by Barris, Ted
A hint about the accuracy of Hollywood’s version of the story is evident in one of the movie’s final scenes. It shows the fifty officers gunned down en masse by a German machine-gun crew in an open field somewhere in Germany. In truth, after their recapture, imprisonment, and interrogation, the officers were taken out and shot in twos and threes by Gestapo death squads hand-picked and given licence to execute the officers in cold blood by a German High Command edict known as the Sagan Order. The little-known origins of the order add much intrigue to this story.
But was the casting as accurate as the rave reviews said? True, the hiring of Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, and James Coburn among a cast of hundreds made a lot of sense. The on-screen ensemble of principal actors represented the cream of Hollywood idols in the early 1960s. They ensured The Great Escape would become among the best box-office draws of the year. But did the movie escape committee accurately represent the real escape committee?
In an effort to make the movie plot and its characters more inviting and palatable to an American audience, the writers invented Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Bob Hendley, an American in the RAF, as the scrounger inside Stalag Luft III. Sturges cast US screen and TV star James Garner to play the part. In fact, the scrounger was a twenty-eight-year-old Blenheim bomber pilot from Calgary, Alberta, named Barry Davidson.
For the key roles of the tunnel designers and diggers, Sturges’s creative team invented RAF F/L Danny Velinski and RAF F/L Willie Dickes and cast American actor Charles Bronson and British actor/singer John Leyton in the roles. The actual tunnel king was a downed Spitfire pilot, twenty-five-year-old Wally Floody, originally from Chatham, Ontario. His tunnel digging partners were fellow RCAF fighter pilots: twenty-four-year-old John Weir from Toronto, Ontario, and twenty-six-year-old Hank Birkland, from Spearhill, Manitoba.
When it came to portraying the chief forger—the POW who designed many of the fake documents used by the air officers during the escape—the screenplay writers manufactured another British flyer named Colin Blythe and cast seasoned British film and TV actor Donald Pleasence (who had actually been a POW during the war) in the role. The actual forger behind much of the document fabrication, however, was twenty-four-year-old Whitley bomber pilot Tony Pengelly, from Truro, Nova Scotia.
Next, the Hollywood production team imagined one of the intelligence chiefs in the camp and parachuted into the script a British air officer named Andy MacDonald, casting Scottish-born actor Gordon Jackson to play him. In fact, among the officers conducting much of the intelligence activities was thirty-two-year-old Kingsley Brown, a journalist and father of four from the Toronto area.
To portray an officer in charge of the security of the three tunnels—“Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry”—the movie producers conceived an RAF F/L Sorren and cast British actor William Russell in the role. In fact, the security team inside the wire at the North Compound included thirty-three-year-old RCAF air gunner George Harsh, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and twenty-four-year-old RCAF bomb-aimer George Sweanor, from Port Hope, Ontario. And that doesn’t include the air officer in charge of security at the entrance of the main tunnels, the so-called trapführer, twenty-six-year-old Patrick Langford from Edmonton, Alberta.
For organizing what were called “diversions” inside the compound, the movie producers invented RAF F/L Dai Nimmo and then hired English horror and mystery film actor Tom Adams to play him. Among the actual diversionary geniuses, however, was twenty-five-year-old George McGill, an RCAF navigator from Toronto; McGill helped orchestrate boxing matches and other sporting attractions to distract German guards during some of the earliest escape attempts at Stalag Luft III. As well, the escape committee inside the North Compound had organized diversionary “culture appreciation sessions” in the prison library, where twenty-nine-year-old RCAF navigator Gordon Kidder from St. Catharines, Ontario, actually taught conversational German to the soon-to-be escapers. Adding to the real diversionary linguistics staff was another Canadian, twenty-one-year-old Spitfire pilot Frank Sorensen, who taught the head of the escape committee, Roger Bushell, basic conversational Danish as the two men exercised on the walking path inside the warning wire at the compound.
In a delicious irony of casting and accuracy, The Great Escape screenplay writers chose to change Roger Bushell’s name to Roger Bartlett. Coincidentally, the man responsible for servicing and hiding an inside-the-camp short-wave radio that delivered nightly newscasts from the BBC was yet another unheralded Canadian, twenty-four-year-old dive-bomber pilot Richard Bartlett, from Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchwan.
In other words, contrary to Hollywood’s Anglo-American version of the Great Escape story, the actual mass breakout owed much of its design, execution, and tactical success to an extraordinarily talented crew of air force officers from Canada. Again, the producers’ rationale for stacking the script with US and UK character names and stars was clear: to help the audience connect to the story and to give the marketing and promotional team plenty of recognizable talent to build box office. And it worked. A film that cost roughly four million dollars to produce grossed more than eleven million dollars in ticket revenue during the summer of 1963.
Motorcycles and the Hollywood dream factory aside, recognizing that the actual Great Escape brain trust was largely Canadian is not the only reason for revisiting this unique war story. The wider picture, occupied by other Canadian air officers shot down during the war and sent to Stalag Luft III, illustrates just how remarkable this escape feat really was. As Kriegsgefangenen (prisoners of war)—or, as they called themselves, “kriegies”—the air officers were not required to work inside the wire. They had to report for appell (roll call) several times a day and abide by all the other rules administered by their Luftwaffe (German Air Force) jailers. But beyond that, they were spared the forced labour, wrath, and deprivation of concentration camps or non-commissioned officer (NCO) compounds.
Consequently, the Commonwealth air officers were left to their own devices day and night—feeding themselves, clothing themselves, educating themselves, entertaining themselves, keeping themselves fit, and conspiring among themselves. For the months and years that they were imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, the POWs—many of them Canadian—built, seemingly from thin air, an extraordinarily orderly world inside the wire. There was “the Tin Man,” John Colwell, who built a pot, or chair, or escape tool nearly every day of his imprisonment. There were the extroverted officers, such as James Wernham, Don Edy, Arthur Crighton, and Tony Pengelly, whose penchant for performing led them to become regulars in the musicals, concerts, revues, and full classical productions staged weekly at the North Compound theatre. And since plenty of the officers had played international or professional sports—including big league pitchers Phil Marchildon and Bill Paton—the sports grounds at the North Compound buzzed with tournaments on the baseball diamond, football pitch, or ice-hockey rink, no matter the season. There was even an inside-the-wire press corps to publish results and colour commentary. But beneath that veneer remained a secret society of officers—about a third of whom were Canadians—intent on breaking out of the camp, or at least disrupting the German war machine sufficiently before being recaptured, sent to solitary confinement for a time, and finally returned to the barracks huts inside Stalag Luft III.
In addition to a review of the existing accounts, telling the Canadian story of the Great Escape has yielded new and disturbing information about some little-known aspects of the breakout and its aftermath. For one, the struggle for power between the Luftwaffe and the Gestapo may have doomed the escape plot and escapers long before the breakout on March 24–25, 1944. For another, it appears that no intervention by Red Cross, Luftwaffe prison administrators, or articles of the Geneva Conventions, could have prevented the murders of the fifty Commonwealth officers, including six Canadians. Conditions of the Sagan Order, and the inbred hostility of those hired to carry it out, meant certain death. Ultimately, as resilient a
nd innovative as the kriegies proved to be throughout their incarceration, the forced march during the last months of the winter in 1945 and on the eve of their liberation proved a final test of mind and body some could not endure.
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 anniversary 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 remembrances 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]
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* During the Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 13, 1964, actor Sidney Poitier awarded the best editing Oscar to Harold F. Cress for his work on How the West Was Won. While it was eligible for best picture in 1963, The Great Escape earned no other Oscar nominations.
1
THE KING’S REGULATIONS
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THE 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 operator-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 Whitley 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. Whenever 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 officers 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 leadership 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 command to Portal; Harris would presently assume total charge of Bomber Command’s strategic bombing campaign.[3] Ironically, as its role suddenly 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 Wellingtons, 71 Hampdens, 59 Whitleys, and 85 Fairey Battles.[4] RAF leadership 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
