SnogBlogy

Even as films go, the new British war drama, The Brylcreem Boys seems a little far-fetched. The facts the film purports to be based on seem so preposterous that one critic apologised to the producers last month for not giving it total approval. She felt it was an excellent film but the basic idea simply wasn't believable.

It is easy to understand her misgivings over the otherwise likeable $5m production. It is set in neutral Ireland in the second world war, where, we are asked to believe, there is a prisoner of war camp for fighting men of either side who end up on Irish soil.

The Irish run this unlikely establishment, and inside its barbed wire fences and four machine-gun towers, Allied and German prisoners are held side-by-side, in conditions akin to a holiday camp. The Irish guards aren't really serious, and only have blanks in their guns. The 'prisoners' have their own bars stocked with duty-free booze, and are allowed out on parole to go shopping, drink in the local pubs, play golf, attend the races, go fishing and even pursue romances with local women. Such a ridiculous melange of Colditz, Mash, Dad's Army and Father Ted only needs that Monty Python colonel complaining that things are getting too silly to complete the picture.

There is one difficulty in dismissing this film as entertaining, but unconvincing, nonsense, though: it is that the historical premise is true. The camp, on the Curragh, 30 miles west of Dublin, existed, and although few of the prisoners are still with us, their diaries are scattered around the world, from Canada to Germany to New Zealand.

And while neither official sources in Britain nor histories of Ireland mention the bizarre anomaly - and the Imperial War Museum until recently regarded it as a kind of urban myth - the story is backed up by documents and memorabilia in the Irish Army's archives and in Canadian files in Ottawa.

The Curragh camp, one of the last and strangest war secrets to be revealed, was a section, known as K Lines, of an Irish Army base. Two of the original huts are still there, visible from a public road, and used as homes for an army commandant's family and a group of nuns.

The makers of the Brylcreem Boys had to play down the lunacy of the true events to have any hope of being believed. 'At every turn during the 15-year process of research and raising money for the movie,' says one of the film's researchers, Susan Morrall, 'We were told, 'come off it, this is just Brigadoon'.' (The name of the fantasy, disappearing Scots village in the Vincente Minnelli musical.) One story kept out of the film for credibility's sake was about two Canadian RAF flyers who crash-landed in Ireland only a few miles from the Curragh camp. Emerging from the wreck thinking they were close to their Scottish base, they spotted a pub and decided to celebrate their survival. They entered the saloon bar to find it heaving with Germans, who, since one was having a birthday, had been given special permission by the Irish to wear Nazi uniforms outside the camp instead of the customary civvies. To add to the Canadians' confusion, the Germans shouted at them to 'go to their own bar'. The landlord had found the best way to stop Allied versus Nazi brawls was to allocate the public bar to one group and the saloon to the other.

The single most extraordinary K Lines episode documented in the Dublin archives also illustrates the serious political implications of the Curragh camp to the war effort, regardless of how funny it may seem now. On December 13, 1941, an American pilot with the RAF, Roland L 'Bud' Wolfe, 23, escaped from the camp - but was sent back by his own side.

Bud Wolfe was from McGehee, Arkansas, and had joined the RAF because he was desperate to fly in combat and wasn't prepared to wait for the US to join the war. After ditching his plane in County Donegal, he was picked up by the Garda and, to his fury, interned. Wolfe found himself with over 40 British, Canadian, New Zealand, French and Polish airmen, magnificently fed, on courteous terms with the guards - and just across a corrugated-iron fence, only four feet high, from several hundred men of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy who had strayed into Eire because their planes had run out of fuel, or their U-boats had been shipwrecked.

The K Lines rules, such as they were, were explained to Wolfe by the senior Allied men. He was told that he would receive his full service pay and get supplied a radio and newspapers from home. His laundry would be done. The prisoners could go out by signing a parole paper at the guardhouse, where bicycles were also provided. On the form, they gave their word of honour not to escape. The same applied to the Germans.

Several German prisoners enrolled for educational courses in Dublin where they could also visit their country's legation, on which the Swastika fluttered. Allied prisoners could similarly visit their own countries' missions to Eire, but went to Dublin less than the Germans, because they were anxious not to seem to be enjoying too easy a war.

The Germans were the more organised POWs, wearing uniforms, planting gardens and making tennis courts, organising exercise classes and singing Nazi songs to taunt the Allies. Once, Irish records relate, they set up a court to convict a comrade of treason. They sentenced him to death and asked the Irish for a rifle and one bullet. The Irish refused. Not only did they want to avoid anyone getting hurt in their custody but, unbeknown to the prisoners, the guards did not have any live ammunition. The execution was abandoned.

But the Germans were not averse to enjoying internment, either. In the archive is a 1944 invoice from a Dublin vintner to a flight lieutenant Fleischmann requesting £4. 10s for three bottles of amontillado, two brown sherry, two Irish whiskey, one Scotch, four Sauternes and one gin. On the Allied side a downed Spitfire pilot, Aubrey Covington, prided himself on keeping the bar, where drinks were 10 US cents a shot. An honour system prevailed - prisoners poured their own and wrote the tally in the book.

The British were the more relaxed prisoners. Some brought their families to live nearby. One officer had his horse shipped over and became a regular with the local hunt. Others joined rugby, soccer and table tennis clubs.

The Germans made no attempt to escape but the Allied men were just over 100 miles from the Ulster border and frequently tried to get up north as a first step to rejoining their units. None was more keen to escape than Bud Wolfe, but as he discovered, escape plans met two formidable problems. The camp may have been harder to escape from than Colditz. Ireland was the only part of Europe outside Switzerland not subject to a blackout, so the Curragh floodlights were on all night. And the camp huts, built in 1915 by the British to house IRA men, were raised from the ground to make tunnelling difficult. But the truly perverse problem was that Britain discreetly but actively discouraged its men from escaping, because Irish neutrality was vital to Winston Churchill.

He was worried that if Ireland tipped towards the Nazis, the Irish Atlantic ports could be used by the German navy. This would massively increase the U-boat threat to Britain's lifeline, the north Atlantic convoys. He also knew Hitler believed Ireland could, with IRA help, be occupied by Germany and used as base to attack Britain from the west. The Irish leader Eamon de Valera did not want to be involved in a war, with memories of the bloody Irish civil conflict still relatively fresh.

The Curragh camp became a showcase for the British and the Irish to demonstrate Irish neutrality, and the Allied prisoners in it were on show for German spies in Ireland. The British representative in Dublin, Sir John Maffey, tactfully explained this to Allied officers in the Curragh, and it was their job to outline the no-escaping rule to their men. Technically, Maffey said, if a prisoner escaped and got back to London - or Berlin - he would have to be sent back to Ireland again. Churchill dreaded such a diplomatic nightmare.

Allied prisoners believed there to be a loophole in the parole deal. If a prisoner managed to get out without signing the form, he would not be breaking parole, and therefore would be a legitimate escapee. Maffey disagreed. Later in the war, he became a hate figure in the camp because he had to inform the Irish military police of a tunnel constructed over eight months by Allied POWs.

Bud Wolfe, who had come 5,000 miles to kill Nazis, was not interested in Anglo-Irish diplomacy. After signing out one evening to go to the pub in nearby Naas, County Kildare, he popped back in to collect the gloves he had deliberately forgotten, then exited the camp a second time, believing he was no longer on parole, but was an escapee. He then caught a bus to Dublin and took a train to Belfast the next morning.

To his horror, Wolfe found himself - a fighter pilot in the middle of a desperate pilot shortage - held at gunpoint by the RAF, and after much frantic telephoning, sent back to the Curragh, where he was beaten up by some British and Commonwealth men for causing their parole to be withdrawn for a week.

In August 1942, after Wolfe's escape and the abortive tunnel breakout, there was a successful mass rushing of the gates by the prisoners, which was deemed 'legal' by the Irish; some made it back to Ulster and were not re-imprisoned. Soon after, in 1943 when the Irish realised the Allies were winning the war, the internment of Allies was abandoned.

For the Germans, the stay in Ireland was longer and more life-changing. Several married locals and settled - only 138 of the 266 German POWs asked to go home at the war's end. Georg Fleischmann (he of the copious drinks bill) stayed to become important in the Irish film industry.

Of those who went home, many wrote letters far into old age to the owner of their favourite pub, the still-standing Lawlor's Bar in Naas. A few years ago, a party of elderly German ex-POWs arrived unannounced at the surviving K Lines huts. The commandant living there recalls them getting off the coach and falling smartly, if creakily, into ranks. Just before last Christmas, the Cathal Brugha barracks archive was bequeathed an entire model Luftwaffe base, hand-made right down to the Swastika flags, the work of a bored German K Lines prisoner which was left after the war in a local family's loft.

Bud Wolfe, after his return from Belfast, fell in with the wacky spirit of the camp. He started riding with the local hunt dressed as a cowboy. But his experience eventually made him both anti-British and anti-Irish. He returned after the war to Nebraska, where in the 1970s, he refused to discuss the war with the first researcher to uncover the Curragh story, the British novelist John Clive, who broke the story in a 1982 novel, Broken Wings. Although the book was a success, and despite an appendix of relevant factual documents, it was not taken seriously.

Clive complains that the film will not help because it is making a joke of history. 'It is funny,' he says, 'but behind it is a great deal of anger and bitterness felt by the interned RAF aircrew. They knew the extent to which they were used and manipulated. They were pawns in a much bigger game played between London and Dublin.'

• The Brylcreem Boys is out on Friday.

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