The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (33 page)

“When I got back, I went to see Grace . . . and I married her,”
McKim said.

Former RAF Spitfire pilot and scrounger at Stalag Luft III Keith Ogilvie finished his war near Bremen, where his forced march had
ended in March 1945. Like so many air officers during the trek, he’d
survived thanks to employing a buddy system with fellow officer
Samuel Pepys. Perhaps what had contributed equally to his survival was that a year earlier, on the morning of March 25, 1944, F/L Ogilvie
had been the last officer out of tunnel “Harry” to get away from the North Compound. He was probably the hard-arser who’d cov
ered the greatest distance on foot—about forty miles—before being recaptured by German Home Guards near Halbau, Germany.

Back in England after VE Day, Ogilvie was hospitalized in Glouces
ter, as much to ensure that fractures in his arm, sustained in July
1941 when his Spitfire was shot down, had healed, as to aid his recovery
from the forced march. Nevertheless, during his convalescence, Ogilvie made up for lost time on a number of fronts. He reconnected with a Canadian friend who had worked with the British Ministry of Infor
mation censoring the letters of Canadian servicemen, Irene Lock
wood.

As well, Ogilvie filled out the forms to transfer from the RAF to the RCAF. And finally, he met with British Intelligence officers of
MI9 to recount his experiences at Görlitz prison following his recap
ture from the breakout on March
24
–25
,
1944
. In question was the
German assertion that the Commonwealth air officers had been shot
while attempting to escape custody and that, at the time, they had
been disguised as civilians.

During the debrief, a British Intelligence official asked Ogilvie to describe what he witnessed on March 29–30, 1944, from his Görlitz cell.

“I saw [F/L Mike] Casey, [S/L Ian] Cross, [F/L George] Wiley,
[F/L Cyril] Swain, and maybe two others [F/O John Pohe and F/O Al Hake] leave handcuffed under the control of civilians,” Ogilvie said. “After this, other parties also left at night usually in fours or sixes.”
[13]

“What clothes were the officers wearing?” the MI9 man asked.

“They were almost entirely dressed in Air Force uniform. [F/O Denys] Street for instance, had an RAF officer’s tunic with wings,
rank, and buttons.”

“As far as you [are concerned] had they committed any criminal offences?”

“Absolutely none!”

F/L Ogilvie returned home to Canada in July 1945 and married
Irene Lockwood in the summer of
1946
. He dedicated much of his
early return to active service in the RCAF, officially welcoming those aircrew members who returned to Canada through the ports of New
York, Montreal, and Halifax. He served in the RCAF another eigh
teen years. He died in Ottawa in May 1998.

Ogilvie is remembered largely for his DFC, his eight damaged or destroyed victories as a fighter pilot, and his nearly quarter century of service in the air force. Equally important in the story of the Great
Escape, however, was that account given to
MI9
. Based, in part, on
Ogilvie’s specific recounting of events on March 30 at Görlitz prison,
Oberregierungsrat
Wilhelm Scharpwinkel of the Gestapo and
Krimi
nal Obersekretaer
Lux were found to be complicit in the murders of
the Commonwealth officers at Halbau and found guilty (in absentia) during the war crimes trials in 1947–48. Scharpwinkel was traced to a prison in the Soviet Union in 1946, and interviewed by Capt. M. F.
Cornish of British Intelligence. The Gestapo chief at Breslau never
faced trial at Hamburg, but died in a Moscow prison in
1947
. Lux
died during the advance of the Soviet Army at Breslau in 1944. Ogilvie had at least helped to deliver the promise that the British Foreign Minister had made in June 1944.

“These foul criminals,” Anthony Eden had said, “will be brought
to exemplary justice.”
[14]

The fifty murdered air force officers weighed heavily on Wally
Floody’s mind for a long time afterward. Perhaps the impact of those bad memories took away Floody’s impulse to speak about the escape
and its aftermath for many years. Unlike other kriegies, Floody the Tunnel King wasn’t liberated until the end of May
1945
, when the
Soviets exchanged him for Russian POWs the Americans had liberated. Floody had spent his twenty-seventh birthday, April
28
, awaiting his freedom. He missed VE Day in England. He was just as glad to get home and leave the war and its experiences behind. Indeed, a year later, when his first son was born, Wally learned he was to receive
the Order of the British Empire.

“Flight Lieutenant Floody . . . became one of the leading organiz
ers and most indefatigable workers in the tunnels themselves,” the
OBE citation read. “Time and time again, projects were started and
discovered by the Germans, but despite all dangers and difficulties, Floody persisted, showing a marked degree of courage and devotion
to duty.”
[15]

The announcement put Floody in the spotlight. Reporters wanted
his story again and again. Buckingham Palace wanted him to come
to London for the OBE investiture. As far as he was concerned,
however, he didn’t deserve the fuss. He never considered his tunnel
designing and digging heroic. He turned the invitation down and attended to his chartered air service based on the islands along the Toronto waterfront instead. Eventually, Floody abandoned the fly
ing business altogether.

“I can still see their faces,”
[16]
Floody told reporters years later,
“especially the six Canadians. The Gestapo and SS took the fifty out,
two by two and . . . dispatched them with shots in the back of the head.”

During the time of the trials of those complicit in the murders of the fifty officers, Floody happened to be employed as a market
ing manager and living in Britain. There he reconnected with Wings
Day, who, after the Great Escape, had been recaptured and thrown
into the Sachenhausen concentration camp. The two ex-POW comrades watched with fascination as the work of S/L F. P. McKenna and the RAF Special Investigation Branch yielded convictions of the Gestapo gunmen during trials at Hamburg in 1947 and 1948. Floody steadfastly refused to talk about his memories, even when Paul Brickhill’s book,
The Great Escape
, was published in 1951. It took another
decade before Floody felt comfortable enough to openly reflect on
events at Stalag Luft III.

A phone call from moviemaker John Sturges came when Floody
was in the right frame of mind. The Hollywood director requested Floody’s expertise as a technical advisor during the shooting of his $4
-million feature film,
The Great Escape
, in the spring and summer of
1962
. Then in his mid-forties, Floody visited the set at Geiselgasteig, in Bavaria near Munich. Initially for two weeks, he offered his
impressions and suggestions on many aspects of the production—
the way the Commonwealth officers’ uniforms should look, how the underground air pump worked, and in particular the way set designers had reconstructed the tunnel “Harry” for the digging and escaping scenes. At one point, before the filming began, Floody was asked
to crawl into the tunnel replica. He noted it had a little too much
room,
so the production designer lowered the tunnel ceiling to make it believably claustrophobic. Just before Wally and Betty Floody left the film location, they enjoyed a dinner with some members of the production crew, who wondered about the production’s authenticity.

“I know you’re getting everything right,” Floody said, “because I had terrible nightmares last night.”
[17]

The Great Escape
opened in the summer of 1963. Its Canadian pre
miere in Toronto on July
3
featured a march past by an RCAF band,
and attendance by the Ontario lieutenant governor and as many former kriegies as Wally Floody could contact. As well as initiating a successful summer of box office receipts in Canada, the opening
netted $10,000 for the RCAF Ex-Prisoner of War Association. Wally
Floody regularly participated in POW reunions and memorials in Canada and abroad. One in Toronto in
1970
reunited not only ex-kriegies, but also Hermann Glemnitz, the former staff sergeant at
Stalag Luft III. As Floody posed for a
Globe and Mail
photographer with Glemnitz, the two men offered an exchange for reporter Arthur Moses.

“I didn’t know anything about any tunnels,”
[18]
Floody grinned.

“Come on, Floody,” the former German guard said, “I won’t put you in the cooler now.”

George Sweanor never fully endorsed the tunnel escape plan. Nor
did he feel comfortable with Roger Bushell’s confrontational strategy when dealing with the Luftwaffe guards at Stalag Luft III. Nevertheless, he co-operated fully with every demand the escape committee
made of him. Almost from the day the North Compound became
home to two thousand Commonwealth flyers, in April
1943
,
Sweanor
had committed to serving X Organization as a duty pilot, making note of everyone who entered or exited the main gate. In addition to those security duties, he had also served as a penguin, dispersing his share of excavated sand, and as a stooge, spying on the ferrets who were spying on the prisoners. As much as anybody else inside
the wire, Sweanor felt motivated to get home, where his wife, Joan,
and the daughter he’d never seen awaited his return. However, when
it came time to draw numbers for the order of escape down tunnel
“Harry,” George Sweanor had refused to enter his name.

“I was all for it initially,” he said. “You were a member of the mili
tary. You were expected to carry on degrading the enemy’s ability to
make war, and escaping would be . . . degrading their manpower.”
[19]

But somewhere between his drive for survival and his conception of trekking through hundreds of miles of enemy-occupied territory back to England, Sweanor discovered a reality that shaped his days of captivity and the rest of his life. Aside from the obvious confinement, surveillance, and deprivation he experienced at the Luftwaffe prison camp near Sagan, Poland, he came to believe that his existence inside the wire had had a lasting intellectual impact on him too.

“I consider Stalag Luft III my alma mater,”
[20]
Sweanor said. “With
years to discuss life with intelligent aircrew from well over a score of
countries, and with interaction with the enemy, it was evident that people are people—good, bad, and indifferent—in every culture.”
[21]

With the help of textbooks that were specially imported from Canadian universities, Sweanor upgraded his education with a political science course. In the library he read newspapers the Luftwaffe regularly supplied because their content endorsed the German posi
tion in the war. Together with the BBC broadcast content passed
along by the kriegies operating the wireless radio hidden inside the
compound, the library books and magazines helped fill in gaps that his wartime imprisonment had created.

“We knew much more about the war than the people who were
still fighting it,” he wrote.

And while it was a chore, he dutifully attended German language class, in part to be conversationally capable should the need arise, but mostly for the discipline of attending and learning. He participated as actively in sports in the prison compound as he would have at a Canadian university; he realized, if nothing else, that the physical exertion
maintained fitness and health when the lack of adequate nutrition sometimes did not. And while he only assisted in the functioning of the North Compound theatre peripherally, helping out with set
construction once in a while, Sweanor felt the regular weekly drama and musical productions constantly boosted the kriegies’ morale.

George Sweanor also took up the pencil and paper while imprisoned at Stalag Luft III. As with so many other rituals developed inside
the wire, writing became a daily habit he has continued throughout
his life. When the first edition of his memoirs,
It’s All Pensionable
Time: Twenty-five Years in the Royal Canadian Air Force
, was published in
1967
, fully two-thirds of the book’s content was drawn from notes
on his experience at Stalag Luft III. And in the years following the
war, when he continued to serve in the RCAF—in Interim Force, the Arctic, the Korean Airlift, the Distant Early Warning (DEW)
line, and NORAD at Colorado Springs—he never stopped writing his observations and thoughts. Preparing his journal for publication, assembling articles for periodicals, and composing notes for speeches, he downplayed as “verbal diarrhea,” but as of
2013
, George Sweanor, age ninety-three, continues to prepare the monthly newsletter of
971
Air Marshal Slemon Wing of the RCAF Association, in Colorado
Springs, Colorado. His sign-off is a regular feature of the publication:
“Ye Olde Scribe.”

Richard Bartlett’s landing back in England proved nearly as bumpy as his crash landing in Trondheim, five years before, during the Allied
defeat in Norway. After hiding “the canary,” the radio that brought BBC broadcasts to the POWs, Bartlett then survived the forced march to Lübeck and was liberated that first week of May
1945
. But
as had become the routine on arrival in the UK, ex-kriegie Bartlett had his uniform virtually stripped from him and his body subjected to repeated delousing showers. When Sub Lieutenant Bartlett emerged from the final medical and debugging sessions, he did not receive the appropriate Fleet Air Arm uniform he required, but a British Army uniform instead. Nevertheless, the RAF put him on a plane with three other Royal Navy personnel and sent ahead a message to Portsmouth to the effect that four naval POWs were en route and transport had to be arranged. The Portsmouth officer in charge misinterpreted the
note and sent a paddy wagon to meet “the prisoners.” To add to the
insult, Bartlett soon learned British authorities had shipped all his
uniforms and kit to his family’s Canadian home in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan.