by Barris, Ted
If Bushell’s grand plan to have hundreds of Allied POWs escape and fan out across German-occupied Europe was going to succeed, he needed assurance that his escapers would have the appropriate documentation.[25] Through his own experiences and listening to tales from fellow officers who’d also tried to get back to Britain, Big X knew his escapers would need at least a light grey identity card (Kennkarte) or, better, a visa (Sichtvermerk), plus a pass (Ausweise), and likely a brown card (Dienstausweise) legally allowing the holder to be on Wehrmacht property. In addition, if a man were disguised as a foreign worker, he would require Polizeitliche Bescheinigung, a police permit authorizing the worker to be in a specific area; Urlaubsscheine, a yellow paper entitling the worker to be on leave to get there; or Rückkehrscheine, a pink-coloured form that signified the worker was legally en route to his home country.
For Dean and Dawson, the escape committee’s forgery section, obtaining accurate samples of these documents amounted to only half the challenge. Equally daunting, the forgers had to procure tools and materials—pens, inks, brushes, and paper stock—to generate the fakes. Initially, Tim Walenn’s forgers worked in an empty room in Hut 120, in the row of huts farthest from the main gate. His team of artists, mapmakers, printers, and even carvers spent the better part of a year assembling master documents, finding the ink and paper with which to duplicate them, and then painstakingly replicating. They even built a mimeograph and used razor blades to carve designs into a boot heel for recreating official Nazi stamps with the swastika and eagle emblems. In Hut 120 there were relatively secluded windows, guarded by stooges, where forgers could practise replicating the documents in bright daylight.
In one respect, one member of the Dean and Dawson document factory owed the quality of his forgery to Canada’s Group of Seven artists. Born and raised in Toronto, Robert Buckham had been attracted to sketching and painting as a young man. In the 1930s, he signed up for art classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto and attended Saturday lectures from established artists such as Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven.[26] Before the war he worked in advertising as an art director. When the war interrupted his career, the six-foot-four Buckham was twice refused by the RCAF for his height; but with the war not going well for Britain in 1941, he was finally accepted. He’d flown ten combat operations with 428 Squadron when his Wellington bomber was shot down by a night fighter in April 1943. At Stalag Luft III, X Organization forgery section leaders Tony Pengelly and Tim Walenn were delighted to learn Buckham was an artist.
“I said I was going to major in art there,” Buckham said, “and I did.”[27]
His steady hand with pen and ink as well as his penchant for colour painting made Buckham an ideal candidate for the reproduction of the Kennkarte and Ausweise passes. Using the best quality paper they could find in the compound—often the fly-leaves of the library Bibles[28] —Buckham and the others cut the paper to the exact dimensions of the pass. They replicated the background swirl of the master document’s watermark (much like currency notes) with pen and ink, and brush and watercolour, then penned in the category headings (first name, surname, date, and place of birth, et cetera). If the document needed a hard back, the forgers glued tracing linen over cardboard and coloured it to match the original. Meanwhile, Jens Muller, a Norwegian air force officer, replicated any official stamps—including date or swastika insignia—by carving a mould in a bar of soap. Once he’d begun sketching and painting for the escape committee, Buckham never stopped. He employed his artistic skills “from morning to night”[29] to paint posters advertising theatre and lecture events. And in his bound, Red Cross–issue diary he drew images of kriegies, their tools, and their surroundings to distract himself from “an empty belly.”[30]
When the forgery room drew guards’ suspicions, Walenn moved the crew to a kitchen next to where the compound orchestra rehearsed. When the orchestra finished practising, the forgers wrapped up their work too and stowed it in a violin case. The musicians left the hut with their instruments in hand; one carried his violin case,[31] with the forgeries-in-progress enclosed, to Hut 104, where Tony Pengelly hid them in a secret compartment behind a removable wall board.
As well as serving the escape committee as custodian of the forged documents, Canadian bomber pilot Pengelly took on the responsibility of coaxing original documents and other things of value from the German guards who regularly patrolled the compound. Some of the guards weren’t necessarily highly educated men, but Pengelly had learned that he could occasionally befriend one by offering him a cigarette and even a short visit to his barracks room for a cup of freshly steeped tea. Pengelly did regular shifts dispensing Red Cross parcels to the kriegies and had been given the authority to “borrow” such luxury items from the parcels to hasten the process. During such visits, Pengelly might share snapshots of his family. A month or two later, Pengelly would invite in the same man and repeat the pleasantries. When the Canadian pilot knew his prey might soon be going on leave, he would offer the bait-covered hook.
“How would you like to take some coffee home?”[32] he would ask the guard.
The German usually jumped at the chance.
Pengelly knew the average German hadn’t tasted real coffee since 1936; nor had he enjoyed other delicacies. “And some chocolate for your little boy?”
Often the gift might draw the offer of a favour from the guard, such as, “Can I bring you anything from outside?”
“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” Pengelly would say. “I’d like a hundred toothpicks.” Something that inconsequential would be sufficient the first time, but it was oil for the machine. With each trip the guard made, Pengelly repeated the exchange until it got to be habitual—taking a little booty home each leave. And having broken the rules once or twice, the “tame” guard wouldn’t likely refuse any of Pengelly’s requests, fearing the POWs might expose him. Coffee and chocolate yielded a camera, developing, and printing equipment, and even the short-term loan of passes and visas.
“It was the psychology of binding a man with a thread,” Pengelly said, “and gradually strengthening the thread until it was far easier to submit to our bondage than to rebel. They never foresaw where it led . . . and we paid them in wartime Europe’s best currency—food that Big X had commandeered from our Red Cross parcels in any quantity he believed necessary.”[33]
As well as his police permit, his leave papers, or his permission to be going home, any potential escaper disguised as an immigrant worker, needed paperwork that validated his transit for the purpose of seeking work. Working from published advertisements in German newspapers, Pengelly directed the forgers to draft letters addressed to a real German, in a real company, from a real German in another real company, all on forged letterhead and with forged signatures and corporate stamps. If a guard on the outside needed proof that the immigrant worker was indeed travelling to legitimate employment in Germany, occupied France, or occupied Holland, the fake letter and a kriegie-manufactured map proved it.
“A bigger bunch of shysters and crooks and con men you’d never find anywhere in the world than in a prison camp,”[34] said Don MacDonald, a pilot officer kriegie from Winnipeg.
For some of the POWs at Stalag Luft III, the lengths to which X Organization went to dig tunnels, forge documents, and hide the evidence was all part of a cat-and-mouse game conducted inside the wire. For others, the activities comprised what Wings Day had once called an “operational function” of an officer’s duty to try to escape while in enemy hands. For those such as Roger Bushell, it was a combination of one-upmanship, spite, never allowing oneself to be idle, and an ideology of never accepting defeat. George Sweanor hadn’t experienced the number of years of imprisonment that Bushell had, but he resented Big X’s control over the cultivation of German guards and ferrets. If a kriegie were not directly involved in using the Germans for the objectives of the Organization, Bushell made it clear the POW was to back off, remain polite, and stay aloof.
“Underhanded tactics were all part
of this war,” Sweanor wrote, “but I argued there was room for those of us who wanted to lessen the enemy’s will to war by showing him that we were just plain folks, willing to make friends, and to share a few luxuries that the Germans had not seen for years. I never was very good at obeying orders I did not like.”[35]
Among the luxuries Sweanor and others seemed eager to share were those found in the new building going up just beyond Hut 119 and in front of the sporting fields. In fact, from his window, Sweanor watched the construction of a theatre in the North Compound.[*] Under a parole system, the Germans had provided the materials and lent kriegies tools, provided at the end of each day’s work every tool was returned intact. Some of the bricks that formed the foundation of the theatre may have come from buildings knocked down during bombing attacks on nearby Sorau, but some of the theatre’s other components had obvious origins. Kriegie carpenters took the plywood from all the crates containing Red Cross parcels from Canada and fashioned it into 350 theatre seats, complete with armrests, sloping backs, and tip-up seats. Just like a professional facility, the house floor was raked from a projection room at the rear of the theatre down to an orchestra pit in front of the stage. And beyond the proscenium, the stage itself featured trapdoors, wings, two dressing rooms, and space for lighting, flats, costumes, and props. An extension of the building backstage included a reference library, a lecture room, the chapel, and an ops room.
The magic ingredient at the theatre, however, was the ingenuity of the POWs themselves. Two RAF non-commissioned officers with electrician skills installed indirect lighting in the auditorium and a switchboard panel for stage lighting.[36] Air force officers who had fine arts degrees or who had joined university theatre productions before the war were suddenly in demand as producers, directors, playwrights, set designers and builders, props and wardrobe creators, and actors.
“There was even an electric sign in the foyer of the theatre,” remembered Canadian pilot Don Edy, who arrived at Stalag Luft III just after the theatre opened. “They took a wheel and put a strip of tin on the wheel. As the wheel turned [powered by the water], the electric current would pass along the tin. When it came to the end of the tin, the current would break and the light would go dark. The light illuminated cut-out letters. . . . So the light would flash on and off announcing the play.”[37]
The only memorable entertainment Edy had experienced since his overseas posting in 1941 came while on operations with the RAF in North Africa. As a Hurricane pilot with 33 Squadron, on leave in Cairo, for instance, he’d enjoyed high tea once at the Mena House resort hotel[38] across from the pyramids. In Alexandria, at the Grand Trianon Bar, he’d marvelled at the “Gilli Gilli” boys who passed the hat while one of them placed a baby chick inside Edy’s shirt one moment, and used sleight of hand to pull out a garter snake in its place.[39] In February 1942, while strafing a truck convoy with his wing mate Lance Wade near Msus, Libya, Edy’s Hurricane took return fire in the engine and radiator; the engine stopped dead and he was forced to crash-land on the desert, where he was quickly captured by German ground troops. Treated for head wounds in Tripoli, he was put aboard a tramp steamer bound for a prison camp in Italy. But the steamer was torpedoed and sunk at sea; Edy clung to debris, was picked up by an Italian cruiser, and eventually delivered to a POW camp in Sicily, then another at Certosa di Padula in southern Italy. He was imprisoned in the monastery (Camp 35) there long enough that he joined some of the British POWs staging musicals, comedies, and revues. One revue, written by POW Neville Lloyd, included a song about life in the camp:
We’re the Padula boys of Camp 35
going rapidly ’round the bend.
One of our habits is digging like rabbits
on tunnels that never end.
We lie in bed quite quietly, while the guards
are on their rounds.
But the moment they’re gone, we’re at it again
with a joy that knows no bounds.
We’re the Padula boys, Hey, Hey.[40]
When the Italians capitulated to invading British, Polish, Canadian, and American forces in September 1943, Don Edy’s group was on the move again. The Germans assumed control of the POWs and during the next two months transported thousands of them aboard trains from northern Italy to camps in Germany or German-occupied territory; Edy’s imprisonments included Stalag VII-A at Mossburg, Fort Bismarck, Oflag V-A at Weinsberg, and, finally, on November 1, 1943, Stalag Luft III.
“I doubt if there is a lonelier feeling in the world than when . . . first taken prisoner of war,” Edy wrote. “Everything seems completely hopeless and the thought of being behind barbed wire for God knows how long, maybe years, brings on an immediate depression.”[41]
By that time, Edy found himself in a Silesian POW compound that housed about two thousand Allied prisoners of war. He recognized the monotony he would have to fight off, the fear he might never see home or loved ones again, and the anxiety over the civilian hostility that surrounded the camp. He was haunted by the story of a recently arrived Irish officer who’d bailed out over Berlin; he’d survived only because German soldiers, cutting down Allied airmen whom Berlin civilians had strung up on a telephone pole following an air raid, got to him first.[42]
Edy fought off his demons by taking on the role of permanent cook in Room 11 of Hut 123 with roommates Bill Stephenson, Johnny Taylor, Cliff Thorpe, and John Crozier. Edy spent hours preparing the meals, in anticipation of the short time he would have cooking on the top of the one hut stove or in the oven below. He worked with the rations officer to have jam tins cut and bashed into additional cooking and heating surfaces for the hut. With the Klim cans that arrived in the Canadian Red Cross parcels, Edy tried his hand at tin-bashing and soldering; he joined a couple of tins end to end, wound some tin around a pencil for a perking tube, perforated a tobacco tin with nail holes, put a specimen bottle upside down in the lid, and manufactured a coffee percolator.[43] It lasted more than a year. All these important distractions helped Edy forget the state of the war and his state of mind. He enjoyed some immediate relief from his travels and travails as a POW on his very first night at Stalag Luft III. Macbeth was playing at the theatre and special arrangements were made for the new arrivals to see the show before it closed.
“Tickets were made available, neatly typed with the date, seat number, and row,” he wrote. “I thought this was a little far-fetched in a prisoner-of-war camp, [but] the theatre only held three hundred people; there were nearly two thousand in the camp and everyone wanted to see the shows.”[44]
Even German officers who wished to enjoy the inside-the-wire productions had a difficult time securing tickets. George McKiel, a navigator on Lancasters shot down in November 1943, joined the theatre production crew as soon as he arrived at Stalag Luft III; he said the Commonwealth officers quickly decided to reserve the front two rows for the German officers. Further, the kriegies suggested that the plays be recorded for posterity,[45] so in return the Germans gave the actors film to snap photos of the casts. Of course, most of the film made its way to Dean and Dawson for the manufacture of forged passports. The shows ran one or perhaps two weeks at most before the next production went into rehearsal and opened at the theatre. The same night Don Edy attended Macbeth, George Sweanor managed to scrounge an extra ticket for another recent arrival to the North Compound—Ley Kenyon, the same RAF gunnery officer who had graciously donated his artistic talent to create a card for the George and Joan Sweanor wedding back in Middleton St. George at New Year’s.
“I was amazed at how well [the theatre] transported us out of kriegieland,”[46] Sweanor wrote.
Don Edy nearly had to pinch himself to his senses at the sophistication of the kriegie productions. Most shows had thirty to forty musicians (in air force uniforms) in the orchestra, conducted by Canadian Flight Lieutenant Arthur Crighton, and officers ushering audiences to their seats. There was a full curtain across the proscenium which rose on cue, full lighting on the performances, staging, props,
and actors who seemed as if they’d stepped out of Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre or Drury Lane in London’s West End onto a stage in far-off Silesia in the middle of a world war. Under appropriate lighting, cardboard that the kriegies cut out and painted black became a wrought-iron fence for The Importance of Being Ernest. For Messalina, the theatre carpentry shop took scrap wood, cardboard, and tin, plus paper swans, and created a fountain with flowing water lit by coloured lights. And the artistic crew took a Red Cross crate, put homemade wheels on it and turned it into the wheelchair for character Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Backstage, actors used oleomargarine as grease-paint makeup.[47] If anyone received colourful wrapping paper in his Red Cross parcel, it immediately found its way onto flats for set decoration. Meanwhile, the same tailors who secretly worked on civilian escape clothes moonlighted by transforming uniforms into suits and coloured sports shirts or pajamas into women’s dresses for the dramas. They created wigs from re-braided and re-stitched rope. Perhaps the most astonishing transformations Edy found were in the portrayal of women on stage.
“Our girls were excellent,” he said. “At first the boys took quite a kidding, but after the first few productions the kriegies all realized there was nothing funny about it. The plays and dances needed girls and these fellows worked really hard to create feminine characters.”[48]
“I was slight . . . and I was young, twenty-one,” said Gordon King, one of the air-pump operators inside tunnel “Tom”; King jumped at the chance to be on stage. “[They made me up] into a girl very easily, so I was in The Man Who Came to Dinner as the daughter. I had falsies, a wig . . . real professional people doing everything.”[49]
George McKiel did his fair share of penguin and stooge service for the escape committee, but among the toughest roles he faced was learning the Katherine Hepburn part in the kriegie production of The Philadelphia Story, because “it took me three months to learn to walk and talk like a woman.”[50]
