The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (21 page)

“Many a weary hour I spent peering out from behind windows
and doors and in all kinds of weather,”
[31]
Harris wrote.

Born and raised in Toronto and eager to land any job he could
after high school, during the Great Depression, John Harris found work as an office clerk with Canadian General Electric. But when the Nazis invaded western Europe and threatened to keep going across the English Channel, he sensed his new job was “to shoot down those Germans blitzing England.”
[32]
As a new recruit with the RCAF in
1941
, however, he was streamed to observer training.
While still in Canada, he faced greater danger on the ground than in the air. Right after his graduation in August
1942
, during a trip home, a freight train crashed into his passenger train on a siding;
nevertheless, all passengers survived. Overseas he was posted to
419 Squadron of Bomber Command and his penchant for survival stayed with him. On September 5, 1943, during their eleventh bombing op over Mannheim, Germany, and immediately following the release of their bomb load, Harris and his crew came under attack. The Halifax began to shudder and descend uncontrollably.

“My poor mother isn’t going to like hearing about this,” was his
first thought; then, just as suddenly, all he could see around him were the stars of the night sky. “My God, I’m out of the kite.”
[33]

Miraculously, either by being sucked through an open machine-gun turret beneath him or blown free by the explosion of the aircraft, Harris found himself floating to earth; he pulled the rip cord for his guide chute, which released the main parachute, and he landed in a forest, the only survivor of his seven-man crew. Following his capture, he was interrogated and eventually packed aboard a Luftwaffe truck for transfer to Stalag Luft III. With him and also shot down that night was F/O John Crozier, flying as a Second Dickie (observing pilot). Crozier was so recently assigned to the station (flying his first op with 620 Squadron) that he was still in his RCAF Blues tunic
[34]
, not his battledress, and considered by the others to be a German spy. The two men—Harris and Crozier—both served X Organization as
stooges. The watches could be as long as a couple of hours, and the
stooges were moved around so the ferrets wouldn’t notice a pattern.

“The system wasn’t foolproof,” Harris said. “One time I was peering out through a door and up a hallway at what was going on.
A German guard came right up beside me. I don’t know where he’d come from.”
[35]

Perhaps a stooge’s ability to recover when caught off guard proved as valuable an asset as passing along an alarm. Harris managed to collect his wits quickly and pretended that he had been worrying about the weather before sauntering out of the building. He hoped his performance was sufficiently convincing that the ferret wouldn’t bother to trigger a complete search of the building where Harris had been
standing guard. It was, and Harris proved he could survive yet again.

“I remember Pat Langford, my immediate superior, he came and chewed me out for not having done my job,” Harris said. “Then they discovered that somebody else had slipped up and he apologized.”
[36]

From the moment “Harry” was reopened, security boss George Harsh spent his days seated within view of the room containing the
trapdoor to the tunnel. Stooges on the job—from the duty pilot watching the main gate to those shadowing ferrets—remained in
touch with Harsh at all times, so that the second any German entered the compound with Hut 104 in his sights, Harsh could let Pat Langford know. In turn, the
trapführer
warned diggers below to stop any
work that might be heard. Then he installed the grill at the top of
the tunnel shaft, tucked blankets over it to muffle the sound, closed the trap with the tiles on top, and moved the stove back on top of the trap, simultaneously replacing the extension flue (above the stove) with its usual short flue. All of this happened within twenty or thirty seconds of Harsh’s call for a shutdown.

By the third week of January 1944, about ten days after the resumption of digging, “Harry” had advanced fifty feet. Right there—about
halfway between Hut
104
and the warning wire—Wally Floody built a halfway house they called “Piccadilly.” He planned a second one when “Harry” was two hundred feet in length. They reached that point—roughly beneath the cooler in the
Vorlager
area of the compound—the first week of February, and finished the “Leicester Square” halfway house by February
10
. During that time, they had
even been forced to shut down for a week when the moon was full in a cloudless sky. Had they continued to dig and disperse the sand as usual under the theatre, the penguins would have stood out against
the moonlit snow. But the escape committee put the excavation
downtime to good use.

By this time, Al Hake’s assembly line in Hut
103
had manufac
tured as many as
250
compasses and hidden them down “Dick’s” vertical shaft. Des Plunkett’s mapmakers had mimeographed approx
imately four thousand escape maps. Meanwhile, the men in Tommy
Guest’s tailoring section were making headway on the task of outfitting
scores of potential escapees in clothing that would help them blend into the civilian populations of Europe. Using shirts, pants,
and jackets from Red Cross parcels, linings from greatcoats, and old uniforms, they shaved the rough surfaces of the cloth and re-coloured them with beetroot, shoe polish, or the dye from book covers. They used the broadsheets of German newspapers to cut out the patterns and sized each piece of clothing to accommodate the escaper.

By the time tunnellers had dug “Harry” as far north as the tunnel would go, Guest’s tailors had manufactured as many as fifty civilians
suits. They would be worn by POWs made up to look like businessmen, professionals, and travellers going about their daily lives, board
ing trains that stopped at the Sagan Junction station. They would be
worn by kriegies with sufficient skill in several languages to talk their way through their documents and German checkpoints fluently. For most of the rest—the so-called “hard-arsers”—there would be some
documentation, some clothing, and the basic tools of travel: maps, compasses, and kitbags. Without multilingual skills, however, the
hard-arsers would have to rely principally on wits and good luck. John Harris, whose forged documents would identify him as Antoine Zabadose, and whose set of stencilled maps would guide him to the Czechoslovak border, was outfitted to look like a Hungarian ironworker.

“I made some effort, though not very successful, to alter the
appearance of my greatcoat,” he said. “It was almost the same khaki
colour as the Canadian army uniform, except that it had flares for
sitting on horseback. It was worsted or tan-coloured heavy wool that covered me from the neck to the calf. Underneath, I wore my battledress, which I’d had since I was shot down.”
[37]

Elsewhere in the North Compound, kriegie life—as far as the
guards and ferrets could tell—looked normal. The baseball, soccer,
volleyball, and other field sports fields beyond the appell area had
given way to the Canadians’ wintertime pursuit. With the surface of the ground nearly frozen or covered in snow, conditions were ideal for flooding the field into a regulation-sized skating rink for hockey. Players would grade the soil for the rink with homemade shovels and
a homemade level—water in a pan—then haul the water from the fire pool several hundred feet away. The first skates were entirely
homemade; kriegies took angle irons from benches and screwed the steel to the bottoms of their boots.
[38]
But true to his kriegieland repu
tation, Alberta-born-and-raised pilot Barry Davidson managed to
scrounge the real equipment needed to outfit teams for shinny.

“I wrote Don Mackay, the mayor of Calgary,” Davidson wrote.
“They got skates and hockey equipment and sent them to the camp. We flooded our rinks with buckets and they were regular sized rinks, so it was a lot of work.”
[39]

Hockey sticks were hard to come by and maintain. In addition to the city of Calgary’s contribution, the YMCA came through with some as well, but depending on the calibre of players and intensity of the play, keeping the sticks in one piece was a challenge. To protect the players from injury, some groups came up with special rules, such as only allowing body checks or shot blocks within a certain distance
of the net. However, there were cases of hockey games, indeed an
entire season at Stalag Luft III, coming to an end when the supply of sticks simply ran out.
[40]

In February, the North Compound theatre staged a homegrown revue.
Between Ourselves
, produced by Peter Butterworth, came
com
plete with comedy skits, dance routines, and short dramatic works.
Among the highlights, Bobby Laumans was back on the boards in the
role of a torch singer and Tony Pengelly joined a Latin dance number with six couples, featuring the female performers made up in Carmen Miranda-like head gear, capes, and miniskirts. Taking one
of the male dancing roles was another Canadian airman, James Wer
n
ham. Born in Scotland in
1917
, Jimmy had emigrated and settled
with his family in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He had worked in a general store and for an accounting firm during the Great Depression years,
but enlisted in the RCAF in
1940
and was trained as an observer. Overseas on ops, he became something of a celebrity in May
1942
,
when newspaper
reporters photographed him and his crew
[41]
(from
405
Squadron) as veterans of “Operation Millennium,” the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany. Three ops later he was shot down over Holland and captured. At Stalag Luft III, when not tending to other escape committee duties, he devoted his time to the theatre as a
means of boosting POW morale.

Another kriegie helping out onstage at the theatre that winter was
twenty-two-year-old George Wiley, from Windsor, Ontario. More
of a free spirit than most, Wiley wasn’t the best student in school and
suffered from rheumatic fever as a youth. And he appeared much
younger than his years, as if he were underage. Nevertheless, he had the credentials when he enlisted in the RCAF in
1940
, about the same time James Wernham did. Wiley flew Kittyhawks for
112
Squadron in North Africa, surviving a crash landing in October
1942
and repeated close calls in dogfights with German fighters through the winter. He was finally shot down in March
1943
in support of the British Eighth
Army over Tunisia. At Stalag Luft III, he joined escape committee preparations by assisting John Colwell with sand dispersal under the theatre. That winter, Flying Officer George Wiley took time to write home about his activities on the theatre floor (and below it).

“I’ve got an important part to play in one of our kriegie plays,” he wrote, “and am a bit nervous about doing my part well. May see you sooner than expected.”
[42]

By the middle of February,
Unteroffizier
Karl Griese, the ferret the kriegies had nicknamed “Rubberneck,” was snooping more suspiciously than usual around the North Compound barracks. He periodically ordered impromptu appells in the middle of the morning or the middle of the afternoon. Big X had warned the section chiefs to be prepared for these unscheduled roll calls. To help attract suspicion to himself—and away from the others—Bushell made certain he was spotted in innocuous pursuits, such as attending language classes or rehearsing his role in that upcoming production of
Pygmalion
. When the spot searches came, the kriegies made sure they dawdled en route
to the assembly area, a tactic that allowed the tunnel crews enough time to be pulled from “Harry” and cleaned up before appell. That
month Rubberneck sprang a sudden search in Hut 104, then one in Hut 110. Then he assembled Wally Floody, George Harsh, Wings Day, and Roger Bushell and strip-searched them. Next, he brought in a diviner who passed the divining rod over the ground around several of the huts. There wasn’t the slightest twitch. In the last days of February, when “Harry” was perhaps a hundred feet short of its run beyond the wire, the escape committee learned that its chief nemesis, Rubberneck, would be on leave for two weeks.

“I told [Bushell] we could finish ‘Harry’ before he got back,”
[43]
Floody said.

But Rubberneck had a parting shot and delivered a nearly fatal blow
to X Organization before taking his leave. On February
29
, during
the morning appell, the pesky ferret appeared with
Hauptmann
Broili
and thirty additional guards. They called out the names of nineteen kri
egies, including Wally Floody, George Harsh, Peter Fanshawe, Kings
ley Brown, MacKinnon “Mac” Jarrell, Gordon “Nic” Nicoll, Robert
Stanford Tuck, Jim Tyrie, and Gwyn Martin. The entire appell ground of kriegies held its collective breath as Broili led his select group to Hut
104
, on the very doorstep of “Harry.” The nineteen were searched for
two hours. Then, without any opportunity to go to their rooms to gather belongings, the column of kriegies was marched under guard through
the main gate and down the road to a satellite POW camp at Belaria
[44]
,
about five miles away. In one short, sharp dragnet, Rubberneck had
hauled away a half-dozen key members of the escape committee, some of whom had been in the service of X Organization since
1940
, invest
ing those four years in one real chance to gain their freedom.