The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  * When Bob Nelson and Dick Churchill considered their good fortune at being sent back to Stalag Luft III and not shot, the two men speculated that perhaps SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe recognized their surnames had historical significance to Britons and didn’t want to tempt fate.

  * Colonel von Lindeiner was court-martialled and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Reassigned to a mental hospital during the German capitulation, he was shot and wounded by Soviet troops, then handed over to the British. On July 1, 1947, the first of two trials in the Stalag Luft III murders began at the War Crimes Court in Hamburg. Testifying for the defence, Colonel von Lindeiner was asked if under the Aktion Kugel and Stufe Römisch III orders he would have shot the prisoners himself. “I should have put a bullet through my head,” he said. He was exonerated, but remained in prison until November 1947.

  10

  LONG ROAD HOME

  * * *

  ART CRIGHTON escaped Stalag Luft III for about an hour in late 1944. The twenty-five-year-old peacetime musician and wartime Wellington pilot was about to enter his third winter of captivity at the POW camp near Sagan. To occupy himself, during his first summer inside the wire, he had fashioned a left-handed five iron and golfed a nine-hole course inside the wire with his fellow kriegies. Evenings he had played trumpet in the Commonwealth officers’ band and eventually led the North Compound orchestra through every musical genre from Beethoven to big band music revues. He’d been dead against escape activity, conducting the orchestra on stage at the theatre even as sand dispersal teams packed tons of earth from tunnels “Harry” and “George” beneath his feet. But suddenly, on December 4, eight months after the mass breakout, word arrived that he was to retrieve his trumpet and report for a detail leaving the compound.

  Crighton joined a group of about two dozen officers assigned to participate in an official ceremony commemorating the fifty dead escapers whose remains had been housed in an outdoor crypt just to the north of the North Compound wire. As both the leader of the orchestra and an accomplished trumpet player, F/L Crighton had been chosen to play “The Last Post” at the memorial. He gladly accepted the assignment, particularly since RAF pilot Les “Johnny” Bull—the first down “Harry” the night of the escape and among the fifty murdered airmen—had been Crighton’s roommate at the North Compound. And yet, as honoured as he felt to be asked to play at the memorial, Crighton recalled something even more indelible about his march to and from the service.

  “[It was] my first walk out into the woods,”[1] he said. “I was excited as hell. A real tree. I could actually touch it.”

  Still surrounded by the pine forest, but beyond the wire, the members of the ceremonial party included the Senior British Officer, Group Captain D. E. L. Wilson, and fifteen other officers representing the home countries of the executed airmen. No Americans were permitted to be there. But seven officers from both the East Compound and the Belaria POW camp (including Wally Floody) were allowed to attend, as well as two representatives from the Swiss legation and an adjutant from Kommandant Braune’s camp staff.

  “The memorial is in the form of a large altar table with three scroll-like stones sweeping up at the back with the [censored] names on it,” Floody wrote to his wife, Betty, that Christmas. “We all lined up around it while the R.C. and C. of E. padres read a burial service, then ‘The Last Post,’ after which the three group captains put wreaths on. . . . It was well done. Tell Betty McGill and others it was quite an impressive service.”[2]

  After he had performed his role on the trumpet and stood silent for the wreath-laying, Crighton and the other Commonwealth officers from North Compound were escorted down the dirt road and back through the main entrance.

  A guard began shouting in German to his partner at the gate: “How many went by?”

  “Twenty men,” the guard replied.

  “We’re twenty officers,” insisted one of the kriegies, who resented being downgraded by the compound guards. “Don’t call us men. We’re officers!”[3]

  That same week, Flying Officer John Weir started his final letter of 1944 from Stalag Luft III to his fiancée, Frances McCormack, back home in Toronto. He began in very much the same way as he’d begun his first letter to her, soon after his Spitfire was shot down over Caen, France, in November 1941.

  “Hi darling. I thought I’d end this day the best way possible, by writing you. I’ve had two-hundred-and-forty-six letters from you,” he wrote. “This is my ninety-fifth epistle . . . so near and yet so far—the end of the war and you. I get more impatient every day . . . but it will be soon now.”[4]

  He wished Frances a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and got her caught up on harmless news from around the camp, news that he expected the censors wouldn’t blacken out on his letter paper. Several times in his letters sent during his hospitalization over the previous fall, he had reassured her that the surgery to graft new skin to his eyelids, burned away in the fire when his Spitfire went down, had gone reasonably well; however, he hinted any future portrait photographs wouldn’t be particularly flattering. He kibitzed about his new roommates’ names—Lorne, Pappy, Sam, Hank, and Pop, as well as his own, Scruffy—sounding “like something out of Snow White.” But to his now savvy fiancée, he was also passing on valuable information about the state of affairs in the camp. First, he was alerting her to the whereabouts of the downed air officers now living in his hut, in case any of their families back in Canada didn’t know. But he was also signalling something else, and Fran would certainly have spotted it.

  “The members of our room have changed,” he pointed out, meaning people were on the move. “Lorne Chamber (came in from the west) and Pappy Plant (also west), Sam Sangster, Hank Sprague, Pop Collette and Scruffy (that’s me). Wally [Floody] is at Belaria now. All ye boys are hail and hearty. . . . If the optimism of this camp is right, I’ll beat this [letter] home to you.”[5]

  Suddenly his barracks in the North Compound—previously offering its veteran kriegies fairly spacious sleeping, eating, and living quarters—were becoming overcrowded with newcomers, he was telling her indirectly. She would certainly have recognized, with five additional men in her fiancé’s hut room, that living space at Stalag Luft III had become cramped, restful sleep less likely, and meagre rations stretched even more thinly than in previous months. His suggestion of beating the letter home offered more a hint of things being in flux at the camp than his honest belief that liberation was at hand. Then, in the same letter, which turned out to be his second last from Stalag Luft III, John Weir inadvertently acknowledged perhaps a greater threat to the well being of the kriegies than even he realized.

  “Darling, it’s so hard to write anything ’cause so little happens here of interest,” he explained. He commented on an American movie called The Spoilers that had been screened in the theatre; it featured Marlene Dietrich and a lively bar room brawl. “I’ve been very lazy the last six or eight weeks, due mainly to bad weather, just reading and doing the occasional circuit [walk].”[6]

  In other words, Scruffy Weir and the rest of the Stalag Luft III kriegies were leading a much more sedentary life without the exercise they had all experienced while digging, maintaining, and protecting the tunnels. Their idleness was reducing, if not eliminating, their higher physical fitness level, dulling their alertness, and certainly taking the edge off their preparedness for the unexpected. And if the officers weren’t able to notice their fitness slipping, they certainly recognized that the quality of their nutrition was almost non-existent. George Sweanor, who had taken on the job of training the Klim Klub for potential commando action to the death, woke up one morning during the fall of 1944 and felt too weak to stand. Half rations, a leg infection, and several physical blows he’d sustained playing football were taking their toll on Sweanor’s heart; his pulse was spiking inexplicably to 150 beats per minute. A South African Army doctor in the compound examined him and deduced that Sweanor was suffering from a severe case of malnutrition. His condition wasn’t uncomm
on among the POW population.

  Robert Buckham, the Toronto-born artist shot down about the same time as Sweanor in 1943, had served the Dean and Dawson forgery factory for a year during the lead up to the mass escape. However, because he had not drawn an escape number on March 24, he’d been forced to leave his bunk in Room 23 of Hut 104 as his fellow kriegies made their way down the shaft under the stove to freedom. After the breakout, with the need for forged documents gone, Buckham didn’t stop drawing, but toward the end of 1944 he did begin to write and sketch in a diary. Some of his first entries noted they’d heard the population of Sagan had swollen from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand as civilians, fleeing westward, sought refuge from the fighting and the cold in the town. He noted in early 1945 that the Soviets were steadily advancing. But his more immediate diary subject matter focused on the basics of survival.

  “A man’s eyes betray his hunger,”[7] he wrote as he surveyed the faces of his eight roommates. “Watch the eyes recede and narrow as they probe deeply for the taste of remembered meals. Watch them . . . comparing the size of portion, measuring the width of bread slice.”

  He described the typical daily menu among the Commonwealth officers that January of 1945. It consisted of one weak cup of Nescafé for breakfast, one cup of turnip soup containing well-boiled white maggots for lunch, perhaps a few slices of bread, and for dinner the boiled pulp of potatoes retrieved from a waste pile outside the huts. The tastiest parts of the ration, if they could salvage them, were the potato peelings salted and fried in margarine. If he and his hut mates could acquire a Red Cross parcel, the contents filled in the remaining ration gap. And though there were still a few evenings of deliciously distracting music or drama at the North Compound theatre that winter, Buckham noted that his mind ricocheted back to reality when his stomach rumbled with hunger during the performances.

  “An empty belly is a very basic thing,” he wrote.

  Then, suddenly, on January 22, 1945, the bread ration stopped. The same day, Buckham described seeing a Soviet pilot—still clad in his helmet, boots, and other flying gear—wandering outside the Vorlager of the camp. This was followed by a large explosion just outside the wire. More and more, the approach of the Soviet armies became evident. Reports came to the camp that Breslau was brimming with evacuees from the east, and that both shelling and minus-eight-degree temperatures were taking a toll on civilians there. Some of the kriegies openly predicted the evacuation of Stalag Luft III and began preparing. Buckham described large crowds gathered at the cookhouse to read German news bulletins, but “equally large crowds were on the circuit, toughening feet and legs in case the threatened forced march becomes a reality.”[8]

  RCAF navigator John Colwell was as much a barometer of the compound’s focus and tempo as anybody. The Tin Man, who had miraculously supplied the escape committee with so many of its working utensils the previous year, was busily supplying kriegies with homemade survival gear—items they would need during the next phase of their wartime experience. His diary entries became shorter and shorter, with simple references to the daily-life tools he was manufacturing or repairing from scraps of metal and wood—potato mashers, cooking pots, water jugs, cigarette containers, and slop pails. He also retrieved his Klim-tin suitcase from a hiding place in the wall of Hut 120.

  “Half-soled my boots,” Colwell wrote on January 25, 1945. “Everyone is sewing.”[9]

  That same day, the spearhead of the westbound Soviet armies reached the River Odra at Steinau, just forty miles east of Stalag Luft III. Though everyone inside the prison camp knew it, both the Germans and the POWs appeared to go about their daily routines ignoring the obvious. The Soviets were getting closer. In the Centre Compound, for instance, the guards carried out a barracks inspection. On January 26, teams of kriegies in both the North and West Compounds staged the first hockey games of 1945. Performances in the compound theatres went on as normal; in fact, that evening, the North Compound theatre troupe was in dress rehearsal for the first performances of The Wind and the Rain.[10] As late as Saturday morning, January 27, Kommandant Braune received orders from Berlin that the prisoners were not to be moved.

  That night in Hut 119, Don Edy and his roommates—Joe Noble, Larry Somers, Ken Rees—had tidied up their room and were seated on stools at the group’s wooden dining table. Fellow officers Barney Barnes and George Smith reclined in their bunks, and Jack Probert fussed with what little food the group had on hand. It was another bitter January night outside. Edy and company anticipated a visit from the Senior Canadian Officer Group Captain, Larry Wray. When he arrived, he joined them at their table for tea to ward off the nighttime chill. Wray initiated conversation by posing a few questions about the coming days: What did they think the Germans were up to? How soon before they reacted to the Soviet advance? For about an hour Wray listened to Edy and the others offer observations and opinions. Everybody had his say. Then Wray offered his view.

  “Personally, I think the Germans have left it too late to move us,” he said. “Their armies will be around and we could only clutter up the roads. I think they’ll leave us here to be overrun by the Ruskies.”

  At about 8:30 that Saturday evening, Don Edy noted that Wray took a final swallow of tea and stood up to leave. Just then the door flew open and Bill Jennings, the group’s liaison officer, rushed in.

  “The camp has to be ready to move out in one hour’s time!” Jennings roared.

  Wray absorbed the shock of Jennings’ announcement in momentary silence. The senior Canadian officer had come to the wrong conclusion. The Germans had in fact received orders to evacuate the entire prison camp almost immediately. And all the camp’s officers would be force-marched away, it seemed, sixty minutes later. Group Captain Wray put down his empty tea cup, made his way to the door, and said, finally, “Good night, gentlemen, and good luck.”

  “I guess this is the beginning of the end,” one of Edy’s roommates said. “I wonder what’s in store for us now?”[11]

  Then, like every other hut and room inside Stalag Luft III, Edy’s quarters were thrown into pandemonium. Edy admitted his first gut reaction wasn’t to the forced march per se, but to the reality of being thrown out of his barracks. The last place he wanted to be on a late January night was outside in the elements. The thought sickened him, but fear propelled him. Edy had a tin suitcase (likely made by Colwell), so he began packing his blanket roll, extra socks, shirts, and a sweater inside. The room that had been cleaned up for Wray’s visit became a shambles. Whatever rations of biscuits, cigarettes, and chocolate the men had saved were divided equally and thrown about as bunk mates in Hut 119 assembled their survival kits. A former RCMP officer in the barracks had shown some of the officers how to manufacture backpacks; another man gave out instructions for nailing bed-boards into a wooden box with skis and a tow rope to create a makeshift sleigh. And because their incarceration at Stalag Luft III had taught all kriegies the meaning of resourcefulness, an officer from each hut was dispatched to the library to tear pages of the thinnest paper he could find in the books to serve as toilet paper during the march.

  When word of the exodus reached Colwell’s hut, he and his roommates—Bill Hoddinott, Jim Jamieson, Art Hawtin, and John Acheson—assembled their rations and all their worldly possessions and methodically went about preparing to leave. Hoddinott divided the so-called “iron rations,” necessities, equally among the officers. Each man had pack boards for their backpacks. Colwell seemed to go into a trance, as if he had rehearsed his departure from the North Compound over and over in his mind. First, he changed into the clothes he was going to wear on the march. Next, he laid out two blankets on a couple of stools in the middle of the room and began piling his supplies on them. He laid out two shirts, six pairs of socks, six handkerchiefs, razor blades, a shaving set, toothbrushes, pyjamas, two pencils, shoelaces, his logbook, photographs, matches, and a towel. Then, the Tin Man gathered his portion of the food rations—raisins, biscuits, sugar, prunes, cheese, meat, and iro
n rations—that went into the centre of his pack. Finally, he retrieved a couple of pounds of chocolate, his sketches of camp life, and his daily diary, all hidden in his Klim clock. By 10 p.m., he was ready to go.[12]

  But departure was delayed by a series of postponements to 10:30, then 11:30, then midnight. Rumours added to the confusion. Someone said the Allies had broken through on a one-hundred-mile front and the Germans were negotiating for an armistice. Another said POWs could hide in the bush and take their chances with the Soviets when they arrived. The suppressed panic and the prolonged delay were sapping the officers’ strength. Colwell’s group conferred and it was decided their colleague Bill Hoddinott was not well enough to travel. He left for the compound hospital in the Vorlager to be liberated, he hoped, by the approaching Soviets. Also during the delay, many of the kriegies tried to consume as much nutritional food as they could find, but couldn’t pack. Remaining members of X Organization had last-minute loose ends to tie up, such as collecting the maps from the library walls in case they came in handy on the march. They also set bonfires to burn old clothes, furniture, and any leftover escape committee documents. In the rush to destroy anything the Germans might consider useful, Hut 104 caught fire[13] and the last of tunnel “Harry’s” entrance went up in smoke.

  At 1 a.m. on Sunday, January 28, the kriegies began moving through the main gate of the North Compound. Robert Buckham took a last look back and considered the significance of the moment. In addition to memories of imprisonment and lost comrades, the kriegies left behind thousands of books in the library; a theatre full of props, tools, and musical instruments; cupboards loaded with sports equipment; and 2.5 million cigarettes.[14] As they passed the stores buildings, each man received one last Red Cross parcel; the Germans had stockpiled as many as fifty thousand of them. But since the POWs had packed their kits to overflowing, most of the departing officers just tore open the boxes right there at the gate and hurriedly selected only items they didn’t have, leaving thousands of partially opened and tossed parcels “bleeding their contents into the snow,” Buckham wrote.