The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  When that first photograph of John Weir arrived with a letter at Frances McCormack’s Toronto home, it shocked her. For the first time she saw how severely Weir’s face had been injured when he bailed out of the burning Spitfire near the River Somme in France. She could see that his eyelids were virtually gone. No doubt she also recognized the starkness of conditions at the prison camp—the barren setting, the primitive huts, the wire-bound world that was his home for the foreseeable future. She marvelled at her fiancé’s strength, his sense of humour, and his very clear vision of the future.

  “I’ve been playing hockey a little and I’m really in fine fettle,” he wrote, and then added a cryptic note about his living arrangements that may have had more to do with escape activity at the camp than building their future dream home. “I’m still working on a design for our cabin, dear. There are a few architects here who’ll help once I get a decent idea to work on. . . . I still have trouble with the children’s rooms—how many, four?”[16]

  Next to the Britons imprisoned at Stalag Luft I, the Canadians were in the minority and—even inside the prison wire—obliged to respect the authority of the Senior British Officer and his adjutant. At Barth, Group Captain Harry “Wings” Day was the SBO. Formerly a member of the Royal Marine Light Infantry in the Great War, Day had been awarded the Albert Medal for saving the lives of crewmen aboard the torpedoed HMS Britannia in November 1918. In the RAF, as the Second World War began, Day served with 57 Squadron, where he earned his nickname, but was shot down five weeks into the war on a reconnaissance operation near Essen, Germany. His adjutant on the Permanent Staff at Stalag Luft I, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Buckley, had trained for naval aviation and served aboard the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Glorious before the war; however, as British aircrew attempted to provide cover for the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France in May 1940, Buckley was shot down over Calais. Another member of the Permanent Staff at Stalag Luft I was RAF Squadron Leader Tom Kirby-Green, who had piloted thirty-seven combat operations when his Wellington bomber was shot down in October 1941. Inside the wire at Barth, he assisted the SBO as a one-man welcoming committee by entertaining newcomers on his bongo drums, offering bits of exotic food from his Red Cross parcels, and delivering lectures in the library room.

  Inside Stalag Luft I, Group Captain Day and Lieutenant Commander Buckley appeared quite compliant to German demands—helping inbound prisoners acclimatize to their new surroundings. Following interrogation by the Germans, a newly arrived POW met with the SBO and his RAF Permanent Staff, received some necessary toiletries from a Red Cross parcel, and was assigned to a barracks hut. The Luftwaffe administration anticipated that the civilized nature of relations between prison camp officials and the kriegies would defuse any hostility inmates might feel and might even invite a POW to allow vital information to slip out. Conversely, the RAF Permanent Staff expected the Germans to think that British Commonwealth prisoners were resigned to their fate to sit out the war without resistance. In fact, Day as SBO and Buckley as “Big X” (chief of X Organization) were hard at work scouring the camp for ideas, arranging the escape expertise, and executing each new plan.[*]

  “I had worked in the gold mines in northern Ontario,” Wally Floody said. “But if you had [an air force] commission and had worked in a mine, the Englishmen figured you had to be an engineer, and if you had worked in a mine you knew a lot about tunnelling in sand. But there was absolutely no similarity between the two.”[17]

  Thousands of feet below ground level in the Lake Shore Gold Mines near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Floody could pass other miners in tunnels that were seven feet high and chiselled through solid Canadian Shield. Sub-surface at Stalag Luft I, escapers dug through unstable sand to create passageways barely two feet wide by two feet deep; they worked on their backs or their stomachs and faced the threat of being buried alive with every cut into the sand. Nevertheless, the trio of Weir, Birkland, and Floody became the principal architects and work crew for the first tunnelling expeditions at the Barth prison compound. Since the huts included boards that skirted the exterior walls to the ground, the digging crews simply crawled unnoticed into the two-foot space under the huts. First they built a trapdoor. Then they excavated a shaft straight down and cribbed it with wood scavenged from the huts. When excavation ended each day, the diggers would simply cover the entrance with boards, pile sandbags around it, and brush earth on top of the entrance.

  Once underground, the dig crews determined where the water table lay; at Barth it was situated just a few feet beneath the surface of the compound sand. But since it proved extremely difficult to keep a tunnel perfectly level, the digging crew often returned to its work on a new day to find depressions in the tunnel filled with water. That forced the diggers to work virtually naked so as not to reveal a pair of pants or a shirt or a jacket covered in wet sand. Additionally, the farther the tunnel proceeded from the hut, the staler the air became. At first, Floody dug narrow shafts upward to allow fresher air into the tunnel. Then the tunnel crew designed its first air pump, consisting of a German jam can with a flop valve and a bicycle pump.

  “Geez, if you went down below about four feet you were swimming in fucking water,” Floody said. “And putting up air holes wasn’t a total success either.”[18]

  The Germans discovered the first tunnel when it caved in from flooding and multiple air holes. That prompted a sea change among the Luftwaffe guards running the camp. German work crews began systematically stripping the Luft huts of their skirting boards to reveal the space between the floors of the huts and the ground. They also began driving heavy wagons around the compound to collapse any shallow tunnels.[19] They organized a counter-intelligence team called Abwehr, or “defence,” dressed the men in blue-grey-coloured overalls and equipped them with steel probing rods. The kriegies dubbed them “ferrets” and fought back with a primitive form of security. A prisoner was assigned the job of taking his laundry—perhaps a pair of underwear and socks—close to the front gate of the compound. He would erect a clothesline with a string stretched between two nails to apparently dry his laundry. The moment vehicles, guards, or ferrets approached the front gate, the laundry man would simply remove his shorts and socks from the line. That alerted a system of prisoners, bucket brigade style, that there was a potential threat to the tunnel. Digging could be shut down and a tunnel trapdoor concealed in minutes. What emerged from the desolation of the camp and the persistence of the POWs to work together was an esprit de corps that went beyond the protocol of squadron barracks in Fighter and Bomber commands. The kriegies had fashioned a prison camp collaboration that knit them together into a single cause—theirs was a bond of wire.

  “I tried digging in the tunnels,” Pilot Officer (P/O) Barry Davidson said, “but I got claustrophobic.”[20]

  Compared to the other Canadians imprisoned at Stalag Luft I, Davidson, at age twenty-eight, was the old man of the group. He had learned to fly in the middle of the Great Depression and earned his private flying licence on a Tiger Moth at the Calgary Municipal Airport in 1937. The moment he got the certificate, he wrote a letter to Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek, who was attempting to repulse attacks from the Imperial Japanese armed forces; Davidson offered his services to the Chinese “Flying Tigers,” but the general politely declined. No matter. Next, he travelled to England, joined the RAF, and became a Blenheim bomber pilot with 18 Squadron. In July 1940, as the German blitzkrieg gobbled up the Low Countries and northern France, Davidson’s squadron was dispatched to slow the enemy offensive.

  “We found one of the forward new aerodromes they were building . . . around fifteen miles from Paris,” Davidson said. “So we lined up on the equipment at the end of the aerodrome with two of our two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs.”[21]

  The German anti-aircraft batteries finally responded and shrapnel ripped through the centre of Davidson’s Blenheim, destroying its wing and tail controls. Disoriented and with a dead stick (virtually no control over t
he aircraft’s direction or attitude in the air), he managed to crash-land the bomber on a beach. He hoped it might be a friendly Allied coast. But moments later, his plane was surrounded by German troops informing him and his crew they were prisoners of war. His first letter home to family in Calgary was a simple one.

  “Looks like I am in cold storage for the duration,”[22] he wrote.

  But if his talents had not properly been put to the test in the air over France, they more than adequately served him on the ground inside Stalag Luft I. Davidson quickly blended into the Canadian kriegie contingent and came to understand that the war had deprived the prison guards of much the same amenities it had the POWs. So, as soon as Red Cross parcels became available to the prisoners of war, Davidson used some of their contents to advance the priorities of the escape committee. Davidson managed to put parcel staples, such as chocolate, coffee, and cigarettes, into the hands of the guards in return for items that would come in handy for the kriegies. Back came tools for tunnelling, the loan of a camera, and the raw materials for forged documents. An avid sportsman, Davidson helped secure sports gear—tennis rackets, baseballs and bats, and hockey skates and sticks—from the YMCA in Morgan’s department store back in Canada. The equipment may well have provided kriegies some welcome recreation, but the hardwood from tennis rackets burned long and hot in a barracks stove and a used skate blade often enjoyed a second life as a cutting or digging tool.[23] From the moment he got settled in the POW compound, P/O Davidson became known as “the scrounger.”

  He wasn’t the only one skilled in the art of scrounging. MacKinnon “Mac” Jarrell, from Armow, Ontario, joined the RAF in 1940 and trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer serving aboard Blenheim aircraft. In July 1941, on his twenty-second operation, Jarrell was shot down and badly burned in the episode. The hospital where Mac was admitted happened to have a German-born doctor raised in the United States. Seconded to military medical work, the doctor administered to Jarrell’s burns with plastic surgery[24] and nursed him back to health. When Jarrell was finally discharged and sent to a POW camp in central Germany, he joined an escape committee that built a tunnel and, months later, nineteen escaped through it. After his recapture, six days later, Mac was considered high-risk to escape, so the Germans kept moving him from prison camp to prison camp—eight different camps over the next forty-five months.

  Once he was cleared by the escape committee at each prison compound, Jarrell joined a crew of scroungers getting to know the German guards and taming them—i.e., bartering with them for the equipment and supplies X Organization needed for its long-term escape agenda. Among other bribing tools, Mac used the flow of tobacco sent from home, including cigarette packs from the Ontario Chinese Patriotic Federation. Also sent from Canada, and innocently cleared by the Luftwaffe administration at the compound, were small wind-up phonograph machines and a regular supply of recordings.

  “One record called ‘Corn Silk,’” Mac noted in his log, “came in almost every package. It was terrible and the prisoners hated it.”[25]

  But that was the intention. Eventually, one POW in the compound became so agitated over the horrible sound of “Corn Silk” that he smashed the record only to discover a map of Germany and area had been hidden inside. Suddenly, Jarrell’s scrounging crew had additional contraband to assist in the long-range escape plans.

  Another western Canadian joined the Stalag Luft I escape committee about the same time that Barry Davidson did. Of course, it had never been Dick Bartlett’s intention to become a POW. Born in 1919 and raised on a dairy farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, as a boy Dick raised silver foxes, the assets of which underwrote his passage to England and provisional entry into the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm (RNFA) in 1938. By October of 1939, a month into the Second World War, Bartlett had received his RNFA graduation wings and joined the torpedo training unit perfecting airborne sorties against German shipping across the Channel. By the spring of 1940, as the Nazi occupation of northwestern Europe and Scandinavia began, Sub Lieutenant Bartlett was posted to 803 Squadron flying Skua dive-bombers attacking targets in occupied Norway. The Skuas were manned by a pilot facing forward in the cockpit and, right behind, a gunner facing aft. As the sun rose ahead of them on June 13, 1940, during an attempted attack on the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in Trondheim harbour, Bartlett and his gunner Lloyd Richards took return fire from German Bf 109s.

  “A heavy blow [felt like] a kick from a mule,”[26] Bartlett explained later.

  Machine-gun bullets and cannon-shell shrapnel had penetrated the Skua’s fuselage, its fuel tank, and Bartlett’s flight suit up his left side. Unable to evade the fighters and rapidly losing consciousness, Bartlett barely made it over the rooftops of Trondheim, and as the Skua disintegrated—ultimately losing its engine—he crashed-landed into a field. Only three of the fifteen Skuas had completed the attack. Bartlett and his gunner survived their crash, but even as he received treatment at a Trondheim hospital, it didn’t take Bartlett long to consider his escape options. Two attempts later, he was put under guard and sent to a series of POW camps in northern Germany and Poland, including Stalag XX-A, where he learned an important covert skill.

  “Through friendly relations with Polish labourers at the camp,” Bartlett related, “[we] bribed one of the Poles to sneak the components for a small radio receiver into the camp.”[27]

  The resulting wireless set allowed the POWs to hear BBC broadcasts. But to ensure that the radio was never discovered by German guards or ferrets, Bartlett regularly disassembled it and placed its parts inside a medicine ball; the ball, a bit larger than a basketball and usually weighted with sand, was used by prisoners of war for calisthenics and other sporting pursuits. Without the guards or ferrets ever realizing it, the wireless set was always out in the open, being carefully tossed among the “sports enthusiasts,” and consequently under close surveillance by members of the escape committee. Only when the kriegies could safely open the medicine ball was the radio pulled from its hiding place and assembled to catch the BBC news from England.

  “[That way,] the radio-equipped medicine ball subsequently travelled from camp to camp [becoming] a continuous source of war news and intelligence,”[28] Bartlett pointed out, and always with S/L Bartlett as its custodian. Despite his standing assignment at Stalag Luft I—protecting the radio—Bartlett was never far from the escape planning among his fellow Canadian POWs.

  “I haven’t missed any German lectures yet,” John Weir reported to Frances in his first letter of 1942 from the Barth prison camp. “I keep myself fairly busy, so the time doesn’t drag too much . . . what with learning to cook and stuff.” Then, in what seemed a Freudian slip apparently missed by both the German and British censors, Weir concluded that Hank Birkland, Wally Floody, and he “will dig in for the winter;” then he signed off with his now routinely optimistic, “it won’t be long before this war is over and we will be home again.”[29]

  Wally Floody noted from his experience inside several German POW camps that there were only three ways of escaping—over the wire, through the wire, or under the wire. He, Birkland, and Weir had chosen tunnelling as the safest and most efficient way out. At Barth, however, the kriegies tried every possible scenario and the RAF Permanent Staff wasn’t about to blunt their initiative. In January 1942, a prisoner tried to escape by hiding in a cart that had just emptied the compound’s latrines. Several others attempted to disguise themselves in mock-ups of German uniforms. Another jumped into a snow bank, but was spotted when steam rising from the snow where he was hiding gave him away. Later that winter, three airmen used the cover of a blizzard to cut their way through the wire at

  the NCO’s compound, but a guard spotted the trio and shot Sergeant Johnny Shaw, making him the first fatality of the escape campaign.[30]

  Arrivals at Barth continued to mount. During the Battle of Britain, RAF fighter pilots who were shot down most often parachuted to safety on British territory; after Dunkirk and the fall of Fr
ance, however, surviving fighter pilots who bailed out over occupied France and Belgium most often became prisoners of war. In 1941, for example, RAF Fighter Command claimed 711 Luftwaffe fighters shot down, while sustaining the loss of four hundred Hurricanes and Spitfires, mostly over enemy territory. Similarly, between July of 1940 and January of 1941, RAF Bomber Command lost 330 aircraft, resulting in fourteen hundred aircrew killed, missing, or captured. Over the course of the entire war, more than six hundred Fighter Command and nearly ten thousand Bomber Command aircrew became prisoners of war.[*] Most of them were captured in Europe and most came through the Luft containment system.