The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “Each penguin nonchalantly sauntered to the edge of the pool with his hands in his pockets,” Bob Nelson said. “On reaching the edge of the pool, he pulled the cords which opened the bottom of the containers inside his trousers and allowed the sand to trickle slowly out as he walked. . . . During the summer, many tons of sand were disposed of. Although the sand around the pool got gradually deeper, it was very imperceptible.”[40]

  Beyond the edges of the pool, Fanshawe and his legion of penguins created numerous other scenarios for making the sand disappear. Whenever a pine stump was removed, exposing yellow subsoil on the surface of the compound, penguins congregated. If a new latrine were dug, penguins would wander by and contribute. One of the American air force officers in the North Compound, Jerry Sage, who had served as a paratrooper in North Africa, used the sports grounds to help the penguins keep up with the flow of excavated tunnel sand. One day, he would organize scores of his USAAF officers to kick up a curtain of dust by demonstrating techniques in unarmed combat. Any and all penguins were invited to participate or spectate; in the midst of the melee, none of the German guards would notice tunnel sand being emptied and mixed into the surface sand of the sports grounds. Other times, Sage staged volleyball matches with penguins two and three deep excreting sand as they jumped up and down cheering on their favourite team.

  The day after the summit, “Tom” advanced ten feet and Fanshawe’s penguins kept pace. The next day, Floody accidentally triggered another cave-in and had to be pulled out by his ankles before leading a repair of the tunnel frame; they only advanced eight feet that day. The following day it was the same thing, only this time hot margarine from a candle burned his leg. Floody seemed cursed. Nevertheless, by mid-June “Tom” was more than a hundred feet in length. At that point the diggers widened the tunnel to create a halfway house about ten feet long and half a foot wider than the tunnel itself. Floody believed the chamber, roughly beneath the compound fencing, would allow a changeover of crews and trolleys so there was less danger of a long tow rope getting tangled or rubbing against the tunnel shoring and loosening a wooden frame. The engineers calculated that another forty feet would put “Tom” beyond the double wire and under the woods. Then, at a section meeting to discuss timelines, digger Johnny Marshall suggested gradually sloping the tunnel to the surface. Floody considered that too risky; a rope could break or a trolley might run away on them and inflict a real setback. He was sure they could complete the tunnel before the Germans completed the South Compound and moved the US POWs into new huts there. Big X sided with Floody. It was July 3.

  Shortly after dawn the next morning, when the Germans had unlocked the barracks doors, and just about the time POWs were beginning to assemble for appell, two men appeared on the sports grounds in a costume—the front and hind quarters of a horse. On the horse’s back was USAAF officer Jerry Sage portraying Paul Revere with a tricorner hat and knee breeches made of woolen underpants.

  “The British are coming!”[41] he shouted as he brought the two-man horse to a halt.

  At first startled, Hauptmann Hans Pieber went along with the prank and commenced the roll call, whereupon the American inside the hind quarters poured out the contents of a can of water; the horse was urinating during Pieber’s appell.

  “Zwei und achtzig . . . und ein pferd,” he shouted to the recorder, noting eighty-two prisoners and one horse.

  But they weren’t done, as John Colwell noted. “Yankee Doodle and his horse . . . then paraded through the huts with a band.”[42]

  Drummers and buglers came marching through the barracks with about forty other US POWs masquerading as native tribesmen on the warpath. While the horse and tribesmen wreaked havoc on the roll call, Paul Revere, a.k.a. Jerry Sage, and George Harsh threw Roger Bushell out of bed, sat on him, and offered him a sample of their latest creation. The Americans had scrimped and accumulated their rations of sugar and dried fruit from Red Cross parcels for weeks and distilled them into a raisin-flavoured wine. The party continued all day, ending with many of the officers, including Wings Day, being tossed into the fire pool during a water fight. It was Independence Day and the American kriegies weren’t going to let it pass without notice.

  “The Goons are afraid of something,” Colwell wrote in his diary a few days later. “We are having four appells per day and they’ve been around the last four nights between 1 and 4 a.m.”[43] Two days later, he recorded, “Last night, [the Germans] were in the hut several hours. Each room was turned out in turn and searched.”[44] Every other day for the rest of the month, Colwell reported searches where “there were dozens of guards and barbed wire used.”[45]

  During one of those staged volleyball matches with penguins gathered around to empty their hidden sand pouches, Glemnitz came prowling. Bushell and the rest of the escape committee realized he was on to something. Security boss Harsh added he’d seen German guards in the towers all equipped with binoculars. Digger Hank Birkland reported seeing a ferret walking in the pine forest beyond the fences; the German didn’t come out. So Harsh and Junior Clark took a closer look and realized the Germans had strategically placed blinds in the woods—piles of brush through which they could use field-glasses to spy on the kriegies without the prisoners realizing they were under surveillance. This sparked a series of after-dark visits from Hans Pieber. The ferret barged into Hut 101, throwing everybody out of bed with shouts of, “Aus! Aus!”

  It prompted digger Ker-Ramsey to tell Pieber he was wasting his time.

  “You think I know fuck nothing,” Pieber defended himself in a broken English malapropism, “but I actually know fuck all!”[46]

  The war of wits continued. Glemnitz resumed the snap searches. He had narrowed his focus to the western perimeter of the compound, with particular interest in Hut 123. Each time the Germans raided, the escape committee resealed the trapdoor at the entrance to “Tom,” waited for the searchers to retreat, and then re-opened the trap and resumed the digging and sand dispersal. Next, Glemnitz arrived with Hauptmann Broili, a member of the Abwehr counter-intelligence, and about forty soldiers. Following another hut search, he ordered the troops to dig a trench between Hut 123 and the outer double fencing. They went down four feet, where the ferrets used five-foot steel rods to probe even deeper. By that time, “Tom,” which was twenty feet below the probing ferrets, had come within about fifty feet of what the escape committee figured was the safety of the pine forest. Floody constructed another halfway house and prepared to dig the last horizontal section and finally the vertical shaft to the exit in the woods. With Fanshawe’s penguins under close surveillance from the forest and towers, he suggested redirecting the sand dispersal teams to Hut 122, where Mike Casey and Ker-Ramsey began filling “Dick” with the sand from “Tom.” The pace picked up; “Tom” was now two hundred feet long and, Floody figured, within striking distance of the woods.

  The ferret chief’s next move was uncanny. It was almost as if he knew “Tom” was beneath his feet. Suddenly there were workers felling pine trees all along the pine forest directly in front of where “Tom” was heading. The tunnel would have to go another hundred feet to find safety under the trees. But the penguins’ secret weapon, tunnel “Dick,” was running out of room; sand had now filled “Dick’s” horizontal space, and Bushell refused to let Fanshawe’s crew fill the vertical shaft. The next sand dispersal area was dangerously obvious—all the empty Red Cross parcel boxes lying about in the huts—but they would try it anyway. Five days later, August 21, penguin Colwell noted the inevitable.

  “The Goons found over a hundred and fifty Red Cross boxes of sand in Hut 101 ,”[47] he wrote. And at the end of August, “Long morning appell. They searched all the huts and took hundreds of Red Cross boxes. Also my soldering outfit.”[48]

  For safety’s sake, the Poles sealed the trap at the entrance to “Tom” once again. The tunnel was 260 feet long, but forty feet short of the recently extended no man’s land to the woods. Still, the escape committee decided that was far enough.
Floody would build the vertical shaft to the surface; while potentially out in the open, “Tom’s” exit might well be far enough away from searchlights to allow men to escape at night. Since April, the hundreds of kriegies had excavated, hauled, hidden, and disguised the dispersal of more than seventy tons of sand from “Tom” alone. They had built an underground railway and ventilation system, not to mention a security and intelligence system. And while they hadn’t delivered the mass escape they’d planned, they had at least escaped detection for more than twenty-one weeks.

  Right after appell on September 8, as Wally Floody prepared to send his latest digging crew into “Tom” again to finish excavating the vertical shaft to the surface, Glemnitz suddenly threw up a wall of guards around Hut 123 and led a team of ferrets into the barracks. A couple of hours later, the German staff sergeant jabbed a probe into the concrete floor around the hut’s chimney and discovered a chip in the concrete that revealed the trapdoor to the tunnel. Glemnitz beamed with pride at his victory. He had thwarted the largest escape attempt the German prison camp system had ever faced. Other German officials saw the discovery of a 260-foot-long escape tunnel at the heart of the inescapable Luft III quite differently.

  “They were amazed, appalled, and at the same time very cocky about their discovery,” Bob Nelson wrote. “Nothing like it had been seen. And high officials of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht came into the camp to inspect it.”[49]

  During their inspection, the Germans evacuated the hut and placed a guard at its entrance around the clock. Having unearthed “Tom,” it appeared that neither the Luftwaffe Kommandant nor the Gestapo chief knew what to do next. So on September 16, they turned “Tom’s” fate over to a demolition team.

  “The German sappers entrusted with the job . . . did [it] very effectively,” Nelson continued, “but at the same time blew a hole through the roof of the hut above the late ‘Tom’s’ trap.”[50]

  “Tom” (if not Big X) had had the last laugh.

  That same week in September 1943, the German police and guards completed the move of American POWs to the South Compound. Without missing a beat, X Organization held its next meeting, with Bushell already planning its next move. Anticipating further Gestapo searches, the escape committee ordered the collection of several thousand more bed-boards and hid them in the still-empty vertical shaft of tunnel “Dick.” For the time being, work was suspended on “Dick” and “Harry.” In Hut 120, John Colwell, despite losing some of his tools and soldering gear in the purges, began work on a cuckoo clock that would amuse his roommates as well as hide his diary.[*] And while he had worked diligently as Big X’s personal Danish language tutor, Sorry Sorensen was stricken with appendicitis that fall and wound up on a dining table used for emergency surgeries; there, without benefit of anesthesia or sterilized surgical tools, a Russian doctor (also a POW at Stalag Luft III) performed the appendectomy.

  “A dog circled the table [and] was rewarded with the appendix,”[51] Sorensen related later. Still, this brush with death didn’t seem to blunt the twenty-one-year-old Canadian’s drive to escape. Writing home to his parents that fall, he said he would refrain from betting on when the war would end, the way his roomies were, but concluded, “I don’t intend being here the winter after this.”[52]

  * * *

  * In his 2011 article, “From Roskilde Cathedral School to Stalag Luft III—And the Great Escape,” Danish writer Mikkel Plannthin points out that Roger Bushell learned Danish from Frank Sorensen and Arne Bøge, who’d both been born and schooled in Denmark.

  * John Colwell not only hid his diary and his tin-bashing tools from any German ferrets rummaging through barracks huts at Stalag Luft III, he also hid messages in his writing. He regularly wrote letters home to his mother, Fern, in Hindi—a language in which they were both fluent, but which German censors couldn’t decipher.

  6

  “SHYSTERS AND CROOKS AND CON MEN”

  * * *

  EACH OF THEM had plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t fall in love, much less get married. Joan Saunders already had a boyfriend, although he seemed noncommittal. Her family had suffered loss in this war; her cousin and his wife had died in the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry in 1940. She had a good wartime job as a bookkeeper at Lougheed, Berg, and Beck’s, in her hometown of Leamington Spa, about ten miles from Coventry. The British company manufactured parts for the Royal Navy, including the hydraulics for motor torpedo boats. Like so many things in the UK then, however, the job was temporary. The plant could be hit by German bombing attacks and put her out of work. The contracts from the Royal Navy wouldn’t necessarily last. She might be called up to enlist in the armed forces. Or, she might only be able to work there until a man needed the job.

  “I was an only child,”[1] she said, and that meant whatever income she could provide her family was minimal, but important.

  George Sweanor was an RCAF airman at an operational training unit (OTU) in Britain when he met Joan. Born in 1919 in Sudbury, Ontario, George had grown up through the Great Depression—the eldest of three children—in Port Hope. He’d idolized his uncles, both veterans of the Great War, but read anti-war literature and even wrote an essay entitled, “Who Wants War?”[2] In spite of that, George was fascinated by aviation, periodically coaxing his father to take him down the road to Trenton, Ontario, to see training aircraft airborne. After high school, he took a job with the bank and volunteered for the militia. By 1941 he had enlisted in the RCAF. By the winter of 1942, he’d graduated as a sergeant-observer. And by that summer, he had crossed the Atlantic and been posted to train as a bomb-aimer at the Wellesbourne OTU. On the training course, he got to know a fellow Canadian, Pilot Officer Pat Porter from British Columbia. They would later crew up for combat operations, but that summer they flew training ops and spent time on leave together.

  Neither Porter nor Sweanor smoked or drank. They generally avoided the pubs, preferring the dances put on by the towns adjacent to their OTU station. They felt guilty sometimes, since so many local young British men were away fighting in North Africa or at sea with the Royal Navy and merchant navy. The dances usually featured a four-piece band playing soft music, which made the atmosphere conducive to having a conversation. Most military men and local women went stag. And the drill was to select a partner (often a wallflower), dance three numbers with her, escort her back to her seat, then select a different partner.

  “If there was one partner you’d like to know better,” Sweanor said, “you would try to get her in the home waltz, which permitted you to ask if you could walk her home.”[3]

  This particular night, Sweanor and Porter arrived by bus at Leamington Spa in search of the main dance hall. As it turned out, a sign on the town hall announced a special dance to raise funds for Red Cross food parcels to be sent to prisoners of war. Admission was more expensive than the regular dance, but the two Canadians wanted to help POWs. Coincidentally, local resident Joan Saunders, age twenty-three, and her girlfriend decided to support the dance fundraiser too. Joan was already seated when the two airmen arrived. On his way into the hall, Sweanor nudged Porter. “That’s for me,” he said, pointing to a potential dance partner who had “looks, poise, and figure.”[4] And for the rest of the night, he plotted to make sure he got Joan Saunders for the home waltz.

  “Everybody knew it was absolutely stupid to get married during the war,” Sweanor said, “because if you survived, you’d probably be minus a leg or an arm or an eye, and be a burden to your wife the rest of your life. On the other hand, life is so temporary.”[5]

  Eventually, however, they each realized they had little control over their feelings, and that the war would affect both of them whether they courted or not. In fact, shortly after the couple met, Joan’s office was strafed by a Luftwaffe fighter pilot shooting up whatever came into his gun sights.

  “His bullets came right through the window, right through my office and my boss’s office,” Joan said. “It would have gone right through my head, if I’d been sitting
there. But it was six in the morning and I always got to the office at eight.”[6]

  Meanwhile, George realized how close he was coming to the death that the war dispensed daily. Early in October of 1942, Bomber Command was directing Wellington bombers from his 419 Squadron against German targets for the first time since the squadron had arrived at its Yorkshire operational stations. On this night Sweanor’s crew was not on ops. Dressed in his best blues to go to a dance, he stopped to speak to F/O Arthur Morlidge, who was going on the bombing raid.

  “Can I be of any help?” Sweanor asked.

  Morlidge pointed to a letter on his dresser and said, “If I decide to stay over there, would you post that letter for me?”[7]

  The letter was addressed to his parents in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. As readily as he’d agreed to Morlidge’s request, Sweanor admitted to an uneasy feeling as he watched his squadron mates leave the Nissen hut for the flight line and the bombing attack to Krefeld that night. The next morning Sweanor saw the padre packing Morlidge’s belongings. Bomber Command had lost nine aircraft that night, the one from 419 Squadron had twenty-year-old observer Arthur Morlidge aboard. Sweanor took the letter for posting.