The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  2

  BOND OF WIRE

  * * *

  FRANCES MCCORMACK got her first letter from her imprisoned fiancé, a downed Spitfire pilot, just before Christmas 1941. She had met John Weir on a blind date a couple of summers earlier, when friends in Toronto arbitrarily matched them for a night of dancing at the Palais Royale on the Toronto waterfront. Weir cursed his friends for tricking him into the double date, but fell in love with Frances as the pair embraced on the outdoor terrace dance floor overlooking Lake Ontario. The war broke out in the middle of their courtship and because the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) sent John to Winnipeg for elementary flight training, the couple began a long-distance relationship by correspondence. Even when John successfully soloed and graduated to service flight training, the air force posted him to Borden, Ontario, more than an hour’s drive north of Toronto, where Frances lived. Still, the two managed to communicate in creative ways.

  On a day when John planned to dodge the curfew at the training station and drive to Toronto for an evening date with Frances, he decided to alert her to his plans for a rendezvous. During the day’s instructional flight near Toronto, the young pilot trainee simply detoured over the Forest Hill area of the city and “bombed” his girlfriend’s residence with a message wrapped in a handkerchief. Neighbours picked up the note attached to a small parachute and rushed it to the addressee: Miss Frances McCormack, 61 Heathdale Road.

  “Be down about 8 o’clock or 8:30. If not, I’ll phone,” Weir said in the note. “No news about a 48 [hour leave of absence]. P.S. Don’t say anything about this to anyone.”[1]

  “You should be a bomber pilot, not a fighter pilot,”[2] Frances later told him.

  As much as Weir’s after-hours dash to Toronto illustrated his youthful exuberance and ingenuity, it nearly ended his air force career. His Borden flight instructor found out about his student’s illegal antics. He lambasted the sprog (novice) pilot about his disregard for the King’s Regulations and lack of respect for his fellow pilots. Then he told Weir he’d be reassigned—i.e., washed out of pilot training. When Weir pleaded his case, the instructor decided to redirect his student away from the multi-engine training that would have streamed him toward becoming a bomber pilot. Instead, Weir would train to eventually fly the single-engine, solo cockpit Hurricane fighter aircraft. John Weir couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate punishment.

  Collisions with authority and protocol seemed routine for Weir, but they never clouded his drive or independence; among many things, he was an avid outdoorsman capable of fending for himself if and when he had to. Later that year, during an instructional flight at Trenton, the young trainee had struggled to bring a Fairey Battle bomber with a burning engine down to earth safely. The episode left his uniform singed, covered in grime, and stinking of glycol from the Battle’s burst coolant system. No one bothered to acknowledge that young Weir had chosen to save the King’s property and put his own personal safety at risk; nevertheless, when a visiting RAF officer spotted him in a parade lineup with a glycol-stained uniform, he pointed him out as “a rather scruffy looking individual.”[3] The nickname stuck.

  Frances McCormack felt so moved by Scruffy’s passion to join up and serve his country that she decided to resign her paying job as a personal shopper at Simpson’s department store to look for war work herself.[4] She found it at Research Enterprises, the company manufacturing ASDIC, the navy device that used sound waves to detect other ships—principally enemy submarines—at sea. Frances knew how to drive so she landed work as the company chauffeur and took great pride in contributing to the war effort this way. Meanwhile, the couple received their parents’ blessing to marry and were engaged October 2, 1940, a few weeks ahead of Weir’s overseas posting. The two travelled with friends to Ottawa and shared final words at the train station. Frances knew her fiancé felt an allure for the excitement of the war.

  “John, I just hate you going away to this war,” she recalled saying to him before he embarked.

  “Fran, I’ve had everything my own way all my life,” he had told her. “I’m not concerned in the least.”[5]

  Partly to prove himself and partly because it was serious now, Weir moved deftly into the cockpits of Hurricanes in operational training at Sutton Bridge, northeast of London. Then he moved to active duty with 1 RCAF Squadron, the first Canadian squadron in Fighter Command that daily joined RAF squadrons scrambling to beat back German Dornier bombers during that historic Battle of Britain summer. By the time Weir went operational with 1 Squadron, it had logged an impressive record—1,694 sorties, 29 downed enemy aircraft, another 43 damaged or destroyed—and its Canadian fighter pilots had earned three Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFCs). However, losses had also been severe—three killed in combat, two in accidents, and ten wounded—and it was generally acknowledged that life expectancy of green pilots was six hours of combat or less. Nevertheless, a primed and combat ready Flying Officer (F/O) John Weir reported for active service in October 1940, just as 1 Squadron relocated to Thurso, Scotland, to protect the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.

  With 1941 came changes. The squadron had replenished its core of experienced fighter pilots. RAF Fighter Command had relocated its aircrew to Digby, in east-central England, and then Biggin Hill south of London. The Canadian squadron had been renumbered 401 and taken into service its first Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft. John Weir had also reconnected with one of his oldest pals from Toronto, Hugh Godefroy. Their families had been close. They had grown up, played shinny hockey, and attended school together. They had both enlisted the same day, September 3, 1939, and for the same reason—the German torpedoing and sinking of the passenger liner SS Athenia. They had been posted overseas within months of each other, and they arrived at Digby together. They paired up in combat formations to look out for each other and at Biggin Hill flew their maiden Spitfire sorties together. And they got their baptism of fire over the Channel together. But as uplifting as banding together this squadron of eager young Canadians felt, Fighter Command victories were few and far between that fall. On October 27, 1941, a Biggin Wing sweep over Dunkirk and the resulting dogfight with scores of Messerschmitt Bf 109s produced an all too frequent result.

  “The ground crew from ‘A’ Flight came into the dispersal hut and sat around in dead silence. None of their aircraft had returned,” Godefroy wrote. “We had lost Wally Floody, Johnny Small, Blake Wallace, Stan Thompson and Brian Hodgkinson.” Three of them had been shot down “on their first ever sweep.”[6]

  It got worse in November when, during the first week of operations into France, the Biggin Wing lost ten of twelve fighter pilots. Then, on November 8, a flight of Spitfires from 401 conducted a sweep over the River Somme Estuary, where German fighter aircraft swooped down and broke up the Spitfire formation. Godefroy was chased by four Bf 109s. He twisted, turned, and threw his aircraft around the sky to the point of near exhaustion, all the while firing at whatever he saw until his ammunition ran out. He barely made it home in one piece. At the dispersal hut he turned in his escape kit and gave his combat report to the duty intelligence officer (IO).

  “Weir and Gardiner are missing,”[7] the IO said.

  “Weir missing?” Godefroy shot back, admitting he’d never worried about his friend not returning.

  “Blakeslee[*] reported seeing two Spitfires astern, both on fire,” the IO added.

  It was Wally Gardiner’s first ever sweep, but John Weir had accumulated a thousand hours in operational flying. To Godefroy, not seeing the “tough as nails and perpetual clown”[8] John Weir home safe for a celebratory drink and slap on the back “seemed impossible.” Nevertheless, the job of informing Weir’s parents and Frances McCormack, his fiancée, fell to Godefroy. Of course, the air force would send the obligatory “we regret to inform you” form letter, but Godefroy worried that whatever words of sympathy and explanation he might cobble together would fall short. Nothing seemed appropriate or adequate. And the silence that followed proved equal
ly painful. Later, Frances would learn that when her fiancé’s Spitfire was attacked at an altitude of twenty-six thousand feet over Caen, France, Messerschmitt shells had ignited one of his fuel tanks. The resulting fire had burned his hands and face, nearly fusing his eyelids shut. A combination of adrenaline and shock must have masked any pain; he’d managed to bail out and, once on the ground, he’d immediately set about burying his parachute and attempting to disappear into the countryside. To no avail. Soon after, F/O Weir was captured, processed at the Dulag Luft, and became a prisoner of war—Kriegsgefangenen or “kriegie”—en route to the airmen’s prison at Barth.

  Luftwaffe-run prison camps, such as Stalag Luft I, housed captured air force personnel. As opposed to the Offizier Lager or Oflag prison for non-commissioned officers, the Luft camps generally imprisoned Commonwealth officers shot down in bombers or fighters. As a rule, those officers, even as POWs, were treated with respect. The morning after he was shot down over Boulogne, France, in January 1942, RAF Spitfire pilot Robert Stanford Tuck was wakened by a German lieutenant, who first saluted him smartly. “We are taking you by train to Germany,” the young German officer said. “You are regarded as an important prisoner . . .”[9] Throughout his trip to Dulag Luft, Stanford Tuck was fed hot drinks, soup, plenty of bread, and potatoes. He was, after all, a squadron leader.

  The architects of Germany’s military prison camps could not have conceived of a better containment area than the facility on the outskirts of the medieval town of Barth. Situated on a peninsula jutting out into the Baltic Sea on the north coast of Germany, the grounds and location of Stalag Luft I alone posed a deterrent to escape. Its sandy soils lay flat and virtually without contour; sightlines were perfect for prison guards. A lagoon to the southeast and the open sea to the northeast meant the water table would be relatively high, only six to eight feet underground; so any thoughts of deep tunnel digging appeared to be out of the question. Some pine tree growth beyond the camp perimeter broke the skyline, but not the flow of frigid north winds off the Baltic.

  The man-made containment, built in the summer of 1940, consisted of barbed-wire fencing with watch towers manned around the clock by armed German guards. Initially, the camp was a dusty cage, roughly one hundred yards long and seventy yards wide.[10] The perimeter was further accentuated with a ditch excavated just inside the outer wire. Then, just inside that ditch, a second line of wire was strung—at about boot-top level. This wire marked the boundary between the inner camp and a no man’s land; prisoners were warned if they ventured beyond the inner wire they would be shot. The compound housing, initially built to hold about two hundred prisoners, was spartan at best. The Germans had hastily constructed low, wooden barracks huts, some with partitioned areas (rooms) containing double-decker bunks for nine to a dozen men (changed to triple-deckers as the number of POWs swelled). The huts lacked insulation, which meant the inside temperature matched the outside in summer and winter, unless the room offered a stove with a modest amount of fuel. And if the chilling winds and primitive accommodation weren’t demoralizing enough, the knowledge that just forty miles northwest, out in the Baltic Sea, lay the international border between Germany and Denmark, made Stalag Luft I the epitome of frustration.

  “My darling, here I am safe and sound in Germany,”[11] John Weir eventually wrote in the first letter to Frances, in mid-December 1941.

  The letter was written on a single, prison-issue, skin-thin piece of paper, which was the allowable limit for POWs. The page measured ten inches by five-and-a-half inches—enough for about three hundred words—and folded in thirds for mailing. Weir wrote that his letters wouldn’t be frequent or very explicit, what with the Germans censoring everything. He appeared to be cut off from the rest of the camp, likely in some kind of solitary. He was not the usual upbeat “Scruffy,” kidding and romanticizing about things, and he encouraged Frances and the Weir family back in Canada to contact Red Cross authorities to send him parcels because, he wrote, he really needed socks and a shaving brush. Finally, perhaps to ease her mind, he wrote that he had her photograph close by.

  By the time he’d composed and mailed his Christmas 1941 letter, ten days later, Weir’s demeanour seemed to have improved. Instead of sounding lost, forlorn, and forgotten, he explained that the Germans had been treating them civilly, that his captors had laid out a skating rink area for hockey (all they needed was ice and skates) and that the entire camp was envious of his colour photo of Frances. In addition to wishing her a Merry Christmas, however, Weir added “as education and entertainment” that he was taking language instruction and that he had been put into a barracks with other downed airmen.

  “There are quite a few Canadians (twenty-eight or twenty-nine) here,” he wrote, sounding more upbeat. “In fact, my darling, it’s not bad at all. . . . I hope I’ll be on my way back to you soon.”[12]

  Perhaps the last thing John Weir might have found inviting about imprisonment in an enemy POW compound, Frances would soon learn, was the camp’s education and entertainment facilities. She knew that as a younger man her fiancé had actually travelled with his family in pre-war Germany. Even so, discovering that he was enrolling in language study in a POW camp must have seemed a bit odd. Yet there it was, his sudden attraction to studying Spanish, French, and German, and even trigonometry and calculus, if he wanted. Perhaps less odd to his fiancée was Weir’s delight that some of his air force mates—Hank Birkland and Wally Floody—were barracked in the same prison hut. Frances would learn later that attending German language instruction inside the camp was preparing her fiancé for life on the run outside the wire, if he could get there. Meanwhile, reacquainting himself with his air force comrades was offering him the means to fulfill that off-handed promise he’d made in his Christmas letter to “be on my way back to you soon.”

  Unlike John Weir’s relatively comfortable upbringing in Toronto, Hank Birkland’s background told a tougher, more school-of-hard-knocks tale. Hank was born in 1917, one of a carpenter’s seven children, in Spearhill, Manitoba. Like many of his generation—born around the time of the Great War and raised during the Great Depression—Birkland rode the rails, worked for his keep, and chased any and all opportunities as a farm hand, meat packer, door-to-door salesman,[13] and labourer in the ore mines of Ontario and the gold mines of British Columbia. In Sheep Creek, BC, he even returned to one of his favourite childhood pastimes—playing lacrosse. With his size and strength came the nickname “Big Train.” When the Second World War broke out, Birkland’s enlistment might well have offered him as much a way out of the Dirty Thirties—with three square meals a day, a new suit of clothes, and a paycheque—as it presented a way to defend King and Empire. At any rate, in the fall of 1941, Flying Officer Birkland was in the RAF and piloting Spitfires with 72 Squadron; during a sweep over the coast of France, German anti-aircraft gunners brought his Spitfire down to a crash landing on the beach and ultimately brought him to the same Stalag Luft I barrack hut as John Weir.

  Also sharing that hut was Weir’s former 401 Squadron wing mate, Wally Floody, shot down just days before him. The six-foot-tall Ontarian was an athlete in every sense. Born in Chatham in 1918, Floody had grown up mostly in Toronto, but during his boyhood summers he enjoyed the family’s access to farm holidays, camping out on Toronto Island, and competitive team sports such as basketball, football, and baseball. As a teenager in search of work in the mid-1930s, Floody travelled to north-central Ontario for shift work shovelling mud, rock, and precious ores excavated from mines near Timmins and Kirkland Lake. But so too did Floody find time to

  play for the mining companies’ sports teams[14] —the Preston East Dome Mine baseball team and the Lake Shore Mines Blue Devils basketball team. Floody did not have the matriculation diploma from high school to gain entry to the RCAF, but a letter from his high school principal convinced the enlistment officer, and Floody joined soon after Canada declared war on Germany. In the short span of eighteen months in 1940 and 1941, Floody got married, grad
uated from the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, got his commission in the RCAF, and was shipped overseas, only to be shot down on his first op, October 27, 1941.

  “I’m having my picture taken . . . in an all-Canadian group,” John Weir signed off his Christmas 1941 letter to Frances.

  The photo depicted a short but broad-shouldered jack-of-all trades, Hank Birkland, aged twenty-four, imprisoned at Stalag Luft I six weeks; a hard-rock miner and natural team leader, Wally Floody, aged twenty-three, in the Barth camp eight weeks; and the youngest, at twenty-two, John Weir, a natural outdoorsman with a scruffy attitude to match, and just a month inside the first prisoner-of-war camp exclusively built for captured British Commonwealth airmen. Since the Luft was run by Luftwaffe, it’s likely the photograph of the three Canadians was snapped by a German airman, who on any other day would have been the Canadians’ mortal enemy. But with his prisoners safely contained inside the wire, the Luft guard likely took out a personal camera and snapped the picture as a gesture of ambivalence and respect.

  Behind that ambivalence and respect lay one of the strangest contradictions of Germany’s prisoner-of-war system. In spite of the racial intolerance and obsessive ideology of Germany’s ruling Nazis, who systematically brutalized prisoners from the East, the regime appeared to deal with prisoners from the West with a degree of deference. With some exceptions,[*] in dealings with POWs from the Commonwealth countries and the United States, the Germans recognized certain clauses of the Geneva Conventions. Early in

  the war there was a very practical reason for such regard; some of those same Commonwealth nations, Britain and Canada for example, held German POWs on their side of the battle lines. As well, though the overall responsibility for wartime prisoners lay in the hands of the German supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, control of the camps themselves fell to army, navy, and air force chiefs where the prisons were located. In the case of captured Allied aviators, all camp administration, food and clothing allotment, accommodation, and day-to-day concerns were governed by the command of the air district, or Luftgau.[15] Nor did it hurt downed Allied aviators that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring held great sway with Hitler; it was no secret that Göring had high regard for fellow fliers no matter which side they fought for. And up until 1944 that attitude at the top filtered down and was reflected in all treatment of captured Allied air officers. It meant, for example, that captured enemy airmen from the Commonwealth or the United States generally did not have to work inside prisons. Allied senior officers would be saluted by equals and lower ranks on the German side. Allied chains of command would be acknowledged even inside the prison wire. Allied officers could receive mail (including regular Red Cross parcels) and send it. They would be entitled to recreation and entertainment of their own making. That Göring chivalry, a holdover from the Great War, at least early in Germany’s war with the West, influenced daily life in Luftwaffe-run POW camps.