The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (10 page)

But Flying Officer McKim never escaped the cold. Because he was only five foot two
[29]
, when he volunteered to help on the escape committee he was assigned to stooge work. That winter and the one that followed, McKim would walk outside discretely noting the arrival, location, and direction of a guard or ferret entering the compound. He would alert the next stooge in the network as to the nature of the goon in the block and which direction he was headed. All the while, he would try to look as if he were just strolling for exercise and pass along his signals while (thanks to his diminutive stature) staying out the sightlines of the guard towers.

“It was certain jobs for certain people,” McKim said. “My job
required me to be out in the cold. I wasn’t capable of doing anything else.”
[30]

Flying Officer Bob McBride wrote his wife back in Montreal about coping with the cold. Shot down during a torpedoing opera
tion off the coast of France in September 1942, McBride’s first postcard to his wife, Jean, simply said, “Wait for me a little longer.”
[31]
As
a consequence, she joined the Prisoner of War Relatives’ Association, packing parcels
for the Red Cross. At one point she managed to pack up and send her husband a bowling set she hoped would provide exercise and diversion.

“The bowling set was marvelous,” McBride wrote back. “It
burned forever.”
[32]

Another new arrival at the East Compound that fall was a no-nonsense fighter pilot from Port Alberni, British Columbia. Just
twenty years old, Arthur “Jack” Moul had learned to fly on the West Coast at age eighteen. Flying sorties with 416 Squadron, he quickly earned a reputation for his quick hands on the Spitfire’s control column and its machine guns. However, on October 23, 1942, during a trip over occupied France strafing German freight trains, a locomo
tive blew up beneath him, damaging his Spitfire. Moul ditched in
the Channel, but was picked up by a German patrol before he could be rescued by RAF seaplanes. Moul arrived at Stalag Luft III in time to become a valued scrounger, working with fellow Canadians Barry
Davidson, Red Noble, and Keith Ogilvie searching for guards who
could be tamed for the good of the escape committee.

The end of
1942
brought top-to-bottom transformation to X
Organization at Stalag Luft III. What had been for Wally Floody and Robert Ker-Ramsey trial-and-error excavation would shortly be elevated to a scale of construction Floody remembered from the mines of Northern Ontario. What George Harsh and George McGill had launched as a ragtag group of inmates scrambling to pinpoint goons and ferrets approaching barracks huts would eventually become so timely a network of spying, tracking, and locating that it would even
outstrip the Germans’ control of their own guarding system. And the intelligence that had created Dean and Dawson and a library
of information for future forgery would soon start generating such sophisticated documentation as to pass for the real thing for hundreds of potential escapers. The catalyst for revamping, expanding, and improving every aspect of X Organization was the arrival of Roger Bushell, the South African-born RAF squadron leader who’d
been captured twice—once after being shot down in France in May
1940
, and again following his escape from Dulag Luft all the way to
the Swiss border the following summer. It was his third escape, during transport to the prison at Warburg, however, that nearly got him free.

En route in a cattle truck, Bushell and several others managed to pry up the floorboards of the truck and drop to the roadway below. One of the three escapers fell under the wheels and was killed, while
Bushell and a Czech officer in the RAF, Jack Zafouk, made it all the way to Prague. Meantime, Operation Anthropoid had landed two
Czech patriots (trained in Britain) back in the Czechoslovak capital. On May 27, 1942, they ambushed Reinhard Heydrich, the Gestapo
chief in charge of the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe; he died of his wounds a week later. Zafouk and Bushell went into hiding but
were eventually recaptured, the former being sent to Kolditz Castle
prison, the latter rushed to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin for torture and interrogation. His interrogators tried to implicate Bushell
in the Heydrich assassination. The Czech family that had hidden the two escapees was executed.

Weighing forty pounds less than when he arrived at Dulag Luft and wearing the scars of his Gestapo grilling in Berlin, Squadron
Leader Bushell miraculously emerged from the interrogation ordeal.
At the time, rumours circulated that the chief censor officer at the Sagan prison camp had a brother in the Gestapo who intervened and returned Bushell to the Luftwaffe prison system. On the day he
arrived at Stalag Luft III, toward the end of 1942, Bushell was wearing his now-tattered air force battledress. That same German censor officer warned the squadron leader if tried to escape and was caught again, the Gestapo would probably shoot him. If he escaped again,
Bushell shot back, the Gestapo would never catch him. Unnoticed
in a bag of belongings the testy air force officer had tucked under his arm was a civilian suit he’d received from the family that had hidden him in Prague.
[33]
No doubt Bushell, now the new chief of escape
operations, or Big X, was already calculating what he would wear
during his fourth escape attempt.

ESCAPE
SEASON

B
Y MARCH of 1943,
Kingsley Brown had become somebody else. He was quite sane, or as sane as any RCAF airman shot down over
Germany, interrogated, and sent to a prison in the middle of Silesia could be. It’s just that besides his kriegie dog tags and
German prison ID file, Brown also now owned a set of false identity papers. His alter ego was Goleb Plasov
[1]
, a steelworker from Liegnitz, in the former Poland. His father’s name was Jakov. His mother’s name Natasha. And he—according to a rehearsed story—was in Germany en route to new steelworks in Strasbourg, France. Among his f
alse documents Brown also held a piece of stationery on which the police chief of Liegnitz had inscribed his signature and affixed his
official stamp. All the details were accurate. Brown knew they were, since he had personally tracked down the police chief’s autograph and seal while doing research for Dean and Dawson, the forgery team. At the same time, Brown and fellow kriegie Gordon Brettell had also received tailored civilian clothing that made the two of them appear to be Bulgarian immigrants. A combination of the papers, German currency, and the clothes—all prepared by X Organization—as well as the two airmen’s conversational German to help them deal with checkpoint officials, gave them nearly all they would need to pull off
an escape from the East Compound of Stalag Luft III.

Construction that had begun over the winter to the west and a little north of what had been the main prison grounds for Commonwealth
air officers appeared to give Brown and Brettell an ideal opportunity.
Kriegies in the East Compound spotted crews of Russian workers
hacking down more of the reforested area beyond the
Kommandantur
. In a casual conversation with one of the guards, Squadron Leader
Bushell had learned that Luftwaffe authorities planned to move
inmates in the East Compound to the new North Compound
[2]
sometime in the spring. As work accelerated, some of the non-commissioned ranks of Allied airmen joined the work crews building the new facility. And since the construction zone had no prisoners housed in it, German guards were few and far between. The escape committee arranged to have Brown and Brettell switch places with two NCOs on the construction gang. On March 27, 1943, four days before the
North Compound was due to open, German guards watching over
the work crew, including Brown and Brettell in disguise, were dis
tracted with some cigarette trading. The two kriegies quickly hid in wood shavings, waited for the commotion of their apparent escape to blow over, and in the dark climbed the North Compound fence and slipped into the Sagan forest.

Brown remembered the first night as a dash through a Grimm’s fairy tale, as the two men used the stars and a compass to navigate
their way through forested areas. In the town of Sorau they bought
tickets, boarded a train, and hunkered down en route to Leipzig. By coincidence, they shared a cubicle with six soldiers of the Weh
rmacht. On the cubicle wall, a poster featured two troops in conversation being overheard by a suspicious-looking civilian. The text on the poster read: “Beware the Third Person! The Enemy has Ears!”
[3]

“I’ve never known the pure joy of living, tempered so deliciously by a sense of danger,”
[4]
Brown wrote.

If an escape bid seated in the same railway coach compartment as their enemies and the propaganda poster weren’t ironic enough, their interrogation four days later sure was. A routine documents
check at a railway station in Chemnitz, southwest of Berlin, revealed their masquerade and the two fugitive air force officers were escorted
to the local Gestapo headquarters. They expected to be shot. In an
office decorated with carpets and potted palms, the district police boss smoked a cigar and fired questions at them.

“Why did you escape?” he demanded.

“It is our duty,” they said.

“Correct,” he acknowledged. Apparently more interested in talk
ing than listening, the police chief regaled them with his own biography. “I was a prisoner in France during the First World War. I also escaped, but unlike you, I got away.” He chatted some more about
prison life and then signalled guards to take the kriegies away
and to have them sent back to their prison camp. He added finally,
“Better luck next time.”
[5]

Having experienced the thrill of getting beyond the wire and a few days of freedom in his first escape attempt, Brown had another crack
at it in December of the same year, with Czech prisoner Joe Ricks along for the ride. That escape was thwarted just as quickly. But it
left Brown with an indelible memory. As he and Ricks travelled with
armed guards back to Sagan, this time they sat in a train compart
ment with a member of the Hitler Youth, a Wehrmacht officer who’d lost a leg on the Russian front, and three young schoolteachers—all heading home for Christmas. Someone began to sing. Brown offered a version of “Alouette.” Ricks chipped in with a Czech folksong. And the three women began “Silent Night.” Everyone joined in, and for those moments, Brown said, the war was forgotten.
[6]

The same winter that Brown and Brettell were brushing up their
German and getting fitted with their escape disguises for the March attempt, the long-range mass escape plans of X Organization took shape, very much in the image of the new escape chief, Roger Bushell. Whether inside barracks huts far from the probing ears of German ferrets, or pounding the exercise circuit along the inside of the warning wire, during the non-tunnelling months of the winter, Big X had assembled and consulted with his section heads—security bosses
Harsh, Kirby-Green, and recently arrived US Lieutenant Albert “Junior” Clark, forgery chiefs Walenn and Pengelly, sand dispersal
leader Fanshawe, and, most urgently, tunnel kings Floody and Ker-Ramsey.

Knowing the Germans would soon move most of the Commonwealth and American prisoners to the new North Compound, Bushell calculated the committee’s next move. It was decided the current SBO, Group Captain Massey, should approach the camp
Kommandant
and, in a spirit of co-operation, suggest some East Compound officers provide work groups to assist in the construction of the new camp. Feigning goodwill and enthusiasm for the construction work, Floody, Ker-Ramsey, Fanshawe, and Bushell himself all joined the work parties. Between shovelfuls and hammer swings, however, the expert earth-movers calculated the length and breadth and depth of their new home. Floody and Ker-Ramsey paced out and recorded the distances and angles of the place to determine where future tun
nels might be built and how creative they’d have to be to put men
beyond the wire. One of them even managed to smuggle back a stolen diagram of the projected underground sewage lines.

Not unlike the Centre and East compounds, the North Com
pound was three hundred yards square, completely surrounded with those reforested pines and with two fences about nine feet high and five feet apart. More bundles of barbed wire filled the space between the double-jeopardy fences, and the warning wire was strung thirty feet inside that fencing. Guard towers—or, as the kriegies described them, “goon boxes”—were situated every one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards. The living quarters consisted of fifteen wooden huts, a kitchen hut (with caldrons for boiling water), a fire pool, and
a large sports field, which doubled as the appell area. Each hut contained eighteen rooms; each of the rooms had a dining area, living area, table, stools, lockers, a stove on a tile base in the corner, and
double-decker bunk beds (with palliasse, a mattress of woven paper or wood shavings) for eight prisoners. Every hut also had a washroom, lavatory, and small kitchen with a coal stove. The fifteen barracks huts could house up to fifteen hundred air force officer prisoners. Again,
north of the barracks, the
Vorlager
contained a coal shed, the hospital,
and a building with both the cooler and a room where Red Cross
parcels were warehoused and inspected by German guards, and then passed along to the Commonwealth officer in charge of distribution.

Moving was scheduled to take place on April Fools’ Day 1943, and the kriegies lived up to the date’s moniker. Seven hundred officers (by this time including some three hundred Americans) gathered their worldly possessions—plates, mugs, cooking pans, makeshift gadgets, thread-bare clothes, and Red Cross parcel boxes filled with personal effects, such as photographs, pieces of string, and nails—and assembled for appell. The roll call among the officers that day had the look and feel of juvenile boys lining up for their first day back at school. The POWs broke ranks and clustered around the guards who were
searching them. Articles were passed in jest from one man to the
next as the inspection descended into chaos. That allowed some vital
escape tools—pens and ink, paper, tin shovels, and civilian clothing (including Bushell’s civilian suit)—to pass through the screening unnoticed. Miraculously, the antics had also kept one of the escape
committee’s most valuable possessions undetected. Since the earliest escape committee days at Barth in 1940, pilot Dick Bartlett had car
ried his exercise medicine ball with him everywhere. Seemingly the kriegies’ physical fitness director, the Canadian Fleet Air Arm sub lieutenant
was still guarding the hidden wireless radio in that ball.
[*]

Many kriegies knew X Organization had the wireless set, nicknamed “the canary,” and that it could receive the evening BBC
broadcasts offering the latest world news. Once the canary had been successfully smuggled into the North Compound via that medicine
ball, Bartlett and two other officers assumed the responsibilities of
its round-the-clock protection. RAF officer Nellie Ellan operated
the radio itself. A second officer recorded the BBC broadcast con
tent in shorthand; the contents were later read aloud in each com
pound barracks. What most kriegies did not know, however, was that relaying the BBC news was a secondary function of the radio. Once
the three custodians of the canary had transcribed the BBC news, Bartlett changed the radio coils to receive signals from the British Air Ministry. These encrypted messages contained intelligence for
X Organization. When the canary went silent after each broadcast and intelligence message, it was up to Bartlett to hide it in a most
unlikely location—under a latrine toilet in Hut 101
[7]
. Bartlett and his two companions practised the emergency response if the Germans suddenly descended on the wireless hiding place. If the canary’s capture were imminent, Bartlett could destroy its coils, eat any written
messages, conceal the wireless under the toilet, and be innocently
sitting on the toilet in half a minute or less.
[8]

Once inside the new North Compound and dismissed, that April
1
,
kriegies dashed into the comparatively spacious huts to claim their rooms, where, one man said, there was “almost enough room to swing a stunted
cat.”
[9]
Big X ensured that the escape committee was represented in every hut; in each barracks he appointed one officer,
Little X, to receive and process all officers’ schemes for breaking
out of the compound, and Little S to deal with security.

The excitement of the move and the confusion on both sides made this time ripe for all manner of escape attempts. Pilot Officer Gor
don King, from Winnipeg, had arrived just in time for the move to
new quarters. At age nineteen, in 1940, he knew Morse code, so the air force streamed him into the wireless air-gunner trade, but he was upgraded to pilot training. The RCAF rushed him overseas and sent
him, as Second Dickie (observing pilot), on several large bombing operations, including the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne,
Germany, on May
31
,
1942
. A few nights later, without the secu
rity in numbers and piloting a slower Wellington bomber, he and his crew were shot down and captured.

King arrived at Sagan barefoot, having lost his boots when he bailed out. At the train station he faced the mile-long walk to the
compound with nothing on his feet; somebody loaned him footwear he’d never seen before—wooden Dutch clogs. They served him well
as he joined the officers’ work crews preparing the North Compound
and then on the walk to his new home on April 1, 1943. King spotted plenty of escape hijinx that first day, including an attempt by Joe “Red” Noble, one of his Canadian barracks mates. Noble spotted a truck loaded with pine tree boughs leaving the camp, jumped into the back, and buried himself among the logs and branches. But a guard in a goon box had spotted him and passed the word to a guard closer to the truck.

“Joe, we know you’re in there,” the guard shouted. “Come on out.”

Noble stayed put, figuring the commotion of moving day would distract the guard.

“Come out, or we’ll start shooting,”
[10]
King remembered the guard
shouting more emphatically. And out came Noble.

Not long after he arrived in the North Compound, Gordon King joined a group building its own tunnel to the cookhouse. He remembered it as a scheme to establish a secret passage to the food stores of the building so that they could fatten their meagre rations whenever they wished. The digger at the face of the tunnel was a former fighter pilot, while King worked as “the dish,” taking the excavated sand to the entry point and handing it off to a dispersal man.