The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (18 page)

“I said I was going to major in art there,” Buckham said, “and I
did.”
[27]

His steady hand with pen and ink as well as his penchant for colour painting made Buckham an ideal candidate for the reproduction of the
Kennkarte
and
Ausweise
passes. Using the best quality paper they could
find in the compound—often the fly-leaves of the library Bibles
[28]
—
Buckham and the others cut the paper to the exact dimensions of the
pass. They replicated the background swirl of the master document’s
watermark (much like currency notes) with pen and ink, and brush
and watercolour, then penned in the category headings (first name,
surname, date, and place of birth, et cetera). If the document needed a hard back, the forgers glued tracing linen over cardboard and coloured
it to match the original. Meanwhile, Jens Muller, a Norwegian air
force officer, replicated any official stamps—including date or swas
tika insignia—by carving a mould in a bar of soap. Once he’d begun
sketching and painting for the escape committee, Buckham never
stopped. He employed his artistic skills “from morning to night”
[29]
to paint posters advertising theatre and lecture events. And in his bound, Red Cross–issue diary he drew images of kriegies, their tools, and their surroundings to distract himself from “an empty belly.”
[30]

When the forgery room drew guards’ suspicions, Walenn moved the crew to a kitchen next to where the compound orchestra rehearsed. When the orchestra finished practising, the forgers wrapped up their
work too and stowed it in a violin case. The musicians left the hut
with their instruments in hand; one carried his violin case,
[31]
with the
forgeries-in-progress enclosed, to Hut
104
, where Tony Pengelly
hid them in a secret compartment behind a removable wall board.

As well as serving the escape committee as custodian of the forged documents, Canadian bomber pilot Pengelly took on the responsibility of coaxing original documents and other things of value from
the German guards who regularly patrolled the compound. Some
of the guards weren’t necessarily highly educated men, but Pengelly had learned that he could occasionally befriend one by offering him
a cigarette and even a short visit to his barracks room for a cup of
freshly steeped tea. Pengelly did regular shifts dispensing Red Cross parcels to the kriegies and had been given the authority to “borrow”
such luxury items from the parcels to hasten the process. During such visits, Pengelly might share snapshots of his family. A month or two later, Pengelly would invite in the same man and repeat the
pleasantries. When the Canadian pilot knew his prey might soon be going on leave, he would offer the bait-covered hook.

“How would you like to take some coffee home?”
[32]
he would ask the guard.

The German usually jumped at the chance.

Pengelly knew the average German hadn’t tasted real coffee since 1936; nor had he enjoyed other delicacies. “And some chocolate for your little boy?”

Often the gift might draw the offer of a favour from the guard,
such as, “Can I bring you anything from outside?”

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” Pengelly would say. “I’d like a hundred toothpicks.” Something that inconsequential would be sufficient the first time, but it was oil for the machine. With each trip the guard made, Pengelly repeated the exchange until it got to be habitual—taking a little booty home each leave. And having broken the rules once
or twice, the “tame” guard wouldn’t likely refuse any of Pengelly’s
requests, fearing the POWs might expose him. Coffee and chocolate yielded a camera, developing, and printing equipment, and even the short-term loan of passes and visas.

“It was the psychology of binding a man with a thread,” Pengelly
said, “and gradually strengthening the thread until it was far easier to
submit to our bondage than to rebel. They never foresaw where it led . . . and we paid them in wartime Europe’s best currency—food
that Big X had commandeered from our Red Cross parcels in any
quantity he believed necessary.”
[33]

As well as his police permit, his leave papers, or his permission
to be going home, any potential escaper disguised as an immigrant worker, needed paperwork that validated his transit for the purpose of seeking work. Working from published advertisements in German newspapers, Pengelly directed the forgers to draft letters addressed to a real German, in a real company, from a real German in another
real company, all on forged letterhead and with forged signatures
and corporate stamps. If a guard on the outside needed proof that the immigrant worker was indeed travelling to legitimate employment in Germany, occupied France, or occupied Holland, the fake letter and a kriegie-manufactured map proved it.

“A bigger bunch of shysters and crooks and con men you’d never find anywhere in the world than in a prison camp,”
[34]
said Don MacDonald, a pilot officer kriegie from Winnipeg.

For some of the POWs at Stalag Luft III, the lengths to which
X Organization went to dig tunnels, forge documents, and hide the evidence was all part of a cat-and-mouse game conducted inside the wire. For others, the activities comprised what Wings Day had once
called an “operational function” of an officer’s duty to try to escape
while in enemy hands. For those such as Roger Bushell, it was a combination of one-upmanship, spite, never allowing oneself to be idle, and an ideology of never accepting defeat. George Sweanor hadn’t experienced the number of years of imprisonment that Bushell had, but he resented Big X’s control over the cultivation of German guards and ferrets. If a kriegie were not directly involved in using the Germans for the objectives of the Organization, Bushell made it clear the POW was to back off, remain polite, and stay aloof.

“Underhanded tactics were all part of this war,” Sweanor wrote, “but I argued there was room for those of us who wanted to lessen the enemy’s will to war by showing him that we were just plain folks, willing to make friends, and to share a few luxuries that the Germans had not seen for years. I never was very good at obeying orders I did not like.”
[35]

Among the luxuries Sweanor and others seemed eager to share
were those found in the new building going up just beyond Hut 119 and in front of the sporting fields. In fact, from his window, Sweanor
watched the construction of a theatre in the North Compound.
[*]
Under a parole system, the Germans had provided the mate
rials and lent kriegies tools, provided at the end of each day’s work
every tool
was returned intact. Some of the bricks that formed the foundation of the theatre may have come from buildings knocked down during
bombing attacks on nearby Sorau, but some of the theatre’s other components had obvious origins. Kriegie carpenters took the ply
wood from all the crates containing Red Cross parcels from
Canada and fashioned it into
350
theatre seats, complete with armrests, sloping backs, and tip-up seats. Just like a professional facility, the
house floor was raked from a projection room at the rear of the theatre down to an orchestra pit in front of the stage. And beyond the
proscenium, the stage itself featured trapdoors, wings, two dressing rooms, and space for lighting, flats, costumes, and props. An exten
sion of the building backstage included a reference library, a lecture room,
the chapel, and an ops room.

The magic ingredient at the theatre, however, was the ingenuity of the POWs themselves. Two RAF non-commissioned officers with electrician skills installed indirect lighting in the auditorium
and a switchboard panel for stage lighting.
[36]
Air force officers who had fine arts degrees or who had joined university theatre productions before the war were suddenly in demand as producers, direc
tors, playwrights, set designers and builders, props and wardrobe
creators, and actors.

“There was even an electric sign in the foyer of the theatre,”
remembered Canadian pilot Don Edy, who arrived at Stalag Luft III just after the theatre opened. “They took a wheel and put a strip of
tin on the wheel. As the wheel turned [powered by the water], the electric current would pass along the tin. When it came to the end
of the tin, the current would break and the light would go dark. The
light illuminated cut-out letters. . . . So the light would flash on and
off announcing the play.”
[37]

The only memorable entertainment Edy had experienced since his overseas posting in 1941 came while on operations with the RAF in North Africa. As a Hurricane pilot with 33 Squadron, on leave in Cairo, for instance, he’d enjoyed high tea once at the Mena House resort hotel
[38]
across from the pyramids. In Alexandria, at the Grand Trianon Bar, he’d marvelled at the “Gilli Gilli” boys who passed the hat while one of them placed a baby chick inside Edy’s shirt one
moment, and used sleight of hand to pull out a garter snake in its
place.
[39]
In February 1942, while strafing a truck convoy with his wing
mate Lance Wade near Msus, Libya, Edy’s Hurricane took return fire in the engine and radiator; the engine stopped dead and he was forced to crash-land on the desert, where he was quickly captured by German ground troops. Treated for head wounds in Tripoli, he
was put aboard a tramp steamer bound for a prison camp in Italy. But the steamer was torpedoed and sunk at sea; Edy clung to debris, was picked up by an Italian cruiser, and eventually delivered to a POW
camp in Sicily, then another at Certosa di Padula in southern Italy.
He was imprisoned in the monastery (Camp 35) there long enough that he joined some of the British POWs staging musicals, comedies, and revues. One revue, written by POW Neville Lloyd, included a song about life in the camp:

We’re the Padula boys of Camp 35

going rapidly ’round the bend.

One of our habits is digging like rabbits

on tunnels that never end.

We lie in bed quite quietly, while the guards

are on their rounds.

But the moment they’re gone, we’re at it again

with a joy that knows no bounds.

We’re the Padula boys, Hey, Hey.
[40]

When the Italians capitulated to invading British, Polish, Canadian, and American forces in September 1943, Don Edy’s group was
on the move again. The Germans assumed control of the POWs
and during the next two months transported thousands of them
aboard trains from northern Italy to camps in Germany or German-
occupied territory; Edy’s imprisonments included Stalag VII-A at
Mossburg, Fort Bismarck, Oflag V-A at Weinsberg, and, finally, on November 1, 1943, Stalag Luft III.

“I doubt if there is a lonelier feeling in the world than when . . . first taken prisoner of war,” Edy wrote. “Everything seems com
pletely hopeless and the thought of being behind barbed wire for God knows how long, maybe years, brings on an immediate depression.”
[41]

By that time, Edy found himself in a Silesian POW compound
that housed about two thousand Allied prisoners of war. He recog
nized the monotony he would have to fight off, the fear he might
never see home or loved ones again, and the anxiety over the civil
ian hostility that surrounded the camp. He was haunted by the story of a recently arrived Irish officer who’d bailed out over Berlin; he’d survived only because German soldiers, cutting down Allied airmen whom Berlin civilians had strung up on a telephone pole following an air raid, got to him first.
[42]

Edy fought off his demons by taking on the role of permanent cook in Room
11
of Hut
123
with roommates Bill Stephenson, Johnny Taylor, Cliff Thorpe, and John Crozier. Edy spent hours
preparing the meals, in anticipation of the short time he would have cooking on the top of the one hut stove or in the oven below. He worked with the rations officer to have jam tins cut and bashed into
additional cooking and heating surfaces for the hut. With the Klim cans that arrived in the Canadian Red Cross parcels, Edy tried his hand at tin-bashing and soldering; he joined a couple of tins end to
end, wound some tin around a pencil for a perking tube, perforated
a tobacco tin with nail holes, put a specimen bottle upside down in the lid, and manufactured a coffee percolator.
[43]
It lasted more than a year. All these important distractions helped Edy forget the state
of the war and his state of mind. He enjoyed some immediate relief from his travels and travails as a POW on his very first night at Stalag Luft III.
Macbeth
was playing at the theatre and special arrangements were made for the new arrivals to see the show before it closed.

“Tickets were made available, neatly typed with the date, seat number, and row,” he wrote. “I thought this was a little far-fetched
in a prisoner-of-war camp, [but] the theatre only held three hundred people; there were nearly two thousand in the camp and everyone wanted to see the shows.”
[44]