The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  Nelson explained that a second Klim can pipeline was laid underground from below each trapdoor to the nearest chimney in the barracks hut. That provided a hidden outlet to expel used air, which otherwise on cold days would have revealed a condensation trail. This way, the regular chimney of the barracks hut gave the tunnel operation a natural draught while a bypass valve in the pump allowed the tunnel to ventilate itself naturally even when no one was underground. The ventilation system also made it possible for a team of diggers, dispersal men, and pump operator to work below with the trapdoor completely sealed above. It meant the work could progress continuously between roll calls.

  Digging the horizontal tunnels presented its own set of problems, including excavating on a level plane and in a straight line. The engineers fabricated a level and stole prismatic compasses from the Germans.[22] To calculate the distance travelled underground, they came up with primitive tools, including a premeasured ball of cord. They melted margarine and other combustible fat into candles with pajama string as wicks, ensuring that the sooty by-product went safely up the Klim can chimney; the resulting fat lamps lit the way up each tunnel. Once “Tom” began on the horizontal, Nelson and the other engineers worked with Floody to shore the walls of the tunnel with box frames in a trapezium shape for strength. Each of the bottom and two side boards of the frame, he said, was 21.5 inches long, while the top board was 20 inches long. Because most of the bed-boards were conveniently that length, and featured tongue-and-slot joints, they fit together like a prefab floor, ceiling, and walls. The weight of the earth above the ceiling and against the outside of the walls kept the entire frame rigid. That meant no nails were needed, nor was any hammering required.

  “It wasn’t very difficult to dig,” Nelson said. “[Floody] digging the tunnel would lie inside the existing frame. He would scoop out the earth and the whole roof would collapse on him, but he’d be protected by the wood frame. The tunnel sand would collapse into an arch-like shape. All the sand that had fallen out would be packed behind the wooden frame and the shaft would move forward with the wooden support. . . . The big problem was the risk of collapse because you could get trapped thirty feet underground.”[23]

  It was about the time the digging team had nearly completed the three workshop chambers at the base of “Dick’s” vertical shaft that near-disaster struck. On a day in late April, just after the 9:30 a.m. appell, as the digging shift began, Ker-Ramsey joined Floody underground to finish shoring up the storage chamber and the sand dispersal chamber. A third digger, Norman “Conk” Canton, was shoring the pumping chamber with bunk-bed timber. Suddenly, about twenty feet above the men, a bed-board in the shaft wall cracked and broke, then a frame broke and sand began cascading through the gap and down the shaft. Fortunately for the diggers, the ladder up the shaft hadn’t broken, so Ker-Ramsey and Canton clambered upward through the spilling sand, with Floody bringing up the rear. In seconds Floody was up to his waist in sand and unable to move. The first two grabbed his arms and heaved him out before the sand smothered him.

  “Much sputtering and shrieking on my part,” Floody said, and he cursed for minutes afterward, but then realized his good fortune. He’d become “a little greyer, a little wiser, and a bit more cautious.”[24]

  It took Floody, Ker-Ramsey, and the others four days to regain the ground they’d lost in the cave-in down the shaft of “Dick.” The same kind of setback occurred in the shaft of “Harry” within a few days. Moreover, digging and re-digging down the throats of “Tom” and “Harry” not only put tunnellers’ lives in peril, it multiplied exponentially the problem facing the sand dispersal teams. German Staff Sergeant Glemnitz, the chief of the anti-escape guards, had warned all his troublemaking kriegies there was no way to hide the damp, bright yellow-coloured sand from beneath the surface of the compound unless they could find a way to “destroy” it.

  At the outset, that apparently impossible piece of magic had fallen to Peter Fanshawe, head of the sand dispersal section. Engineers, such as Nelson, had calculated that each stretch of tunnel, roughly three-and-a-half-feet long by two-and-a-half-feet wide (or twenty-two-cubic-feet), yielded about a ton of sand. Initially, Fanshawe’s dispersal men used pots and pans, jugs, washbasins, socks, and makeshift sandbags to dispense with sand in manageable quantities. They could hide it under huts, in latrines, behind wallboards, and even inside Red Cross parcel boxes. But with three tunnelling teams excavating in three sites from morning appell to evening appell, in total likely to generate maybe a hundred tons of sand, his dispersers were running out of places to hide it all. And each time Glemnitz and his team of ferrets found traces of the telltale yellow sand, they increased their spot searches, added unexpected roll calls, and ratcheted up the tension everywhere. The answer?

  “Trouser bags,”[25] Fanshawe said at a section meeting of X Organization.

  From beneath his tunic and pants, he pulled out a set of suspenders from which hung two cut-off legs of a pair of long, woolen underpants, looking like two sausage bags. (Suspenders and underpants had been sent by the score to POWs in Red Cross parcels in anticipation of the coming cold winter.) A pin was stuck into the lower end of each sausage. By placing the suspenders around his neck and sticking the sausage bags (full of sand) inside his trousers, he could pull a string concealed in his pants pocket. It would release the pin and allow the sand contents of the two sausage bags to flow down the inside of his trousers and onto the ground, where it could be scuffed into the ground relatively unnoticed.

  The dispersal team members—now numbering in the hundreds—could fan out across the compound. They could march across the parade square and disperse sand as they conducted a drill. They could cultivate their gardens and hoe the evidence in among the plants. They could even stage fights and mix surface and sub-surface dirt in the resulting dust, and make both nearly disappear. Noting the way his dispersers tended to waddle with eight or ten pounds of sand down their legs, X Organization dubbed Fanshawe’s men “penguins.” The trick was to find equilibrium, to ensure that, each day, the penguins could disperse roughly the same volume of sand the diggers excavated. Wally Floody noted the diggers were clawing out ten feet of sand per day, while Peter Fanshawe said the penguins could get rid of about six feet per day. One POW noted astutely that kriegies had become servants to an ugly hole in the ground.[26]

  John Colwell joined that servitude in June of 1943. Not that he had an aptitude for hauling and hiding sand. But Flying Officer Colwell had experience at just about everything else. The son of a medical missionary, John grew up in India through the 1930s, when his father, a veteran of the Great War in the British Army, decided to move the family to Canada’s west coast to own and operate a chicken farm. Riding to and from Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, to take school and sell the farm’s eggs didn’t appeal, so when the war began Colwell joined the RCAF, where his skills in math and geometry moved him quickly through the air training plan. By 1942 he was posted as a navigator to 405 Squadron and flying operations with Coastal Command, chasing U-boats and guiding rescuers to downed airmen. Grounded due to bad September weather and a broken engine radiator, Colwell was told replacement parts were a week away.

  “No matter,” a fellow airman wrote. “John and his crew . . . scrounged a radiator and did the repairs themselves.”[27]

  By the spring of 1943, his squadron had joined the newly formed 6 Group of Canadian squadrons, with his 405 Squadron flying seven-man Halifax bombers against submarine pens on the coast of France and industrial targets along Germany’s Ruhr River valley. On April 3, F/O Colwell was navigating one of the lead bombers in the stream to attack Essen, Germany. They delivered their bombs, but anti-aircraft flak had damaged Colwell’s astro compass; instead of a path northward away from heavily populated areas and Luftwaffe night-fighter bases, they were headed west and were shot down near the Maas River, southwest of Rotterdam.

  Colwell’s first entry in his POW diary was a simple one.

  “Made my first parachute jump
at 11 p.m.,”[28] it read. Nine days later, Colwell noted that he and a couple of the officers in his Halifax crew, pilot Jim Lago and wireless-operator Bill Hoddinott, “arrived in Sagan about 8 a.m. It was about noon before we were finally allowed into the compound . . . got our Red Cross parcels to start housekeeping . . . in Room 14, Block 120.”[29] A few days after he and his roommates figured out who cooked, who cleaned, and who took care of retrieving Red Cross parcels, Colwell began to focus on the rhythm of the North Compound, its periodic escapes, its scheduled and unscheduled appells, and contributing to the escape committee’s greatest needs.

  “Two Americans got out under the south fence. . . . They searched the camp just after 1 a.m., and identified everyone by card and picture,” Colwell wrote on June 17. “We were then moved out into the hall while they searched the room carefully. They lost . . .”[30] Three nights later, “another night search. Jamie [Jim Jamieson], Art [Hawtin], Ach [John Acheson], Mull [W. D. Mullins], and I had our hair all cut off.”[31] A day later, he simply noted, “Night search. Started work as a penguin.”[32]

  Colwell learned about the penguin work shortly after arriving at the compound that spring of 1943. Since none of the officers was compelled to work, he enjoyed the notion of joining a friendly horseshoe match after appell one day.

  “Suddenly, these two Dutch POWs came along and sort of scuffed around in the middle of our game,” Colwell said. “I remember thinking it wasn’t very considerate of them. And then I saw this sand trickling out of their pant legs and I realized what was going on.”[33]

  Colwell’s diary reflected the experiences of an officer newly introduced to Stalag Luft III and feeling his way into the routine of POW life. He sensed his first priority, self-preservation, was a matter of being accepted by his roommates, assuming a role in Block (or Hut) 120 life, and attending to his health and nutritional needs as best he could. The Allied doctors in the compound recommended that a grown, fairly active man needed three thousand calories in his diet each day; the German rations at best delivered fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred calories in the form of bread, some portions of vegetables, and even fewer of meat. Colwell noted early on that he weighed 148 pounds. His lower calorie intake and his penguin activity consumed those limited calories very quickly. For penguins, each circuit began at the tunnelling hut. One penguin loaded another’s two inner pant legs with sand; at capacity that could mean columns of sand two feet long and three inches in diameter down each leg. Then, controllers sent the penguin on a casual walk to a specific dumping site. Controllers also directed penguins to various loading points and dumping sites so that the ferrets wouldn’t spot a kriegie repeating a circuit. It was hot, continuous work that summer as Colwell and the other penguins tried to keep pace with the diggers.

  Moving sand underground had also become more sophisticated. As each of the three tunnels crept farther and farther from the base of its entry shaft, diggers abandoned their washbasins and jugs in favour of higher-volume transport. The engineers had scrounged the makings of an underground railway system. Willy Williams had retrieved battens that lined the ceilings and walls of the barracks huts; split lengthwise, the battens became one-inch-wide rails nailed to the floor of the tunnel. Bob Nelson and the other carpenters built sturdy trolleys—consisting of chassis and detachable boxes built from beechwood bed-boards, axels liberated from barracks stoves, and wheels of wood covered in tin from discarded food containers. When a shift started, the first digger would wheel himself on the trolley chassis to the face of the tunnel. A second man reeled the empty trolley back with its draw rope and wheeled himself forward. The first digger, facing forward, cut into the face, drew the sand down his body to the second digger, who faced backwards and scooped the sand up his body and into the trolley box. When the box was full he tugged the rope and a third man back at the base of the shaft reeled in the trolley to remove the sand. All the while, a fourth man pushed the bellows in the air-pump chamber, delivering a steady flow of fresher air through the Klim can ventilation system under the railway tracks and floor boards to the face of the tunnel. Gordon King, who had worked as the dish man on the impromptu tunnel to the cookhouse a couple of months earlier, gladly took on the role of air-pump operator.

  “I was small and in good shape,” King said. “I could stay on the bellows . . . for a shift of eight hours if I had to. We stopped from time to time to rest. Using the cart with the long rope attached, we could bring the sand out much faster. They even put carpet on top of the rails to deaden the sound.”[34]

  Matching the digging pairs required a bit of psychology and physics. The section bosses matched John Weir with Hank Birkland, for example. First of all, they were both Canadian. More important, they had dug tunnels together since the first escape efforts at the Stalag Luft I camp back in 1941. But they also compensated each other’s work in a unique way. Weir had a tendency to dig harder to the left when he was at the face of “Tom,” while Birkland often veered to the right; by the end of a shift one would balance the other. On other shifts, Floody worked at the face of the tunnel and Weir was his second, pulling out the bags of excavated sand. The bond these fellow diggers shared, going all the way back to Luft I at Barth, was paying off.

  “One time, Wally was digging and I was passing [the sand] back,” Weir said. “Suddenly the candle blew out and there was a helluva wind in my face. I knew damn well what it was. I just went forward as fast as I could and got [Wally] out in a matter of minutes.”[35]

  Birkland preferred to dig fully naked and that aggravated Floody; he was afraid the ferrets would notice the scrapes on Birkland’s elbows and knees and start paying closer attention to his activities. To hide any telltale scars, tunnel boss Wally Floody insisted his diggers wear long underwear and vests. John Weir’s fiancée Frances McCormack might well have wondered why the flow of letters from Weir had slowed that spring; his digging shifts underground increased and lengthened. Further, she was probably puzzled as to why he seemed to be going through his underclothes so quickly.

  “This is my forty-seventh letter and I’ve had a hundred and twenty-three from you so far,” Weir began his letter of April 30, 1943. “You wondered what clothes I need? I could do with some light pajamas. . . . Five pair underwear and shirts, sox [sic] could be used. . . . I don’t think another May will come with us separated.”[36]

  Fear of cave-ins, vomiting from pockets of foul underground air, and elbows and knees scraped raw by the sand were just some of the occupational hazards the diggers tolerated. Fat lamps proved extremely helpful in guiding the tunnellers up to and back from the tunnel face, but they too were a half measure. To address the problem, some of the escape committee’s engineers came up with a partial solution. They calculated that the wiring in the barracks huts probably had some slack, so clandestinely they stripped away sections of the wall and ceiling boards to track down any excess.[37] When they finished their wire roundup they had spliced together enough wire to bring electricity and lighting to the mouths of all three tunnels. The Germans regularly turned power to the huts off during the day, so for some of the evening tunnel shifts, the electric light was a psychological lift.

  Meantime, and suddenly, on June 10, 1943, the Russian work crews—with their axes, picks, and debris wagons—were back at work inside the wire, this time beyond the south fences of the North Compound. The then-SBO, H. M. Massey, learned from Colonel von Lindeiner that the upper command of the prison administration had decided the ever-increasing numbers of American officers flowing through the gates of Stalag Luft III would require a separate compound—a new South Compound—to house as many as four or five hundred USAAF POWs. The inner circle of X Organization met in an emergency session. Bushell and Day were feeling guilty that so many USAAF officers had contributed to the design, creation, and protection of the three tunnels, and it now seemed likely von Lindeiner would complete the South Compound before the kriegies finished any of the three North Compound tunnels. Big X recognized that a lot of American officers might f
eel cheated out of their chance at freedom. He felt obliged to find a solution.

  “We close up ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ for now,” Bushell said. “We go full out on ‘Tom.’ . . . We might make it before South Compound is ready.”[38]

  At that point “Tom” had advanced some sixty feet from Hut 123. There were still at least a hundred feet to cover to get the face of the tunnel beyond the double fence and into the protection of the reforestation pines. Bushell asked Wally Floody how much they might advance the tunnel by September if all three digging shifts concentrated on “Tom.” Floody told him that digging advanced each tunnel about five to ten feet a day with one team, but simple arithmetic meant three digging teams might move “Tom” westward up to thirty feet a day. Fanshawe agreed that the pace would put pressure on the penguins, but it was manageable.

  “It was decided that ‘Tom’ should be finished before the Americans went,” Bob Nelson said. “With the necessity for speed, however, greater risks were taken and the Germans’ suspicions were aroused.”[39]

  With the priority shifting to “Tom,” digging and dispersing sand from the two other tunnels came to a stop. The Polish officers who had so expertly created the invisible trapdoors for “Dick” in the showers of Hut 122 and the rebuilt tile flooring at the entrance to “Harry” in Hut 104 returned to seal them up as if they’d never been there. Bushell and Floody then chose the fifteen best diggers, included all of the American diggers available, and divided them into three teams of five for the new push at the face of “Tom.” Wally Floody’s predictions of ten feet per day proved accurate, and so did Fanshawe’s promise to “disappear” the sand as quickly as it came to the surface.

  Out of urgency, or perhaps by accident, that summer a number of penguins stumbled on an ideal dumping ground for the now relentless flow of yellow sand gushing from “Tom” like Niagara Falls. And it was incredibly obvious. With few exceptions, neither the Russian workers nor the escape committee “volunteer” officers had disturbed much of the sub-surface yellow sand during the felling of the pine forest or the construction of the barracks huts and sports grounds. The one exception was the structure known as the fire pool, which had required a deep cut a dozen feet into the sand and then installation of a solid brick lining to catch and supply rainwater in the event of a fire. While much of the yellow sand excavated from the pool hole had been hauled away, around the edge of the structure some still lay on the surface. But the pool was right in the centre of the compound, under direct and constant observation by goons in the towers and by some with binoculars hiding in the woods spying on every move the kriegies made inside the wire. The pool perimeter suddenly became a focal point for Fanshawe’s dispersers.