The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “He could make anything out of anything,” Hawtin said. “There were twelve of us who moved into a bigger room. There wasn’t a thing in the room when we got there. Seven o’clock the next morning he rounded up all the tin cans he could get and we had every utensil we needed within a week. He was a master tinker.”[15]

  When he moved into a room that doubled their numbers from six to twelve POWs, Colwell felt he needed to build a new oven. At some point in the manufacturing process, he drew a diagram in his diary showing that his Klim tin stove required “120 Klim tins, 25 pounds of clay, a grate and two fire bricks.”[16] Colwell also helped organize the menu for Christmas that year. It wasn’t lavish, but following appell on December 25, 1943, Colwell’s roomies enjoyed a breakfast of sausages with a cheese soufflé, toast and jam, and coffee. At 12:30, they had a lunch of toast and jam and tea. And for Christmas dinner, the cooks for the day—Bill Hoddinott and Art Hawtin—served up macaroni with cheese, roast beef, baked potatoes, Christmas pudding, and coffee. As well, they enjoyed chocolate sent to them by the Canadian Prisoners of War Relatives Association and a package forwarded from the Canadian government with a greeting from the prime minister.

  “All Canada joins in warmest Christmas greetings and good wishes to you,” the attached card read. “Arrangements have been made to forward to all Canadian prisoners of war a Christmas gift . . . comprising articles such as gramaphone [sic] records and cooking utensils.”[17] It was signed W. L. Mackenzie King.

  It’s difficult to know whether the prime minister realized it at the time, but the gramophone records in the Christmas packages could not have come at a better time. Two huts away from John Colwell’s one-man utensil production line, in Hut 103, Al Hake, an Australian airman with a penchant for three-dimensional designing and construction, was hard at work building a more covert utensil—compasses for the escape committee. Chief among the basic components of the compasses, Mackenzie King might have chuckled to discover, were melted-down Bakelite (plastic) gramophone records. Hake and his co-workers cut the plastic into pieces, heated it until it was dough-like, and pressed it into a mould for the compass base about an inch in diameter. They created the directional device with either a sewing needle or a razor blade strip stroked repeatedly with a magnet; the magnetized needle or razor was carefully mounted on a gramophone needle, which stuck up vertically from centre of the Bakelite base, creating the pivot point for the needle or razor. A compass card inside the casing indicated magnetic north (later models actually had luminous chips stolen from the Kommandant’s alarm clock). From broken windows, Hake then fashioned a glass face and gently heated it and the gramophone plastic to create a waterproof case around the compass mechanism. It was further sealed with reused window-frame putty. And if there was any question about the authenticity of the compass, Hake and his team pressed a manufacturer’s inscription into the bottom of the compass while the Bakelite base was still warm.

  “Made in Stalag Luft III,”[18] it read.

  It may well be that Mackenzie King had no hint his government’s thoughtful gift of gramophone recordings was playing right into the hands of the escapers. But some of the kriegies’ relatives received direct, if a bit perplexing, appeals to help supply them with the tools of escape. Since December 1941, Flying Officer John Weir had been writing regularly to Frances McCormack at the family’s residence in the Forest Hill area of Toronto. Naturally, Weir’s fiancée had become accustomed to his words of longing to be with her. But she also began to understand he wasn’t sitting idly by waiting for the war to end. He had told her of his German language lessons, that he had managed to have pictures taken of his fellow POWs, and that he needed several pairs of long johns. Harmless on the surface, the correspondence clearly indicated Weir was up to something. And while Frances might not have deduced her fiancée was one of X Organization’s most reliable and productive tunnellers, she probably sensed from his Halloween letter of 1943 that there was a reason behind all of his requests.

  “The pajamas you sent in the July parcel just came in time,” wrote Weir, referring to what likely became his tunnelling clothes. And then he added a new, emphatic request. “Darling, what we really need are gramophone needles or are they practically non-existent at home too? There are two hundred or more of us here in the compound now. We are all hale ’n hearty, but itching to be home.”[19]

  Ironically, just weeks later, Scruffy Weir’s lingering war wounds would remove him from both the task of finishing “Harry” and the entire escape plan. Dating back to November 8, 1941—the day Weir’s Spitfire was hit by Messerschmitt shells and the resulting fuel and cockpit fire nearly blinded him—Weir had coped with no eyelids over his eyes. In the fall of 1943, after “Tom” was discovered and excavating underground was halted, tunnel boss Wally Floody recommended that Weir take an opportunity to have surgery to prevent potential blindness. Weir was transported to a German hospital near Frankfurt-am-Main, where he underwent skin-graft surgery performed by a British surgeon captured by the Germans in the Mediterranean in 1942. Weir would not return to Stalag Luft III until June 1944.

  Mid-upper gunner Albert Wallace arrived at the North Compound in late May of 1943. By coincidence, he was shot down the same night as Art Hawtin. Aged twenty-two, Wallace had already worked at two or three civilian jobs, enlisted in the RCAF, graduated as a gunner, become a pilot officer, and completed fifteen and a half bombing operations with 419 Squadron in Bomber Command when he was shot down over Duisburg, Germany. But if he thought spending the night in the mid-upper gun turret of a Halifax bomber was a lonely experience, Wallace discovered, when he first arrived at Stalag Luft III, that life as a POW could be even more isolating. Once he’d been deloused, photographed, and issued a blanket and cutlery by the Germans, he was assigned to Hut 101 and “a friendless room,”[20] where the occupants spoke only South African dialects. Cut out of any conversation, he asked for a transfer and was eventually moved to Hut 104 and Room 23, the very place where tunnel “Harry” had begun.

  “I had no idea it was the tunnel room,” he said. “I didn’t know for weeks that goddamn tunnel was seven feet from my bunk bed. Periodically, the sand would come out, but at first I didn’t realize.”[21]

  Wallace never actually saw the tunnel opened or closed, although he did notice that one of his roommates, Pat Langford, was “extremely security conscious,”[22] almost always sitting on his top bunk, legs dangling over the side and surveying things all the time. Wallace eventually learned that Langford was “Harry’s” trapführer, responsible for opening and closing the entrance to the tunnel at a moment’s notice. In time Wallace would participate in escape activities, but as winter approached he and his fellow kriegies faced a more immediate problem: keeping warm behind the thin, poorly insulated, and under-heated barracks walls. Taking a page from the tunnelling efforts, Wallace and several roommates began a nightly ritual—sneaking out of their hut, breaking into the German kitchen facility, filling their kitbags with coal briquettes, and stockpiling them for use during the colder nights.

  “We had so much coal in our room, but there was nowhere to hide it,” Wallace said. “We put it under our bunks. We put it in our Red Cross boxes to hide it. We’d be in our shirt sleeves, hotter than hell, and guys would come in muffed up to their necks with tuques on and we’d say, ‘Oh, it’s our new chimney.’”[23]

  The supply of extra briquettes dried up when the Germans noticed the sudden depletion at the kitchen and padlocked the coal bin. But Wallace, after a further move to Hut 107, would soon find himself busy with another wintertime activity, in the ranks of the penguin sand-dispersal team. Right after New Year’s, Roger Bushell assembled his section heads for the first escape committee meeting of 1944. He sensed that a combination of the ferrets’ success in discovering “Tom” in September and the kriegies’ relative inactivity through the fall had lulled the Germans into a false sense of security. It was January 7, and he wanted work to resume on “Harry” within days, while the goons’ defence
s were down. The greatest barrier to any progress underground, Wally Floody pointed out, was trying to get rid of the sand with snow all over the compound. The meeting wrapped up without a solution. Then, Fanshawe and Ker-Ramsey hit on an idea. They told Bushell they would explore the space between the raked floor and the earthen foundation of the North Compound theatre. Fanshawe took a fat lamp into the crawl space. He reported that there was enough space under the floor to handle as much sand as “Harry” could ever deliver.

  As usual, the toughest part of the transaction—the journey between “Harry” and the theatre—was getting the penguins from one to the other without bumping into ferrets. On January 10, when appell was done, three non-permanent residents of Hut 104 assembled in the large room at the north end of the building. Wally Floody, Robert Ker-Ramsey, and Pat Langford spent a couple of hours removing the square of tiles under the stove that concealed the trapdoor, swinging it open, and descending into “Harry’s” vertical shaft. The air was cold; although the trapdoor had been sealed shut for three months, Ker-Ramsey had left a bypass open to allow air to circulate below. Floody discovered that the kitbags on the air pump had rotted through and needed replacing. Still, the greater problem was lack of air circulation farther up the tunnel. A couple of the Klim tin ducts had collapsed a short distance up the tunnel; they were soon repaired to restore the flow of fresh air. Three days after the section bosses reopened “Harry,” Floody took his first shift digging and the sand began to move again. About that time, he took a few minutes to dash off a postcard to his sister, Catherine, at home in Toronto.

  “My mail has taken its usual winter lapse . . . a four-month gap,” Floody wrote late in January, suggesting he might have been slightly distracted. Then he added an ironic sign-off. “Life goes on in its predestined rut . . . Your brother, Wally.”[24]

  Meanwhile, Group Captain Massey got the Kommandant to ease the outdoor winter nighttime curfew; kriegies were allowed to walk between the barracks huts until 10 p.m. Massey was reminded, however, that one of the ball-retrieval rules, enacted during the previous season’s baseball games, was now in effect. “Snowballing must cease one-half-hour before roll call,”[25] the order said. The kriegies would abide by the snowball rule, but under cover of darkness, a steady line of penguins moved between “Harry” and the theatre carrying something else. Unlike the previous summer’s covert activity, the winter penguins didn’t have to hide their sand pouches. When a penguin arrived at the mouth of the trapdoor in Hut 104, Langford laid a kitbag or trouser pouches full of sand over his shoulder. When security boss George Harsh told him the way was clear, the penguin carried his load out the door of Hut 104 straight to Hut 109. And if the route was safe from there, a stooge directed him around Hut 120 through the snow and into the theatre.

  Given that Flight Lieutenant Tony Pengelly was stage manager for all the kriegie productions, the goons had little reason to be suspicious of his late evening presence at the theatre. But when Big X announced the push to renew digging in “Harry,” Pengelly worked with the stage carpenters to install false nails in the base of a seat in the back row of the theatre so that it looked secured to the floor but was actually movable. The chair back was also not secured in place. When a trap operator slid the chair back up in the air, then flipped the seat itself forward toward the row in front, a small trapdoor in the floor under the seat was revealed.

  “That was a lifesaver, because about a hundred tons of sand came out of [“Harry”],” Albert Wallace said. “I remember going into the theatre one night with my bags full of sand. I was told where to sit because that’s where the trapdoor was. I sat in seat number thirteen, pulled my little tickies and out went the sand.”[26]

  Pengelly explained that when the theatre was dark (had no productions running), dirt was dumped through the trap all evening. Beneath the floor boards of the theatre, meanwhile, the Tin Man (John Colwell) and five other sand-dispersal men worked feverishly to keep the trap under seat thirteen clear and move the sand to the far reaches of the theatre’s crawl space.[27] When each penguin unloaded his kitbag or pouch through the trap, the sand fell into a basin that was pulled by rope to a packing point. There, Colwell’s crew tamped the sand up tight to the floor between the joists and against the walls. No space was left empty. At the end of an evening’s work, as they left the crawl space, each of Colwell’s crew would stand over the open trapdoor, slap the dirt from his clothes, and sweep the floor clean of the evidence. Pengelly and his crew would close the trap and reposition the seat and chair back, completing another successful night of making sand disappear.

  “One day, we estimated we got rid of a total of twelve tons of sand,”[28] Pengelly said.

  If the raked floor and Red Cross crate seats in the theatre weren’t all they seemed, neither was the chapel, a room of prayer and reflection built into the backstage area toward the eastern end of the theatre building. Most afternoons between 1 and 4 p.m., when the autumn and wintertime light was at its best, RAF pilot Des Plunkett led a staff of about a dozen draftsmen (with about a dozen stooges guarding in the hallways and outside the windows of the chapel) working on the manufacture of escape maps. The men took the “flimsies” (thin paper linings) from gramophone record sleeves or cigarette packs and drew escape routes on them. Using inks they acquired or manufactured in the camp, the mapmakers then created negatives in jelly, which in turn generated map prints. The final editions of the maps had five legible colours: green for wooded areas, black for railway lines, red for roads, blue for rivers, and yellow for autobahns. Among the map copyists was former architect turned RAF pilot John Hartnell-Beavis, who knew the value of accurate maps. Shot down in occupied-Holland, he used a silk map from inside his flight jacket to evade German troops for several days before being captured in July 1943. By November he had volunteered his drawing skills to create the jelly stencils that printed up to thirty-five copies of a specific map.

  “All our work inks, pens, rulers, dividers, paper, etc., had to be used [so that] it was possible for everything to be concealed in a matter of a few seconds especially when [ferrets were] in camp,” Hartnell-Beavis wrote. “If the padre had seen all the secret hiding places and panels in the floor and walls of the chapel, he would have had a severe shock.”[29]

  The signalling system used by X Organization stooges could be as simple as a red book set in a window as a sign that a ferret was in the area, or a blue towel on a clothesline indicating that all was clear. During the fall and winter of 1943–44 , however, the system depended on signals communicated from inside a window in one barracks hut to inside a window in another, and on down the line. Australian air force officer Paul Brickhill[*] served the escape committee in the security section. He worked out a system of signals passed from one stooge to the next to protect the forgery work going on in the library in Hut 110 and the secret mapmaking going on in the chapel of the theatre. A window or a blind suddenly opened by one stooge would signal danger to a second stooge; that stooge would hold a folded piece of paper in his window, signalling a full shutdown of activity; and those signals would prompt a third stooge near the covert production to tap on the wall. All the forgery in the library or mapmaking in the chapel would disappear in seconds.[30] None of X Organization’s stooges considered his work glamorous, but most learned how vital it was, including Flying Officer John R. Harris.

  “Many a weary hour I spent peering out from behind windows and doors and in all kinds of weather,”[31] Harris wrote.

  Born and raised in Toronto and eager to land any job he could after high school, during the Great Depression, John Harris found work as an office clerk with Canadian General Electric. But when the Nazis invaded western Europe and threatened to keep going across the English Channel, he sensed his new job was “to shoot down those Germans blitzing England.”[32] As a new recruit with the RCAF in 1941, however, he was streamed to observer training. While still in Canada, he faced greater danger on the ground than in the air. Right after his graduation in August 1942,
during a trip home, a freight train crashed into his passenger train on a siding; nevertheless, all passengers survived. Overseas he was posted to 419 Squadron of Bomber Command and his penchant for survival stayed with him. On September 5, 1943, during their eleventh bombing op over Mannheim, Germany, and immediately following the release of their bomb load, Harris and his crew came under attack. The Halifax began to shudder and descend uncontrollably.

  “My poor mother isn’t going to like hearing about this,” was his first thought; then, just as suddenly, all he could see around him were the stars of the night sky. “My God, I’m out of the kite.”[33]

  Miraculously, either by being sucked through an open machine-gun turret beneath him or blown free by the explosion of the aircraft, Harris found himself floating to earth; he pulled the rip cord for his guide chute, which released the main parachute, and he landed in a forest, the only survivor of his seven-man crew. Following his capture, he was interrogated and eventually packed aboard a Luftwaffe truck for transfer to Stalag Luft III. With him and also shot down that night was F/O John Crozier, flying as a Second Dickie (observing pilot). Crozier was so recently assigned to the station (flying his first op with 620 Squadron) that he was still in his RCAF Blues tunic[34] , not his battledress, and considered by the others to be a German spy. The two men—Harris and Crozier—both served X Organization as stooges. The watches could be as long as a couple of hours, and the stooges were moved around so the ferrets wouldn’t notice a pattern.