison basement to a small shed adjoining a nearby house. At 06:30 on 5 September 1940, Reid and five others broke out and made for Yugoslavia, only 150 miles away. Initially they made some progress walking across country at night, but as they entered more mountainous terrain they were forced onto the roads. The escapees were recaptured after five days in Radstadt, Austria, travelling around 50 miles. They were stopped by some locals; one of the escapees spoke fluent German, and by himself he might have bluffed it, but as they did not have any identification and the others did not speak German the locals became too suspicious.[5] Reid was sentenced to a month of solitary confinement, on a diet of bread and water.[6]
As one of the "Laufen Six", Reid was then sent to Colditz Castle, designated Oflag IV-C, a special "escape-proof" camp, arriving there on 10 November 1940. It was not long before Reid attempted an escape. He bribed a seemingly willing German guard to look the other way. On the night of 29 May 1941 twelve prisoners crawled through a sewer pipe from the canteen to an outer courtyard, planning to then descend a forty-foot wall, and then over another wall 12 feet high topped with barbed wire. However, although the guard had accepted the bribe, he also reported the escape plan to his superiors, and the Germans were waiting for them. After another spell in solitary, Reid accepted the position of Escape Officer, responsible for overseeing all British escape plans. Reid assisted in many escape attempts, some successful,[6] until April 1942, when he was replaced as Escape Officer by fellow member of the "Laufen Six" Captain Richard "Dick" Howe.[7]
Escaping Colditz
The German Kommandantur in 2011.Colditz Castle (1945)
Reid finally took his own chance to escape on the night of 14/15 October 1942, along with Major Ronald Littledale, Lieutenant Commander William L. Stephens RNVR, and Flight LieutenantHoward WardleRAF. They cut through the bars on a window in the prisoners' kitchen, and climbed out onto the flat roof of the German kitchen. They then crossed the brightly lit outer yard, and avoided being seen by a guard. They entered a storage cellar under the Kommandantur (Commandant's HQ), crawled out through a narrow air shaft leading to the dry moat, and exited through the park.
This escape was much more professional than Reid's first escape, e.g. they had fake identities as Flemish workmen, to explain their lack of fluency in German and French. They split into pairs, with Reid and Wardle travelling by train to Tuttlingen, near the Swiss border, via Zwickau and Munich. They crossed the border near Ramsen on the evening of 18 October. Stephens and Littledale also travelled to Tuttlingen by train, via Chemnitz, Nuremberg and Stuttgart, then followed Reid and Wardle across the border in the early hours of 20 October.[4][8][5]
Reid remained in Switzerland until after the end of the war, serving as an Assistant Military Attaché in Bern from 9 March 1943 until early 1946, and receiving promotion to Temporary Major on 1 November 1945.[2] He was unusually discreet about his duties there, and was in fact working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) gathering intelligence from arriving escapees.[9]
Postwar
Reid left the army on 29 March 1947, but remained a member of the Regular Army Reserve until reaching mandatory retirement age on 15 November 1965. On that day he was awarded the honorary rank of Major.[2]
Reid was married three times; first in 1943 to Jane Cabot. They had three sons and two daughters, and were divorced in 1966. His second marriage in 1977 to Mary Stewart Cunliffe-Lister ended with her death in 1978. In 1982 he married his third wife, Nicandra Hood, but they separated after a few years.[citation needed] He died at the Frenchay Hospital, Bristol,[8] on 22 May 1990, at the age of 79.[2]
Other activities
Reid served as president of the Blackboys Cricket Club in Framfield, Sussex in 1972.[10] He actively went on lecture tours in the early 1970s with his models of Colditz Castle and other memorabilia and photographs.
The Colditz Story (Hodder & Stoughton, 1952) was Reid's memoir of his time in Colditz, which later became the basis for the 1955 film The Colditz Story, directed by Guy Hamilton, with John Mills playing Reid and with Reid himself serving as a technical advisor. Although focusing mainly upon life inside Colditz and the development of an 'escape academy', the final chapters of the book are devoted to Reid's own escape. The book chronicles everyday prison life, in which characters such as Douglas Bader and Airey Neave appear with no special mention, reporting events in an anecdotal and almost comical style. On 14 October 1942 Reid, along three other British officers, escaped and made their way to neutral Switzerland. What Reid does not mention in his book is that he escaped using Hans Larive's Singen route. Larive, a Dutch naval lieutenant, attempted his first escape from Oflag VI-A in Soest in 1940, but was caught at the Swiss border. The interrogating Gestapo officer was so confident the war would soon be won by Germany that he told Larive the safe way across the border. Larive memorized the information, and many prisoners later escaped using this route.[13]
The Latter Days (Hodder & Stoughton, 1953), republished as Latter Days at Colditz, also published with the title Men of Colditz:[14] Whilst his first book ended with Reid and Wardle shaking hands under the first Swiss lamp post, the sequel follows the trials and tribulations of the escape committee until the eventual liberation of the castle by U.S. troops on 15 April 1945. It gives even more anecdotal insight into the events following his escape, including the French Tunnel and the Colditz Glider, or the occasion when the entire Dutch contingent unhooked their POW railway car from the rest of the train unbeknownst to the German guards. This last part of the Dutch prisoners cannot be confirmed by any Dutch reference about POWs. Reid probably refers to the mass escape of Dutch officers from train transports towards the end of the war when they were transported from Stanislau to Neubrandenburg.
Escape from Colditz: The Two Classic Escape Stories: The Colditz Story, and Men of Colditz in One Volume (Lippincott, 1953)[15]
Colditz (Hodder & Stoughton, 1962) : This was an omnibus edition of the first two books, and served as the basis for the BBC Television series Colditz, which ran from October 1972 until April 1974. Reid served as technical advisor to the TV series and would also co-design a board game with Bob Brechin and Brian Degas as an official licensed tie-in to the TV series. The game, Escape from Colditz, was published in the UK by Gibsons Games in 1973.
From Nile to Indus : Economics and Security in the Middle East, with Sir Olaf Caroe and Sir Thomas Rapp (Conservative Political Centre, 1960)
My Favourite Escape Stories (Lutterworth Press, 1975)
Prisoner of War : The Inside Story of the POW from the Ancient World to Colditz and After, with Maurice Michael (1983)
Colditz: The Full Story (1984) : While the first two books can be read as adventure narratives, and have a distinctly 'Battler Briton' ethos of 'sticking one up to the goons' this book takes a more analytic approach, and covers a number of previously suppressed details. For example, Reid describes some of the ways prisoners obtained contraband material, and how British prisoners communicated clandestinely with the authorities in London. He also gives a full account of how prisoners discovered the 'Singen Escape Route'. He also deals with some of the tensions and tragedies of wartime Europe, for example the tensions in the French contingents between Gaullists and supporters of Pétain.
