The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  The flow of downed and captured Commonwealth aircrew—perhaps a dozen or two a month at the beginning of the war—became a torrent of hundreds a month in 1941 and 1942; the tide of downed airmen had grown too with the entry of the United States into the war after the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The impact of this ever-growing prisoner-of-war population on Luftwaffe resources—the availability of trained interrogators, transit guards, and bureaucrats, not to mention food, accommodation, and living space—became more than one prison facility could handle. But camp administrators recognized they were facing perhaps an even greater problem—the growing number of dedicated escape artists the camp appeared to be fostering. And with the growing number of escape attempts, Kommandants at POW camps across Germany feared reprisals from their superiors should any of the large-scale escape plots succeed.

  Meanwhile, Wings Day took full advantage of that fear, even if in truth as few as 5 per cent of the POWs might be described as dedicated escapers. Day’s intelligence told him that maybe a quarter of the camp’s inmates considered escape an option. To further motivate kriegie escape attempts, he made it known that escaping was an “operational function”[31] in the camp, reinforcing the perception that attempting an escape was an RAF airman’s duty. The result was nearly a fever pitch of escape activity at Stalag Luft I; or, as Day described it, he’d been incarcerated “in a kennel with a good pack of foxhounds” all sniffing to get out.

  John Weir’s letters to his fiancée trailed off slightly in the winter and spring of 1942. In a few notes during January and February, he wondered if Hugh Godefroy (still flying with 401 Squadron) had found the gold pin John had purchased for Frances as a Christmas present just two days before he was shot down on November 8, 1941. Then, in just a couple of letters in late winter, he explained that hockey was over because the rink had become a mud hole and that the reduced number of Red Cross parcels had left him in need of basic “clothing—pajamas, sox [sic], shoes, slippers, gloves and cap.”[32] Yes, Frances had received her Christmas present, but she sensed her fiancé’s calls for additional clothes were more for a stockpile than his own personal use. He was up to something.

  As it turned out, so were the German prison authorities. Scuttlebutt around the Barth compound suggested most of the officers and air force NCOs were about to be packed off to somewhere in Silesia. In mid-March, Stalag Luft I guards instructed the prisoners to pack their belongings, assembled them for parade, and marched them to the trains outside Barth. Along with the instructions came warnings against any attempts to escape. Roommates Birkland, Floody, and Weir became separated when the Germans loaded POWs into the train cars alphabetically, but that didn’t dissuade Scruffy. He teamed up with another kriegie named Mike Wood and the two worked out the details of Weir’s escape plan.

  Based on maps the escape committee had stowed away in the camp, Scruffy expected the eastbound train would pass through Stettin, which had access to the sea; if the two men could loosen the train windows and jump from the moving train as it slowed through Stettin, maybe they could make it to the harbour and stow away on a ship. Everything went according to plan—preparation of the windows, the jump from the train, safe passage to the waterfront, and refuge overnight until they could find a ship leaving the port. It nearly worked until they ran into an SS officer and were arrested, jailed, interrogated, and shipped off to their intended destination—the Silesian town of Sagan and the new home of imprisoned aircrew, Stalag Luft III.

  “Hello, Darling,” John Weir began his twelfth letter home to Frances McCormack in the spring of 1942. “We are now well installed in the new camp . . . situated in the middle of a reforestation area with lots of fresh air.”[33]

  Scruffy complained that it had been almost two months since he’d heard from anybody in Canada. His fiancée and the Weir family had no idea he had just been shipped from a prison camp where he’d participated in forty-eight tunnel escape attempts, daily goon-baiting (terrorizing the German Officers or Non-coms, or “goons”), and then a nearly successful leap to freedom from the prison train.

  “We’ve been clearing stumps for a kitchen garden (I only hope the Germans give us some seed) and for basketball, volleyball, and tennis courts. . . . Besides that I’m slinging the discus. I hope to be fairly healthy by the time I get back to you. Then all you’ll have to do is fatten me up.”[34]

  Frances McCormack wouldn’t necessarily have understood what her husband-to-be was up to, but clearing stumps, gardening, and pursuing sport while inside the wire at this new state-of-the-art prison camp in Silesia were not at all about filling a cold cellar with fresh produce for POWs’ diets or even about keeping fit. These were the grassroots pursuits of a transplanted escape committee already cultivating its next plan.

  * * *

  * American-born Don Blakeslee joined the RCAF in August 1940, arrived in England in January 1941 to serve with 401 Squadron (earning a DFC), and was transferred to 133 Eagle Squadron in June 1942 as a flight leader. In August 1943 he flew four sorties over Dieppe and was promoted to squadron leader. By the time the three Eagle Squadrons were turned over to the USAAF as the heart of 4th Fighter Group, Blakeslee had flown 120 Spitfire sorties and accumulated 240 combat hours.

  * In the summer of 1944, German authorities delivered as many as 168 Allied airmen shot down over occupied Europe to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Since many of these Allied aircrew, including twenty-six Canadians, had been assisted by members of European underground groups (and were therefore disguised as civilians carrying non-military identity papers), their German captors considered them spies not protected by the Geneva Conventions. At Buchenwald they were subjected to the same torture, deprivation, confinement, work details, and even human medical experimentation that others faced in the death camp. By October, most air force prisoners were transferred to German prison camps under Luftwaffe control.

  * The first official escape meeting took place at Dulag Luft near Frankfurt-am-Main, in August 1940, when Royal Navy airman, Lieutenant Peter “Hornblower” Fanshawe, directed the construction of a tunnel through the fall of the year, but the Germans discovered it just as it reached the prison camp fence.

  * Between 1939 and 1945, from a total of 125,000 aircrew, Bomber Command lost 55,573 airmen killed, 8,403 wounded, and 9,838 became prisoners of war; 8,325 aircraft were lost. Fighter Command lost 3,690 airmen killed, 1,215 wounded, and 601 became prisoners of war; 4,790 aircraft were lost. Total RCAF casualties included 3,150 killed, 9,890 presumed dead, and 49 who died as POWs.

  3

  “SPINE-TINGLING SPORT”

  * * *

  TREES used for reforestation, especially pines planted closely together, are cultivated that way to allow fast growth upward, not much outward. Stuck into the ground as seedlings perhaps a few feet apart, and with little or no human attention—water or fertilizer—reforestation pines shoot skyward. Their purpose is not to grow freely, but to keep loose, sandy soils from eroding and to create, overnight, what foresters refer to as a “green wall.” For some years, farmers along the Bobr River near the town of Sagan in Silesia had protected their sandy soils by planting rows and rows of these fast-growing pines. By the 1940s, thousands of tall, palisade-like pines appeared to cut off the town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants from the outside world. Whether by accident or design, when Sagan’s new arrivals—several hundred aircrew prisoners of war—began debarking at the train station and marching down the road to their new quarters, the pine forest seemed to gobble them up for good.

  “Situated in the middle of Sagan forest,” one aircrew POW said, “one could never see more than a few hundred yards in any direction, except upwards. . . . The lack of view rather enhanced the fenced-in feeling.”[1]

  In fact, the new prison compound—Stalag Luft III—was carved out of those woods, hundreds of miles from any ocean coastline and even farther from existing battlefields; there was little chance that an escaper could get far enough west to contact the French
or Dutch Underground, or the other direction to find refuge with Soviet allies beyond the Eastern Front. For a year before the prison camp opened in March of 1942, Russian forced-labour workers and eventually some of the first non-commissioned Allied aircrew (whom the Germans could force to work) who were brought there chopped down many of the reforested pines to form a clearing—about three hundred acres of grey-coloured sandy topsoil. The fine consistency of the soil would pose an obvious problem for tunnellers, while assisting any camp officials thwarting them. Working in the tunnellers’ favour, however, was the virgin ground, without any previous excavation and (unlike Barth) with a water table hundreds of feet under the surface. In addition, Sagan, less than a mile from the camp, was a busy train terminus with six rail lines intersecting in its marshalling yard. And while that meant smoother delivery of prisoners from trains to platforms and then to the compound, for any observant POW the presence of so many railway lines seemed to provide countless ways to exit town, should he get that far.

  The Germans had built two separate and parallel wire fences around the roughly half-mile-square compound. The double-jeopardy fences each stood about ten feet tall and six to eight feet apart. Atop the fences, like a thorny crown, they had installed a barbed-wire overhang that pointed inward toward the prisoners. And between the two fences they had piled and strung additional barbed wire to impede any passage. Illustrating the immense size of the prison, about thirty feet inside the outer fence was an inner warning wire, strung about eighteen inches off the ground; beyond the knee-high wire was no man’s land, and any POW caught in it, they were told, would be shot without warning. Guard towers were positioned on each corner and every hundred or so yards along the perimeter of the compound; all were armed with searchlights and machine guns. Eight barrack buildings were built a further forty yards inside the warning wire (each hut sat several feet off the ground on concrete pillars so that ferrets could inspect beneath them at a glance), as well as a wash house, a cookhouse, a couple of latrines, and a pool for rainwater in case of fire. Meanwhile, outside the entire enclosure, the pine forest had been clear-cut back as much as a hundred feet beyond the double fences. The message was evident everywhere: this camp was built to prevent escaping.

  When the majority of their occupants began arriving on the first day of spring 1942, there were two compounds ready and waiting. The East Compound contained eight barracks huts; these would house approximately nine hundred air force officer prisoners. The Centre Compound had a dozen barracks to house approximately sixteen hundred non-commissioned air force prisoners. Every POW barrack was a wooden, single-storey hut containing twelve good-sized rooms, and each of those held six double-decker bunk beds and a stove for heat in winter (whenever fuel was provided); before they became overcrowded, two of the dozen rooms in each hut offered a library and recreation room. West of the Centre Compound was the Kommandantur,[2] the German administrative compound for the whole camp. To the northeast stood the Vorlager, the utility section of the camp housing a bathhouse, an infirmary, buildings to store fuel and supplies, housing for Russian prisoners (the camp’s forced labour), and the notorious “cooler”—solitary confinement cells.

  For several days freight trains pulled into Sagan Junction disgorging their human cargo—Allied air force prisoners that none of the German Kommandants at POW camps across Germany ever wanted to see again. Emerging from the “forty-and-eights”—boxcars built for either forty men or eight horses but often fit for neither—were hundreds of the most experienced escape artists the European air war had produced. German authorities figured it was safer to dump all the bad apples into one basket, a basket that could contain them, than to have them causing havoc at thirty different prison camps all over Germany.

  Among the prisoners marched into the new facility near Sagan was the old guard of Royal Air Force men, those who had been locked up in German POW camps for two or three years already. Of course, there was Harry “Wings” Day, who had led 57 Squadron’s Blenheim bombers right from the beginning of the war, but was brought down in October 1939—on a Friday the thirteenth. Perhaps the Germans had been the unlucky ones for shooting him down that day; as Senior British Officer, Day entertained most of the hundreds of escape plans while appearing to toe the line with German camp brass. There was Peter Fanshawe, a Royal Navy pilot shot down June 13, 1940, while attacking the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst. One of the original kriegies, “Hornblower” Fanshawe had organized the first escape meetings inside Dulag Luft at Frankfurt-am-Main in August 1940.

  There were RAF aircrew men such as Blenheim pilot Mike Casey, shot down over Emden, Germany, on October 16, 1939; and Fleet Air Arm flight commander Jimmy Buckley, shot down near Calais, France, six days later on May 29, 1940. Buckley and Casey had organized the first breakout attempts even before RAF airmen were transferred to Stalag Luft I at Barth. From Warburg and Oflag VI-B prisoner-of-war camp came fighter pilot Douglas Bader (shot down in August 1941), whose Lazarus-like recoveries from combat and crashes had earned him the rank of wing commander, but whose lust for escaping had his German captors threatening to take away both his artificial legs.[3] And from Spangenberg prison came Battle of Britain ace and RAF squadron leader Robert Stanford Tuck, shot down January 28, 1942; he had also made numerous individual escape attempts.

  Similarly experienced and equally undeterred by the imposing look of the prison camp were the Canadian POWs. In fact, some of the Canuck prisoners being transported from Spangenberg prison to Sagan had become quite notorious, even among the German hierarchy. When Ottawa-born RAF fighter ace Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie was shot down over Lille, France, on July 4, 1941, William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, the British-born fascist who became the Nazis’ chief English-language broadcaster) announced the victory immediately; normally, processing and publishing such information took days or even months to accomplish.[4] Even earlier, there was the flurry of attention around the capture of Alfred “Tommy” Thompson, from Penetanguishene, Ontario. Like Ogilvie and Tony Pengelly, the twenty-one-year-old Thompson had packed up for England in the 1930s to take advantage of the RAF’s Commonwealth-wide enlistment option. Posted to 102 Squadron in 1937 and assigned the job of bombing a German target with propaganda leaflets from his Whitley bomber on September 8, 1939, he and his crew were shot down just five days into the war. Tommy Thompson had the dubious distinction of being the first Canadian airman captured in the war and as such was taken to a special meeting with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in Berlin.

  “He said they discussed hockey,” Tommy’s son Andrew Thompson said. “[Göring] liked Canadian hockey. That was one topic they talked about. And [Göring] mentioned that my father had gotten him out of bed the night before, when his bomber had flown over Berlin.”[5]

  Not only was Thompson exposed to Göring, but also to German propaganda cinematographers. Shortly after his capture, they shot newsreel footage and sound of Thompson in his RAF uniform standing at a microphone and speaking about living conditions as a POW.

  “Since being taken prisoner here in Germany,” Thompson said haltingly to the camera, “my brother officers and myself have been treated with every courtesy and consideration.”[6]

  Also en route from Spangenberg prison to Sagan was RCAF navigator George McGill, just twenty-three and from Toronto Island. During a combat operation over Wilhelmshaven in January of 1942, McGill was ordered by his pilots to bail out of their burning Wellington bomber. Immediately after the premature order, the two pilots managed to put out the fire and keep the bomber aloft all the way back to England[7] , leaving McGill to face years as a POW. And from Barth came F/L Henry Sprague, from Nelson, BC, shot down in November of 1941, when his 96 Squadron began using Defiant aircraft as night fighters.[8] Another Barth alumnus was 102 Squadron bomber pilot Tony Pengelly, as well as Spitfire pilots Hank Birkland from 122 Squadron and Wally Floody from 401 Squadron. Floody’s wing (and tunnelling) mate, Scruffy Weir, would arrive a few days later.

  All these men had one thing in
common. They had experienced years inside the German stalag system. Sometimes alone, other times in teams, they all had plotted and dug tunnels to escape it, and while nearly every one of their attempts had failed, none of the perpetrators had ever given up. Their jailers felt equally assured they could keep their prisoners inside the wire and, with a few exceptions, they had been successful.

  When he arrived at the end of his march from Sagan Junction train station, on March 21, and surveyed what his German captors had prepared for the officers and NCOs, Pilot Officer Wally Floody didn’t see all the sophistication of the new Sagan camp so much as a preventative system. He considered all the German-designed features of the new facility a compliment to the determination and ingenuity of the kriegies’ abilities to find new ways of breaking out.

  “It wasn’t a punishment camp,” he said. “It was the one camp they’d built with all the knowledge they’d acquired during two or three years of holding us prisoners of war. It was supposedly escape-proof.”[9]

  The Germans called the new camp Stalag Luft III. The prisoners called it Göring’s luxury camp,[10] but did so sardonically. Even in the earliest days of captivity there, some of the Commonwealth aircrew POWs weren’t prepared to sit still; they set about testing the weakest points of the compound right away. On March 21 , the very first day inside the wire, Wings Day joined two other officers in transforming their RAF uniforms to look like German Luftwaffe uniforms (the pants and tunics were not dissimilar in colour), and—being fluent German speakers—tried to talk their way to freedom through the main gate; the bluff didn’t work and the three got the obligatory fourteen days of detention in the cooler.

  Meanwhile, Jimmy Buckley re-established X Organization[*] inside the East Compound and began receiving a steady flow of escape proposals. One scheme—worked out by Bill Nichols, an American in the RAF, and Irish airman Ken Toft—claimed that the mass of coiled wire between the double fences and the distance between German sentry positions created blind spots along the outer barrier. They theorized if the two of them could get across the warning wire to a blind spot at the main fence, they could cut their way through the wire before being spotted. All they needed was a diversion. So, Wings Day and the escape committee organized a series of them. There was a staged fight. A prisoner approached a key sentry box and asked that a phone call go through to the Kommandant for an interview. A POW at another sentry box asked permission to retrieve a ball in no man’s land. And elsewhere, one prisoner dumped a bucket of water over the head of another. All this distracted the guards long enough to allow Nichols and Toft to snip their way through both fences and the obstruction wire in between. Once the two men emerged outside the double-jeopardy fences, other prisoners orchestrated more diversions to help the escapers get into the pine forest beyond. It all worked. But they were soon recaptured on the run and sent to the cooler too.