The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  Joan Saunders and George Sweanor were married just after New Year’s, on January 6, 1943. As with most events in the UK at that time, the actual wedding happened when the war dictated. At the time, 419 Squadron (now flying brand new Halifax bombers) was standing down, waiting for what Sweanor called “delightfully foul weather”[8] to clear before it resumed flying. His squadron leader, D. W. S. Clark, loaned Sweanor a bicycle to get to and from Middleton St. George, where the couple had rented a single room. His wing commander volunteered his own crew to fly in place of Sweanor’s to give the couple two free nights away from the war as a wedding present. His aircrew mates bought the couple a chest of silverware. Air force friend and artist Ley Kenyon designed a wedding card. His pilot, Pat Porter, stood up as best man. And as the couple was married, George Sweanor got a promotion to Flying Officer. Three nights later his Halifax “K for Kitty” was back in the battle order, dropping mines in German shipping lanes off the East Frisian Islands. But the inclement weather persisted, limiting his combat flights to three in January. They made up for the operations scrubbed in January with seven ops in February. Then he was away on a four-week bombing leaders’ course, then back on bombing operations against submarine pens at St. Nazaire and German industrial targets at Duisburg and, on March 27, Berlin.

  Sweanor counted the op to Berlin that Saturday night among numerous “wrong decisions” in his life. In the first place, although the operation didn’t need their services, pilot Pat Porter volunteered his crew to replace one with lesser experience. Although they had flown most operations in Halifax “K for Kitty,” she was in for repairs, so they settled for an unfamiliar bomber “E for Edward.” Sweanor was sick with stomach flu and could have opted out. As bomb-aimer, however, he was the most mobile member of the crew—serving as second pilot on takeoff and landing, manning the front turret, taking astro shots for the navigator, changing fuel tanks for the engineer, and ultimately lining up and bombing the target. Sweanor didn’t want to let his mates down. A decision not to go would have changed his life. Instead, he joined the op.

  Early in their outbound flight southeast of Bremen, their bomber was hit by flak, knocking out one of the Halifax bomber’s four engines. Unperturbed, Porter felt that they should press on to the target, despite the danger of losing altitude on three engines and perhaps becoming a target themselves. Sweanor released the bombs at a target near Berlin, muttering “my usual, useless prayer that my bombs hit only military targets,”[9] and Porter banked for home. But they’d been sighted by an airborne night fighter that quickly caught up with them and raked their aircraft from behind. The attack set fire to the wireless radio area, and shrapnel wounded several of the crew. With the Halifax losing altitude, hydraulic oil fires breaking out, and wounded aircrew, Porter ordered his six crew members to abandon the aircraft. Sweanor went to the cockpit.

  “I don’t know if I’ve got any engines left,” Porter said, working the throttles.

  “Look at the altimeter,” Sweanor said. It was unwinding at a terrific pace. “We’re in a plunge. We’ve got to get out of here.”[10] He made his way to the forward escape hatch so the crew could bail out, but the hatch had been fused shut by the enemy cannon fire. The two gunners aboard reported on the intercom that the rear hatch was fused too, and frozen solid. Sweanor made one more stop in the cockpit to give the pilot his parachute and to open the hatch over his head so Porter could bailout. “Good luck, Pat,” he shouted, and then, with an axe in his hands, Sweanor made his way to the rear hatch to help the rest of the crew get out.

  Rear gunner Scottie Taylor, who happened to have been a lumberjack in Quebec before the war, grabbed the axe from Sweanor’s hands and hacked at the hatch until it fell open. One by one the crew evacuated the Halifax—Murray Bishop, the flight engineer; Gerry Lanteigne, the wireless air gunner (he hesitated and Taylor pushed him out); Alan Budinger, the navigator; Danny London, the mid-upper gunner; and finally Sweanor, who paused for a second.

  “I knew I was leaving my last ticket home,”[11] he said. One further thought haunted him this night: Joan was pregnant with their first child, and Sweanor revisited the reasons why they shouldn’t have gone ahead with a wartime marriage. Would he be maimed? Would he a burden to his wife, if he got back? And if he didn’t return, how would his widow and fatherless child manage?

  As he fell from the hatch into the night, Sweanor felt a sheet of flame pass over his head. He hadn’t realized how much of the Halifax was ablaze. He pulled his rip cord and immediately felt the jerk of the chute; it was barely open when there was a second jerk as the chute caught a tree. Had he delayed just a few seconds longer, he quickly realized, he would have ploughed into the ground with the burning bomber; the chute catching the tree as rapidly as it did probably saved his life. Back in Middleton St. George, in the early hours of March 28, Joan was awake.

  “He used to come in [after a bombing operation] about four o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I used to reach over and there he was. But this morning I woke up and it was daylight and there was nobody there. And I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s not coming home.’”[12]

  The 419 Squadron padre notified Joan later that day that her husband had, in fact, been shot down. A few days later, the wing commander wrote a letter encouraging her to hope he was a POW. The International Red Cross confirmed that to be true on April 19, 1943. By that time, however, Sweanor had gone from downed airman on the run, to police prisoner, to the subject of repeated Luftwaffe interrogations, and, finally, to prisoner of war and inaugurated kriegie in the newly opened North Compound of Stalag Luft III. During that transition he learned that crew mates—Bish, Bud, Gerry, Danny, and Scottie—had all survived the crash with contusions and shrapnel wounds, but that his pilot, Pat Porter, who had apparently kept the Halifax airborne long enough for his crewmates to chop their way through the rear hatch and bail out, had died in the burning wreckage.

  Later, Sweanor learned that forty-three bombers had been shot down in two nights of Bomber Command attacks against Berlin, and that of 301 aircrew aboard those bombers, only fifteen men had survived to be interrogated at Dulag Luft—six of them from his Halifax “E for Edward.”[13] Sweanor considered himself fortunate to be among the 5 per cent who survived those end-of-March raids.[*] He felt well treated by the civilians who’d captured him, sufficiently respected by the police and Luftwaffe officials who’d questioned him, relieved upon his arrival in Sagan that German civilians hadn’t lynched him, and grateful that his captors promised there would be Red Cross food once he arrived inside the compound.

  “Freed from operations, we could cease contemplating how few hours we had yet to live,” Sweanor said. “Our taut nerves could relax.”[14]

  In spite of the relative ease he felt as he was about to enter the prison camp, Sweanor learned that relief was ephemeral. There was commotion at the gate as a prisoner was caught trying to escape disguised as a Soviet worker. A dozen German guards marched the new arrivals into a large shack for a routine naked search. Sweanor remembered he still had some escape aids—a cloth map of Europe, currency, hunting knife, compass, German-English dictionary[15] —in his pockets; he handed away his jacket to distract the guard and palmed the escape aids as he removed the rest of his clothes. When the guard returned his jacket, Sweanor dumped it on the floor with the escape aids underneath. The final indignities during his introduction to Stalag Luft III were a search of body orifices, a head-and-shoulder mug shot, and fingerprinting. Passing through the main gate into the compound for the first time, he realized the might of the place—its double-fence outer barrier, guard towers, guard dogs, searchlights, and rifle-toting guards. The often-repeated words of Welsh kriegie Shag Rees felt more haunting than humorous.

  “So this is where we are going to lose the best years of our wives!”[16] Rees reminded his fellow POWs.

  In his first permitted letter home to his wife, George Sweanor wrote a tribute to his Halifax pilot, Pat Porter, who “had not left [the aircraft] via the top ha
tch as I had thought, but had deliberately sacrificed his life to save ours. I felt deep guilt being alive. . . . Would I ever be worthy of his sacrifice?”[17] Sweanor and others thought Porter’s heroism warranted his receiving the Victoria Cross posthumously, but since so many pilots had died similarly in an air offensive experiencing such high casualty rates, Porter received recognition only by Mentioned in Dispatches. Tangible evidence that his first letter got to Joan arrived at the prison camp about a month later. One day, Sweanor spotted a familiar face coming through the main gate of the North Compound. He waited patiently while the outside guards processed the new arrival and the inside kriegie interrogators passed him. Then he pounced on his fellow 419 Squadron crewmate, Jack Fry. The two men exchanged the latest 419 news. Fry explained that he had been shot down over Stettin on April 20; despite being fluent with his high school German, he’d been unable to get through German checkpoints. Fry assured Sweanor that Joan had received his first letter home as proof he was alive.

  Several weeks passed before Sweanor learned about the escape activities that abounded in the compound. His initial contributions were the few bits of escape kit he’d managed to smuggle past the search guards and into the compound. He joined the outdoor gardening units, mixing regular surface soil with the yellow tunnel sand that passing penguins deposited in their vegetable patches. But Sweanor saved some of his best work for the camp-wide security network, serving X Organization as a stooge. He worked in shifts spying on the whereabouts of ferrets, the Abwehr men in their blue overalls. Stationed outside at the northeast corner of Hut 101, with a full view of the main gate into the compound, Sweanor would look, for all the world, as if he were just reading a book or playing a game of chess with another kriegie. In fact, he was the “duty pilot,” logging every German who entered or exited the compound via the main gate, especially the chief ferret Hermann Glemnitz and his Unteroffizier (Corporal) Karl Griese. Because of the nature of his appearance—he had a conspicuously long neck—the kriegies nicknamed Griese “Rubberneck.”

  One day, the Germans appeared to have vacated the compound, but Sweanor’s log showed Rubberneck still somewhere inside the prison camp. The Commonwealth officers working as security stooges narrowed their search to the cookhouse, which they discovered was locked from the inside. They responded by closing the shutters, so anyone inside the cookhouse could no longer see out. Within an hour, Rubberneck emerged embarrassed and fuming. It wasn’t long before the duty pilot position at the main gate was openly accepted by both sides. Even by Glemnitz. One afternoon, the Oberfeldwebel himself came through the gate, walked up to Sweanor, saluted, and shouted, “I am in. Mark me down.”[18]

  Sweanor marked Glemnitz in.

  “Who else is in?” Glemnitz asked and took Sweanor’s logbook. It showed no other ferrets in the compound. Further, it showed Rubberneck and another guard had just left the compound. Glemnitz was not happy. “Book me out!” he bellowed.

  Sweanor learned later that the two ferrets had left their posts too early. Glemnitz punished them—one got four days in the cooler, the other no leave for two weeks. The stooges were beating the ferrets at their own game—surveillance. In fact, in early September 1943, when tunnel “Tom” was discovered, X Organization bounced back even when the Gestapo briefly took over the compound. The secret police, who descended on Hut 123 and its occupants, were accustomed to pushing around civilians, not experienced air force officers. At the North Compound, when the Gestapo men set about searching an area, they armed themselves to the teeth, surrounded the offending area, and then ransacked it, placing anything they fancied—pens, pencils, rope, and anything resembling a tool—in a “swag bag” off to one side. As soon as they put the swag bag down, the kriegies created diversions and began pilfering the contents of the bag back. The net gain invariably favoured the prisoners, not the Gestapo.

  “To any but the Gestapo,” Bob Nelson wrote, “it was a well-known fact that if a workman was sent into a prisoners’ compound, two guards also had to be sent to watch the workman’s tools.”[19]

  A perfect illustration of Nelson’s assessment occurred about the same time as the Italian army in Sicily capitulated to the Allies in the summer of 1943. Colonel von Lindeiner, sensing a need to compensate for the Mediterranean setback and ramp up German morale, sent in a work crew to begin stringing electrical cable for a loudspeaker to broadcast German radio propaganda into the prison camp. The escape committee noted the workers in their midst and organized a diversion to attempt to steal some of the electrical cable. They were too late. Coincidentally, Canadian officer Red Noble had just completed a term in the cooler, so German guards were releasing him back into the North Compound. In strolled the redheaded Noble, carrying his blanket over one arm. He spotted a spool of wire lying unattended on the ground. Going just a few steps out of his way, but not missing a beat, Noble snatched the wire, tucked it under his blanket, and disappeared into a hut, leaving the workmen flummoxed as to where they’d mislaid the wire. Noble had pilfered more than eight hundred feet of wire, which immediately went into the vertical shaft of tunnel “Dick” for storage and later provided power for the lighting system inside tunnel “Harry.”[20]

  The impromptu Gestapo inspection of the North Compound that autumn may well have appeared to be a bumbling affair, with the kriegies quickly reversing every measure the secret police instituted or recapturing any contraband their jailers seized. As Nelson observed, the Gestapo did not appear to understand the nature of a Luftwaffe prison nor the means of containing its inmates; he ridiculed the Gestapo “searches [as] very ineffective compared to those of the experienced Luftwaffe ferrets.”[21] On the other hand, allowing the kriegies to believe they had the upper hand inside the wire may have been part of a greater Gestapo game plan.

  In November 1943, Max Wielen, the head of the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) at Breslau visited von Lindeiner at the North Compound and toured the site. A system of buried microphones, which the Germans had installed a year earlier, conclusively revealed that throughout the previous six months “large-scale digging was being carried out by the prisoners.”[22] However, Wielen’s search of huts and other buildings, according to von Lindeiner, “failed to discover where the tunnels were situated, or at least left that impression in the camp.”[23] The Kripo chief’s visit to Stalag Luft III was followed by renovations to several of the compound facilities, including construction to enlarge the camp area. Not surprisingly, during such disruptive renovation (and perhaps not coincidentally as escape activity began to intensify), Luftwaffe administrators were forced to remove the microphone listening equipment. Still more remarkable was that the microphones remained disconnected through the fall and into the new year.

  Then, early in 1944, von Lindeiner convened a meeting of district security personnel to discuss ways to prevent camp breakouts. He brought in local security chief, SS Major Erich Brünner, who listened to von Lindeiner’s concerns that a large-scale escape was imminent. However, Brünner stayed at the meeting barely an hour. He merely chatted with von Lindeiner about the problem, carried out no inspections of anti-escape measures, and refused to order the redeployment of the underground microphone listening system. Dissatisfied with the security chief’s response, von Lindeiner went so far as to arrange a meeting among Group Captain Massey, the senior Commonwealth officers, chaplains, and doctors and delivered a special warning to be passed to the prisoners not to undertake a major escape plan.

  “Escapers [will] in future suffer very severe penalties,”[24] Kommandant von Lindeiner told one of the RAF officers.

  This pre-emptive approach was reinforced when the camp adjutant, Hauptmann Hans Pieber, spoke to F/L Henry “Johnny” Marshall early in February. Pieber liked Marshall and hinted that the RAF reconnaissance pilot and his fellow POWs might face horrible consequences from higher up the chain of command if they attempted a mass breakout. If they did, he suggested, the Gestapo might respond with lethal force. Pieber’s warning to Marshall, as well as Brünner’s failure
to re-activate the anti-escape defences, and von Lindeiner’s veiled warning against mass escapes all suggest that German High Command had already decided it would turn a blind eye to or even encourage a larger escape. And if such a breakout occurred, that would prompt the Gestapo to take matters into its own hands. The Gestapo, it appeared, was setting a trap for both the Commonwealth prisoners and the camp’s Luftwaffe administrators. What made the secret police involvement a greater threat to those involved in an attempted escape was that the German High Command was drafting a restraining order called “Stufe Römisch III,” or Grade III, which decreed that any recaptured escaped POW—whether he escaped in transit, via a mass escape, or on his own—would not be returned to his military jailers, but instead be handed over to the secret police.[*]

  Inside the wire, with the Gestapo seemingly out of the picture and von Lindeiner and the Luftwaffe guards apparently back in control of Stalag Luft III during the autumn of 1943, X Organization’s tunnel activity went on hiatus. While the diggers and penguins enjoyed a well-deserved rest, the pause did not signal a decline in escape committee activity. To be sure, Big X entertained one-shot “wire jobs.” Roger Bushell welcomed kriegies presenting reasonably sound escape plans and travel arrangements that might deliver them out of Germany. To assist, the escape committee would supply potential escapers with some currency, compasses, civilian outfits, and wire cutters. Among the attempts, a New Zealander and a Canadian thought they had found another blind spot at the far south end of the sports grounds. On the designated night, they crawled for seven hours, undetected by searchlights or tower guards, and had all but two wires of the outer fence snipped when a patrolling guard spotted and recaptured them. Meanwhile, the escape committee ramped up production in the mapmaking, tailoring, and forgery sections.