The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  the same. The bottom line was that Richard Peirse’s Bomber Command, 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 development 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.

  At approximately ten o’clock, Pengelly and Moyle, his co-pilot, homed in on their Berlin-area objective and released their bomb load. They then decided to make a second pass over the target so that the Whitley’s newly mounted cameras could record the accuracy and damage of their attack. That’s when German anti-aircraft batteries around Berlin found their mark. Flak penetrated one of the bomber’s two engines and ignited a fire, just as it had two nights earlier aboard Cheshire’s Whitley. Pengelly reacted quickly, shutting down the engine in an attempt to prevent the fire from spreading to the fuel tanks inside the wing. Desperately, he turned the aircraft westward for home, but he knew the odds were prohibitive. The loss of one of his Merlin engines effectively cut his power in half. And the results were as predictable as a mathematical equation. Cheshire’s heroic dash for home on November 13 had succeeded because he still had two serviceable engines. Pengelly knew the technical specifications of his now one-engine Whitley—even empty of bombs—would prevent him and his crew from making it to friendly soil in England.

  To his credit, the experienced bomber pilot did manage to keep the crippled bomber airborne long enough for his crew to prepare for the end. The extra minutes in the air gave each crewman enough time to tighten harnesses, secure parachutes and survival kit, and open escape hatches for evacuation. An hour west of Berlin, the radio operator tapped off an SOS on the wireless to alert RAF Coastal Command of their final descent. Five hundred miles from home, flying on one engine over German-occupied territory in a heavy bomber destined to crash or be shot down, and with just enough altitude to bail out successfully, Pengelly ordered his crew to abandon the aircraft. Then, just as the procedure manual stated, and as they had practised regularly on the ground at Topcliffe, first Moyle the co-pilot crouched and fell backward through the forward escape hatch, next Followes the observer-bombardier, then Radley the wireless radio operator (as well as Michie the tail gunner on his own out the rear hatch), and finally, Pengelly, the skipper, bailed out of the nose of their crashing Whitley. All got out safely.

  When Tony Pengelly ran away from his Canadian home in Weston, Ontario, in 1938, two-and-a-half years earlier, to join the Royal Air Force, he’d resigned himself to the RAF life. It meant dedication to a life of service of indeterminate duration. Typically in the Commonwealth air forces, thirty combat operations or about two hundred hours were considered a complete tour of duty. But reaching that plateau merely entitled an airman to a six-month rest from operations (often instructing at a training station during the break) and then a return to combat. Early in the war, when 102 Squadron accumulated the third-worst casualty rate in the RAF, fewer than half all bomber crews were surviving a single tour.

  Miraculously, by the night of November 14, 1940, Pengelly had completed thirty-one ops. Had he made it home that night, he might have been entitled to some leave time or at least service behind the lines as a respite. But at that stage of the war, Pengelly’s oath of service meant he was in for the duration. The expatriate Canadian had chosen life and loyalty to a centuries-old system of King’s Regulations that governed British society, commerce, and military service. And in the Royal A
ir Force, Pengelly had sworn to uphold its list of directives when serving in a theatre of war. If nothing else, Pengelly was a master of detail, and even as he floated to earth in Germany, he considered his actions methodically and exactly.

  “I took my chute off and buried it,”[7] Pengelly said. “Being very optimistic—which you were at twenty—I was going to head west and walk to England, probably try walking on the water.”

  With equal naïveté, Pengelly started to travel on the wrong side of a public road and nearly collided with a volunteer police officer on his bicycle. Before long he was in the custody of two policemen, in a car, and en route to a local Luftwaffe station. He learned from his captors that they had detained at least two other “M for Mother” crew members, but because Pengelly was an officer, he was destined for a train ride to the district Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe (Dulag Luft)—interrogation centre—in Frankfurt-am-Main. Inside a cell with no window on the door, but a view through bars to a nearby wooded area and wire fence, Pengelly again reflected on the appropriate actions as he prepared for his first interrogation. They were lines he’d memorized among the King’s Regulations and Air Crew Instructions at initial training school, reminding him “to protect the Security of the Royal Air Force by every means.”[8]

  His captors brought him coffee and bread, probably to invite his co-operation. He felt unkempt. He hadn’t shaved. He was still in his flying suit. Then a German interrogator entered the room. Pengelly thought he looked as if he’d just stepped from a tailor’s shop and was terribly polite.

  “Good day, Flight Lieutenant Pengelly,” the man said in plain English. “How’s life in 102 Squadron?”

  Pengelly hadn’t recalled giving anybody his squadron number. The reference in the regulations to the Geneva Conventions of 1929 came back: “a prisoner of war is only required to give his name, rank, and number.”[9]

  The interrogation officer offered descriptions of other members of Pengelly’s squadron; it proved he knew their names and some of their activities. It also suggested the captor actually knew everything and needed nothing from the prisoner.

  Pengelly would have to, as he recalled from the interrogation manual, “stand correctly to attention, maintain rigid silence, avoid attempts to bluff or tell lies, address any officer senior to himself as ‘Sir’ and . . . don’t fraternize; the enemy is not in the habit of wasting his time, whisky and cigars on those who have nothing to give him in return.”[10]

  The interrogation officer explained to Pengelly that he had been a professor in Austria, had majored in British history, and had even travelled widely in England. And, oh, by the way, he happened to have English cigarettes apparently captured from the British Expeditionary Force during its hasty withdrawal from Dunkirk.

  As attentive to the interrogator’s methods as Pengelly felt he was, every time his captor edged toward sensitive information, Pengelly reminded himself of the regulations that required him not to try “to fool your interrogators; they will be experts at their job, and in any battle of wits you are bound to lose in the end.” Pengelly repeated that he did not have to tell the man anything.

  “That’s all right,” Pengelly’s interrogator insisted. “I’ll find out some way or other. We’re shooting lots of you chaps down.”[11]

  He couldn’t let on, but Pengelly was amazed by the volume of information his interrogator spouted, including turnover figures on the squadron, casualty numbers, and that on one of his combat operations, Pengelly had flown to Italy and back.

  Even though the interrogation had ended, and Pengelly felt some relief at having emerged without divulging any secrets of the Service, there were still other parts of that RAF manual at play. Yes, he had offered only his name, rank, and number. Yes, he had seen through the German officer’s offer of food and idle chatter and not shown his surprise at how much the German knew about 102 Squadron and its crews. Yes, he had rebuffed the interrogator’s attempts to fraternize with him, no matter how good those cigarettes might have smelled. But no, he had not yielded any data about his squadron, where it was stationed, what its strength was, or about the performance of any new designs in aircraft or armament. He hadn’t revealed a speck of information about air force training, tactics, or defence systems. F/L Pengelly had indeed lived up to all the King’s Regulations stipulated and memorized . . . except one.

  All the regulations, while never specifically saying so, implied that included in an airman’s duty to King and country, particularly when captured and imprisoned on enemy territory, was an obligation to escape.

  “Don’t betray those who help you to escape,” the RAF document stipulated. It added, “Do keep your eyes and ears open after capture. You may learn much which may be of value both to your country and yourself if you succeed in escaping.”[12]

  Escaping was a military obligation for which Pengelly admitted there had been no training. None of his instructors at initial training, elementary, or service training in the RAF had explained how to cut barbed wire at night, steal timely documents that would allow him to travel undetected, disguise himself as a German civilian, or dig a tunnel under a fence. All this and more—if he cared to live up to all the obligations of his contract with the King—he would have to learn by trial and error. But Pengelly was a quick study. After just four months in England, in the summer and fall of 1938, he had earned his “certificate of competency for private flying machines”[13] which meant he could fly “all types of land planes.” In addition, within his first year in the UK Pengelly had earned his commission as a flying officer in the RAF, making him equally capable in the cockpits of all military aircraft of the day.

  Later that first full day in German captivity—November 16, 1940—F/L Pengelly was moved from the interrogation centre to the Dulag Luft prison camp. Curiously, as far as Pengelly was concerned, everybody inside the wire gathered at the gate to see the latest arrival. Among the greeters was a great surprise for Pengelly: the Senior British Officer (SBO) in the camp, Group Captain Harry “Wings” Day. Pengelly hadn’t seen his wing commander for over a year; a decorated veteran of the Great War and already age forty when the Second World War began, Day had been shot down on his first op on October 13, 1939. The welcome from Wing Commander Day provided Pengelly’s first official lesson as a prisoner of war: each incoming POW had to be scrutinized to verify he was who he said he was. Because his wing commander knew Pengelly and could prove it, any suspicion was immediately lifted about his identity.

  But Pengelly’s reacquaintance with Day initiated the next phase of his POW education. At Dulag Luft, the German prison camp officials had designated Day as Permanent Staff. They assigned him the responsibility of acclimatizing incoming captured aircrew to their new POW lives. It turned out to be a perfect ploy. Together with captured RAF fighter pilot Roger Bushell and Fleet Air Arm pilot Jimmy Buckley, as well as Middlesex Regiment infantryman Johnny Dodge, Pengelly would help cover Day as he dug a tunnel out of the camp from beneath his prison bed. A precedent had been established.

  In June 1941, eighteen POWs broke out of Dulag Luft; all were recaptured, but the effort was the first mass escape of the war.[14] A few months later, when the Germans had transferred all the RAF POWs to Stammlager Luft I—or, more commonly, Stalag Luft I—in Barth, the ad hoc escape committee, dubbed “X Organization,” masterminded another tunnel breakout of twelve officers. Again the prisoners were recaptured. But by then the escape committee had started pushing back. The Canadian bomber pilot who’d prepared his crewmen carefully should they have to evacuate their crashing Whitley now began preparing to overcome the next adversity.

  “Active participation in [escape] work and planning for escape became the most important thing in my prison camp life,”[15] Pengelly said. “The two and a half years I spent behind barbed wire before we began to plan the big escape was all training for that opportunity.”

  For Pengelly and the others, intent on living up to that final obligation of their Royal Air Force service, the trial-and-error period
would seem horribly long, tedious, and frustrating. Pengelly was an officer, a skilled bomber pilot, capable photographer, and born leader. But for him the air war was finished. He would have to focus his talents on the new tasks at hand. Over the next year and a half, the escape committee at Barth successfully dug forty-eight tunnels. Their German captors found every one of them and thwarted every escape.

  “That was because at Barth escaping was strictly private enterprise,” Pengelly said. “[But] a man can’t forge his own identity papers, dig his own tunnel, make his own wire clippers, escape clothes, maps [and] compasses. . . . From our futility, we knew we would have to organize to be successful.”[16]

  * * *

  1. The DSO citation read: “Showing great coolness, Pilot Officer Cheshire regained control of his aircraft, which had lost considerable height and was being subjected to intense anti-aircraft fire, and although the explosion had blown out a large part of the fuselage and caused other damage he managed to regain height. . . . Although the aircraft was only partially answering the controls Pilot Officer Cheshire succeeded in returning to his aerodrome.”