The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (23 page)

All day long the atmosphere was electric at the North Compound.
Behind closed barracks doors—all with stooges at the watch—kri
egies collected their forged maps, compasses, and food rations and stitched them into clothing pockets. Meanwhile, Ker-Ramsey, staying behind like Pengelly as an escape committee veteran, made last-minute adjustments underground—covering the trolley tracks with
fresh blankets to muffle the sound, installing new tow ropes (passed
through the main gate by the
Vorlager
on the premise they would be used for a North Compound boxing ring) on the trolleys, and installing light bulbs (taken from the huts) in every socket available along the full length of “Harry.”

After sunset, about six o’clock, those on the escape list had last meals prepared by their roommates. John Travis, the tunnelling engineer, cooked up a concoction of bully beef fritters and a gruel of boiled barley, Klim powder, sugar, and raisins for two of his barracks mates—Roger Bushell and Bob van der Stok. Van der Stok,
the Dutch flyer, was going out in the first twenty of the escape order.
When they’d finished eating as much of Travis’s fritters and gruel as they could, Bushell got into the suit he’d smuggled into the compound from Prague a year before and van der Stok emerged in his
escape apparel; unlike the fake German corporal’s uniform he’d used during Operation Bedbug, van der Stok wore a civilian business suit, handmade by Tommy Guest’s tailors.

“How do I look?”
[13]
he asked his roommates.

“Immaculate,” Gordon King told him as they examined the tai
loring and the quality of his passes and identity documents forged
by Dean and Dawson. King knew van der Stok had been a medical student in Holland prior to the war and spoke several different lan
guages, including German. He planned to connect with the French Underground to get across the Pyrenees to Spain en route to Britain. He was going through “Harry” in the eighteenth spot.

In Hut
112
, George Wiley had gathered up his things and joined fellow Canadian James Wernham in
104
to await their call. Wiley appeared anxious about his first escape attempt and approached his roommate Alan Righetti. He handed Righetti his watch and a few
other personal things, asking him to pass them along to his mother
back in Windsor, Ontario, if things didn’t work out. Righetti, a veteran of earlier escape attempts, joked that Wiley would likely be home before Righetti, but he accepted the watch and Wiley’s final wish.
[14]

Just before 7 p.m., the clockwork movement of men to Hut 104 began. Under the direction of block commanders at each hut in the
compound, and with stooges positioned at windows, men trickled
into Hut 104 at thirty-second intervals. They were assigned rooms
in which to wait for their escape number to be called. Once that happened, they were guided into Room
23
and to the trap under the stove.
The committee had appointed marshals among the escapers; each
marshal ensured his allotted ten men were all set. Within an hour the priority escapers were in position, ready to go. And even though their spots were way down the list, so too the hard-arsers began
to make their way to Hut 104.

“In the room where we were, we tried to play bridge,” John Harris said. “I was with three other would-be escapers. I was with Johnny Crozier because he was the one with the set of maps.”
[15]

At 8:45 p.m., the first man in the escape sequence, Les “Johnny” Bull, hustled down the ladder in the shaft beneath Hut 104, stretched
himself face down on the trolley, and dog-paddled his way to Piccadilly, the first halfway house, a hundred feet up the tunnel. Once there, he jerked the rope for Johnny Marshall, who would act as an underground conductor for the first hour and—once his ten men were through—exit the tunnel in the number eleven position.
Marshall retrieved the trolley by reeling in the rope, climbed aboard,
jerked the rope ahead, and Bull reeled him up to Piccadilly. They repeated the exercise to get to Leicester Square, and finally to the base of the exit shaft at the north end of “Harry.” Their job was to remove the ceiling boards at the top of the exit shaft and make the
final cut through the sod in the pine forest. Behind them, Czech flyer Arnost “Wally” Valenta (second), Roger Bushell (third), and Bernard Scheidhauer, a Free French officer and fourth on the list, prepared to do the same. At the bottom of the entry shaft two Canadians got into
position in the pump room.
Trapführer
, Pat Langford, would help get men up the tunnel and reel in the empty trolley; then, with his group of ten on their way, he would take his turn as the fifty-eighth on the list. Meanwhile, Gordon King, the diminutive Wellington
pilot from Winnipeg, volunteered to pump the bellows through the night until his turn came, way down the list.

“I was a hard-arser,” King said. “I had a map of the area, a little
package of food, and my compass, just waiting my turn.”
[16]

Also in position along the escape route through “Harry” were expe
rienced tunnellers Red Noble, Shag Rees, and Hank Birkland. They
had agreed to position themselves at the halfway houses and haul ten men to their location before joining the escape. The eleventh, twelfth,
and thirteenth men in the order—also with underground experi
ence—would haul the next ten through and hand off the responsi
bility to the next three.
[17]
The plan called for a controller to remain
outside the exit hole in the woods to get twenty men on their way and then hand off the controller job to the twenty-first man. Everybody was in place. The only piece missing was the completion of the exit hole up through the sod in the woods.

About ten o’clock, the German lock-up guard from the
Vorlager
went through the North Compound closing shutters and barring the
hut doors from the outside for the night. Shortly afterward, King, Ker-Ramsey, and Langford began to wonder what was wrong. Seventeen escapers had been in position since
9
:30, but nobody was moving through “Harry” yet. The first two men up the exit shaft—
Les Bull and Johnny Marshall—had been battling for thirty minutes to open the exit to the tunnel, but the wooden ceiling at the top of the shaft was wet, swollen, and wouldn’t budge. Bull and Marshall,
both dressed as civilians bound for the early morning trains, had to
strip down to their underpants so as not to soil their business suits and try to free the wood and break through the soil above. Bull finally succeeded in prying the boards loose, and then, using a small shovel, broke a hole through the soil and snow above. He felt the cool air of the winter night on his face as the hole widened and he could see the
night sky above, the stars unobscured by wire. Up the last rungs of
the ladder, he poked his head through the hole. The sight was both awesome and terrifying.

Just as the tunnel engineers had planned, the exit to “Harry” was
well outside the wire. However, the reason Bull could see so many
stars as he peered up the exit hole was that there was no tree canopy blocking his view. There was nothing overhead. “Harry” was short of the pine forest by ten feet. Worse, the goon tower was just forty feet away. Worse still, the path of two sentries posted outside the wire—
one pacing between the tower and the gate to the east, the other walking to the west fence and back—passed within thirty feet of the exit hole. Even without moonlight, at ground level a sentry would spot anyone moving in the open against the blanket of snow in an
instant. All this Bull reported to Marshall and Bushell, who’d by now reached the base of the exit shaft. Amid the frustration and panic rising among the lead group, Bushell weighed the options. They could put the whole thing off and dig farther, but the digging and dispersal units had virtually shut down and were in escape mode. And with the compound-wide final preparations, there was a good chance ferrets would stumble across something to draw them to Hut 104 and “Harry’s” trapdoor. Then it dawned on Bushell: they couldn’t postpone the escape. All the documents were dated March 24, 1944.

Just as quickly, the solution dawned on Les Bull. At the edge of the woods, closest to the exit hole, lay a blind, a tangle of timber and brush. Birkland, Clark, and Harsh had spotted the ferrets hid
ing behind it spying on kriegies during the push to complete tunnel “Tom” the previous summer. Bull concluded if they attached a signal rope from the top of the escape shaft ladder, up through the exit hole, and out to the blind, a controller behind the blind could signal with a tug on the rope when the way was clear of German sentries. It was settled in an instant. They tied a new rope to the top rung of the lad
der and—when the sentries were out of view—Bull unravelled the
rope to the blind and prepared to signal the next man, Johnny Marshall, through. Bushell quickly scribbled the sequence on the wall at the base of the shaft, so each man would read the note and know what to do.

“Pause at top of shaft. Hold signal rope tied to rung. Receiving
two tugs, crawl out. Follow rope to shelter,”
[18]
it said.

Bull got into position behind the blind in the woods and waited
for the sentries to come back into view, stop at the tower, turn, and
retrace their steps out of view. He tugged twice on the rope and Wally Valenta popped up, wriggled through the snow across the distance to the blind, and entered the woods. A few minutes later Roger Bushell, number three, did the same. Big X had planned to travel with Robert
Stanford Tuck, but with the British ace purged to Belaria a month earlier, his new partner was Bernard Scheidhauer, the fourth man
through the exit and into the woods. The improvised “controller in
the blind” system meant the interval between men was now longer
than the planned two or three minutes, but at least the system was working.

Deeper into the pine forest, the kriegies stood up without fear of being seen. For two years those pine trees—a green wall—had been a physical and psychological barrier keeping them from the outside world. Now it concealed them from the compound they’d just fled. Among the first groups assembling in the woods were Wally Valenta,
Johnny Marshall, Des Plunkett, and Freddie Dvorak, all bound for Valenta’s and Dvorak’s homeland, Czechoslovakia. Next, Roger
Bushell and Bernard Scheidhauer, who planned to hook up with the French Underground in Alsace and Paris. Shortly afterward came
the two Norwegians, Halldor Espelid and Nils Fugelsang, who’d
taken Canadian Dick Bartlett’s sixteenth spot, along with New Zea
lander Arnold Christensen and James Catanach, one of whom had
switched with Canadian Frank Sorensen; they were headed through Berlin to the Danish frontier. The eighteenth man out of the tunnel,
in his “immaculate” suit, was Bob van der Stok; he too was making
his
way toward the station with intentions of getting across France and through Spain back to England. They exchanged “see you in London” send-offs, and then dashed into the night. They had all been instructed to vary their routes into the railway station. There were three options: stairs to a walkway west of the station, directly across the tracks to the eastern entrance of the station, or through a
subway that ran under the tracks into the station.

Bushell and Scheidhauer as well as Plunkett and Dvorak emerged from the woods and approached the station just as an express train en route from Breslau to Berlin arrived at Sagan. The first two entered the station in plenty of time to purchase their tickets and
board. Meanwhile, Plunkett and Dvorak were blocked at the eastern entrance to the station by a passing Russian work party; when they diverted to the subway under the tracks, they were stopped by a railway worker and a guard. However, at exactly that moment, there was confusion all over the station and marshalling yard because an air-raid siren sounded and the station lights went out. The two kriegies took advantage of
the moment and dashed aboard the express without tickets. Dutch
airman Bob van der Stok got caught in the same confusion; he was
just outside the southern entrance to the subway under the station tracks. A soldier questioned him, and van der Stok explained he was
a foreign worker trying to board the train. Conveniently for van der
Stok, the soldier insisted he follow instructions and enter the air-raid shelter, which in turn led him conveniently to the subway under the tracks to the station and boarding platforms.
[19]
But by now, the entire Sagan area was in blackout against a looming Allied bomber attack.

It was just before midnight when the sirens sounded at Stalag Luft III. Wings Day, twentieth in the escape sequence, had just begun his
climb down the entrance shaft. By the time he reached the bottom of the ladder, the Germans at the
Kommandantur
had cut electrical power to the entire prison facility. Everything above and below
ground fell into darkness. The single benefit from the blackout was that it snuffed boundary lights and tower searchlights too, which expedited the escapers’ dash from the exit hole into the woods.

Back inside the North Compound, however, “lights out” required
hut shutters to be opened and fat lamps in the hut rooms doused; it also sent the
hundführer
and their dogs patrolling through the compound. Inside Hut
104
, dozens of hard-arsers lay still in hallways and in bunks throughout the perceived danger of the air raid. With electricity cut
off to “Harry” as well, tunnel travellers couldn’t judge the distances,
the whereabouts of the halfway houses, or even how close they were to the tunnel walls. Ker-Ramsey was quick to realize the additional danger of throwing already jittery escapers into total darkness in such a confined space, and he immediately began lighting fat lamps along
the tunnel. The escape schedule was falling further behind. Instead of taking two or three minutes, it was now taking a man at least six minutes to travel the full length of “Harry” and up the exit shaft.