The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (35 page)

David Pengelly was three years old in
1938
when his older brother
left the family home in Weston, Ontario. At eighteen, Tony Pengelly
couldn’t vacate the household fast enough. He had not enjoyed a close
relationship with his father, besides which, he had his heart set on a career in the Royal Air Force whether his father endorsed his decision or not. A few weeks later, the older Pengelly son stepped off a cattle boat in the UK and was quickly accepted into RAF train
ing, which had him flying combat operations in Bomber Command from the first week of the war in September 1939. Periodically, Tony
sent mementos to his little brother, the first being a picture postcard
depicting a Fairey Battle bomber. Tony had addressed the card “To Liney,”
since Lionel was David’s middle name. He cherished the card. On
David’s fifth birthday, just a few months before F/L Tony Pengelly
and his Whitley bomber crew were shot down over Germany, David received a Dinky toy model of a Whitley in the mail.

“From the time I was five,” David Pengelly said, “I adored the
thought of my brother. Spitfire and bomber pilots were like rock stars
or astronauts flying these wonderful machines.”
[30]

In July 1945, Tony Pengelly, former flight lieutenant and forgery chief at Stalag Luft III, came home to Canada. The family made plans to help
Tony decompress on Pengelly Island, a one-acre rock outcropping
on Sawyer Lake in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario.
There was no electricity on the island, nor indoor plumbing, just a family cottage accessible only by boat. With limited accommodation
inside the cottage, David and Tony were encouraged to camp out
side in a tent. The first night alone together, older brother regaled
younger brother with some of his wartime yarns. Then, the boys’ mother prepared a meal with all of Tony’s favourites—roast beef,
corn-on-the-cob, and fruit pies—and watched the former kriegie dig
into his first home-cooked meal since he’d left Weston in 1938.

“Do you have a little more?”
[31]
Tony asked when he’d finished his first portion.

“Sure! Sure!” his family all said. And he dove into a second portion
and a third until he couldn’t eat another mouthful.

“There’s two or three cobs of corn left,” Tony noticed. “What’s
going to happen to those?”

“Oh well, they’ll be cold,” his mother said. “We’ll just throw them out.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll have them for breakfast,” Tony insisted. And
he promised he’d do the same with the beef and the pies.

Mementos that prisoners of war brought home were few and far between. Any personal items Tony Pengelly may have carried with him when he was shot down on November
14
,
1940
, were destroyed
in the crash of his Whitley bomber or confiscated during questioning by Luftwaffe interrogators as they processed him for imprisonment in Germany and later Poland. And since he became one of X Organization’s principal forgers, Pengelly would have shown or shared very few of his possessions publicly inside the compound either. In other words, despite helping to win the war, Pengelly had little to show for it outside of service medals and replenished air force insignia. Consequently, when he married and had his own children, Tony came to his younger brother David for a favour.

“Do you still have that Whitley [Dinky toy] I sent you?” he asked.

“Of course,” David told him. It was the favourite memento from his big brother’s service overseas as a bomber pilot during the war.

“Can I have it for a while? I’d like my kids to see it,” Tony said.

David agreed to loan it, but then never saw it again. Some of the other keepsakes that Tony did manage to salvage from his time at Stalag Luft III ended up in a small briefcase passed down to his son, Chris Pengelly. A few RAF certificates, diagrams, letters, newspa
per clippings, and photographs of Tony posing in a group in front of barracks huts or on stage at the North Compound theatre survived
in the leather case. Of his father’s role in the Great Escape, Chris
Pengelly knew just a little. His father had shared more with his Uncle David than with him. Chris was a teenager in 1963 when
The Great Escape
was released; his mother Pauline reported the movie disrupted Tony’s sleep with recurring nightmares. In contrast, when the sitcom
Hogan’s Heroes
—depicting life in a mythical German POW camp—
appeared on television between
1965
and
1971
, Chris recalled that
his parents loved the series.

“They watched it all the time,”
[32]
Chris Pengelly emphasized. “He
laughed so hard each time [the farcical German Sergeant Schultz]
said, ‘I see nothing. I hear nothing.’ He considered it very funny, but
quite realistic. You don’t get shot down and say, ‘Oh, I’ll just take
my digital camera with me.’ He knew they had to make things from scratch and bribe the guards for things like the camera . . .

“
The Great Escape
movie gave him nightmares,” Chris said finally. “The TV show let him laugh about it.”

Very little of the North Compound that the six hundred Canadians
knew from
1943
to
1945
exists intact today. On the actual site, just
outside the town of Zagan (the Polish spelling of Sagan), the double fencing is gone. So are the watchtowers, the
Vorlager
, and any above-
ground evidence of the cook house, the theatre, or the fifteen barracks huts. All gone. Only concrete pads and some masonry walls remain the way they were when the Commonwealth kriegies were
transferred there from the East Compound in the middle of the
war. The rest of the former prison camp, the forest and weeds have pretty much reclaimed. Periodically, Polish groundskeepers chop back the brush that pokes through the bricks of the fire pool or the
theatre foundation so that visitors passing through each summer can get an idea of what they once looked like.

At the northern edge of the property, a walkway of crushed stone with wooden borders, twenty inches wide, runs 336 feet north-south the full length that tunnel “Harry” did—from the concrete pad where
Hut
104
stood to the approximate exit hole just shy of the woods. At the edge of that same pine forest (that stands very much as it did
dur
ing the war) are sun-faded commemorative plaques. Near the end
of the walkway nearest Hut
104
rests a series of flat stone markers with the names of the fifty executed air force officers engraved on
them. The markers include the names of Hank Birkland, Gordon Kidder, Pat Langford, George McGill, James Wernham, and George Wiley—
the Canadians murdered after the breakout.

To their credit, the volunteers at the Museum of Allied Forces
Prisoners of War Martyrdom periodically welcome groups of tourists, school children, and some of the kriegie offspring who occasion
ally stop to explore and imagine on their own. West of the former prison compound, at the museum site, a replica of Hut
104
gives
visitors an approximation of the Commonwealth air officers’ barracks experience. There’s a stove (like the original that covered the trap to tunnel “Harry”) sitting in the appropriate corner of Room
23
, as well
as bunk beds, a dining area, and the “To All Prisoners of War! The escape from prison camps is no longer a sport!” propaganda poster
tacked on the hut wall after the Great Escape. A nearby pavilion contains a small library and an exhibit room. Out in front of the pavilion,
a reproduced watchtower lords over a stretch of tunnel containing
replica bed boards, trolley, and tracks. This is a facsimile of about fifty
feet of “Harry” constructed a few feet down and covered in a see-
through plastic ceiling. The replica gives a false sense of accessibility
and ease of passage.

Nowhere on the old compound property nor among the museum
exhibits can visitors experience the claustrophobia that tunnel designer
Wally Floody and diggers John Weir and Hank Birkland knew under
ground . . . or realize the audacity and skill of scroungers Barry
Davidson, Joe Noble, and Keith Ogilvie . . . or recognize the volume of intelligence Kingsley Brown amassed for Dean and Dawson . . .
or appreciate the precision of Tony Pengelly’s work forging docu
ments and performing female roles on the theatre stage . . . or witness the speed with which
trapführer
Pat Langford opened and closed the entrance to “Harry” each day it moved the kriegies closer to a shot at freedom . . . or hear the conversation basics that language trainers
Gordon Kidder and Frank Sorensen gave potential escapers . . . or comprehend the nerve that security men George McGill, George
Sweanor, and Dick Bartlett exhibited to protect the escape committee’s greatest secrets . . . or understand the efficiency of the penguins,
stooges, and duty pilots all running interference at the camp their
German captors described as “escape proof” . . . or feel the helplessness the six Canadians murdered by the Gestapo must have known in their last moments.

Proof of their contribution to the Great Escape is recorded in
these pages and in the stories yet to be gathered and verified by his
torians, the families of ex-kriegies, and an apparently ever-growing community that
refuses to let this story die.

Space inside an RAF Whitley bomber (above left) was extremely limited. In 1940, after he bailed out of his crashing Whitley, RCAF pilot Tony Pengelly found himself in an equally confined space (above right, seated on bed, left) in a POW hut at Stalag Luft I (Barth, Germany) with downed Canadian Spitfire pilot Wally Floody (seated next to him).

(above left) Long before The Great Escape, a tunnel designing/digging team—(clockwise from lower left) Wally Floody, Sam Sangster, John “Scruffy” Weir, and Hank “Big Train” Birkland—experimented in ad hoc escape attempts at Stalag Luft I. Eventually, under Big X, Roger Bushell (above right), at Luft III, X Organization developed plans for a sophisticated mass breakout.

This photo, taken from the American South Compound (Sagan c. 1943) and looking northeast toward the German administration area (
Kommandantur
), shows the barren landscape of the appell area of the North Compound broken physically and psycologically by the theatre.