The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  It didn’t take the seasoned tunnellers long to begin sampling the soil inside the compound and testing the Germans’ detection systems. Just as the Canadians had organized themselves at Barth to design, construct, and employ specific tunnelling approaches, a New Zealander and his group had pioneered their own unique tunnelling technique. Air officer Henry Lamond’s team would first construct a tunnel about four feet underground and twenty feet long, capable of accommodating three men head-to-toe in a line and closed at each end. Inside the tunnel, the lead digger would pull soil from the front and pass it to the rear. So would the second and the third, advancing the face of the tunnel while enclosing the space behind. The men would work in the nude, pulling their clothes in bundles behind them. They would dig in complete darkness and survive by poking sticks to the surface for air. Lamond’s “mole” concept got the green light from Buckley and X Organization that first spring inside the new camp.

  In order to make the plan work, the group needed a legitimate excuse to be digging near the double-wire fence. They found one when they realized water from the wash huts drained close to the fences. Day convinced a German duty officer to let the POWs use shovels to trench the water deeper and toward the wire. Over several days Lamond and his two mole mates—Jack Best and Bill Goldfinch—dug the drainage ditch deeper and deeper until they estimated they could begin their horizontal shaft toward the fences without being spotted. Following the evening appell (roll call) on June 30, the three buried themselves in their horizontal shaft and began pulling and pushing the soil to advance their tunnel under the wire. After moling 150 feet, the following night they emerged on the other side of the fence and dashed into the woods. They got all the way to the river near Sagan, stole a rowboat, and managed to make it some distance toward the Baltic when the boat’s owner caught up with them and had them arrested.

  On most days, since the Geneva Conventions prevented German captors from putting the officer captives to work, any gatherings in the East Compound attracted a lot of kriegies either by accident or design. One September afternoon in 1942 proved no different. Seemingly uninvolved, Jimmy Buckley and Wings Day watched as members of the escape committee assembled a primitive boxing ring in the extreme southeastern corner of the compound. Moments later, as the kriegies began cheering and jeering their arrival, Canadian airmen George McGill and Eddie Asselin entered the ring, donned boxing gloves, and began to spar. Of course, not only was the match a spectacle for the kriegies, but it also captivated the attention of the German sentries, most notably in the guard towers. As it did, and with a nod from Buckley and Day, two POWs dressed like compound workers slipped over the warning wire, quickly hit the dirt in one of those blind spots next to the fences, and began cutting their way through the wire. In just a few minutes, with all eyes riveted on the McGill–Asselin boxing exhibition, the two so-called workers were through the wire and into the woods for at least a temporary escape.

  To deter any future above-ground escape attempts, the Germans expanded their sentry staff. The Kommandant instituted foot patrols outside the double fences. At night the patrols were augmented with hundführer, armed guards with dogs (twenty-four dog handlers and thirty-two dogs). While a guard could survey an area of perhaps thirty-five feet beyond the wire, a watchdog could easily pick up movement or scents across a thousand-foot area.[11]

  Meanwhile, to counter the subterranean escape attempts, the German guards dug an eight-foot-deep ditch inside the double fencing in an attempt to deter further moling excavations. That just drew more challenges to the trench; it wasn’t long before Canadian digger Joe “Red” Noble and a friend attempted a mole dig from the security ditch, but failed. Then another three-man team tried and was caught. That prompted the Germans to undo the ditch. They filled it back in and resorted instead to a subterranean preventative device they had pioneered at Barth. They buried microphones deep in the ground along the perimeter inside the double fences and posted ferrets on headphones around the clock, listening for the sounds of tools cutting through the soil.[12] It was turning into a tit-for-tat summer. With sentries mounting in number and listening devices going underground, X Organization met to discuss the means of circumventing them. Several familiar tunnelling experts inside the East Compound brought new ideas to the table for consideration.

  “The basics are these,” Floody told Harry Day and Jimmy Buckley. “First you’ve got to find a place to sink a shaft. Next, you’ve got to build a tunnel very deep so the Germans can’t hear any digging. You’ve got to dispose of the sand. And most important, you’ve got to be able to do all this under the very noses of the Germans.”[13]

  At the escape committee meeting, Floody suggested they dig two distinct tunnels at the same time, each one thirty feet underground to avoid detection by the buried microphones. If the Germans discovered one of the tunnels, Floody said, the ferrets might let their guard down while the diggers continued with the second tunnel. The tunnelling committee worked out schemes for camouflaging trapdoors in the floors of the barracks huts where the tunnels began. It also hatched a scheme for hiding the real escape tunnels with dummy tunnels. Tunnel diggers would excavate shallow camouflage tunnels that went down a few feet and out about thirty feet before they were terminated. In the floors of the camouflage tunnels the kriegies rigged a trap system through which they would dig an additional shaft fifteen feet deeper underground. That shaft would lead to the entrance of the real escape tunnel. If the Germans discovered the camouflage tunnels, they likely wouldn’t spot the deeper shafts. The tunnel crews could then reconnect with the hidden shaft from another location and continue work on the real escape tunnel undetected. Wally Floody and Robert “Crump” Ker-Ramsey began a tunnel from Hut 67, some four hundred feet from the fence line; they figured the Germans would least suspect a tunnel that far from the wire.

  “I had started tunnelling in 1941,” Floody said. “But by the time we got to Sagan, we were getting pretty expert at it.”[14]

  Digging deeper into the Silesian sand triggered new problems, however. Each new shift underground meant more diggers emerging with more bags and washbasins of dirt. The volume of soil excavated from camouflage tunnels, vertical shafts, and the two actual escape tunnels began to mount. And because the sub-surface sand was damp and bright yellow in colour, which differed from the fine, dusty grey-coloured sand on the surface of the compound, the escape committee recruited kriegies whose sole job became finding new places and ways of dispersing the excavated sand. Initially, they raked the subsoil into the surface sand beneath the barracks huts, but when ferrets discovered one of the camouflage tunnels, the dispersal crews needed to find new, less obvious hiding places.

  The farther down Floody and his diggers burrowed, the tougher it was to breathe. They improvised by fitting sticks together end-to-end and pushing them up to break the surface of the soil above, allowing some fresh air to pass twenty feet down into the escape tunnel. Tunnel sentries, called “stooges,” watched for the sticks breaking the surface of the compound soil; their job was to hide the holes—first with their bodies and then by placing a stone temporarily over the air hole. But the air holes proved a half measure. Tunnel diggers, such as Wally Floody, John Weir, and Hank Birkland, could work only a few hours without light or fresh air. When they emerged from their shifts underground, they had to cope with headaches or vomiting. Improvising a solution, Jimmy Buckley found an accordion among the prisoners and had it configured to force fresher air into the tunnel system.

  To assist in the dispersal of sand, the diggers changed the direction of one of the main escape tunnels toward the cookhouse so they could hide sand under it. Ferrets discovered the camouflage tunnel and destroyed it. In the process, Floody was caught in a cave-in and nearly suffocated. When Ker-Ramsey and Floody dug their way back toward the main escape tunnel and replaced the camouflage tunnel, they inadvertently weakened the hut foundations above them and the entire dummy tunnel collapsed with Floody still inside. The only thing that saved the veteran tunne
ller was that his face happened to be over the trapdoor to the vertical shaft; while his teammates dug furiously to reach him, Floody was able to breathe the air from the entrance to the shaft.

  When the escape tunnel reached three hundred feet in length, just a hundred feet short of the wire, ferrets raided Hut 67. They tore the building apart and dug far enough to unearth both the dummy tunnels and the main escape tunnel. They blew them all up.

  Floody told the escape committee that the elaborate excavation scheme was missing an important ingredient: an equally elaborate scheme to protect the tunnels, the trapdoors, the sand dispersal, and the diggers themselves. In his view, the escape committee had to pay closer attention to security. It needed someone who could be as ruthless as the German prison architects and ferrets. It required the know-how of an individual who could instinctively predict the actions of a prison’s inmates and its keepers. It had to find somebody with first-hand knowledge of prison life, well before he fell from the sky and into the Germans’ stalag system. It found those qualifications in an RCAF air gunner who had arrived with a civilian record as infamous as his peers’ military ones were famous.

  “Of the thousand prisoners . . . of Stalag Luft III,” George Harsh wrote, “I was the only ex-convict, and so, for me, the psychological adjustment [to being imprisoned] was basically a minor one.”[15]

  Harsh had lived an entire lifetime, it seemed, before he ever considered risking his second chance at life in the air over German-occupied Europe. The son of a well-to-do family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, eighteen-year-old George Harsh—fulfilling a “thrill” pact with some buddies at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta—held up a grocery store in 1928. During the robbery, Harsh shot and killed a clerk, was himself shot, then later arrested, charged, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. Plea bargaining saved his life, but relegated Harsh to existence on a Georgia chain gang. For the next twelve years he shovelled dirt for fourteen hours a day, slept in an iron cage, fought off sexual attacks, and eventually knifed another prisoner in a fight over a cake of soap.

  In prison Harsh learned how to endure punishment, how to bargain, whom to trust, when and why to fight back, and eventually how to campaign to reform the penal system. Transferred to less severe internment at a Fulton County prison, near Atlanta, Harsh became a trusty (an inmate seeking freedom via legal means), serving as an attendant at the prison hospital and eventually conducting an emergency appendectomy to save a prisoner’s life. In 1940 Harsh won a pardon, was freed, and considered his options. He felt the need to begin again with a clean slate. He travelled to Montreal and presently found himself at an air force recruiting centre pleading his case to become an air gunner in the RCAF.

  “In one flamboyant beau geste,”[16] Harsh wrote, “I was trying to counterbalance my entire past. . . . I was a man trying to prove something.”

  Overseas Flying Officer George Harsh was posted to 4 Group as a gunnery officer aboard Halifax bombers with 102 Squadron. In Bomber Command’s history, early 1942 proved a key period when its commander, Arthur Harris, ramped up the strategic bombing offensive with spectacular one-thousand-bomber raids on Cologne, Lübeck, and Rostock, Germany. This period of Harsh’s service, however, also witnessed the improvement of German defences. Harsh and his squadron mates knew well the 4.3 per cent loss rate[17] of Bomber Command raids. That summer, Canadian army, armoured corps, and aircrews had also joined Operation Jubilee, the attack on the French port of Dieppe. On August 19, 1942, 4,963 Canadians spearheaded the morning raid on the seaport in the nine bloodiest hours of Canadian military history; the Second Infantry Division suffered 907 dead and 1,946 captured; the RCAF lost thirteen aircraft, its highest single-day total in the war so far. The setback resonated for everyone in a Canadian service uniform.

  Some weeks later, on October 4, RCAF F/O Harsh was not scheduled to fly an operation from 102 Squadron’s station at Pocklington, England; however, as gunnery officer he joined the operations officers that night directing the stream of Halifax bombers into the air with signals from an Aldis lamp. The third to last bomber in the flight had a problem. Its rear gunner—on his first op—had a broken gun sight and had no idea what to do. Harsh ordered him out of the turret and went in his place to ensure an experienced gunner was aboard to protect this rookie crew. Everything went wrong that night. Instead of the lightly defended Dusseldorf target, Harsh and his crew found themselves over Cologne and all its night fighter and anti-aircraft defences. His bomber was coned by several searchlights and flak converged on the aircraft, igniting fires and forcing its crew to bail out over Germany. Harsh spent two weeks in hospital for treatment of shrapnel wounds. Then they moved him on to Dulag Luft for interrogation and eventually to Stalag Luft III, where he was photographed, given a kriegie dog tag, and handed over to the SBOs inside the wire.

  Over a barracks table, Wing Commander Harry Day conducted the question-and-answer session to verify Harsh was who he claimed to be. Once he’d passed the SBO cross-examination, the serious questioning began. A New Zealand squadron leader wanted to know everything Harsh had witnessed on his way into Sagan: What were the trains like currently? What were present procedures at railway stations? What passes did the guard escort show en route? As Harsh offered his recollections of what he’d seen and heard, the squadron leader made notes on a small “chewable size” piece of paper. Finally, at the end of a very long day that effectively returned him to the life he had led for twelve years in the US penal system, Harsh commiserated with himself about a prospect as dim as it had been his first day shackled to a Georgia chain gang in 1928.

  “They tell me you’re an American,”[18] a friendly voice suddenly interrupted.

  “Yup,” Harsh had said, using his best Gary Cooper impression.

  “I’m Wally Floody. I got my monthly letter [from home] from the Germans today,” he said. “I’m writing my wife, Betty, in Toronto. If there’s anyone in the States you want to know you’re a prisoner, I’ll get her to contact them.” Floody explained that by passing on the information in this way, Harsh’s family would know he was alive faster than if they waited for official word from the Red Cross or Air Ministry. He was right; Betty Floody was able to notify Harsh’s sister of his whereabouts and status six weeks before the official air force form letter arrived with its “we are pleased to inform you” language.

  A kriegie friendship and collaboration began in that moment. Floody’s generosity left an indelible impression on the latest arrival to Stalag Luft III. In the days that followed, Floody and Harsh often walked the perimeter of the camp, up against the warning wire. It was the only safe place to talk. They shared their histories, their hopes for survival, and the current state of escape committee activity under X Organization. Floody brought Harsh up to date on the growing list of problems facing the tunnel designers and diggers—too much sand to disperse in secret, too many ferrets to track, too many tunnel operations to protect, too limited an inside security force. At the end of one of their exchanges, Harsh walked right into Floody’s verbal trap.

  “Just how the hell do you guys plan to secure [all] this?”[19] Harsh asked.

  “That’s going to be your problem,” Floody said with a grin. “You, my friend, are going to be in charge of security.”

  Harsh was not impressed by being dragooned into the job, or by what he realized would become a mammoth responsibility. Floody pointed out that Harsh would be assisted by Canadian officer George McGill, who had earlier delivered such a convincing escape diversion with his impromptu boxing exhibition that the escape committee immediately recruited him for security. Tom Kirby-Green, who spoke myriad languages (including dialects from his homeland of Nyasaland—now Malawi— in Africa), would become a third member of the security team. And Harsh’s final security co-chief would be a fellow American. Albert “Junior” Clark had risen quickly in the military; at age twenty-seven, he was already a lieutenant colonel, and by the summer of 1942 was serving in the RAF. In July he’d been flying a sweep over Abbevil
le, France, where Luftwaffe fighters shot his Spitfire down; he’d arrived at the East Compound of Stalag Luft III in August, a few months before Harsh, and was also befriended by tunnel designer Floody.

  “You know something?” Floody said finally to Harsh. “You’re probably the only man in the world who got a job because he’s an ex-convict.”[20]

  Another item on the escape committee’s wish list was its own version of MI5, an intelligence service designed to recognize any threat to the secret activity of the escape committee, conceive and organize defence against that threat, and carry out counter-intelligence to mislead or derail all efforts to discover the day-to-day operations of X Organization. Some of the expertise the escape committee needed arrived at the Sagan prison in the form of a Canadian airman shot down over Germany that summer. Born in Toronto and educated in England, Kingsley Brown had two passions as a young man—writing and flying. Beginning in 1928, he wrote for the Toronto Star, the New York Herald-Tribune and the Halifax Herald, and while employed at the latter he learned to fly at the Halifax Aero Club. When war broke out he enlisted in the RCAF and was serving as a Hampden bomber pilot when he was shot down over Bremen, Germany, on July 2, 1942.