The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (19 page)

Even German officers who wished to enjoy the inside-the-wire
productions had a difficult time securing tickets. George McKiel, a navigator on Lancasters shot down in November
1943
, joined the theatre production crew as soon as he arrived at Stalag Luft III; he
said the Commonwealth officers quickly decided to reserve the front two rows for the German officers. Further, the kriegies suggested
that the plays be recorded for posterity,
[45]
so in return the Germans
gave the actors film to snap photos of the casts. Of course, most of the film made its way to Dean and Dawson for the manufacture of forged passports. The shows ran one or perhaps two weeks at most before the
next production went into rehearsal and opened at the theatre. The
same night Don Edy attended
Macbeth
, George Sweanor managed to scrounge an extra ticket for another recent arrival to the North Compound—Ley Kenyon, the same RAF gunnery officer who had graciously donated his artistic talent to create a card for the George and
Joan Sweanor wedding back in Middleton St. George at New Year’s.

“I was amazed at how well [the theatre] transported us out of kriegieland,”
[46]
Sweanor wrote.

Don Edy nearly had to pinch himself to his senses at the sophis
tication of the kriegie productions. Most shows had thirty to forty musicians (in air force uniforms) in the orchestra, conducted by
Canadian Flight Lieutenant Arthur Crighton, and officers ushering audiences to their seats. There was a full curtain across the proscenium which rose on cue, full lighting on the performances, staging, props, and actors who seemed as if they’d stepped out of Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre or Drury Lane in London’s West End onto
a stage in far-off Silesia in the middle of a world war. Under appropriate lighting, cardboard that the kriegies cut out and painted black became a wrought-iron fence for
The Importance of Being Ernest
. For
Messalina
, the theatre carpentry shop took scrap wood, cardboard,
and tin, plus paper swans, and created a fountain with flowing water lit by coloured lights. And the artistic crew took a Red Cross crate,
put homemade wheels on it and turned it into the wheelchair for
character Sheridan Whiteside in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
. Backstage, actors used oleomargarine as grease-paint makeup.
[47]
If anyone received colourful wrapping paper in his Red Cross parcel, it imme
diately found its way onto flats for set decoration. Meanwhile, the same tailors who secretly worked on civilian escape clothes moon
lighted by transforming uniforms into suits and coloured sports shirts or pajamas into women’s dresses for the dramas. They created wigs
from re-braided and re-stitched rope. Perhaps the most astonishing
transformations Edy found were in the portrayal of women on stage.

“Our girls were excellent,” he said. “At first the boys took quite
a kidding, but after the first few productions the kriegies all realized there was nothing funny about it. The plays and dances needed girls and these fellows worked really hard to create feminine characters.”
[48]

“I was slight . . . and I was young, twenty-one,” said Gordon King, one of the air-pump operators inside tunnel “Tom”; King jumped at the chance to be on stage. “[They made me up] into a girl very easily, so I was in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
as the daughter. I had falsies, a wig . . . real professional people doing everything.”
[49]

George McKiel did his fair share of penguin and stooge service for the escape committee, but among the toughest roles he faced was
learning the Katherine Hepburn part in the kriegie production of
The Philadelphia Story
, because “it took me three months to learn to
walk and talk like a woman.”
[50]

When the house lights dimmed and the curtain went up, Don Edy said Belgian airman Bobby Laumans made a beautiful Elaine D’Argent in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, and New Zealand officer Michael
Ormond won storms of praise for his “Connie Boswell” act in a revue. Meanwhile, John Dowler made a fitting Frankie in
George and Mar
garet
, and Kenneth Mackintosh was stellar as Lady Macbeth. Edy
remembered playing a lowly executioner in
Saint Joan
, but Malcolm Freegard was memorable in the starring role; and, he remembered, Tony Pengelly was a perfect Clara Popkiss in
Rookery Nook
.

Flight Lieutenant Tony Pengelly claimed that time was a kriegie’s cheapest commodity. He expended a lot of it at the theatre as stage manager, producer, and cast member. He most enjoyed memorizing
his lines, walking through his roles in rehearsal, and, when it came show time, using makeup, prostheses, wigs, costumes, and a higher
register voice to transform himself into countless female characters on the theatre stage. He played ingénues, young wives and old, dancers, singers, goddesses, and witches. Like so many of the men taking on those alter egos on the theatre stage, Pengelly was creating a gift for his fellow POWs and a fanciful distraction from the realities of life in a wartime prison.

“I spent most of the Second World War in drag,”
[51]
Tony Pengelly later joked.

Still, Pengelly performed his most vital roles elsewhere at Sta
lag Luft III. From the moment he arrived in the compound outside
Sagan—and under the escape committee’s direction—he began to
pool kriegie artists, calligraphers, cartographers, photographers, and
printers to generate a whole array of forged papers. Beginning with
documents, letters, and fake identification cards, he worked with
four officers. He led ten others drafting the maps that escapers would need once they got beyond the Sagan area. They started their forgery—an hour or two every day at first—making sure that every detail was noted and replicated with utmost accuracy. If a forger happened
to use the wrong colour for a forged rubber stamp, he could ruin a year’s worth of work. By the time the Dean and Dawson forgery
group was operating at capacity, Pengelly had 137 on his staff. Naturally, Pengelly controlled any and all incoming items that might offer
information or technology required for the forgery shop. At one
point he oversaw the smuggling of an entire typewriter—one piece at a time—into the North Compound.

This led to another of Pengelly’s high-priority responsibilities: acting as a chief parcel officer. Almost from the very beginning of the war—when Wings Day was first SBO at Dulag Luft in late
1939
—British and Canadian kriegies had decided to pool and redistribute the contents of the Red Cross parcels.
[52]
In this way the older prisoners of war gave up their seniority for food and toiletries in favour of new arrivals, who had just been shot down, interrogated, and shipped to the prison compound with nothing but what they had on their backs. When parcels arrived at Stalag Luft III, they were not immediately
distributed for consumption; they were stored in the building that
housed the sick quarters in the
Vorlager
adjacent to the compound.
[*]
On average, each week a POW received the equivalent of a full parcel—from the US, the UK, or Canada. Generally, the parcel contents
consisted of basic ingredients (what the British called “housewife
treats”) such as soup, cheese, corned beef, salmon, sardines, raisins, pudding, coffee, tea, butter, jams, biscuits, powdered milk, and occasionally sweets such as chocolate or candy. Since Pengelly was also
on the front lines of kriegies taming bribery prospects among the
guards, his work, of necessity, required bait to entrap the prospects, or, as he put it, to “oil the machine.” Pengelly had the authority from Roger Bushell himself to confiscate any and all parcel items.

“Big X had full control over everything that came into the camp,”
Pengelly said. “Each [Red Cross] parcel received bore with it a list
of contents, and from those lists, Big X commandeered anything he thought the organization could use.”
[53]

Consequently, civilian shirts, sports jackets, plain blankets, and sheets became fair game for X Organization’s tailoring group. Picture books, pen and ink, toilet paper, coloured wrapping paper, and even newspaper clippings helped supply the forgery group. Meanwhile, chocolates and any item considered rare in wartime Germany
went right into the hands of those blackmailing the guards. In one
instance, Pengelly said, they had one guard so well tamed they asked for his passport for an afternoon; the kriegies promised in turn that the guard would not be caught without it and that it would be back
in his hands by nighttime. It was, and the guard got a gift for his
trouble.

“The camp
Kommandant
’s secretary had a boyfriend, a German guard we had tied up pretty well,” Pengelly remembered. “The secretary would get correspondence files from the
Kommandant
’s desk, give them to her boyfriend, who would give them to us. Big X would read them and then send them back along the same route.”
[54]

That autumn, fighter pilot Don Edy signed up for a couple of productions at the North Compound theatre—a small part in the
operetta
Messalina
and
some parallel bar gymnastics in a show called
Six to the Bar
. He had been a POW for just under two years. That
November, bomb-aimer George Sweanor acknowledged his twenty-fourth birthday. Back in June, he’d been buoyed by a letter from Joan
telling him she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl she named Barbara. More than once Sweanor found himself seated on a stump in
the compound, glaring at the barbed wire and vowing he would survive and one day return
home to his wife and daughter. He had been a prisoner of war for eight months. Meanwhile, Roger Bushell also got involved in the kriegie theatre productions. Partly to draw the Germans’ attention away from his escape committee activities, and no doubt to seek psychological escape from the summer setbacks of
1943, that fall Big X appeared in a production of
George and Mar
garet
. At age thirty-three and more than three years a captive of the German stalag system, Bushell agreed to prepare the part of
Professor Higgins for an upcoming production of
Pygmalion
. He would
rehearse periodically through the coming winter in anticipation of
an opening night scheduled for March 24, 1944, a night during which he would ultimately be otherwise engaged.

Like so much else at Stalag Luft III, the theatre, while appear
ing to offer harmless and distracting entertainment to young POWs awaiting the war’s outcome, became a disguise for greater pursuits.

THE
PLAY
’
S THE
THING

I
T SEEMED a world away and it was, but that fall of 1943 the Harlem Globetrotters maintained their winning ways— 2,163 victories
versus
162
defeats in fifteen seasons. The war was, however,
having an impact on the calibre of all professional sports back in
North America. At the end of the
1942
–43
NHL season, Boston’s
entire Kraut line of Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart enlisted in the forces, which prompted Bruins coach Art Ross to say,
“the best forward line today couldn’t make the Bruins’ third line a
couple of years ago.”
[1]
And that fall the New York Yankees won the
fortieth World Series, four-games-to-one over St. Louis. The Car
dinals committed ten errors in the series. Ironically, pro baseball’s
commissioner promised the game would go on as long as there were at least eighteen men left to play.
[2]

For perhaps that one season, members of the Canadian All-Star
Baseball Team, playing games inside the wire at Stalag Luft III, could have thumped the ’43 champion Yankees. They had that much talent in their lineup. With the Canadians and Americans housed in sepa
rate compounds (since September
1943
), contact between the two
nationalities of air force officers was limited. That changed, however, when the Americans asked the camp
Kommandant
if they could meet their Canadian rivals in a challenge for softball supremacy.

“The Americans always figured they were better ballplayers than
the Canadians,” Flying Officer Art Hawtin said. “They were just next to us in the [South] Compound and they got permission to bring their
team over.”
[3]

While baseball was a sport Art Hawtin had enjoyed in the 1930s (he had a Babe Ruth baseball card in his collection), it would not have
been his first choice. The fifth of six children born on a farm near
Kinmount, Ontario, Art did his fair share of chores, but his favourite
physical activity was pole-vaulting; in fact, he stayed in Beaverton
High School an extra year as a junior athlete to accumulate more victories and won ten track events in 1938. Along with his blue ribbons, Art gained a valuable skill landing repeatedly in all those high school pole-vaulting pits. On the night of May 13, 1943, as a navigator on a 405 Squadron bombing mission to Germany, Hawtin’s Halifax was
shot down; he bailed out of the crippled aircraft and landed in the
Dutch countryside.

“Landing with a parachute or pole-vaulting over a bar ten or
twelve feet high is just about the same,” Hawtin said. “I came down in a farmer’s field near Dedemsvaart, Holland. . . . I was completely relaxed and I landed safely.”
[4]

With the likelihood that any Dutch family hiding an evader would
be shot, Hawtin agreed to turn himself in. A week later he came walking through the main gate at Stalag Luft III and was assigned to the same room as John Colwell, the dedicated diarist and tin-
basher originally from Vancouver Island. Hawtin and Colwell had both served as navigators with 405 Squadron stationed in Yorkshire, so Colwell was able to vouch for his friend in front of the compound
SBO. Hawtin’s kriegie card identified him as a student. And when he was asked about participating in escape committee activities, he
readily volunteered to work as a penguin. But on the day the Americans decided to show the Canadians the finer points of their softball prowess, Art Hawtin turned out to be a pretty agile, hard-hitting left fielder on the Canadian All-Star Baseball Team roster.

Before F/O Hawtin arrived on the scene, baseball had already
become an all-consuming pastime at most of the prison camps where
North American POWs were incarcerated. Originally, the prisoners of war played sandlot baseball. The game didn’t require a lot of equipment, so the kriegies improvised by using bedposts as bats
and baseballs fabricated from old shoes or scraps of leather wrapped together with the rubber seals from empty coffee cans. Eventually, the YMCA back home shipped bats, balls, and some gloves into the camps so that the games at least looked like legitimate softball competitions. Initially, barracks hut played against barracks hut, senior officers versus junior officers, married men against bachelors.
[5]
The
games took on greater significance when the editors of the
Gefangenen Gazette
camp newspaper began publishing box scores and
commentary. Eventually, across the six compounds of Stalag Luft III, there were as many as two hundred teams playing on the improvised baseball diamonds of the various sports grounds.

“The Americans made arrangements to play us twice,” Hawtin said. “But we had Bill Paton pitching for us. He’d pitched senior ball
for the Beaches League in Toronto. They had a pretty good pitcher
too . . . but Paton [struck] out sixteen batters.
”
[6]

About the fifth or sixth inning of that first game, umpire Larry Wray went out to the mound to have a confab with Paton. Wray was Senior British Officer and also a Canadian, but he wanted the game to be more competitive. The Americans hadn’t hit the ball out of the infield to that point.

“Please let them hit, Bill,”
[7]
Wray pleaded.

“One ball was hit into the outfield in that game,” Hawtin said,
adding that the most strenuous part of the game for him was walking to and from the outfield. “The first game we didn’t get many runs, but we got enough to win. The second game wasn’t even close. I think
we won fourteen to one.
”
[8]

Not ones to miss out on such sporting spectacles, the German guards gathered along the baselines to witness the games too. Art
Hawtin wasn’t sure for whom the Germans cheered—the Americans or the Canadians—but Colonel von Lindeiner was frequently seen beating his cane on his leather boots enthusiastically.
[9]
While he was quite content to leave the rules on the diamond up to Allied air force officers, the colonel nevertheless kept tight control on other aspects of kriegie baseball, no matter who was winning or losing. Art Hawtin noted in his diary some of the rules the
Kommandant
wanted obeyed rigidly in and around the barracks, but especially near the warning wire.

“Care must be taken that no window panes are broken,”
[10]
Hawtin quoted from one rule. “Panes broken through carelessness will not be replaced.”

“Opportunity will be given twice weekly under the supervision of an interpreter to collect small balls from between the warning wire
and the fence,” stated another rule. “POWs must furnish a man to
collect balls. . . . He must wear some mark which will be easily seen and readily distinguishable at a distance by the guards.”

As awkward and silly as the wording of the ball-reclamation rule seemed, its application occasionally proved deadly. Phil Marchildon, from Penetanguishene, Ontario, pitched seventeen winning games
for the Philadelphia Athletics in the
1942
major league baseball season before enlisting in the RCAF; a pilot officer and tail gunner aboard a Halifax bomber, he was shot down in
1944
. During a
kriegie baseball game he witnessed, a ball bounced over the warning wire. A Canadian asked permission from a guard to retrieve the ball; Marchildon wrote that the guard waved the POW to get the ball, but
“when the Canadian [was] no more than a foot over the fence [the
guard] shot him dead.”
[11]

And there were flying objects other than fly balls that could get kriegies into trouble near the warning wire. Canadian Frank Sorensen had been a regular “circuit basher” when he first got to
Stalag Luft III, walking along the safe side of the warning wire with Roger Bushell, teaching him Danish. But later, when his Danish relatives sent him a glider kit, he test flew the model with its seven-foot wingspan and worried more about its landing than its flight.

“I’m afraid to tow it too high, as it might hit a window or fly over the wire,”
[12]
he reported in one of his letters home. In fact, on its maiden flight from the appell grounds, the glider caught a gust of wind and flew over the fence. Fortunately, the guard outside the
wire wasn’t as volatile as some, and tossed it back into the compound.

Meanwhile, letters posted the other way—from his Danish family
connections—helped keep Frank Sorensen and fellow kriegies up-to-date on wartime events closer to the front lines. He learned,
for example, about the so-called “clearing murders,” in which civil
ians such as Danish author Kaj Munk
[13]
were executed in retaliation for Danish resistance murders of German soldiers. BBC broadcasts received on the kriegies’ hidden wireless were also a lifeline to the Allies’ progress in
1943
. The balance of the war was tipping
in their favour. They learned about Montgomery’s pursuit of Rommel at El Alamein in January, the eventual victory of Soviet forces over the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad in February, the success
ful Bomber Command attacks on Ruhr River dams in May, and the
capitulation of the Italian army to joint Canadian-British-American forces in Sicily that summer.

Not surprisingly, there was more at stake on the kriegie baseball diamonds than just the Canadian All-Stars beating the Americans at
their favourite pastime. The escape committee took full advantage of the movement of people and sports gear around the compound to camouflage its activities. Some camera and radio receiver parts
were small enough to be smuggled inside baseballs, and if a bat were hollowed out, it too could help X Organization deliver contraband between compounds. In addition, prior to the discovery of tunnel “Tom” in Hut 123, in September 1943, American paratrooper Jerry Sage’s scheme of mingling penguins and fans helped disperse tons
of sand along the sidelines of kriegie football scrimmages, soccer
matches, track meets, and baseball games. But with the first snows and nighttime temperatures below freezing in November and December, only the Canadians’ maintained outdoor activities, either circuit bashing or playing shinny hockey on the sports grounds. However, neither sand dispersal in the snow, nor above-ground escape seemed practical or inviting during that time of year.

Across from baseball player Art Hawtin in Room
14
of Hut
120
lived the man Hawtin called “the Tin Man.”
[14]
In his diary, F/O John
Colwell
continued to keep a record of POW activities. More impor
tant, he kept fabricating tools and, with those tools, a steady flow of practical utensils—some overt and others covert—made of tin
, wood, wire, cloth, glass, and any other raw materials he could scavenge. Colwell had arrived April 12, 1943, but within a few months he had tailored ten pairs of shorts, an airman’s tunic, socks, and a sleeping bag. With the woodworking and tinsmith tools he’d fabricated from scratch, he then became a virtual assembly line, manufacturing useful items for any kriegies in need. Using pieces of tin and steel, and mislaid screws and nails, he built appliances such as coffee per
colators, kettles, cooking pots, pie plates, baking pans, toast racks, a fireless cooker, an ice cream freezer, picture frames, a Klim clock, and a metal brace for Group Captain Massey’s injured leg. Then,
from any Klim tins left over, he secretly began building a suitcase. It took eighty-one tins, but by November the bag was finished. Somehow, he sensed he’d be going somewhere.

“He could make anything out of anything,” Hawtin said. “There
were twelve of us who moved into a bigger room. There wasn’t a
thing in the room when we got there. Seven o’clock the next morn
ing he rounded up all the tin cans he could get and we had every
utensil we needed within a week. He was a master tinker.”
[15]

When he moved into a room that doubled their numbers from six to twelve POWs, Colwell felt he needed to build a new oven. At some point in the manufacturing process, he drew a diagram in his diary showing that his Klim tin stove required “120 Klim tins, 25
pounds of clay, a grate and two fire bricks.”
[16]
Colwell also helped organize the menu for Christmas that year. It wasn’t lavish, but following appell on December
25
,
1943
, Colwell’s roomies enjoyed a
breakfast of sausages with a cheese soufflé, toast and jam, and coffee. At 12:30, they had a lunch of toast and jam and tea. And for Christ
mas dinner, the cooks for the day—Bill Hoddinott and Art Hawtin—served up macaroni with cheese, roast beef, baked potatoes,
Christmas pudding, and coffee. As well, they enjoyed chocolate sent to them by the Canadian Prisoners of War Relatives Association and a package forwarded from the Canadian government with a greeting from the prime minister.

“All Canada joins in warmest Christmas greetings and good wishes
to you,” the attached card read. “Arrangements have been made to
forward to all Canadian prisoners of war a Christmas gift . . .
comprising articles such as gramaphone [sic] records and cooking utensils.”
[17]
It was signed W. L. Mackenzie King.

It’s difficult to know whether the prime minister realized it at the time, but the gramophone records in the Christmas packages could not have come at a better time. Two huts away from John Colwell’s one-man utensil production line, in Hut 103, Al Hake, an Australian
airman with a penchant for three-dimensional designing and construction, was hard at work building a more covert utensil—com
passes for the escape committee. Chief among the basic components of the compasses, Mackenzie King might have chuckled to discover, were melted-down Bakelite (plastic) gramophone records. Hake and his co-workers cut the plastic into pieces, heated it until it was dough-like, and pressed it into a mould for the compass base about an inch in diameter. They created the directional device with either a sewing needle or a razor blade strip stroked repeatedly with a magnet; the magnetized needle or razor was carefully mounted on a gramophone
needle, which stuck up vertically from centre of the Bakelite base,
creating the pivot point for the needle or razor. A compass card inside the casing indicated magnetic north (later models actually had luminous chips stolen from the
Kommandant
’s alarm clock). From broken windows, Hake then fashioned a glass face and gently heated it and the gramophone plastic to create a waterproof case around the com
pass mechanism. It was further sealed with reused window-frame putty. And if there was any question about the authenticity of the
compass, Hake and his team pressed a manufacturer’s inscription into the bottom of the compass while the Bakelite base was still warm.