The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  Brown recalled his first night at Stalag Luft III in the East Compound barracks hut adjusting to his new surroundings. As new boy he’d been assigned a top bunk, so when the German guards locked the hut doors for the night and the prisoners drew the blackout curtains shut, Brown just sat on his bed, legs dangling. He recalled how, with his head near the ceiling, he was nearly overcome by the stench of body odours and the cloud of smoke from cigarettes and burning candles made of margarine and shoe polish. Despite the haze, however, he began to notice activity at the opposite end of his room, where the stove had been moved aside to reveal a hole in the floor.

  “In this eerie light, I watched naked and half-naked men, their bodies shiny with sweat, slipping in and out of the black hole,”[21] Brown wrote.

  This was his first exposure to a tunnelling crew, assembling, disappearing down the excavation hole, and then emerging with cloth bags, pails, and tin cans full of sand. Brown was allowed to witness this parade of diggers entering and exiting the trapdoor for the night’s excavating only because several kriegies had vouched for him; they had known him in Toronto or at his Bomber Command aerodrome in England and knew he could be trusted. After a few days of orientation, Brown was summoned to a meeting with Group Captain H. M. Massey. Then the SBO, Massey was in his sixties and (before being captured in 1942) had been appointed to liaise with US strategic bombing personnel in Washington, DC; but Massey had felt he ought to witness a bombing operation over Germany first-hand and was shot down on his inaugural op. Massey knew Brown had worked for newspapers and concluded his journalism skills might help the escape committee’s propaganda activity.

  Thrilled at the prospect of potentially working in connection with those underground operations he’d witnessed, or perhaps joining clandestine radio transmitting, or assisting in production at a secret printing press, Brown reported immediately to his superior, Wing Commander Taffy Williams. Brown found Williams alone in his barracks room. He was seated at a table in front of an open window, working with what looked like empty jars, a pair of scissors, and tiny pieces of paper.

  “You’re just in time to lend me a hand,” Williams told Brown. “We’ve got a propaganda job.”[22]

  Williams handed Brown one of the German jam jars he’d procured from a guard. Held inside the jar by a piece of cheesecloth were several bumblebees—very much alive, but not very happy about the arrangement. Williams had a crew of kriegies capturing the bumblebees near the cookhouse and passing them along for propaganda duty. Williams handed Brown a pair of gloves and instructed him to open the top of the jar and gently grab each bumblebee by the wings. Williams then slipped a noose of thread over the abdomen of the bee to where the abdomen joined the thorax and gently tightened the noose; attached to the thread was a pennant-shaped piece of tissue paper on which was carefully written, in tiny script, the propaganda Germans later discovering the bees would read. The kriegies hoped the messages would surprise and offend.

  “Deutschland kaput,” one side of the pennant said, and on the other, “Hitler kaput.”[23]

  Graduating from his initiation into the kriegies’ hierarchy to the escape committee enterprise (with relatively few stings to show for it), Brown moved to a new level of intelligence service. Upon his arrival at the compound, he’d been given a German language textbook that apparently was standard issue to the thousands of non-German workers transported inside the country to work as forced labour. Language was among Brown’s specialties and he soon learned that his conversational German was an asset inside the wire. Brown could initiate small talk with the guards to discover valuable bits of information or to determine which guard might be a potential bribery prospect, a so-called “tame” guard. And that work led to joining a sub-committee of the X Organization—known as “Dean and Dawson,” after the British travel agency—which forged such documents as identity cards, travel passes, and labour permits. Dean and Dawson, led by Briton Tim Walenn and Canadian Tony Pengelly, put Brown’s journalist skills to work, assembling a complete card index of police stations, labour recruiting centres, and industrial addresses for every major town and city in Germany.

  As a consequence, Kingsley Brown became something of a fixture in the library or reading rooms in the East Compound. When the latest German newspapers—Völkischer Beobachter and the Frankfurter Zeitung—arrived in the camp, the former Canadian journalist who was apparently hungry for news (if any guard asked) pored over each edition of the newspapers’ classified ads, obituaries, and public service announcements. From his daily readings, Brown might learn the names of real people whose identities could be stolen, the names of police officials who might sanction travel papers, and which industries in what locations might be recruiting migrant workers in Germany or any part of the occupied territories of the Third Reich. While building the card index in the service of Dean and Dawson, Brown met Gordon Brettell, a British pilot officer from Fighter Command. They both spoke conversational German. And that helped them hatch an escape plan for the coming winter.

  “The prospect of escape had all the exhilarating fascination of a spine-tingling sport,” Kingsley Brown wrote. “And it was this aspect more than any other that beckoned to captives from the free side of the wire.”[24]

  If digging tunnels, hiding excavated sand, dodging guards and dogs, or tying propaganda notes to the abdomens of bees weren’t enough of a sporting challenge, some kriegies tried out-and-out theft. In addition to the data that Brown and the rest of the Dean and Dawson volunteers were compiling from newspapers and public service announcements in the library, Keith Ogilvie contributed on his own. Since his official job inside the wire involved handling the Red Cross parcels[25] arriving for the POWs, Ogilvie had regular contact with the Luft guards and vice versa. One day, he spotted a wallet sticking out of the back pocket of an older guard’s uniform. Ogilvie silently lifted it, rushed it along to the forgers to copy, and then informed the distraught guard he’d discovered the wallet on the floor.[26] Worried about the consequences of prison authorities discovering he had lost his papers inside the compound, the guard thanked Ogilvie profusely. In one short, deft act of thievery, Ogilvie had gained temporary possession of valuable identity papers and tamed a prison guard; the man was forever in the Canadian officer’s debt.

  In spite of the spirited nature of the kriegies engaged in escape attempts, there was no escaping some of the harsh conditions of prison camp life. When his Halifax bomber was shot down by a German night-fighter aircraft over Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in December 1942, navigator Don “Tiger” McKim (from Lynedoch, Ontario) jumped into the frigid night sky and a 185-mile-per-hour wind. In addition to the cold and fear he felt, he smashed his head going through the escape hatch and was temporarily knocked out. He came to soon enough to activate his chute, but on the ground was quickly arrested and interrogated at Dulag Luft, arriving at Stalag Luft III on Christmas Eve. His present, on arrival, was a Red Cross parcel and the bottom tier of a bunk bed, closest to the floor and consequently closest to the outside December air.

  “I was never so cold in my life,” McKim said. “The mattress was made of bags of wood chips, so the cold would work its way through. . . . I didn’t take off my clothes. I put all the clothes I had on. My greatcoat. My mittens. Everything.”[27]

  Following appell outside each day, McKim could anticipate the kriegies’ breakfast ration—a slice of German black bread, which often had fine wood chips or sawdust inside to make the loaf go further; the bread ration was a loaf per person per week. There might be a tiny piece of butter or cheese with it and their Red Cross tea or coffee. For later meals, meat and fresh vegetables were rare. The Germans doled out either potatoes or kohlrabi (a coarse vegetable that resembled turnips) to make sauerkraut or thin vegetable soup. Generally, the Stalag Luft III officers remained hungry, but had enough to sustain life and health; in fact, with the aid of Red Cross parcel staples, they generally digested more nutrition and calories than the Germans guarding them.[28]

  But Flying Of
ficer McKim never escaped the cold. Because he was only five foot two[29] , when he volunteered to help on the escape committee he was assigned to stooge work. That winter and the one that followed, McKim would walk outside discretely noting the arrival, location, and direction of a guard or ferret entering the compound. He would alert the next stooge in the network as to the nature of the goon in the block and which direction he was headed. All the while, he would try to look as if he were just strolling for exercise and pass along his signals while (thanks to his diminutive stature) staying out the sightlines of the guard towers.

  “It was certain jobs for certain people,” McKim said. “My job required me to be out in the cold. I wasn’t capable of doing anything else.”[30]

  Flying Officer Bob McBride wrote his wife back in Montreal about coping with the cold. Shot down during a torpedoing operation off the coast of France in September 1942, McBride’s first postcard to his wife, Jean, simply said, “Wait for me a little longer.”[31] As a consequence, she joined the Prisoner of War Relatives’ Association, packing parcels for the Red Cross. At one point she managed to pack up and send her husband a bowling set she hoped would provide exercise and diversion.

  “The bowling set was marvelous,” McBride wrote back. “It burned forever.”[32]

  Another new arrival at the East Compound that fall was a no-nonsense fighter pilot from Port Alberni, British Columbia. Just twenty years old, Arthur “Jack” Moul had learned to fly on the West Coast at age eighteen. Flying sorties with 416 Squadron, he quickly earned a reputation for his quick hands on the Spitfire’s control column and its machine guns. However, on October 23, 1942, during a trip over occupied France strafing German freight trains, a locomotive blew up beneath him, damaging his Spitfire. Moul ditched in the Channel, but was picked up by a German patrol before he could be rescued by RAF seaplanes. Moul arrived at Stalag Luft III in time to become a valued scrounger, working with fellow Canadians Barry Davidson, Red Noble, and Keith Ogilvie searching for guards who could be tamed for the good of the escape committee.

  The end of 1942 brought top-to-bottom transformation to X Organization at Stalag Luft III. What had been for Wally Floody and Robert Ker-Ramsey trial-and-error excavation would shortly be elevated to a scale of construction Floody remembered from the mines of Northern Ontario. What George Harsh and George McGill had launched as a ragtag group of inmates scrambling to pinpoint goons and ferrets approaching barracks huts would eventually become so timely a network of spying, tracking, and locating that it would even outstrip the Germans’ control of their own guarding system. And the intelligence that had created Dean and Dawson and a library of information for future forgery would soon start generating such sophisticated documentation as to pass for the real thing for hundreds of potential escapers. The catalyst for revamping, expanding, and improving every aspect of X Organization was the arrival of Roger Bushell, the South African-born RAF squadron leader who’d been captured twice—once after being shot down in France in May 1940, and again following his escape from Dulag Luft all the way to the Swiss border the following summer. It was his third escape, during transport to the prison at Warburg, however, that nearly got him free.

  En route in a cattle truck, Bushell and several others managed to pry up the floorboards of the truck and drop to the roadway below. One of the three escapers fell under the wheels and was killed, while Bushell and a Czech officer in the RAF, Jack Zafouk, made it all the way to Prague. Meantime, Operation Anthropoid had landed two Czech patriots (trained in Britain) back in the Czechoslovak capital. On May 27, 1942, they ambushed Reinhard Heydrich, the Gestapo chief in charge of the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe; he died of his wounds a week later. Zafouk and Bushell went into hiding but were eventually recaptured, the former being sent to Kolditz Castle prison, the latter rushed to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin for torture and interrogation. His interrogators tried to implicate Bushell in the Heydrich assassination. The Czech family that had hidden the two escapees was executed.

  Weighing forty pounds less than when he arrived at Dulag Luft and wearing the scars of his Gestapo grilling in Berlin, Squadron Leader Bushell miraculously emerged from the interrogation ordeal. At the time, rumours circulated that the chief censor officer at the Sagan prison camp had a brother in the Gestapo who intervened and returned Bushell to the Luftwaffe prison system. On the day he arrived at Stalag Luft III, toward the end of 1942, Bushell was wearing his now-tattered air force battledress. That same German censor officer warned the squadron leader if tried to escape and was caught again, the Gestapo would probably shoot him. If he escaped again, Bushell shot back, the Gestapo would never catch him. Unnoticed in a bag of belongings the testy air force officer had tucked under his arm was a civilian suit he’d received from the family that had hidden him in Prague.[33] No doubt Bushell, now the new chief of escape operations, or Big X, was already calculating what he would wear during his fourth escape attempt.

  * * *

  * In March 1942, when Commonwealth air force officers arrived at Sagan, Harry Day remained the Senior British Officer and Jimmy Buckley as Big X, chief of the escape committee. In June 1942, Group Captain H. M. Massey arrived at Stalag Luft III and assumed SBO duties. In October 1942, Wings Day, Jimmy Buckley, and others were purged to Oflag XXI-B at Schubin, and Massey to Obermassfeld hospital to treat his injured foot, so the SBO became newly arrived Group Captain D. E. L. Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force, until Massey returned from treatment in November 1943 and was restored as SBO until May 1944. In March 1943, Day and Buckley participated in an escape from the Schubin prison. Day was recaptured and returned to Sagan just as the North Compound opened, while Buckley disappeared in his attempt to navigate a small boat to Sweden. By that time, Roger Bushell had arrived and had become Big X.

  4

  ESCAPE SEASON

  * * *

  BY MARCH of 1943, Kingsley Brown had become somebody else. He was quite sane, or as sane as any RCAF airman shot down over Germany, interrogated, and sent to a prison in the middle of Silesia could be. It’s just that besides his kriegie dog tags and German prison ID file, Brown also now owned a set of false identity papers. His alter ego was Goleb Plasov[1] , a steelworker from Liegnitz, in the former Poland. His father’s name was Jakov. His mother’s name Natasha. And he—according to a rehearsed story—was in Germany en route to new steelworks in Strasbourg, France. Among his false documents Brown also held a piece of stationery on which the police chief of Liegnitz had inscribed his signature and affixed his official stamp. All the details were accurate. Brown knew they were, since he had personally tracked down the police chief’s autograph and seal while doing research for Dean and Dawson, the forgery team. At the same time, Brown and fellow kriegie Gordon Brettell had also received tailored civilian clothing that made the two of them appear to be Bulgarian immigrants. A combination of the papers, German currency, and the clothes—all prepared by X Organization—as well as the two airmen’s conversational German to help them deal with checkpoint officials, gave them nearly all they would need to pull off an escape from the East Compound of Stalag Luft III.

  Construction that had begun over the winter to the west and a little north of what had been the main prison grounds for Commonwealth air officers appeared to give Brown and Brettell an ideal opportunity. Kriegies in the East Compound spotted crews of Russian workers hacking down more of the reforested area beyond the Kommandantur. In a casual conversation with one of the guards, Squadron Leader Bushell had learned that Luftwaffe authorities planned to move inmates in the East Compound to the new North Compound[2] sometime in the spring. As work accelerated, some of the non-commissioned ranks of Allied airmen joined the work crews building the new facility. And since the construction zone had no prisoners housed in it, German guards were few and far between. The escape committee arranged to have Brown and Brettell switch places with two NCOs on the construction gang. On March 27, 1943, four days before the North Compound was due to open, German guards watching over the w
ork crew, including Brown and Brettell in disguise, were distracted with some cigarette trading. The two kriegies quickly hid in wood shavings, waited for the commotion of their apparent escape to blow over, and in the dark climbed the North Compound fence and slipped into the Sagan forest.

  Brown remembered the first night as a dash through a Grimm’s fairy tale, as the two men used the stars and a compass to navigate their way through forested areas. In the town of Sorau they bought tickets, boarded a train, and hunkered down en route to Leipzig. By coincidence, they shared a cubicle with six soldiers of the Wehrmacht. On the cubicle wall, a poster featured two troops in conversation being overheard by a suspicious-looking civilian. The text on the poster read: “Beware the Third Person! The Enemy has Ears!”[3]

  “I’ve never known the pure joy of living, tempered so deliciously by a sense of danger,”[4] Brown wrote.

  If an escape bid seated in the same railway coach compartment as their enemies and the propaganda poster weren’t ironic enough, their interrogation four days later sure was. A routine documents check at a railway station in Chemnitz, southwest of Berlin, revealed their masquerade and the two fugitive air force officers were escorted to the local Gestapo headquarters. They expected to be shot. In an office decorated with carpets and potted palms, the district police boss smoked a cigar and fired questions at them.