The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “The system wasn’t foolproof,” Harris said. “One time I was peering out through a door and up a hallway at what was going on. A German guard came right up beside me. I don’t know where he’d come from.”[35]

  Perhaps a stooge’s ability to recover when caught off guard proved as valuable an asset as passing along an alarm. Harris managed to collect his wits quickly and pretended that he had been worrying about the weather before sauntering out of the building. He hoped his performance was sufficiently convincing that the ferret wouldn’t bother to trigger a complete search of the building where Harris had been standing guard. It was, and Harris proved he could survive yet again.

  “I remember Pat Langford, my immediate superior, he came and chewed me out for not having done my job,” Harris said. “Then they discovered that somebody else had slipped up and he apologized.”[36]

  From the moment “Harry” was reopened, security boss George Harsh spent his days seated within view of the room containing the trapdoor to the tunnel. Stooges on the job—from the duty pilot watching the main gate to those shadowing ferrets—remained in touch with Harsh at all times, so that the second any German entered the compound with Hut 104 in his sights, Harsh could let Pat Langford know. In turn, the trapführer warned diggers below to stop any work that might be heard. Then he installed the grill at the top of the tunnel shaft, tucked blankets over it to muffle the sound, closed the trap with the tiles on top, and moved the stove back on top of the trap, simultaneously replacing the extension flue (above the stove) with its usual short flue. All of this happened within twenty or thirty seconds of Harsh’s call for a shutdown.

  By the third week of January 1944, about ten days after the resumption of digging, “Harry” had advanced fifty feet. Right there—about halfway between Hut 104 and the warning wire—Wally Floody built a halfway house they called “Piccadilly.” He planned a second one when “Harry” was two hundred feet in length. They reached that point—roughly beneath the cooler in the Vorlager area of the compound—the first week of February, and finished the “Leicester Square” halfway house by February 10. During that time, they had even been forced to shut down for a week when the moon was full in a cloudless sky. Had they continued to dig and disperse the sand as usual under the theatre, the penguins would have stood out against the moonlit snow. But the escape committee put the excavation downtime to good use.

  By this time, Al Hake’s assembly line in Hut 103 had manufactured as many as 250 compasses and hidden them down “Dick’s” vertical shaft. Des Plunkett’s mapmakers had mimeographed approximately four thousand escape maps. Meanwhile, the men in Tommy Guest’s tailoring section were making headway on the task of outfitting scores of potential escapees in clothing that would help them blend into the civilian populations of Europe. Using shirts, pants, and jackets from Red Cross parcels, linings from greatcoats, and old uniforms, they shaved the rough surfaces of the cloth and re-coloured them with beetroot, shoe polish, or the dye from book covers. They used the broadsheets of German newspapers to cut out the patterns and sized each piece of clothing to accommodate the escaper.

  By the time tunnellers had dug “Harry” as far north as the tunnel would go, Guest’s tailors had manufactured as many as fifty civilians suits. They would be worn by POWs made up to look like businessmen, professionals, and travellers going about their daily lives, boarding trains that stopped at the Sagan Junction station. They would be worn by kriegies with sufficient skill in several languages to talk their way through their documents and German checkpoints fluently. For most of the rest—the so-called “hard-arsers”—there would be some documentation, some clothing, and the basic tools of travel: maps, compasses, and kitbags. Without multilingual skills, however, the hard-arsers would have to rely principally on wits and good luck. John Harris, whose forged documents would identify him as Antoine Zabadose, and whose set of stencilled maps would guide him to the Czechoslovak border, was outfitted to look like a Hungarian ironworker.

  “I made some effort, though not very successful, to alter the appearance of my greatcoat,” he said. “It was almost the same khaki colour as the Canadian army uniform, except that it had flares for sitting on horseback. It was worsted or tan-coloured heavy wool that covered me from the neck to the calf. Underneath, I wore my battledress, which I’d had since I was shot down.”[37]

  Elsewhere in the North Compound, kriegie life—as far as the guards and ferrets could tell—looked normal. The baseball, soccer, volleyball, and other field sports fields beyond the appell area had given way to the Canadians’ wintertime pursuit. With the surface of the ground nearly frozen or covered in snow, conditions were ideal for flooding the field into a regulation-sized skating rink for hockey. Players would grade the soil for the rink with homemade shovels and a homemade level—water in a pan—then haul the water from the fire pool several hundred feet away. The first skates were entirely homemade; kriegies took angle irons from benches and screwed the steel to the bottoms of their boots.[38] But true to his kriegieland reputation, Alberta-born-and-raised pilot Barry Davidson managed to scrounge the real equipment needed to outfit teams for shinny.

  “I wrote Don Mackay, the mayor of Calgary,” Davidson wrote. “They got skates and hockey equipment and sent them to the camp. We flooded our rinks with buckets and they were regular sized rinks, so it was a lot of work.”[39]

  Hockey sticks were hard to come by and maintain. In addition to the city of Calgary’s contribution, the YMCA came through with some as well, but depending on the calibre of players and intensity of the play, keeping the sticks in one piece was a challenge. To protect the players from injury, some groups came up with special rules, such as only allowing body checks or shot blocks within a certain distance of the net. However, there were cases of hockey games, indeed an entire season at Stalag Luft III, coming to an end when the supply of sticks simply ran out.[40]

  In February, the North Compound theatre staged a homegrown revue. Between Ourselves, produced by Peter Butterworth, came complete with comedy skits, dance routines, and short dramatic works. Among the highlights, Bobby Laumans was back on the boards in the role of a torch singer and Tony Pengelly joined a Latin dance number with six couples, featuring the female performers made up in Carmen Miranda-like head gear, capes, and miniskirts. Taking one of the male dancing roles was another Canadian airman, James Wernham. Born in Scotland in 1917, Jimmy had emigrated and settled with his family in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He had worked in a general store and for an accounting firm during the Great Depression years, but enlisted in the RCAF in 1940 and was trained as an observer. Overseas on ops, he became something of a celebrity in May 1942, when newspaper reporters photographed him and his crew[41] (from 405 Squadron) as veterans of “Operation Millennium,” the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany. Three ops later he was shot down over Holland and captured. At Stalag Luft III, when not tending to other escape committee duties, he devoted his time to the theatre as a means of boosting POW morale.

  Another kriegie helping out onstage at the theatre that winter was twenty-two-year-old George Wiley, from Windsor, Ontario. More of a free spirit than most, Wiley wasn’t the best student in school and suffered from rheumatic fever as a youth. And he appeared much younger than his years, as if he were underage. Nevertheless, he had the credentials when he enlisted in the RCAF in 1940, about the same time James Wernham did. Wiley flew Kittyhawks for 112 Squadron in North Africa, surviving a crash landing in October 1942 and repeated close calls in dogfights with German fighters through the winter. He was finally shot down in March 1943 in support of the British Eighth Army over Tunisia. At Stalag Luft III, he joined escape committee preparations by assisting John Colwell with sand dispersal under the theatre. That winter, Flying Officer George Wiley took time to write home about his activities on the theatre floor (and below it).

  “I’ve got an important part to play in one of our kriegie plays,” he wrote, “and am a bit nervous about doing my part well. May see you sooner than ex
pected.”[42]

  By the middle of February, Unteroffizier Karl Griese, the ferret the kriegies had nicknamed “Rubberneck,” was snooping more suspiciously than usual around the North Compound barracks. He periodically ordered impromptu appells in the middle of the morning or the middle of the afternoon. Big X had warned the section chiefs to be prepared for these unscheduled roll calls. To help attract suspicion to himself—and away from the others—Bushell made certain he was spotted in innocuous pursuits, such as attending language classes or rehearsing his role in that upcoming production of Pygmalion. When the spot searches came, the kriegies made sure they dawdled en route to the assembly area, a tactic that allowed the tunnel crews enough time to be pulled from “Harry” and cleaned up before appell. That month Rubberneck sprang a sudden search in Hut 104, then one in Hut 110. Then he assembled Wally Floody, George Harsh, Wings Day, and Roger Bushell and strip-searched them. Next, he brought in a diviner who passed the divining rod over the ground around several of the huts. There wasn’t the slightest twitch. In the last days of February, when “Harry” was perhaps a hundred feet short of its run beyond the wire, the escape committee learned that its chief nemesis, Rubberneck, would be on leave for two weeks.

  “I told [Bushell] we could finish ‘Harry’ before he got back,”[43] Floody said.

  But Rubberneck had a parting shot and delivered a nearly fatal blow to X Organization before taking his leave. On February 29, during the morning appell, the pesky ferret appeared with Hauptmann Broili and thirty additional guards. They called out the names of nineteen kriegies, including Wally Floody, George Harsh, Peter Fanshawe, Kingsley Brown, MacKinnon “Mac” Jarrell, Gordon “Nic” Nicoll, Robert Stanford Tuck, Jim Tyrie, and Gwyn Martin. The entire appell ground of kriegies held its collective breath as Broili led his select group to Hut 104, on the very doorstep of “Harry.” The nineteen were searched for two hours. Then, without any opportunity to go to their rooms to gather belongings, the column of kriegies was marched under guard through the main gate and down the road to a satellite POW camp at Belaria[44] , about five miles away. In one short, sharp dragnet, Rubberneck had hauled away a half-dozen key members of the escape committee, some of whom had been in the service of X Organization since 1940, investing those four years in one real chance to gain their freedom.

  “They just wanted to get rid of us,” Wally Floody said. “But they had a pretty good shot at it, because they got the man in charge of sand dispersal, the man in charge of security, [an intelligence specialist], and myself, a tunnel digger.”[45]

  Darker more deadly counter-escape measures were occurring in Berlin, even as the dust settled on Rubberneck’s surprise purge. Because Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and architect of the Holocaust, wished to put greater control of prison camps into the hands of the SS, he gave his blessing to Aktion Kugel, or Bullet Operation. Clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it stated that any recaptured escapee officers who were not American or British were to be chained and handed over to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and either gassed or shot.[46] Himmler’s directive also used the code phrase “Stufe III” or “Grade III” to cover up all reference to activities surrounding any recaptured POWs. The directive was not handed down as a document, but passed by word of mouth to Colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner-Wildau, the Kommandant at Stalag Luft III. The order also gave Lindeiner the authority, should he choose to use it, to execute recaptured POWs in his camp. Von Lindeiner apparently had no intention of resorting to summary executions. In fact, when he received the Bullet Order, he assembled senior officers, medical officers, and padres from all the Stalag Luft III compounds. As explicitly as he could, von Lindeiner relayed the content of the order, almost entreating the officers to halt all escape activity. For the North Compound, however, the die was already cast.

  On March 1, 1944, with Rubberneck on leave and several Canadian veteran section heads now removed from the scene, Robert Ker-Ramsey took the lead in the tunnel. Deflated by the loss of key men, but bolstered by the opportunity to complete the final push while their ferret nemesis was away, the tunnellers went back to work. The crew underground doubled, with two diggers at the face of the tunnel, two in each of the halfway houses, a carpenter preparing the shoring, and a man on the air pump continuously. The parade of penguins to the back row of seats in the theatre and John Colwell’s packers under the floorboards made the most of the shortened daylight hours and the 10 p.m. curfew. In just nine days, by March 9, the tunnel had extended the one hundred feet that—based on the underground measurements—they figured would put “Harry” beyond the wire, beyond the road, and well into the pine forest. On the tenth day the diggers carved out what would be the base of the vertical shaft to the surface. Over the next five days they gingerly dug upward and—just as Wally Floody had done in the first hours of the tunnelling downward a year before—at the upper end of their vertical dig they built a final solid box frame around four bedposts and a wooden ceiling. It was positioned right below some pine-tree roots, to remain in place until the night chosen for the breakout.

  They had tunnelled for eleven months—from April 11, 1943, to March 14, 1944. They had removed and dispersed several hundred tons of sand from three major tunnels. Scrounging from every corner of the compound, kriegies had incorporated 4,000 bed-boards, 90 double bunk beds, 1,212 bed bolsters, 1,370 battens, 1,699 blankets, 161 pillow cases, 635 mattresses, 192 bed covers, 3,424 towels, 76 benches, 52 twenty-man tables, 10 single tables, 34chairs, 30 shovels, 246 water cans, 1,219 knives, 582 forks, 478 spoons, 1,000 feet of electric wire, 600 feet of rope, and 69 lamps[47] into “Tom,” “Dick,” and, mostly, “Harry.” According to the measured ball of string the diggers unravelled in the tunnel, “Harry” covered 336 feet (nearly 400 feet including the two vertical shafts). They were just six inches away from the sod and roots of the forest floor well outside the wire—six inches to freedom.

  The theatre troupe made a couple of offbeat choices to complete its winter playbill. In March, they presented the farcical black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace.[*] Next came Escape, a 1926 play by celebrated British novelist and playwright John Galsworthy. The storyline followed the life of a law-abiding man who met a prostitute, accidentally killed a police officer defending her, and then escaped from prison. The POW production featured longtime kriegies Peter Butterworth as the shopkeeper, John Casson as the parson, and, of course, taking on the female leads were John Dowler, Malcolm Freegard, and Tony Pengelly.[48] No doubt the irony of the plot occurred to the kriegie performers as well as the German officers seated in the first two rows. But nobody made mention of it. Not even Pengelly had much of the play’s subject matter on his mind during the production.

  “Up until this last great escape plan was well underway, none of us knew how many were to go out in it, or who,”[49] he said.

  During a two-hour meeting in the library room of Hut 110 on March 14, the same day Rubberneck returned from leave, Big X led discussion about the timing of the breakout. The escape committee considered three possible dates—March 23, 24, and 25—the next three nights without potential exposure by bright moonlight, the New Moon period. March 25 was a Saturday, which likely meant additional train traffic and potential congestion along some rail routes through Sagan. They would wait to see what the weather brought on March 23 and 24. The section heads debated whether a mass escape in bad weather, freezing nighttime temperatures, and with snow on the ground might jeopardize any hard-arsers’ attempts to get away. Did it make sense to delay a month? The tunnel experts couldn’t guarantee the construction integrity of “Harry’s” shafts, ceilings, and walls, not to mention the continuing danger of the tunnel’s discovery. The decision was to go either March 23 or 24, depending on the weather. The committee hoped between nine o’clock on the night of the escape and 5:30 the next morning it could spring more than two hundred kriegies—one every three or four minutes.

  The final agenda item involved Big X and the section heads drawing
the names of those who would comprise the list of escapers. The first thirty names selected came from a list of the best German speakers. The next twenty names came from the most prominent escape committee workers. Then, thirty more were drawn from a list of stooges, penguins, tailors, compass and mapmakers, and forgers. Finally, all remaining names of escape workers were pulled from a hat to bring the total number to about two hundred.[50] Escapers would go through “Harry” in the same order the names were drawn.

  “When the time came close,” Pengelly continued, “we drew lots, intensely, in small groups. Mere slips of paper they were, holding the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of freedom—and for the lucky ones, how long he would be after the first to leave . . . I drew number ninety-three.”[51]

  The mass escape scenario that the committee chiefs and about six hundred other Commonwealth prisoners of war had built from scratch was just days away from its final act.

  * * *

  * Paul Brickhill was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia; during the war, he was shipped to Canada to train in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Serving as a Spitfire pilot in RAF 92 Squadron, he was shot down over Tunisia in 1943 and sent to Stalag Luft III, where he joined the security section of X Organization. Post-war, his book, The Great Escape, provided the first comprehensive telling of the POW and escape experience at Luft III.

  * An air force officer arrived at Stalag Luft III in the winter of 1944 with unused tickets in his pocket to a production of Arsenic and Old Lace being staged at the Hudson Theatre in London. His tickets were honoured at the North Compound theatre.

  8

  “THROUGH ADVERSITY TO THE STARS”