The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (22 page)

“They just wanted to get rid of us,” Wally Floody said. “But they
had a pretty good shot at it, because they got the man in charge of
sand dispersal, the man in charge of security, [an intelligence specialist], and myself, a tunnel digger.”
[45]

Darker more deadly counter-escape measures were occurring in Berlin, even as the dust settled on Rubberneck’s surprise purge.
Because Heinrich Himmler,
Reichsführer
of the
Schutzstaffel
(SS) and
architect of the Holocaust, wished to put greater control of prison camps into the hands of the SS, he gave his blessing to
Aktion
Kugel
,
or Bullet Operation. Clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it stated that any recaptured escapee officers who were not American
or British were to be chained and handed over to the Mauthausen
Concentration Camp and either gassed or shot.
[46]
Himmler’s direc
tive also used the code phrase “
Stufe
III” or “Grade III” to cover up all reference to activities surrounding any recaptured POWs. The
directive was not handed down as a document, but passed by word of mouth to Colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner-Wildau, the
Kommandant
at Stalag Luft III. The order also gave Lindeiner the authority,
should he choose to use it, to execute recaptured POWs in his camp.
Von Lindeiner apparently had no intention of resorting to summary executions. In fact, when he received the Bullet Order, he assembled
senior officers, medical officers, and padres from all the Stalag Luft
III compounds. As explicitly as he could, von Lindeiner relayed the content of the order, almost entreating the officers to halt all escape
activity. For the North Compound, however, the die was already cast.

On March 1, 1944, with Rubberneck on leave and several Canadian veteran section heads now removed from the scene, Robert Ker-Ramsey took the lead in the tunnel. Deflated by the loss of key men, but bolstered by the opportunity to complete the final push while their ferret nemesis was away, the tunnellers went back to work. The crew underground doubled, with two diggers at the face of the tun
nel, two in each of the halfway houses, a carpenter preparing the shoring, and a man on the air pump continuously. The parade of
penguins to the back row of seats in the theatre and John Colwell’s
packers under the floorboards made the most of the shortened daylight hours and the 10 p.m. curfew. In just nine days, by March 9, the tunnel had extended the one hundred feet that—based on the underground measurements—they figured would put “Harry” beyond the wire, beyond the road, and well into the pine forest. On the tenth day the diggers carved out what would be the base of the vertical shaft to the surface. Over the next five days they gingerly dug upward and—just as Wally Floody had done in the first hours of the tunnelling downward a year before—at the upper end of their vertical dig they built a final solid box frame around four bedposts and a wooden ceiling. It was positioned right below some pine-tree roots, to remain in place until the night chosen for the breakout.

They had tunnelled for eleven months—from April
11
,
1943
, to March
14
,
1944
. They had removed and dispersed several hundred tons of sand from three major tunnels. Scrounging from every cor
ner of the compound, kriegies had incorporated 4,000 bed-boards, 90 double bunk
beds,
1
,
212
bed bolsters,
1
,
370
battens,
1
,
699
blankets,
161
pillow cases,
635
mattresses,
192
bed covers,
3
,
424
towels,
76
benches,
52 twenty-man tables, 10 single tables, 34chairs, 30 shovels, 246 water cans, 1,219 knives, 582 forks, 478 spoons, 1,000 feet of electric wire, 600
feet of rope, and
69
lamps
[47]
into “Tom,” “Dick,” and, mostly, “Harry.” According to the measured ball of string the diggers unravelled in the tunnel, “Harry” covered
336
feet (nearly
400
feet including the two vertical shafts). They were just six
inches away from the sod and roots of the forest floor well outside the wire—six inches to freedom.

The theatre troupe made a couple of offbeat choices to complete its winter playbill. In March, they presented the farcical black comedy
Arsenic and Old Lace
.
[*]
Next came
Escape
, a
1926
play by celebrated
British novelist and playwright John Galsworthy. The storyline followed the life of a law-abiding man who met a prostitute, accidentally killed a police officer defending her, and then escaped from prison. The POW production featured longtime kriegies Peter Butterworth
as the shopkeeper, John Casson as the parson, and, of course, taking on the female leads were John Dowler, Malcolm Freegard, and
Tony Pengelly.
[48]
No doubt the irony of the plot occurred to the kriegie performers as well as the German officers seated in the first two rows. But nobody made mention of it. Not even Pengelly had much of the play’s subject matter on his mind during the production.

“Up until this last great escape plan was well underway, none of us knew how many were to go out in it, or who,”
[49]
he said.

During a two-hour meeting in the library room of Hut
110
on
March 14, the same day Rubberneck returned from leave, Big X led
discussion about the timing of the breakout. The escape committee
considered three possible dates—March
23
,
24
, and
25
—the next three nights without potential exposure by bright moonlight, the
New Moon period. March
25
was a Saturday, which likely meant
additional train traffic and potential congestion along some rail routes through Sagan. They would wait to see what the weather brought on March 23 and 24. The section heads debated whether a mass escape
in bad weather, freezing nighttime temperatures, and with snow on
the ground might jeopardize any hard-arsers’ attempts to get away.
Did it make sense to delay a month? The tunnel experts couldn’t
guarantee the construction integrity of “Harry’s” shafts, ceilings, and walls, not to mention the continuing danger of the tunnel’s discovery.
The decision was to go either March
23
or
24
, depending on the
weather. The committee hoped between nine o’clock on the night of the escape and 5:30 the next morning it could spring more than two hundred kriegies—one every three or four minutes.

The final agenda item involved Big X and the section heads drawing the names of those who would comprise the list of escapers. The first thirty names selected came from a list of the best German
speakers. The next twenty names came from the most prominent escape committee workers. Then, thirty more were drawn from a list of stooges, penguins, tailors, compass and mapmakers, and forgers.
Finally, all remaining names of escape workers were pulled from
a hat to bring the total number to about two hundred.
[50]
Escapers
would go through “Harry” in the same order the names were drawn.

“When the time came close,” Pengelly continued, “we drew lots, intensely, in small groups. Mere slips of paper they were, holding the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of freedom—and for the lucky ones, how long he would be after the first to leave . . . I drew number ninety-three.”
[51]

The mass escape scenario that the committee chiefs and about
six hundred other Commonwealth prisoners of war had built from scratch was just days away from its final act.

“THROUGH
ADVERSITY TO
THE STARS”

H
olding
the slip of paper with his escape number on it, and
sensing all his work falsifying documents for dozens of his comrades at Stalag Luft III was nearly done, F/L Tony Pengelly still agonized over his shot at freedom. He hadn’t seen his fiancée in England for more than three years. He hadn’t seen Canada since
1938
. All the amenities he’d gone without—the food, the people, the shows, the lights, the freedom to open a door and walk down any street whenever he wished—could be waiting at home in Toronto.

“It was the greatest decision of my life as a prisoner of war,”
[1]
he said.

Weighing on his mind, however, were the details of duty. He had directed the production of many of the escape documents. He knew their design, detail, and delivery better than almost anyone inside the forgery section of X Organization. He wondered whether—on the night of the escape—somebody in his branch of Dean and Dawson should stay behind to check that every identification card was in the right hands of the right escaper as he entered “Harry” on his way out.
Nothing could be left to chance. No man could leave with papers
that didn’t match his disguise. And if Pengelly took his position—ninety-third in the tunnel—and left the job to someone else, might one vital detail be omitted? Could there be a mistake he might have caught? Should someone with his seniority stay behind to help the next escape?

“In the nights when the [barracks] were quiet,” Pengelly said, remembering that crucial moment in Hut 104, “I ground it over in
my
mind. . . . I realized in those nights I lay awake and those days
I pounded the circuit inside the wire, that more than a high wire
fence had me prisoner now. There was this responsibility, and on my acceptance or rejection of it, depended my chance at freedom.”
[2]

In the end, Pengelly decided to forfeit his spot. Just twenty-four, engaged to be married to Pauline Robson, and a POW in Germany
since the fall of
1940
, the wily pilot who’d cajoled countless German guards to loan him their legal papers, and then stepped on the North
Compound theatre stage to flawlessly portray female roles, had
decided to bow out of the finale. Instead of joining the coming mass escape, he would stay behind. In doing so, he would help give the escape committee a nucleus of old hands to ensure the success of the
current breakout and to build up X Organization again for another.

The same kind of decision weighed heavily on navigator George
Sweanor’s mind. A year older than Pengelly, he had even more to
hurry home to, including a new bride and a newborn daughter he’d never seen. But the young RCAF flying officer considered other fac
tors. Despite the sophistication of the security operations in which he’d participated (as the duty pilot inside the main gate), Sweanor still concluded that escaping to Britain was a pipe dream. He realized Stalag Luft III was too deep in occupied Europe and that only those who spoke German had a legitimate chance of getting away.
He was also realistic enough to fear the Gestapo’s brutality should he be recaptured. He also sensed he had reason to fear German propaganda that had painted Allied aircrew as
Luftgangsters
(air gangsters) and their bombers as
Terrorflugzeuge
(terror aircraft); survival in cities decimated by Bomber Command was not a sure thing either.
[3]

“I argued that a mass escape would cause a desired disruption to the German war effort because it would take a lot of people to track us down, but there would be little hope of anybody getting home,” Sweanor said. “[So] I felt relieved when my name was not drawn.”
[4]

A couple of Sweanor’s barracks mates did have their names drawn,
including George McGill, who had conjured up diversions during earlier escape attempts and then worked as tunnel security assistant to George Harsh; he would be seventy-fifth into the tunnel.
[5]
Other Canadians’ names drawn or chosen by Big X included Gordon Kidder, the Johns Hopkins University master’s prospect who spoke
German and French fluently; he was thirty-first on the escape list. James Wernham and George Wiley, who had both joined the theatre production crew during the past year, would be thirty-second and thirty-third. Hank Birkland, the Big Train, had dug tunnels in every German compound that had imprisoned him since the fall
of 1941; he would go through “Harry” for the last time in the fifty-first position. Pat Langford, the
trapführer
responsible for opening and closing “Harry” almost every day for the previous eleven months
was number fifty-eight. Tommy Thompson, the Canadian pilot
who’d personally earned the wrath of Hermann Göring for waking the
Reichsmarschall
the September night he was shot down in 1939, would be sixty-eighth; once outside the wire he planned to team up with Flying Officer Bill Cameron, who was in the sixty-second spot. Fighter pilot Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie had won a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for intercepting a Dornier bomber en route to bomb Buckingham Palace during the Battle of Britain; he was seventy-sixth
on the escape list. Bob McBride, who’d burned the bowling set his wife sent him the winter before to stay warm, would face the March cold in the eightieth position. A few more Canadians held escape numbers in the eighties and nineties, including Jack Moul, Red Noble and Mac Reilley. Further down the list, Gordon King, who had regularly operated the air pump, held escape number
141
. Meanwhile, John Colwell, the Tin Man, who’d hand-built many of
the tools of escape while making so much of the sand disappear under the theatre, would be 147. All set to travel outside the wire as Hungarian ironworkers, John Crozier and his roommate John R. Harris had drawn escape numbers 179 and 180.

As Pengelly’s forgers put the finishing touches on the fake identity
Kennkarte
and
Ausweise
passes that Crozier, Harris, and many others would need, X Organization moved into fine-tuning mode on other fronts. John Travis’s engineers weren’t building tools and equipment for the tunnelling anymore; they were transforming sheets of food tins into portable water bottles for the escapers. Des Plunkett’s assembly line had completed its last multicoloured, mimeographed
maps. For Tommy Guest’s tailors there was still civilian wear to stitch and colour, but Al Hake had punched his Stalag Luft III manufacturer’s imprint on the last escape compass. Robert Ker-Ramsey and Johnny Marshall began assembling the escapers in small groups to explain how to get through the tunnel. Roger Bushell called for one last levy on the Red Cross parcels, with every ounce of sugar, cocoa, raisins, milk, and biscuits being confiscated and poured into a stewing pot and then a baking oven; the resulting fudge, prepared in Hut
112
, could provide a man with enough caloric intake to last him two days.

Otherwise, Bushell remained away from the escape production centres as much as he could—conducting lectures in the library and
rehearsing his lines as Professor Higgins in the upcoming theatre
production of
Pygmalion
—so that the guards could see him in a normal, innocuous routine. But Big X had one final piece of the puzzle to orchestrate: the logistics for getting more than two hundred men into Hut 104 on the appointed night and through the tunnel in an orderly escape. The first thirty to make their way through “Harry” would attempt to get to the Sagan station in time to catch the earliest trains. Then, using their natural linguistic skills, civilian disguises,
and forged papers, they would board passenger coaches and scatter in a half-dozen different directions. The next seventy to make their way through, the so-called “hard-arsers,” would be dressed in
work clothes, looking like migrant workers in transit. If they couldn’t get tickets for third-class passenger seats, they would resort to using compasses, maps, intuition, and darkness to make their getaway individually and in small groups.

Air gunner Albert Wallace had no seniority with the escape committee,
but he had served as a penguin hiding sand under the theatre, and could have put his name in the draw. He chose not to. He
recognized in himself and others the pent-up frustration of extended
imprisonment in the German
Straflager
system. When life boiled down to twice-a-day roll calls, scrounging for food, and shivering
inside poorly insulated barracks, he saw comrades become “barbed-
wire happy,” obsessed with getting out. A Canadian kriegie who had
notoriously attempted an escape by cutting through the wire was put
in solitary for a month. The resulting claustrophobia turned a trip to the toilet into a run for it; he was shot, though not fatally.
[6]
Two others had committed suicide, one at Stalag Luft I and the other at Luft III.
[7]
As depressing and debilitating as compound life became, however, Wallace felt he’d kept his head.

“I had no interest in escaping whatsoever,” he said. “We were
eight hundred miles from England. Escape through Germany with
eighty million people all speaking German and I spoke English? It
would take a miracle to get back.”
[8]

Having spent a little less than a year behind wire at the North
Compound, Canadian Spitfire pilot Frank Sorensen was nonetheless
feeling the tyranny. Through the winter of
1944
, his letters home
more often reflected the symptoms that Albert Wallace had seen in some of his roommates. Sorry Sorensen wrote home that the winter
had forced the POWs indoors and that “indoor life in a kriegie camp does not make time go any faster.”
[9]
Fortunately, Sorensen had the benefit of fluency in Danish and therefore had received the nod to exit through “Harry” in the first or second wave of escapers on the
night of the escape. However, several factors influenced Sorensen’s eventual decision to forfeit his higher position on the list. X Organization intelligence suggested the first escapees—fluent in German
and dressed like businessmen or travellers—stood the best chance of getting away safely if they caught the fast morning trains leaving Sagan. Sorensen deduced those same express trains would
also undergo the greatest scrutiny and surveillance by German police and railway guards. He therefore considered going through the tunnel lower on the list to catch a later, slower train, where his presence
would attract less attention.

But Sorensen weighed yet another consideration. Among his closest friends inside the wire was James Catanach, an Australian officer who’d grown up in a tightly knit family, and Arnold Christensen, a New Zealand officer who shared Sorensen’s Danish heritage. Both
Catanach and Christensen had been imprisoned longer than Sorensen had, and in the grand scheme of the mass breakout, their successful escape seemed to hold greater emotional significance, at
least in the way Sorensen looked at it. So, for strategic purpose or matters of the
heart or both, he chose to trade his earlier spot on the escape list for a higher number and later exit through the tunnel.
[10]

Canadian Fleet Air Arm pilot Dick Bartlett faced a slightly different dilemma before the breakout. For nearly four years he had successfully moved the kriegies’ wireless radio, hidden inside a medicine ball, from one prisoner-of-war camp to another, right under the Germans’ noses. At the North Compound, he had safely concealed “the canary” in a non-functioning toilet. Based on his service, Bartlett was
assigned the sixteenth position on the escape list, and paired with
Norwegian pilot officer Halldor Espelid in the fifteenth spot. Then, in the weeks leading up to the breakout, another Norwegian flying officer, Nils Fugelsang, was shot down and imprisoned at the North Compound. Bartlett figured that Espelid and Fugelsang, with their linguistic advantage, together stood a better chance of evading cap
ture and getting home. Bartlett chose to give up his spot to Fugel
sang and stay behind.
[11]

Circumstances leading up to the breakout also put an end to Barry Davidson’s hopes of escaping through “Harry.” The former Blenheim pilot shot down in July
1940
had served on the original
escape committee and in time had become X Organization’s leading scrounger. A born baseball and hockey player, but also a poet, diarist, and artist, Davidson had shone brightest in the art of friendly persuasion, taming Germans guards—offering them Red Cross chocolate, coffee, and cigarettes—to lend him the makings of tools or identity
documents. In the pre-breakout lottery, he had won the seventy-
eighth position on the escape list. But then, almost on the eve of the breakout, his strength became his weakness.

“I had been seen talking to Fischer, one of the guards, shortly
before the escape,” Davidson said. “He hated the Nazis and had sym
pathy for the POWs. We had such a good security system that [X
Organization] knew the Germans had seen me talking to him. . . . My relationship with this guard would have risked his life had I gone. . . . So Roger Bushell asked me if I’d step back and not go out.”
[12]
Reluctantly, Davidson agreed.

A couple of days past the official arrival of spring, the Sagan area of Silesia still had six inches of snow on the ground. But the air above the ground was mild. The escape committee met in Hut
104
on March
23
and decided to delay the breakout one more day. There was more
snow that night, but when the committee met in Hut
101
on the
morning of March
23
, the members knew a decision had to be made
right away to give Ker-Ramsey the day to prepare “Harry” for the
wear and tear of the escape and to allow Pengelly the time to have all required documents signed and date-stamped “March
24
.” More dis
cussion focused on the plight of the hard-arsers in the snow and
cold of the night. Wings Day and Roger Bushell agreed the hard-arsers’ chances of escaping were slim anyway, but even if they were
only on the loose
for a few days, the resulting chaos across Germany rounding them up would have as desirable an effect as if they all got back to Britain.
Bushell gave the decision his blessing and then walked to the
North Compound theatre where his understudy, Kenneth
Mackintosh, got the word Big X would not be onstage as Professor Higgins that night.
Pygmalion
would have to open without him.