The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  * * *

  Holding the slip of paper with his escape number on it, and sensing all his work falsifying documents for dozens of his comrades at Stalag Luft III was nearly done, F/L Tony Pengelly still agonized over his shot at freedom. He hadn’t seen his fiancée in England for more than three years. He hadn’t seen Canada since 1938. All the amenities he’d gone without—the food, the people, the shows, the lights, the freedom to open a door and walk down any street whenever he wished—could be waiting at home in Toronto.

  “It was the greatest decision of my life as a prisoner of war,”[1] he said.

  Weighing on his mind, however, were the details of duty. He had directed the production of many of the escape documents. He knew their design, detail, and delivery better than almost anyone inside the forgery section of X Organization. He wondered whether—on the night of the escape—somebody in his branch of Dean and Dawson should stay behind to check that every identification card was in the right hands of the right escaper as he entered “Harry” on his way out. Nothing could be left to chance. No man could leave with papers that didn’t match his disguise. And if Pengelly took his position—ninety-third in the tunnel—and left the job to someone else, might one vital detail be omitted? Could there be a mistake he might have caught? Should someone with his seniority stay behind to help the next escape?

  “In the nights when the [barracks] were quiet,” Pengelly said, remembering that crucial moment in Hut 104, “I ground it over in my mind. . . . I realized in those nights I lay awake and those days I pounded the circuit inside the wire, that more than a high wire fence had me prisoner now. There was this responsibility, and on my acceptance or rejection of it, depended my chance at freedom.”[2]

  In the end, Pengelly decided to forfeit his spot. Just twenty-four, engaged to be married to Pauline Robson, and a POW in Germany since the fall of 1940, the wily pilot who’d cajoled countless German guards to loan him their legal papers, and then stepped on the North Compound theatre stage to flawlessly portray female roles, had decided to bow out of the finale. Instead of joining the coming mass escape, he would stay behind. In doing so, he would help give the escape committee a nucleus of old hands to ensure the success of the current breakout and to build up X Organization again for another.

  The same kind of decision weighed heavily on navigator George Sweanor’s mind. A year older than Pengelly, he had even more to hurry home to, including a new bride and a newborn daughter he’d never seen. But the young RCAF flying officer considered other factors. Despite the sophistication of the security operations in which he’d participated (as the duty pilot inside the main gate), Sweanor still concluded that escaping to Britain was a pipe dream. He realized Stalag Luft III was too deep in occupied Europe and that only those who spoke German had a legitimate chance of getting away. He was also realistic enough to fear the Gestapo’s brutality should he be recaptured. He also sensed he had reason to fear German propaganda that had painted Allied aircrew as Luftgangsters (air gangsters) and their bombers as Terrorflugzeuge (terror aircraft); survival in cities decimated by Bomber Command was not a sure thing either.[3]

  “I argued that a mass escape would cause a desired disruption to the German war effort because it would take a lot of people to track us down, but there would be little hope of anybody getting home,” Sweanor said. “[So] I felt relieved when my name was not drawn.”[4]

  A couple of Sweanor’s barracks mates did have their names drawn, including George McGill, who had conjured up diversions during earlier escape attempts and then worked as tunnel security assistant to George Harsh; he would be seventy-fifth into the tunnel.[5] Other Canadians’ names drawn or chosen by Big X included Gordon Kidder, the Johns Hopkins University master’s prospect who spoke German and French fluently; he was thirty-first on the escape list. James Wernham and George Wiley, who had both joined the theatre production crew during the past year, would be thirty-second and thirty-third. Hank Birkland, the Big Train, had dug tunnels in every German compound that had imprisoned him since the fall of 1941; he would go through “Harry” for the last time in the fifty-first position. Pat Langford, the trapführer responsible for opening and closing “Harry” almost every day for the previous eleven months was number fifty-eight. Tommy Thompson, the Canadian pilot who’d personally earned the wrath of Hermann Göring for waking the Reichsmarschall the September night he was shot down in 1939, would be sixty-eighth; once outside the wire he planned to team up with Flying Officer Bill Cameron, who was in the sixty-second spot. Fighter pilot Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie had won a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for intercepting a Dornier bomber en route to bomb Buckingham Palace during the Battle of Britain; he was seventy-sixth on the escape list. Bob McBride, who’d burned the bowling set his wife sent him the winter before to stay warm, would face the March cold in the eightieth position. A few more Canadians held escape numbers in the eighties and nineties, including Jack Moul, Red Noble and Mac Reilley. Further down the list, Gordon King, who had regularly operated the air pump, held escape number 141. Meanwhile, John Colwell, the Tin Man, who’d hand-built many of the tools of escape while making so much of the sand disappear under the theatre, would be 147. All set to travel outside the wire as Hungarian ironworkers, John Crozier and his roommate John R. Harris had drawn escape numbers 179 and 180.

  As Pengelly’s forgers put the finishing touches on the fake identity Kennkarte and Ausweise passes that Crozier, Harris, and many others would need, X Organization moved into fine-tuning mode on other fronts. John Travis’s engineers weren’t building tools and equipment for the tunnelling anymore; they were transforming sheets of food tins into portable water bottles for the escapers. Des Plunkett’s assembly line had completed its last multicoloured, mimeographed maps. For Tommy Guest’s tailors there was still civilian wear to stitch and colour, but Al Hake had punched his Stalag Luft III manufacturer’s imprint on the last escape compass. Robert Ker-Ramsey and Johnny Marshall began assembling the escapers in small groups to explain how to get through the tunnel. Roger Bushell called for one last levy on the Red Cross parcels, with every ounce of sugar, cocoa, raisins, milk, and biscuits being confiscated and poured into a stewing pot and then a baking oven; the resulting fudge, prepared in Hut 112, could provide a man with enough caloric intake to last him two days.

  Otherwise, Bushell remained away from the escape production centres as much as he could—conducting lectures in the library and rehearsing his lines as Professor Higgins in the upcoming theatre production of Pygmalion—so that the guards could see him in a normal, innocuous routine. But Big X had one final piece of the puzzle to orchestrate: the logistics for getting more than two hundred men into Hut 104 on the appointed night and through the tunnel in an orderly escape. The first thirty to make their way through “Harry” would attempt to get to the Sagan station in time to catch the earliest trains. Then, using their natural linguistic skills, civilian disguises, and forged papers, they would board passenger coaches and scatter in a half-dozen different directions. The next seventy to make their way through, the so-called “hard-arsers,” would be dressed in work clothes, looking like migrant workers in transit. If they couldn’t get tickets for third-class passenger seats, they would resort to using compasses, maps, intuition, and darkness to make their getaway individually and in small groups.

  Air gunner Albert Wallace had no seniority with the escape committee, but he had served as a penguin hiding sand under the theatre, and could have put his name in the draw. He chose not to. He recognized in himself and others the pent-up frustration of extended imprisonment in the German Straflager system. When life boiled down to twice-a-day roll calls, scrounging for food, and shivering inside poorly insulated barracks, he saw comrades become “barbed-wire happy,” obsessed with getting out. A Canadian kriegie who had notoriously attempted an escape by cutting through the wire was put in solitary for a month. The resulting claustrophobia turned a trip to the toilet into a run for it; he was shot, though not fatally.[6] Two others
had committed suicide, one at Stalag Luft I and the other at Luft III.[7] As depressing and debilitating as compound life became, however, Wallace felt he’d kept his head.

  “I had no interest in escaping whatsoever,” he said. “We were eight hundred miles from England. Escape through Germany with eighty million people all speaking German and I spoke English? It would take a miracle to get back.”[8]

  Having spent a little less than a year behind wire at the North Compound, Canadian Spitfire pilot Frank Sorensen was nonetheless feeling the tyranny. Through the winter of 1944, his letters home more often reflected the symptoms that Albert Wallace had seen in some of his roommates. Sorry Sorensen wrote home that the winter had forced the POWs indoors and that “indoor life in a kriegie camp does not make time go any faster.”[9] Fortunately, Sorensen had the benefit of fluency in Danish and therefore had received the nod to exit through “Harry” in the first or second wave of escapers on the night of the escape. However, several factors influenced Sorensen’s eventual decision to forfeit his higher position on the list. X Organization intelligence suggested the first escapees—fluent in German and dressed like businessmen or travellers—stood the best chance of getting away safely if they caught the fast morning trains leaving Sagan. Sorensen deduced those same express trains would also undergo the greatest scrutiny and surveillance by German police and railway guards. He therefore considered going through the tunnel lower on the list to catch a later, slower train, where his presence would attract less attention.

  But Sorensen weighed yet another consideration. Among his closest friends inside the wire was James Catanach, an Australian officer who’d grown up in a tightly knit family, and Arnold Christensen, a New Zealand officer who shared Sorensen’s Danish heritage. Both Catanach and Christensen had been imprisoned longer than Sorensen had, and in the grand scheme of the mass breakout, their successful escape seemed to hold greater emotional significance, at least in the way Sorensen looked at it. So, for strategic purpose or matters of the heart or both, he chose to trade his earlier spot on the escape list for a higher number and later exit through the tunnel.[10]

  Canadian Fleet Air Arm pilot Dick Bartlett faced a slightly different dilemma before the breakout. For nearly four years he had successfully moved the kriegies’ wireless radio, hidden inside a medicine ball, from one prisoner-of-war camp to another, right under the Germans’ noses. At the North Compound, he had safely concealed “the canary” in a non-functioning toilet. Based on his service, Bartlett was assigned the sixteenth position on the escape list, and paired with Norwegian pilot officer Halldor Espelid in the fifteenth spot. Then, in the weeks leading up to the breakout, another Norwegian flying officer, Nils Fugelsang, was shot down and imprisoned at the North Compound. Bartlett figured that Espelid and Fugelsang, with their linguistic advantage, together stood a better chance of evading capture and getting home. Bartlett chose to give up his spot to Fugelsang and stay behind.[11]

  Circumstances leading up to the breakout also put an end to Barry Davidson’s hopes of escaping through “Harry.” The former Blenheim pilot shot down in July 1940 had served on the original escape committee and in time had become X Organization’s leading scrounger. A born baseball and hockey player, but also a poet, diarist, and artist, Davidson had shone brightest in the art of friendly persuasion, taming Germans guards—offering them Red Cross chocolate, coffee, and cigarettes—to lend him the makings of tools or identity documents. In the pre-breakout lottery, he had won the seventy-eighth position on the escape list. But then, almost on the eve of the breakout, his strength became his weakness.

  “I had been seen talking to Fischer, one of the guards, shortly before the escape,” Davidson said. “He hated the Nazis and had sympathy for the POWs. We had such a good security system that [X Organization] knew the Germans had seen me talking to him. . . . My relationship with this guard would have risked his life had I gone. . . . So Roger Bushell asked me if I’d step back and not go out.”[12] Reluctantly, Davidson agreed.

  A couple of days past the official arrival of spring, the Sagan area of Silesia still had six inches of snow on the ground. But the air above the ground was mild. The escape committee met in Hut 104 on March 23 and decided to delay the breakout one more day. There was more snow that night, but when the committee met in Hut 101 on the morning of March 23, the members knew a decision had to be made right away to give Ker-Ramsey the day to prepare “Harry” for the wear and tear of the escape and to allow Pengelly the time to have all required documents signed and date-stamped “March 24.” More discussion focused on the plight of the hard-arsers in the snow and cold of the night. Wings Day and Roger Bushell agreed the hard-arsers’ chances of escaping were slim anyway, but even if they were only on the loose for a few days, the resulting chaos across Germany rounding them up would have as desirable an effect as if they all got back to Britain. Bushell gave the decision his blessing and then walked to the North Compound theatre where his understudy, Kenneth Mackintosh, got the word Big X would not be onstage as Professor Higgins that night. Pygmalion would have to open without him.

  All day long the atmosphere was electric at the North Compound. Behind closed barracks doors—all with stooges at the watch—kriegies collected their forged maps, compasses, and food rations and stitched them into clothing pockets. Meanwhile, Ker-Ramsey, staying behind like Pengelly as an escape committee veteran, made last-minute adjustments underground—covering the trolley tracks with fresh blankets to muffle the sound, installing new tow ropes (passed through the main gate by the Vorlager on the premise they would be used for a North Compound boxing ring) on the trolleys, and installing light bulbs (taken from the huts) in every socket available along the full length of “Harry.”

  After sunset, about six o’clock, those on the escape list had last meals prepared by their roommates. John Travis, the tunnelling engineer, cooked up a concoction of bully beef fritters and a gruel of boiled barley, Klim powder, sugar, and raisins for two of his barracks mates—Roger Bushell and Bob van der Stok. Van der Stok, the Dutch flyer, was going out in the first twenty of the escape order. When they’d finished eating as much of Travis’s fritters and gruel as they could, Bushell got into the suit he’d smuggled into the compound from Prague a year before and van der Stok emerged in his escape apparel; unlike the fake German corporal’s uniform he’d used during Operation Bedbug, van der Stok wore a civilian business suit, handmade by Tommy Guest’s tailors.

  “How do I look?”[13] he asked his roommates.

  “Immaculate,” Gordon King told him as they examined the tailoring and the quality of his passes and identity documents forged by Dean and Dawson. King knew van der Stok had been a medical student in Holland prior to the war and spoke several different languages, including German. He planned to connect with the French Underground to get across the Pyrenees to Spain en route to Britain. He was going through “Harry” in the eighteenth spot.

  In Hut 112, George Wiley had gathered up his things and joined fellow Canadian James Wernham in 104 to await their call. Wiley appeared anxious about his first escape attempt and approached his roommate Alan Righetti. He handed Righetti his watch and a few other personal things, asking him to pass them along to his mother back in Windsor, Ontario, if things didn’t work out. Righetti, a veteran of earlier escape attempts, joked that Wiley would likely be home before Righetti, but he accepted the watch and Wiley’s final wish.[14]

  Just before 7 p.m., the clockwork movement of men to Hut 104 began. Under the direction of block commanders at each hut in the compound, and with stooges positioned at windows, men trickled into Hut 104 at thirty-second intervals. They were assigned rooms in which to wait for their escape number to be called. Once that happened, they were guided into Room 23 and to the trap under the stove. The committee had appointed marshals among the escapers; each marshal ensured his allotted ten men were all set. Within an hour the priority escapers were in position, ready to go. And even though their spots were way down the list, so too the har
d-arsers began to make their way to Hut 104.

  “In the room where we were, we tried to play bridge,” John Harris said. “I was with three other would-be escapers. I was with Johnny Crozier because he was the one with the set of maps.”[15]

  At 8:45 p.m., the first man in the escape sequence, Les “Johnny” Bull, hustled down the ladder in the shaft beneath Hut 104, stretched himself face down on the trolley, and dog-paddled his way to Piccadilly, the first halfway house, a hundred feet up the tunnel. Once there, he jerked the rope for Johnny Marshall, who would act as an underground conductor for the first hour and—once his ten men were through—exit the tunnel in the number eleven position. Marshall retrieved the trolley by reeling in the rope, climbed aboard, jerked the rope ahead, and Bull reeled him up to Piccadilly. They repeated the exercise to get to Leicester Square, and finally to the base of the exit shaft at the north end of “Harry.” Their job was to remove the ceiling boards at the top of the exit shaft and make the final cut through the sod in the pine forest. Behind them, Czech flyer Arnost “Wally” Valenta (second), Roger Bushell (third), and Bernard Scheidhauer, a Free French officer and fourth on the list, prepared to do the same. At the bottom of the entry shaft two Canadians got into position in the pump room. Trapführer, Pat Langford, would help get men up the tunnel and reel in the empty trolley; then, with his group of ten on their way, he would take his turn as the fifty-eighth on the list. Meanwhile, Gordon King, the diminutive Wellington pilot from Winnipeg, volunteered to pump the bellows through the night until his turn came, way down the list.

  “I was a hard-arser,” King said. “I had a map of the area, a little package of food, and my compass, just waiting my turn.”[16]

  Also in position along the escape route through “Harry” were experienced tunnellers Red Noble, Shag Rees, and Hank Birkland. They had agreed to position themselves at the halfway houses and haul ten men to their location before joining the escape. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth men in the order—also with underground experience—would haul the next ten through and hand off the responsibility to the next three.[17] The plan called for a controller to remain outside the exit hole in the woods to get twenty men on their way and then hand off the controller job to the twenty-first man. Everybody was in place. The only piece missing was the completion of the exit hole up through the sod in the woods.