The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (11 page)

“We got about halfway to the cookhouse,” King recalled, “when a team of horses pulling a wagon walked on the sand above the tunnel and it caved in. The Germans thought it was a big joke. They were
elated they’d found it. But at that point tunnelling was just something
to do.”
[11]

While such tunnelling efforts seemed short-sighted, they suc
ceeded in creating a diversion for other escape committee enterprises.
Bushell used a similar diversion to send four-foot-three-inch Ken “Shag” Rees through the manhole into the North Compound sewage system to see if human passage was possible. The Welshman
returned moments later with bad news; the sewage pipe was only six inches around. At this point in his wartime service, Rees was into his fourth
military aviation career. He’d completed a tour with
40
Squadron
in 1941, added a second tour based in Malta, then contributed as an RAF instructor back in Britain, and was flying Wellingtons with 150 Squadron in October 1942 when he was shot down and eventually sent to Stalag Luft III. Inside the North Compound, he was effectively commencing his fifth tour of duty, as a member of the principal tunnel-digging team for Roger Bushell’s escape committee.

“There were escape attempts going on all the time,” Wally Floody
said. “The escape committee was vetting people who wanted to try anything . . . even one chap who wanted to go out the main gate disguised as a German shepherd dog.”
[12]

Two creative kriegies—Czech Ivo Tonder and Australian Geoff Cornish—let their beards grow for a few days. Then they traded Red Cross parcel cigarettes and sweets for some Polish greatcoats,
smeared their faces with dirt, and joined a Russian work crew leaving the compound through the main gate. The guard there noticed that the numbers entering and exiting didn’t add up, but couldn’t distinguish the real workers from the imposters. The seasoned
Abwehr
duty officer,
Hauptmann
Hans Pieber, arrived on the scene. Formerly a member of the Austrian Nazi Party, Pieber had worked at Stalag
Luft I outside Barth and then was transferred to the complex near Sagan with the Commonwealth officers the previous year. Pieber
recognized the kriegies in disguise and despite the Russians’ protestations
that the two men were truly members of their work crew,
carted Cornish and Tonder off to the cooler. Another escape attempt about that time, a kriegie clinging to the chassis of a work truck, was
stopped by the chief of the German anti-escape troops. Staff Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz (dubbed “Dimwits” by the kriegies) had
also served the German military prison system for several years. He
had worked and lived in England before the war. Nevertheless, he took great pleasure in unravelling escape schemes, whether it was a
man
hiding in the undercarriage of a truck or tunnel crews burrowing
toward the double fence.

Meanwhile, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell seemed equally intent on winning the war of wits. Even if all escape activity at Stalag Luft III did not deliver a “home run”—actu
ally getting Allied air force officers back to Britain—Bushell planned to disrupt as much of the Third Reich’s momentum as he could from inside its
occupied territory. In the first eleven days of April
1943
, Big X and
the section chiefs of the escape committee met to determine the num
ber of tunnels to be built, their locations, their trapdoor entrances
and projected exits, their depths and direction, their designers, their engineers, their diggers, their soil dispersal units, their security overseers, their routines, and the communications support. Settling into their new quarters in the North Compound were more than seven hundred officers, with just as many skills and aptitudes among them. Each one could now be called on to fulfill every job X Organization required. It all began with Roger Bushell’s original meeting among his section chiefs.

“My idea is to dig three major tunnels,”
[13]
he told the committee.
He added that teams would dig simultaneously, that it would take
five hundred officers in the camp to do the job, and that if the goons and ferrets found one or two of the tunnels, his view was that one would eventually deliver two hundred or more POW officers outside the wire.

“Now you’re talking,” Floody said. Already a seasoned tunneller
with experience at three German prison compounds, he recognized
the brilliance of the plan. Later he commented, “We didn’t
dream that getting one or two or three people back to Britain was going to change the outcome of the war. But we realized that larger escape
s would make the Germans tie down a lot more troops.”
[14]

The committee had decided a crew would dig one tunnel originating in Hut
123
and running westbound from a trapdoor in concrete and brick that formed the foundation for the chimney in that
barracks. It was a location the committee recognized the Germans would suspect, because it was closest to the double fence, but farthest from the main gate of the compound. It offered the most seclusion and therefore aroused the most suspicion.

“We’re going to call this one ‘Tom,’” Bushell said.

“Dick,” the second tunnel, would originate in Hut
122
and also
run westbound. Its trap would be concealed beyond a concrete wall and below a pool of water that was run off through an eighteen-inch-square grating in the floor of the hut’s washroom shower. Less obvi
ous because it was located inside an inner barracks hut, the tunnel was
perfectly concealed.

Meanwhile, the third tunnel, “Harry,” would head northbound from Hut
104
, under the warning wire, the entire
Vorlager
, and, in
fact, beneath the cooler itself en route to the pine forest beyond the northern perimeter of the compound. Its trapdoor had to be excavated beneath a stove in Room 23, through a square of tiles, then through the solid brick and concrete foundation that supported the
weight of the stove and chimney, ultimately into the topsoil and sand below. Building the traps to each tunnel entrance took days of planning, manpower, tool assembly, security, and precise timing. Canadian Flight Lieutenant Henry Sprague witnessed the birth of
tunnel “Harry.”

“That night we staged a diversion, which means we had a party
in the block,” said Sprague, a veteran of Dulag Luft and Stalag Luft I imprisonment. “The stove rested on tiles in a six-foot-square configuration . . . so during the party some Polish chaps [officers Minske
witz, Wlod Kolanowski, and Zbigniew Gotowski], who were expert
cement men, they chipped away the tiles carefully, constructed a
platform underneath, re-cemented the tiles—that’s all they did that night—and put
the stove back in place. That gave us an access point to what later
became the vertical shaft to ‘Harry.’”
[15]

The next step, cutting into the concrete beneath the now movable tile flooring, demanded an equally tricky manoeuvre. First, a pick-head borrowed from the Russian work crews was strapped to a
baseball bat handle that Ker-Ramsey used to pound through the concrete. Under Floody’s supervision, the digging crew laid blankets to catch the debris and muffle the noise. To mask the smacking sound of each blow, Junior Clark and others organized a team of diversionary kriegies outside the window of Hut 104. There they began pounding pieces of tin and wood as if manufacturing cookware, not an out-of-
the-ordinary sight for POWs just settling into their new barracks. Meanwhile, George Harsh’s kriegie guards, or “stooges,” watched
every move the Germans made, whether they were armed guards in the towers, goons on foot patrol, or ferrets wandering the compound looking for evidence of tunnelling.

“We had close to two hundred people in our security force,”
Floody said. “The moment a German guard or ferret came through the gate, we had one of our security people spot him and signal his whereabouts. . . . I could say to Harsh at any given time, ‘How many
Germans are in the camp?’ And he knew exactly how many, where
they were, and when they were due to go off shift. . . . It was complete surveillance.”
[16]

By contrast, as many kriegies as there were in the ranks of the
security system, only a handful knew where the trapdoors to the three
tunnels were located; in fact, few knew which huts had been chosen as starting points for the digging. Soon after the move to North
Compound, most officers in camp spotted notices going up, inviting kriegies to participate in this baseball game or that cricket match, when really the escape committee was recruiting volunteers for duty
in the day-to-day escape operations. Patrick Langford joined right away. As far as he was concerned, too much of his time in the air
force had been spent preparing, and not enough spent doing. Born in Edmonton in 1919, Langford had taught himself to ski, ride horses,
and play the piano. When the war broke out, he left a good chauffeuring job to join the air force and get into the fighting; instead,
because of his high grades in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada, the RCAF made him an instructor. After sixteen
months of teaching others to fly, he finally got an overseas posting
to heavy bombers himself, but in July 1942 his Wellington was shot
down over Lübeck, Germany. He bailed out safely, but fire in the
disintegrating aircraft burned him across his upper body.

After lengthy hospitalization, Langford arrived at Stalag Luft III just as his fellow officers prepared to move to the North Compound.
He seemed eager to join the parade of escape attempts—one plan
he presented to Big X involved using a trench the Russians had built
as an avenue of escape, and another involved hiding in an exiting garbage wagon. However, the escape committee found a job more
demanding and valuable for Pat Langford and his workmate Henry Sprague. They shared the responsibility for protecting the trapdoor to “Harry.” As Ker-Ramsey picked his way deeper into the concrete
foundation beneath the stove, early in April
1943
, the floor in that corner of Hut
104
was exposed for almost ten days. Langford and Sprague used spare palliasses to cover the area whenever guards
came near. And with the ferrets staging more surprise inspections all
the time, the two kriegies trained themselves to open or close the trapdoor system with lightning speed.

“Sprague and Langford were the fastest trap men in the world,”
Floody said. “They could open or close the trap in twenty to thirty
seconds.”
[17]

Generating some good-natured chaos during the move to the North Compound seemed innocent on the surface. But it too was
serving a greater purpose. As the general population of officers
moved into new barracks, claimed bunks, and established routines for shar
ing kitchens, washrooms, and all other facilities under a barracks
roof, the inner circle of the escape committee never rested. Bushell
and the section heads began looking for any and all weak points in
the Germans’ day-to-day maintenance of the stalag. Even the smallest of details—such as haphazard document checks at the main gate in the weeks immediately following the move—might offer the best escape opportunity.

So it was when the first insect infestation of the barracks buildings occurred in the spring of 1943. All it took was the senior Commonwealth medical officer to alert the German medical officer to an outbreak of lice, fleas, or bedbugs and, with not unexpected precision,
the prison system responded. Prisoners living in the infested hut
would be paraded in parties of twenty-five to the shower house in the woods—four hundred yards outside the main gate—for hot showers and bug inspection. Meanwhile, a delousing team would move into
the hut and fumigate it. On June
11
, just after
2
p.m. (immediately
following a routine relief of every guard in the compound), a delous
ing party of twenty-five kriegies (each carrying a towel covering a second set of clothes) and two German
Unteroffizier
(NCO) guards
approached the main gate. Meanwhile, inside the compound in full
view of the guards at the gate, two kriegies—Bill Geiger and Henry
“Johnny” Marshall—began a fencing demonstration. Tony Pengelly assembled an apparently impromptu audience that began cheering on the fencers.

“The Germans, who love fencing, had only one eye on business,”
Pengelly said. “The delousing party reached the gate, its guards
shouted something to the guards on the gate, and off it marched into the woods toward the showers.”
[18]

Before the Germans at the main gate realized anything was
wrong, part two of the caper had already kicked into gear. A second
group under guard approached the main gate. This time the party consisted of seven Commonwealth wing commanders and group
captains and an American lieutenant colonel—allegedly on their way to an emergency meeting with the camp
Kommandant
—with a German corporal escorting them through. One guard gave little notice to the pass the corporal handed him. A second gatekeeper paused and examined the corporal and his pass more closely. A phone call to the
Kommandant
confirmed that the emergency officers’ meeting had been fabricated, and a closer examination of the corporal escorting the officers revealed that it was really kriegie Bob van der Stok,
[19]
a
Dutch-born fighter pilot in RAF 41 Squadron shot down a year earlier, in July 1942; as well as the fake German uniform, van der Stok had a dummy gun in a cardboard holster.
[20]
The camp
Kommandant
, Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau, was furious. The sixty-one-year-old ex-cavalry officer from the Great War and former member of Hermann Göring’s personal staff was notorious for his quick temper, but also his sense of humour.