The Great Escape: A Canadian Story
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“Why did you escape?” he demanded.
“It is our duty,” they said.
“Correct,” he acknowledged. Apparently more interested in talking than listening, the police chief regaled them with his own biography. “I was a prisoner in France during the First World War. I also escaped, but unlike you, I got away.” He chatted some more about prison life and then signalled guards to take the kriegies away and to have them sent back to their prison camp. He added finally, “Better luck next time.”[5]
Having experienced the thrill of getting beyond the wire and a few days of freedom in his first escape attempt, Brown had another crack at it in December of the same year, with Czech prisoner Joe Ricks along for the ride. That escape was thwarted just as quickly. But it left Brown with an indelible memory. As he and Ricks travelled with armed guards back to Sagan, this time they sat in a train compartment with a member of the Hitler Youth, a Wehrmacht officer who’d lost a leg on the Russian front, and three young schoolteachers—all heading home for Christmas. Someone began to sing. Brown offered a version of “Alouette.” Ricks chipped in with a Czech folksong. And the three women began “Silent Night.” Everyone joined in, and for those moments, Brown said, the war was forgotten.[6]
The same winter that Brown and Brettell were brushing up their German and getting fitted with their escape disguises for the March attempt, the long-range mass escape plans of X Organization took shape, very much in the image of the new escape chief, Roger Bushell. Whether inside barracks huts far from the probing ears of German ferrets, or pounding the exercise circuit along the inside of the warning wire, during the non-tunnelling months of the winter, Big X had assembled and consulted with his section heads—security bosses Harsh, Kirby-Green, and recently arrived US Lieutenant Albert “Junior” Clark, forgery chiefs Walenn and Pengelly, sand dispersal leader Fanshawe, and, most urgently, tunnel kings Floody and Ker-Ramsey.
Knowing the Germans would soon move most of the Commonwealth and American prisoners to the new North Compound, Bushell calculated the committee’s next move. It was decided the current SBO, Group Captain Massey, should approach the camp Kommandant and, in a spirit of co-operation, suggest some East Compound officers provide work groups to assist in the construction of the new camp. Feigning goodwill and enthusiasm for the construction work, Floody, Ker-Ramsey, Fanshawe, and Bushell himself all joined the work parties. Between shovelfuls and hammer swings, however, the expert earth-movers calculated the length and breadth and depth of their new home. Floody and Ker-Ramsey paced out and recorded the distances and angles of the place to determine where future tunnels might be built and how creative they’d have to be to put men beyond the wire. One of them even managed to smuggle back a stolen diagram of the projected underground sewage lines.
Not unlike the Centre and East compounds, the North Compound was three hundred yards square, completely surrounded with those reforested pines and with two fences about nine feet high and five feet apart. More bundles of barbed wire filled the space between the double-jeopardy fences, and the warning wire was strung thirty feet inside that fencing. Guard towers—or, as the kriegies described them, “goon boxes”—were situated every one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards. The living quarters consisted of fifteen wooden huts, a kitchen hut (with caldrons for boiling water), a fire pool, and a large sports field, which doubled as the appell area. Each hut contained eighteen rooms; each of the rooms had a dining area, living area, table, stools, lockers, a stove on a tile base in the corner, and double-decker bunk beds (with palliasse, a mattress of woven paper or wood shavings) for eight prisoners. Every hut also had a washroom, lavatory, and small kitchen with a coal stove. The fifteen barracks huts could house up to fifteen hundred air force officer prisoners. Again, north of the barracks, the Vorlager contained a coal shed, the hospital, and a building with both the cooler and a room where Red Cross parcels were warehoused and inspected by German guards, and then passed along to the Commonwealth officer in charge of distribution.
Moving was scheduled to take place on April Fools’ Day 1943, and the kriegies lived up to the date’s moniker. Seven hundred officers (by this time including some three hundred Americans) gathered their worldly possessions—plates, mugs, cooking pans, makeshift gadgets, thread-bare clothes, and Red Cross parcel boxes filled with personal effects, such as photographs, pieces of string, and nails—and assembled for appell. The roll call among the officers that day had the look and feel of juvenile boys lining up for their first day back at school. The POWs broke ranks and clustered around the guards who were searching them. Articles were passed in jest from one man to the next as the inspection descended into chaos. That allowed some vital escape tools—pens and ink, paper, tin shovels, and civilian clothing (including Bushell’s civilian suit)—to pass through the screening unnoticed. Miraculously, the antics had also kept one of the escape committee’s most valuable possessions undetected. Since the earliest escape committee days at Barth in 1940, pilot Dick Bartlett had carried his exercise medicine ball with him everywhere. Seemingly the kriegies’ physical fitness director, the Canadian Fleet Air Arm sub lieutenant was still guarding the hidden wireless radio in that ball.[*]
Many kriegies knew X Organization had the wireless set, nicknamed “the canary,” and that it could receive the evening BBC broadcasts offering the latest world news. Once the canary had been successfully smuggled into the North Compound via that medicine ball, Bartlett and two other officers assumed the responsibilities of its round-the-clock protection. RAF officer Nellie Ellan operated the radio itself. A second officer recorded the BBC broadcast content in shorthand; the contents were later read aloud in each compound barracks. What most kriegies did not know, however, was that relaying the BBC news was a secondary function of the radio. Once the three custodians of the canary had transcribed the BBC news, Bartlett changed the radio coils to receive signals from the British Air Ministry. These encrypted messages contained intelligence for X Organization. When the canary went silent after each broadcast and intelligence message, it was up to Bartlett to hide it in a most unlikely location—under a latrine toilet in Hut 101[7] . Bartlett and his two companions practised the emergency response if the Germans suddenly descended on the wireless hiding place. If the canary’s capture were imminent, Bartlett could destroy its coils, eat any written messages, conceal the wireless under the toilet, and be innocently sitting on the toilet in half a minute or less.[8]
Once inside the new North Compound and dismissed, that April 1, kriegies dashed into the comparatively spacious huts to claim their rooms, where, one man said, there was “almost enough room to swing a stunted cat.”[9] Big X ensured that the escape committee was represented in every hut; in each barracks he appointed one officer, Little X, to receive and process all officers’ schemes for breaking out of the compound, and Little S to deal with security.
The excitement of the move and the confusion on both sides made this time ripe for all manner of escape attempts. Pilot Officer Gordon King, from Winnipeg, had arrived just in time for the move to new quarters. At age nineteen, in 1940, he knew Morse code, so the air force streamed him into the wireless air-gunner trade, but he was upgraded to pilot training. The RCAF rushed him overseas and sent him, as Second Dickie (observing pilot), on several large bombing operations, including the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany, on May 31, 1942. A few nights later, without the security in numbers and piloting a slower Wellington bomber, he and his crew were shot down and captured.
King arrived at Sagan barefoot, having lost his boots when he bailed out. At the train station he faced the mile-long walk to the compound with nothing on his feet; somebody loaned him footwear he’d never seen before—wooden Dutch clogs. They served him well as he joined the officers’ work crews preparing the North Compound and then on the walk to his new home on April 1, 1943. King spotted plenty of escape hijinx that first day, including an attempt by Joe “Red” Noble, one of his Canadian barracks mates. Noble spotted a truck loaded
with pine tree boughs leaving the camp, jumped into the back, and buried himself among the logs and branches. But a guard in a goon box had spotted him and passed the word to a guard closer to the truck.
“Joe, we know you’re in there,” the guard shouted. “Come on out.”
Noble stayed put, figuring the commotion of moving day would distract the guard.
“Come out, or we’ll start shooting,”[10] King remembered the guard shouting more emphatically. And out came Noble.
Not long after he arrived in the North Compound, Gordon King joined a group building its own tunnel to the cookhouse. He remembered it as a scheme to establish a secret passage to the food stores of the building so that they could fatten their meagre rations whenever they wished. The digger at the face of the tunnel was a former fighter pilot, while King worked as “the dish,” taking the excavated sand to the entry point and handing it off to a dispersal man.
“We got about halfway to the cookhouse,” King recalled, “when a team of horses pulling a wagon walked on the sand above the tunnel and it caved in. The Germans thought it was a big joke. They were elated they’d found it. But at that point tunnelling was just something to do.”[11]
While such tunnelling efforts seemed short-sighted, they succeeded in creating a diversion for other escape committee enterprises. Bushell used a similar diversion to send four-foot-three-inch Ken “Shag” Rees through the manhole into the North Compound sewage system to see if human passage was possible. The Welshman returned moments later with bad news; the sewage pipe was only six inches around. At this point in his wartime service, Rees was into his fourth military aviation career. He’d completed a tour with 40 Squadron in 1941, added a second tour based in Malta, then contributed as an RAF instructor back in Britain, and was flying Wellingtons with 150 Squadron in October 1942 when he was shot down and eventually sent to Stalag Luft III. Inside the North Compound, he was effectively commencing his fifth tour of duty, as a member of the principal tunnel-digging team for Roger Bushell’s escape committee.
“There were escape attempts going on all the time,” Wally Floody said. “The escape committee was vetting people who wanted to try anything . . . even one chap who wanted to go out the main gate disguised as a German shepherd dog.”[12]
Two creative kriegies—Czech Ivo Tonder and Australian Geoff Cornish—let their beards grow for a few days. Then they traded Red Cross parcel cigarettes and sweets for some Polish greatcoats, smeared their faces with dirt, and joined a Russian work crew leaving the compound through the main gate. The guard there noticed that the numbers entering and exiting didn’t add up, but couldn’t distinguish the real workers from the imposters. The seasoned Abwehr duty officer, Hauptmann Hans Pieber, arrived on the scene. Formerly a member of the Austrian Nazi Party, Pieber had worked at Stalag Luft I outside Barth and then was transferred to the complex near Sagan with the Commonwealth officers the previous year. Pieber recognized the kriegies in disguise and despite the Russians’ protestations that the two men were truly members of their work crew, carted Cornish and Tonder off to the cooler. Another escape attempt about that time, a kriegie clinging to the chassis of a work truck, was stopped by the chief of the German anti-escape troops. Staff Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz (dubbed “Dimwits” by the kriegies) had also served the German military prison system for several years. He had worked and lived in England before the war. Nevertheless, he took great pleasure in unravelling escape schemes, whether it was a man hiding in the undercarriage of a truck or tunnel crews burrowing toward the double fence.
Meanwhile, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell seemed equally intent on winning the war of wits. Even if all escape activity at Stalag Luft III did not deliver a “home run”—actually getting Allied air force officers back to Britain—Bushell planned to disrupt as much of the Third Reich’s momentum as he could from inside its occupied territory. In the first eleven days of April 1943, Big X and the section chiefs of the escape committee met to determine the number of tunnels to be built, their locations, their trapdoor entrances and projected exits, their depths and direction, their designers, their engineers, their diggers, their soil dispersal units, their security overseers, their routines, and the communications support. Settling into their new quarters in the North Compound were more than seven hundred officers, with just as many skills and aptitudes among them. Each one could now be called on to fulfill every job X Organization required. It all began with Roger Bushell’s original meeting among his section chiefs.
“My idea is to dig three major tunnels,”[13] he told the committee. He added that teams would dig simultaneously, that it would take five hundred officers in the camp to do the job, and that if the goons and ferrets found one or two of the tunnels, his view was that one would eventually deliver two hundred or more POW officers outside the wire.
“Now you’re talking,” Floody said. Already a seasoned tunneller with experience at three German prison compounds, he recognized the brilliance of the plan. Later he commented, “We didn’t dream that getting one or two or three people back to Britain was going to change the outcome of the war. But we realized that larger escapes would make the Germans tie down a lot more troops.”[14]
The committee had decided a crew would dig one tunnel originating in Hut 123 and running westbound from a trapdoor in concrete and brick that formed the foundation for the chimney in that barracks. It was a location the committee recognized the Germans would suspect, because it was closest to the double fence, but farthest from the main gate of the compound. It offered the most seclusion and therefore aroused the most suspicion.
“We’re going to call this one ‘Tom,’” Bushell said.
“Dick,” the second tunnel, would originate in Hut 122 and also run westbound. Its trap would be concealed beyond a concrete wall and below a pool of water that was run off through an eighteen-inch-square grating in the floor of the hut’s washroom shower. Less obvious because it was located inside an inner barracks hut, the tunnel was perfectly concealed.
Meanwhile, the third tunnel, “Harry,” would head northbound from Hut 104, under the warning wire, the entire Vorlager, and, in fact, beneath the cooler itself en route to the pine forest beyond the northern perimeter of the compound. Its trapdoor had to be excavated beneath a stove in Room 23, through a square of tiles, then through the solid brick and concrete foundation that supported the weight of the stove and chimney, ultimately into the topsoil and sand below. Building the traps to each tunnel entrance took days of planning, manpower, tool assembly, security, and precise timing. Canadian Flight Lieutenant Henry Sprague witnessed the birth of tunnel “Harry.”
“That night we staged a diversion, which means we had a party in the block,” said Sprague, a veteran of Dulag Luft and Stalag Luft I imprisonment. “The stove rested on tiles in a six-foot-square configuration . . . so during the party some Polish chaps [officers Minskewitz, Wlod Kolanowski, and Zbigniew Gotowski], who were expert cement men, they chipped away the tiles carefully, constructed a platform underneath, re-cemented the tiles—that’s all they did that night—and put the stove back in place. That gave us an access point to what later became the vertical shaft to ‘Harry.’”[15]
The next step, cutting into the concrete beneath the now movable tile flooring, demanded an equally tricky manoeuvre. First, a pick-head borrowed from the Russian work crews was strapped to a baseball bat handle that Ker-Ramsey used to pound through the concrete. Under Floody’s supervision, the digging crew laid blankets to catch the debris and muffle the noise. To mask the smacking sound of each blow, Junior Clark and others organized a team of diversionary kriegies outside the window of Hut 104. There they began pounding pieces of tin and wood as if manufacturing cookware, not an out-of-the-ordinary sight for POWs just settling into their new barracks. Meanwhile, George Harsh’s kriegie guards, or “stooges,” watched every move the Germans made, whether they were armed guards in the towers, goons on foot patrol, or ferrets wandering the compound looking for evidence of tunnelling.
By contrast, as many kriegies as there were in the ranks of the security system, only a handful knew where the trapdoors to the three tunnels were located; in fact, few knew which huts had been chosen as starting points for the digging. Soon after the move to North Compound, most officers in camp spotted notices going up, inviting kriegies to participate in this baseball game or that cricket match, when really the escape committee was recruiting volunteers for duty in the day-to-day escape operations. Patrick Langford joined right away. As far as he was concerned, too much of his time in the air force had been spent preparing, and not enough spent doing. Born in Edmonton in 1919, Langford had taught himself to ski, ride horses, and play the piano. When the war broke out, he left a good chauffeuring job to join the air force and get into the fighting; instead, because of his high grades in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada, the RCAF made him an instructor. After sixteen months of teaching others to fly, he finally got an overseas posting to heavy bombers himself, but in July 1942 his Wellington was shot down over Lübeck, Germany. He bailed out safely, but fire in the disintegrating aircraft burned him across his upper body.
After lengthy hospitalization, Langford arrived at Stalag Luft III just as his fellow officers prepared to move to the North Compound. He seemed eager to join the parade of escape attempts—one plan he presented to Big X involved using a trench the Russians had built as an avenue of escape, and another involved hiding in an exiting garbage wagon. However, the escape committee found a job more demanding and valuable for Pat Langford and his workmate Henry Sprague. They shared the responsibility for protecting the trapdoor to “Harry.” As Ker-Ramsey picked his way deeper into the concrete foundation beneath the stove, early in April 1943, the floor in that corner of Hut 104 was exposed for almost ten days. Langford and Sprague used spare palliasses to cover the area whenever guards came near. And with the ferrets staging more surprise inspections all the time, the two kriegies trained themselves to open or close the trapdoor system with lightning speed.