The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Brickhill, a heavy smoker, had to learn to get by on a reduced ration of cigarettes. As for regular intakes of booze, he would crave that for six months, along with female company, before adjusting to the privations of prison life. A typical Aussie who’d grown up on a meat diet, he never adjusted to the lack of nutrition, flavour or variety in camp food, and his dreams were frequently about food.

  The worst aspect of camp life was boredom, so the inmates did their best to keep mentally occupied. Theatrical types produced shows in the camp theatre. Sporty types organised games on the Appell ground. There were bridge tournaments, an active debating group and an international relations society to integrate North Compound’s various nationalities. Many men also took advantage of the opportunity to improve their education while in camp, taking lessons in a variety of subjects using textbooks provided by the Red Cross and taught by inmates with the requisite skills. Brickhill took up French and Spanish lessons.

  Above all, the one activity that was guaranteed to keep prisoners from becoming bored was the covert planning and execution of escapes. In this game, Paul Brickhill would be an enthusiastic player. He, like everyone else in North Compound, was oblivious to the fact that, in East Compound, Englishmen Eric Williams and Michael Codner had teamed up with Canadian Oliver Philpot to execute an ingenious plan. They would disguise the entrance to a tunnel brazenly dug from their Appell ground by using a hollow wooden vaulting horse – over which inmates vaulted while a man was inside, digging. A digger was carried to and from the tunnel entrance inside the horse, returning with the soil he’d dug. He covered the entrance with a wooden trapdoor which was in turn covered with earth. When the horse was carried away, there was no sign of the entrance. On the day of their break, all three escapees would be carried to the tunnel site in the horse.

  Williams and Codner knew all about tunnelling, having participated in a March 1943 underground escape from the Oflag XXI-B POW camp at Schubin in Poland. As clever as the wooden-horse scheme was, at best only three prisoners would be able to escape via it. Nonetheless, the inventive trio received approval from their compound’s SBO and X Organisation, and the cooperation of men who vaulted over the horse. Through the spring and summer, East Compound’s wooden-horse tunnel crawled towards the wire.

  In North Compound, Big X Roger Bushell had grander ambitions. He was intent on a mass escape, one potentially capable of almost emptying the compound. Within a week of the transfer of prisoners to North Compound, and just three days after Brickhill arrived at the camp, Bushell had completed planning for what would become the Great Escape. Like Eric Williams and his colleagues, Bushell felt that tunnelling offered the best chance for a successful escape. But Bushell planned a break so large it would give the Germans enormous headaches and, in the furore that followed it, give the escapees the maximum opportunity to get back home.

  Bushell astonished his escape-committee colleagues when he announced his plans in the second week of April. To achieve his big break, he said, they would dig not one tunnel, but three. And, to gasps, he declared that 600 men should be able to escape via these tunnels in one night. But, for reasons of security, the word ‘tunnel’ must henceforth never be uttered carelessly in the compound.

  Codenaming his tunnels Tom, Dick and Harry, Bushell designated their routes. Tom was to be dug from 123 Block, which housed seventy Polish RAF officers, out under the west wire. Dick would go from 122 next door, also to the west. Harry would go from 104, tracking under the Vorlager and, cheekily, under the Cooler, to the woods on the camp’s northern edge. Harry would be by far the longest – roughly 130 metres. But Bushell also felt that Harry might have the best chance of success, because the logical Germans would think no one would tunnel such a distance, and beneath their very feet.

  Treating the escape as a business enterprise, Bushell set up a series of X Organisation departments to execute escape plans, choosing heads of department from among his fellow prisoners according to their skills. The tunnelling department would be headed by Wallace ‘Wally’ Floody, a bearded Canadian who had mined for gold on the Yukon. Brickhill, who came to know Floody well, reckoned the slight, gaunt Canadian looked like a consumptive. When Floody told Bushell of his gold-digging background, Bushell assumed he was a qualified mining engineer. Floody didn’t have the heart to tell Bushell he’d been a self-taught miner without any formal training. But, as it would turn out, Floody’s work underground would prove inspired. To support him with tunnelling equipment, the engineering department would be headed by South African Johnny Travis.

  To give escapees the maximum chance of evading capture, Bushell dictated that escapers be sent out completed tunnels with specially tailored clothing to enable them to blend in with the population, and forged papers to get them across Germany and occupied Europe. Tommy Guest set up the tailoring department, recruiting men who could sew. His sixty tailors would work in their rooms throughout the compound. The gentlemanly Gilbert ‘Tim’ Walenn had operated an art studio in London before the war, and he took charge of the forgers. Because so many of the fakes his team would produce would be travel documents, Walenn named his department after a well-known British travel agency, Dean and Dawson.

  Paul Brickhill’s new Aussie friend, Al Hake, had a reputation as a skilled tinkerer, and Bushell gave him the task of creating 200 small hand compasses. Jerry Sage, a gregarious, twenty-five-year-old, six-foot-two American paratroop major from Spokane, Washington, was put in charge of organising diversions to distract guards away from X Organisation activities. John ‘Willy’ Williams, a curly-headed Australian, became supply supremo, or chief scrounger. Williams’ task was among the most difficult, with a long list of items for procurement including a camera and photographic materials for ID photos, special paper for the forgers, copies of German military and government documents, even German money.

  Some items would be stolen from under the Germans’ noses. For the rest, German speakers under the intelligence department’s Czech chief Arnost ‘Wally’ Valenta were assigned the job of befriending the less dedicated ‘ferrets’, the overall-wearing German guards whose job it was to prowl through the camp, day and night, armed with torches and probes, looking for suspicious activity. Valenta’s team had to pick their marks carefully. The two most senior ferrets were avoided like poison. Methodically efficient Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz earned the grudging respect of his charges. An engineer by profession, he had worked in Yorkshire before the war. Not only did Glemnitz speak excellent English, he had a good understanding of how the British mind worked.

  Glemnitz was not averse to sharing a joke with prisoners, unlike his humourless deputy Corporal Karl Griese, who earned the kriegies’ intense dislike for his unrelenting hate of the British and a dogged determination to prevent escapes. Because of his long neck, which he tended to poke into their business, prisoners nicknamed him ‘Rubberneck’.

  While Glemnitz and Griese were beyond corruption, several of their subordinate ferrets were seduced into friendships with prisoners, who then became their X Organisation handlers. In return for a discreet cup of Red Cross coffee, some chocolate, a cigarette and a friendly chat, these ferrets began doing their new RAF friends small favours. Gradually, the handlers of these German ‘contacts’, as they became known, upped the ante, asking for more and more outrageously illicit items. When a ferret backed off, his kriegie ‘friend’ would remind him of the other things he’d brought into the compound for him. If a prisoner were to tip off the ferret’s superiors about this, the incautious German would face severe punishment – probably a posting to the dreaded Russian front.

  When one ferret was asked to bring in a camera, he rejoined that he’d be shot if he did. Roger Bushell told his handler to tell the already compromised German he’d be shot if he didn’t. A tiny camera found its way into the compound, plus photographic paper and developer. In most cases, the blackmailed ferrets came up with the goods. One guard even proved sympathetic to the prisoners and got his wife in Hamburg to help with materi
al needed by Tim Walenn’s department.

  The most senior German collaborator was Hans Pieber, an Austrian Luftwaffe captain and Lageroffizier in day-today charge of North Compound. Hauptmann Pieber carried out his superiors’ orders to the letter, but, convinced that Germany would lose the war, he covertly helped the prisoners wherever he could. He had even smuggled the prisoners’ radio into North Compound for them during the 1 April transfer from East Compound. Despite this, following the war Pieber would be convicted as a Nazi and imprisoned, losing all his property.

  Bushell decided that overall compound security would be headed by Albert ‘Bub’ Clark, a toweringly tall, ginger-headed United States Army Air Force lieutenant-colonel still in his twenties. Paul Brickhill nicknamed him ‘Junior’, because he looked so young. Designated ‘Big S’ by Bushell, security chief Clark instigated a system of ‘stooges’, prisoners who ‘stooged around’ acting as lookouts. With a number of deputy security officers reporting to Clark, each block had its own Little X in overall charge of escape activities on the block and a Little S in charge of block security.

  By 11 April, Bushell and Floody had jointly chosen the locations for the three tunnel shafts and their entry trapdoors. To prevent prisoners from digging tunnels, the Germans had erected each accommodation block 20 centimetres off the ground. But they’d built solid foundations beneath the washrooms and stoves in each block, and that was all Floody and his team needed. Tom would go from near a chimney, Dick from a drain sump in a washroom floor and Harry from beneath a stove. Tunnelling began with the sinking of three shafts, firstly by chipping through the brick and concrete foundations. The shafts were then sunk into the dry Silesian soil underneath, neatly shored up with timber slats removed from bunks.

  It took just two weeks for Tom to go down ten metres. It was necessary to dig this deep because the Germans had installed microphones around the fences to detect the sounds of digging. Floody and company reckoned that, at ten metres, their tunnels would avoid sound detectors. As it happened, a listening device would pick up digging sounds near 104, but the Germans would put it down to activity in the nearby coal store. Progress on Dick and Harry was a little behind Tom, but they too soon reached the required ten-metre depth.

  As digging continued, a major problem emerged. The deeper soil proved sandy. Much lighter in colour than the topsoil, it would be easily spotted if spread on the ground above, tipping off ferrets that tunnelling was afoot. Peter ‘Hornblower’ Fanshawe, a Fleet Air Arm navigator, had tunnelled at Schubin, and Bushell put him in charge of dispersing their mining spoils, with the formidable Jerry Sage rounding up ‘volunteers’ for dispersal work. Initially, tunnel earth was removed in pots, jars and anything else that could do the job, and Fanshawe came up with the idea of digging vegetable gardens outside every block to hide it. Block gardens sprang up overnight. Bordered by low stone walls, they permitted tunnel soil to be covered by a layer of disguising topsoil. Jerry Sage was digging the garden outside 105 when a ferret appeared and asked him what was going on.

  ‘We’re just beautifying the Third Reich,’ Sage replied with a grin, before asking the German for white paint for the border stones. Scoffing at the request, the ferret moved on.83

  Before long, the increasing amounts of tunnel earth demanded a more industrial-scale dispersal method. Hornblower solved that problem, too, inventing trouser bags, made from woollen ‘long john’ underpants, which would be filled with tunnel soil and suspended inside prisoners’ trousers. Once the wearer had filled up, he would amble out to a block garden, pull strings inside his pockets, and release the soil from the bottom of the trouser bags. The soil which oozed out over his shoes was then casually spread into the garden with the toe. Not surprisingly, these soil-distributors became known as ‘penguins’. Men not involved in other X Organisation activities were roped into Fanshawe’s penguin brigade; ultimately there would be 150 of them.

  Meantime, upwards of 300 prisoners would work for the security department as stooges. Paul Brickhill was among the first, joining the roster of men keeping watch at assigned stations throughout the compound, or tailing ferrets as they did their rounds. It was important work, but it was boring. Brickhill told Roger Bushell that he was also keen to be involved in digging. Only the chosen few worked as diggers, men who were physically fit and who could be trusted implicitly. Many prisoners in North Compound knew that tunnels were being dug. Only those who needed to know were aware in which blocks the tunnels started, and only a few dozen knew the precise locations of the trapdoors – the X Organisation’s most senior men, and the diggers. Because Brickhill was doing important work on the Canary team and had Bushell’s trust, he received approval to tunnel.

  In preparation for digging work, Brickhill was briefed by Floody. Digging shifts lasted four hours, with enough time after each for a digger to wash down in the block washroom and appear at Appell. Men dug in long johns, or naked. Because of the soft soil, there was a constant risk of cave-in. Brickhill would have to work fast, all the while listening for the sound of shifting earth above, after which hundreds of kilograms of sandy soil could suddenly come tumbling down, smothering him.

  ‘There’s a shaven second to get out,’ Floody told him.84

  Down one of the shafts went Brickhill. Which shaft, he never revealed, but he described it as having a west-facing tunnel, so it was almost certainly Tom, the most advanced of the three. After squeezing through the trapdoor in the washroom floor in 123, he climbed down a wooden ladder nailed to one side of the neatly timber-lined shaft, to the dispersal area below. At the shaft’s base he found a series of chambers hacked from the earth, all shored up with timber stripped from bunks throughout the compound. One chamber, about two metres long, housed a carpenter who shaped the bed-boards used to shore up the growing tunnel. Opposite, another small chamber was used to store sand until it could be hauled to the surface by dispersers working at the trap.

  On the third side, another chamber would in time contain one of the most ingenious aspects of Floody and company’s work, the air-conditioning plant, and its operator. This was a hand pump with home-made bellows which pushed air from the surface along a pipe made from Klim dried milk cans linked together, with tops and bottoms removed, and run beneath the tunnel floor. (The catchy manufacturer’s Klim brand name was ‘milk’ backwards.) An air vent would come up where two tunnellers lying full length worked at the tunnel face, the first facing forwards, his number two facing back to the shaft. Each day’s last shift would extend the underfloor air pipe to allow the first shift next day to get straight to work digging.

  Into the tunnel crawled Brickhill to commence his shift with another digger. Lighting was provided by home-made lamps: Klim tins containing pyjama-cord wicks sitting in margarine. ‘They were a bit smelly,’ Brickhill later recalled.85 Subsequently, electrical wiring would be pilfered to create a tunnel lighting system patched into the camp’s electricity supply. The air down here was thick and hot, and the diggers were soon bathed in perspiration as one dug with a trowel at the tunnel face and then pushed earth back to the man behind. Every metre, they would pause to shore up around them.

  ‘No one ever spoke much down below,’ said Brickhill. ‘You were too busy listening.’86

  In his writings, Brickhill gave the impression that, as he dug, with one ear to the tunnel’s roof, he heard the telltale sound of wood creaking above, and began back-pedalling, fast. But not before being caught in a cave-in and covered in earth. He was hauled back by his feet by the man behind, with sand in his mouth, eyes and ears. Panicking, he became desperate to get out of the coffin-like confines. Once he returned to the surface, gripped by claustrophobia, Brickhill couldn’t bring himself to go digging again.

  Perhaps being caught half in and half out of his falling Spitfire had contributed to his fear of being trapped. He was not alone; several others also panicked underground, and, like Brickhill, had to beg to be excused from tunnelling duty. Still, with no history of claustrophobia, Brickhill was devast
ated by his reaction. Ashamed by what he clearly perceived as a flaw in his character, he would never write about his debilitating panic attack underground, or speak about it publicly.

  10.

  In the Light of Day

  IN MAY, ONLY weeks into the digging of Tom, Dick and Harry, two dramatic things occurred on the same day. Work was proceeding slowly in Dick. Three men including Wally Floody were still completing the tunnel’s dispersal area when there was a massive cave-in. Two men shot up the shaft’s ladder as the sandy soil poured into the hole behind them like water at the flood. Floody, last man out, was caught on the ladder, trapped, and overwhelmed. He was almost suffocated. Luckily for him, the two men above were able to reach down, grab the unconscious Floody, and pluck him to safety. Floody proved to possess nerves of steel. The next day, he went back down the ‘rat hole’, as Brickhill called it, and in just four days he and his team had repaired the damage caused by the fall, and resumed tunnelling.

  The day of Dick’s cave-in, Wing Commander Harry ‘Wings’ Day arrived back at Stalag Luft 3. Wings had been one of the camp’s original inhabitants, after his Blenheim bomber had been shot out of the sky on a reconnaissance flight over the Rhineland on Friday the 13th of October, 1939. Transferred by the Luftwaffe from Stalag Luft 3 to the Schubin camp in April 1942, becoming Senior British Officer there, Day had been one of thirty-four RAF officers in the Schubin tunnel break. Although all got out of the camp undetected, two escapees had drowned in the Baltic trying to cross to neutral Sweden. The remainder, including Day, had soon been recaptured. After spending weeks in the Schubin Cooler, Day had been sent back to Sagan as part of the transfer of all British prisoners from Schubin. The Germans turned their old camp into Oflag 64, a camp for US Army officers.