Obituary: John McCallum MM, Maryhill-born signalman awarded Military Medal for daring escape from PoW camp

SIXTY-SEVEN years after he won the Military Medal for a daring escape from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, John McCallum will receive recognition around the UK next month, and eventually much of the world, when the actor Sir David Jason features his story in a TV documentary about great escapes of the Second World War. Sadly, the former Royal Corps Signalman died at the age of 94 before the programme is due to go out to mark Remembrance Day.

Having landed with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France in late 1939, Signalman McCallum found himself on the frontlines, providing the vital battlefield communications for Allied forces unsuccessfully trying to drive back the Nazis.

With the Dunkirk retreat looming, he was wounded in combat at La Capelle-lès-Boulogne on 23 May, 1940, and transported overland to the notorious PpW camp Stalag V111B at what the Germans called Lamsdorf, now Lambinowice in south-western Poland.

There, to his surprise and delight, he found his half-brother Jimmy O’Neill, with whom he had grown up in the family home in Glasgow, as well as another Glasgow lad, Patrick Joseph “Joe” Harkin from Woddrop Street, Dalmarnock.

Both were fellow signalmen, captured together at Calais three days after McCallum was wounded. Together, for the next four years, the three planned an escape using the techniques with which they had been brought up – gall, charm and the belief that if you can break into somewhere, you can break out. On 23 March, 1944, they were among a group transferred to a camp known as Kommando E-476 at Römerstadt near the German-Czech border (now part of the Czech Republic).

On 24 April, 1944, on a moonless night, all wearing homemade black clothes and having studied the guards’ routine, they got to the perimeter wire, snipped their way out and replaced the wire as well as they could to gain time.

They walked to a local village where they received civilian clothes and faked documents from friendly Czech locals. At one point, they walked through the Polish town of Zagan, but found locals wary of helping them because of the furore caused a few weeks earlier by the escape of 76 allied prisoners from the local camp Stalag Luft 111 – the famous “Great Escape” of the movie.

Via a series of train journeys, and bluffing their way past many a Nazi guard, the Glaswegian trio finally reached the port of Stettin, hiding from the Germans in houses bombed by the RAF.

They reached a dockside brothel, where a Swedish sailor helped them sneak on board his cargo ship and hid them from Nazi guards among the coal in its hold.

Once at sea on 25 May, they gave themselves up to the friendly Swedish captain, who transferred them to a Swedish minesweeper which then took them to Malmo.Other Swedes took them to Stockholm, where an RAF plane picked them up and flew them to RAF Leuchars in early June.

John McCallum was born at Firhill Road, Maryhill – in the shadow of Partick Thistle’s quite-new-at-the-time ground Firhill Park – where he grew up with his half-brother, five years his elder.

He also spent several years in Oban before leaving school at 14 to work as a messenger boy in the Post Office.

Aged 18, he joined the GPO’s engineering department as a trainee and spent two years working on external phone lines before being transferred to indoor work.

As Hitler threatened, he followed his half-brother James Bruce “Jimmy” O’Neill by joining the Supplementary Reserves of the Royal Signal Corps in 1935. In France with the BEF in May 1940, he and his fellow signalmen took much of the brunt of frontline fighting.

Allied commanders needed the best, most secret communications to have any chance of halting the Nazis, with Hitler clearly intent on invading Britain. McCallum often found himself out in front of the infantrymen.

After he was wounded on 23 May, 1940, McCallum spent three weeks in hospital in Boulogne, several months in Cambrai and a spell in German custody in Lille before being taken by train to occupied Poland and Stalag V111B.

He, Jimmy and Joe all received the Military Medal, the non-commissioned men’s equivalent of a Military Cross, for the bravery of their escape.

After the Allied victory of 1945, McCallum returned to Germany as an army intelligence officer, where he remained mostly for the next 10 years.

He said that, in 1944, he had fallen in love with a local girl called Traudl, who had helped the three get the crucial false papers after their escape from Römerstadt, but when he finally got back to trace her, she had married a Czech army officer.

Instead, while in post-war Germany, he fell in love again – with a girl called Franziska, who he married.

From the mid-1950s, the couple settled in Scotland, John returning to his work as a telephone engineer for the Post Office. They lived in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, and latterly in nearby Comrie.

In 2005, after declassification of wartime documents covered by the Official Secrets Act, McCallum finally published his memoirs: The Long Way Home: The Other Great Escape.

His wife Franziska lived just long enough to see it published but died in 2006. It was the book that attracted the attention of the production team of Sir David Jason, best-known for Only Fools and Horses, for his “Great Escapes” documentary to be aired next month.

John McCallum, who died in Crieff Community Hospital at the age of 94, is survived by his sons John and Kenneth.

PHIL DAVISON