The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (3 page)

If there remains any doubt that the Great Escape myth and reality
continue to resonate and demand Canadians’ attention, consider the appetite for the story on the eve of the seventieth anniver
sary of the historic breakout. Across the country today, the legacy of the kriegie experience lives on in local, regional, and national reunions (albeit in ever decreasing size and frequency). Fascination for the story persists because the surviving wives, sisters, and brothers kept letters and news clippings. It lingers because daughters and sons and grandchildren never stop seeking the answers to unresolved
questions about their kriegie parent’s experience. Meanwhile, the Great Escape
tale
grows exponentially; every year, fresh stories
emerge in newly
discovered postcards and letters, never before published photos, unearthed tunnel archaeology at the site near Zagan, Poland, and remem
brances that are finally shared by kriegie offspring and dedicated collectors with the rest of us. Documentarians and authors continue to expand the library of discoveries and views. Canadians and others
never stop asking why this kriegie lived or that one died. And then, on Christmas break, near the anniversary, or online, there always seems to be a constituency—young and old—eager to
watch Hollywood’s version, right down to Steve McQueen’s mythical motorcycle
attempt to beat the odds.

About the longevity and indelibility of The Great Escape story at Stalag Luft III, US Air Force veteran and historian Arthur A. Durand may have assessed it best.

“In a day when we don’t have many heroes, it’s kind of nice to see some heroes resurface,” he wrote. “And while there’s a part of it that says instinctively, ‘Yeah, but that’s Hollywood,’ there’s the other part that says if even a fraction of that was true . . . then here’s something to [make us] take notice and find inspiration.”
[2]

THE
KIN
G
’
S REGULATIONS

T
HE ESCAPE SEQUENCE from a Whitley bomber about to crash seemed pretty straightforward in the procedure manual. Pilot
Tony Pengelly had practised it often enough with the other four members of his crew, although they had only done it when the
Whitley was stationary and sitting on the ground. When the bail-out order comes and the Whitley is flying straight and level, the Royal Air Force (RAF) manual said, Pengelly’s co-pilot, seated behind him in the cockpit, had to move quickly down a couple of steps to the cabin
escape hatch below and to the right of the pilot. By the time he got there, the observer-bombardier, positioned below the pilot in the nose of the Whitley, would have opened the escape hatch door on the floor next to him, and the door would have dropped open with
gravity. That would allow Pengelly’s co-pilot to be the first to crouch, fall backwards through the escape hatch and free of the aircraft, open
his parachute, and descend safely to the ground. He would be followed by the observer-bombardier, next by the wireless radio oper
ator-gunner, and finally by the pilot himself. The manual stipulated
that the tail gunner had to extricate himself from the rear turret, fit
on his parachute, and climb to the escape hatch in the roof of the rear of the fuselage. The rear-gunner was always pretty much on his own.

The problem remained, however, that a Whitley wouldn’t necessarily be flying straight and level in such an emergency. It could be side-slipping, diving, spinning out of control, or upside down in its
unscheduled descent. It could be stricken by icing on its wings, hit by lightning, or buffeted by upward or downward turbulence. Nor did the procedure manual take into account such variables as a power failure, fire in the fuel tanks, explosions in a bomb bay, blocked passageways, or any other unexpected impediments to an orderly escape.
Finally, the official RAF instructions for bailing out of a Whitley
bomber in its death throes did little to account for the final variable in such an event—the nighttime skies over enemy-occupied territory.

When Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft introduced its state-of-the-art prototype Whitley bomber aircraft in
1934
, the Royal Air
Force adopted it as its first heavy night bomber. Among its unique
characteristics, to offset the absence of flaps, the Whitley’s main
wings were set permanently at a high angle to potentially improve its takeoff and landing capabilities. Aircrews recognized right away,
however, that the Whitley seemed to fly with a pronounced nose-
down attitude, and its pilots sensed this added to the aircraft’s considerable drag in flight. By the time he began piloting them in 1938, Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Pengelly was flying a version of the Whit
ley bomber that included higher performance Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, modified fins, de-icing on the wings’ leading edge, manually operated turrets armed with .
303
Browning machine guns, and
an extended tail section for a better field of fire for the tail gunner. But all that made his Whitley considerably heavier and less manoeuverable. Pengelly and his comrades considered the Whitley—with a crew of five, capacity for a seven-thousand-pound payload of bombs, and a maximum speed of 230 miles per hour at sixteen thousand feet—vulnerably slow, notoriously cold, and, if forced to shut down an engine, unable to maintain altitude. Whitley crews came to refer to their bomber as “the flying coffin.”

To offset the Whitley’s alleged shortcomings and intimidating
nickname F/L Pengelly—being a stickler for detail—ensured that his aircrew was fully trained to cope with them. But as meticulously as he
prepared his crew, Pengelly prepared himself even more so. When
ever new navigational aids appeared at his home aerodrome, the Canadian bomber pilot learned to use them as well as his navigator could. He paid close attention to the way meteorological offi
cers read cloud formations and wind velocities so that he could read them equally well. And because the airworthiness and efficiency of his
Whitley bomber depended so directly on the skills of his Erks, the ground crew,
Pengelly developed tight working relationships with
the mechanics, artificers, armourers, and riggers at RAF Topcliffe,
where 102 Squadron was based in Yorkshire, England.

When his Whitley Mk V arrived at Topcliffe, Pengelly studied all its attributes and idiosyncrasies—engine revolutions, gun armament, bomb loads, petrol capacity, and the location of everything from the wireless radio to the evacuation dinghy. On days the squadron wasn’t briefed and dispatched to bomb targets in German-occupied Holland or France, he even took to blindfolding himself and his aircrew,
simulating nighttime conditions inside the Whitley in an emergency.
Pengelly insisted that if their aircraft were hit by flak or night fighters, all members of his crew had to be able to find any piece of equipment or reach an escape hatch by touch alone. As much as he could, he wanted to inspire an esprit de corps among the other four
members of his crew—J. F. M. Moyle, C. P. Followes, H. Radley,
and T. Michie. During downtime at the station, Pengelly even challenged his crewmates to motorcycle races on the aerodrome tarmac to sharpen the crew’s competitive edge. The skipper of the Whitley bomber, nicknamed “M for Mother,” wanted everyone on his crew at the top of his game. No doubt, some of the British prime minister’s oratory rang in Pengelly’s ears.

“Only one thing . . . will bring Hitler down,” Winston Churchill wrote, “and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland . . . without which I do not see a way through.”
[1]

Forty-eight hours before he was shot down, Tony Pengelly felt fully prepared and sharply motivated to take on the enemy. At age twenty, he’d already served as an officer in the Royal Air Force for two years, since the fall of 1938. He’d seen action as a bomber pilot as soon as the war broke out. His RAF 102 Squadron had flown operational
sorties (ops)—dropping propaganda leaflets on the Ruhr River in
Germany—on September 4, 1939, the second day of the war. Then, for the first year of fighting, his bomber squadron had played mostly a supporting role. His station’s Whitley aircraft had flown operations to Norway in a losing cause. They had bombed German supply lines inland from Dunkirk as the British Expeditionary Force retreated from France in late May 1940. Through the rest of that year, including the crucial Battle of Britain period, which tested principally the Fighter Command aerodromes around London, 102 Squadron was on loan to Coastal Command, escorting naval convoys to sea from Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland. Like most of his air force comrades, F/L Pengelly—a Canadian in the RAF—felt as if Bomber Command was flying in circles. He was sick of Britain’s taking it on the chin. He was itching to go on the offensive.

“For the first six months of the war,” Pengelly lamented, “I flew at night mostly over Germany to gain operational and navigational experience dropping leaflets.”
[2]

If the fate of aircrews seemed up in the air, so too was the leader
ship and bomber strength of RAF Bomber Command. While it didn’t
concern Pengelly and his crew directly, in the fall of 1940, Sir Charles Portal moved up to commander-in-chief of the RAF, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse took over Bomber Command, and Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris became Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, second in com
mand to Portal; Harris would presently assume total charge of Bomber
Command’s strategic bombing campaign.
[3]
Ironically, as its role sud
denly seemed suspended, so did Bomber Command’s aircraft strength
suddenly diminish. Late in 1940, the British Air Ministry reported a
total inventory of
532
bomber aircraft—
217
Blenheims,
100
Welling
tons, 71 Hampdens, 59 Whitleys, and 85 Fairey Battles.
[4]
RAF lead
ership deemed the Blenheims and Battles obsolete and began moving them to Training Command or the scrap heap. Wellingtons still proved
reliable so the RAF called for another hundred of them. Meanwhile,
the Hampdens and Whitleys would soon be ready for replacement
by
more modern aircraft; but for the moment their numbers remained
the same. The bottom line was that Richard Peirse’s Bomber Com
mand, in the fall of
1940
, was reduced by more than half, to
230
aircraft.
Operations would be fewer, but more specific and with less impact.

That autumn, nighttimes brought heavy frosts and penetrating cold. Like many crews waiting for news, Pengelly’s men dressed in their flying suits for warmth and huddled inside crew huts at the station. They had hung thick curtains as much to hold in heat as to black out the windows and doors. Spartan wall decor included propaganda posters, diagrams reminding aircrew about emergency procedures,
and a few favourite pin-ups. And the men sat at linoleum-topped
tables marked with indelible glass and cup stains and cigarette burns
from hundreds of nights like these. Their talk—of pubs, of home,
of women who couldn’t resist the attraction of an RAF uniform—reflected their bravado, their boredom, and their apprehension.
[5]
They all just wanted the CO to come in, announce offensive ops, and get on with it. Inevitably, he did arrive with those orders.

Mid-November brought what aircrew called the moonlight period, a time most Royal Air Force bomber crews welcomed during that phase of the war. If skies were clear, ops to a target would
be smoother without clouds buffeting them en route, targets would be more discernable, and the damage they inflicted on the ground would
be more photographable. Aircrew also said a moonlit sky seemed to release them personally from the oppressiveness of flying in total
darkness or dense, endless cloud. The British Air Ministry had earmarked German marshalling yards and iron smelters as high priority
targets, but at the top of the list were synthetic oil plants in western
Germany. A nighttime sortie against the refineries at Wesseling, near Cologne, revealed many of the shortcomings of
102
Squadron’s weapon of war—the Whitley bomber. But the emergency response aboard one of Pengelly’s sister aircraft illustrated the capability
of 102 Squadron bomber crews to offset that deficiency.

On November
13
,
1940
, over Cologne, German anti-aircraft batteries on the ground hit the Whitley bomber piloted by Pilot Officer Leonard Cheshire. The enemy flak ignited a fire near the
fuel tanks and among the target flares still inside the fuselage. With fire and smoke filling the cockpit and his bomber descending rapidly, Cheshire wrestled with the controls to keep the Whitley aloft while his crew ejected the remaining flares and battled the fires. Eventually, his crew extinguished the flames, and after nearly nine hours in the
air, Cheshire brought the shredded Whitley back to base safely. For
Cheshire, leaving the aircraft—even in a dire emergency—was not an option. The action earned Cheshire a Distinguished Service Order
[*]
and inspired the entire
102
Squadron, including F/L Pengelly.
Explaining the successful return of his Whitley, Cheshire credited the variable that had overcome any of the Whitley’s inefficiencies.

“These eighteen-year-olds,” said Cheshire, himself just twenty-three, “are a remarkable breed of men.”
[6]

If Cheshire’s courageous example and the exhilaration of taking the war deep into enemy territory hadn’t boosted the sense of purpose around 102 Squadron’s crew huts at Topcliffe, the news from northwest of London the next evening certainly would. On November 14 came intelligence reports that the Luftwaffe had delivered its most lethal bombing raid of the war. The same clear, moonlit skies RAF bombers relished had led four hundred German bombers to the heart of Coventry in Britain’s West Midlands. The enemy bombers had dropped five hundred tons of high explosives and thirty thousand incendiaries. The attack had destroyed three-quarters of the city’s munitions, aircraft, and armament plants, the centuries-old St. Michael’s Cathedral, and four thousand houses, more than half the city’s residential area. Britons were stunned and appalled. Pengelly had experienced the blitz himself. Earlier in the war, his private apartment had been bombed in a Luftwaffe raid that destroyed most of his
photographic equipment. But cameras, lenses, and photo develop
ment gear could be replaced; nearly a thousand people had died in
Coventry that night—the night immediately preceding Pengelly’s last
combat flight of the war.

At the briefing for his operation, F/L Pengelly discovered that
of the three ops targets slated—Berlin, Hamburg, and the airfields at
Schipold and Soesterberg—the largest, Berlin, would be theirs. He’d
been to Berlin first on the night of September
23
–24
and three
times since. This would be his fifth sortie to the German capital. In all,
eighty-two Hampdens, Wellingtons, and Whitleys would set out across the North Sea that night and of them fifty bombers would attack sites in and around Berlin. The idea of security in numbers
was not something Whitley crews experienced or even preferred. For most of his previous thirty trips—and commonly on Whitley sorties—Pengelly’s “M for Mother” Whitley had flown alone. As the Luftwaffe had over Coventry, the RAF operation to Berlin on November
14
–15,
1940, enjoyed the assistance of moonlight, but for various reasons only half the attacking force of Whitleys actually reached the city.