The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “I was outside the wire for the first time in twenty months,” he went on. “Ahead the road disappeared into the darker mass of the forest, the trees soft in silhouette and taller than imagined from inside the camp.”[15]

  For the moment, Buckham had forgotten about his empty stomach, as Colwell had forgotten about the scores of utensils he’d bashed together—a veritable museum of inmate ingenuity in two years of imprisonment—ultimately left inside the wire. Don Edy had fond memories of his bit parts on stage at the North Compound theatre doing gymnastics in the Six to the Bar review and dressed up in a toga in the operetta Messalina. There were even photographs as evidence he had been featured on stage, but they never crossed his mind the night they left the prison camp. Art Crighton, the North Compound orchestra leader, said he had played countless solos during North Compound concerts on “a hell of a great instrument,”[16] a trumpet the YMCA had sent from Canada, but he somehow felt the trumpet ought to stay behind. He learned later someone had wrapped it around a tree in anger. But every memento, every memory faded at least temporarily as the kriegies marched away from Sagan. Even Hans Pieber was selective about what he carried out of the camp. The German duty officer, who’d been perhaps closest to the kriegies going back to their days at Barth in 1941, agreed to carry the canary—the illegal radio—since he too wanted to know the BBC’s latest reports on the war.

  “Although the sky was covered with clouds, it was quite light since the moon was up,” John Colwell wrote in his diary. “Although my pack was heavy, I enjoyed the march, especially when we passed through small towns and villages where there were things to see besides barbed wire fences and Goon boxes.”[17]

  Kriegies completed their evacuation of the West Compound by 12:30 Sunday morning. The last of the North Compound prisoners passed through the main gate by 3:45 a.m. The Centre Compound was empty shortly afterward. By 6 a.m. Sunday, the final group of POWs from the East Compound was on the road. Stalag Luft III—once home to nearly ten thousand prisoners of war—was like a ghost town. Only those kriegies left behind in the compound infirmaries remained in the Vorlagers. They were under guard, attended by a doctor, and would wait for the Soviets to arrive to determine their fate. Because of his irregular heartbeat, for example, George Sweanor had been placed back on sick parade. He sat in the North Compound hospital as his fellow kriegies trekked out of the camp.

  Later on Sunday, however, Sweanor, the one-time duty pilot inside the North Compound gate, got permission from the Germans guarding the hospitalized POWs to retrieve his personal belongings. As he dashed into the compound back to Hut 119, all he could think of were his letters from his wife Joan, his personal photographs, his books, and the food he’d stashed inside his palliasse. The food and some of his scribblers were gone, but the rest was intact. In fact, he noticed that some optimistic kriegies had even bundled their belongings and inscribed them with some Russian words requesting their personal effects be forwarded to home addresses later. The guards then let Sweanor enter the parcel shed to gather rations for his imminent departure. From rations such as Berger’s Food, condensed milk, egg powder, dried fruit, and sugar, he cooked up a nutritious concoction and poured it into small tins, sealed the tops with tape, and sewed the tins into the lining of his greatcoat. Much the way Colwell had assembled his backpack, Sweanor prepared his. Then, on orders from the infirmary doctor to vacate the compound and attend to two other patients in the process, Sweanor too made his final exit from Stalag Luft III.

  “I glanced back for a last look at the compound that had been my home and where I had met so many fine human beings,”[18] he wrote.

  But Sweanor didn’t have much time to reflect on either his nearly two years of imprisonment at the compound near Sagan, or the hundreds of men with whom he’d shared a prison camp bond. He suddenly faced different responsibilities on the road to survival. He was a patient tending other patients. He had to keep a USAAF officer with pneumonia comfortable as they marched. And he regularly had to apply a calamine-like lotion to the oozing sores of a Rhodesian airman in his care. And when the elderly German assigned to guard the sickly patients en route to a train siding a full night’s march away could no longer carry his heavy rifle, Sweanor agreed to carry it part of the way. Dick Bartlett carried more than his fair share too. The Canadian Skua dive-bomber pilot shot down over Norway in 1940, and the custodian of the secret radio, had befriended fellow Fleet Air Arm pilot John Nicholson at Stalag Luft III. Sub Lieutenant Nicholson had been shot down at Dunkirk the same year, but a bullet had remained lodged in his chest near his heart throughout his time in German prison camps. On the march from Sagan, Nicholson kept asking Bartlett if he could just stop and lie down in the snow.

  “Hang on and keep moving,”[19] Bartlett encouraged his friend as he half dragged and half carried the still wounded Dunkirk veteran.

  When they did stop, Bartlett would loosen his bootlaces to relieve pain and swelling in his feet. After the short rest, when Bartlett’s hands were too numb to retie his own boots, Nicholson was able to reciprocate his friend’s care and concern during the forced march that winter.

  Similarly, Edward Nurse and Mac Reilley—two officers who’d crewed up together in 1943, flown ops together with 405 Squadron, bailed out together from the same doomed Halifax bomber,[20] and vouched for each other upon arrival at Stalag Luft III—turned to each other for support in the exodus from prison camp a year and a half later. In moments when they felt too frozen to continue, too hungry to find that extra burst of energy, and too exhausted to keep moving, both Nurse, the pilot, and Reilley, the navigator, leaned on each other to keep going.

  It was Sunday evening by the time the Germans emptied the satellite prison camp at Belaria, a few miles from Sagan. Since February 1944, just a month before the mass escape, the Belaria camp had been home to three members of the original Stalag Luft III X Organization—tunnel architect Wally Floody, intelligence specialist Kingsley Brown, and security boss George Harsh. It hadn’t taken the three RCAF men long to realize that Colonel von Lindeiner’s purge of officers to Belaria had likely spared them the wrath of the Sagan Order and murder at the hands of the Gestapo. Now it was up to them to fend for themselves as their German guards rounded up kriegies by the thousands to “save us from the Bolshevist terror,” Kingsley Brown remembered a camp officer saying. Brown added that “we found it difficult to appreciate their solicitude,”[21] and concluded that their German captors actually hoped to buy their way out of the war using the kriegies as human bargaining chips.

  George Harsh imagined the future outside the Belaria prison and immediately drew several conclusions. Though he had endured twelve years on a chain gang in the United States prison system back in the 1930s, and nearly three more as a POW during the war, when the evacuation order came Harsh recognized his best shot at survival depended on his two resourceful roommates. Floody told Harsh to line the insides of his jacket with newspapers[22] for warmth, and to fill his pockets with chocolate for quick energy. Brown told him to stash cigarettes as barter for food along the way. Each man tied a Klim tin to his belt with a loop of string so that anything liquid, hot, and edible could be contained in it for a meal. Together, the three men tore apart a table and stool, and with bed-boards for skis and belts and blankets for harnesses, fashioned a crude sleigh for transporting their clothing, bedding, and survival food supplies.

  “As Wally, Brownie, and I marched out the gate our pockets were bulging, but our hands were free,” Harsh wrote, “except for the tins of bully beef we were wolfing.”[23]

  During his pre-war civilian days, Kingsley Brown had enjoyed his life as a journalist gathering and publishing stories for newspapers in Toronto and Halifax. When the X Organization at Stalag Luft III learned of his researching and writing talents, it immediately dispatched Brown to gather intelligence information from library newspapers and magazines for the Dean and Dawson forgery section. By his own admission, Brown did most of his gathering for the escape committee, not for hi
mself. In the mad dash at Belaria to assemble his own survival gear before he marched out the gate, however, he allowed himself the luxury of salvaging one keepsake: a German beer stein with a delicate silver top. But the first hours of marching through drifting snow and penetrating cold imposed a sudden reality among the prisoners. Out in the elements and in the POWs’ weakened state, the supply sleighs became heavier by the hour. The kriegies began to unburden themselves of extra tins of food, packs of cigarettes, and blocks of chocolate—all but the absolute minimum luggage needed to survive.

  “The beer stein . . . was my one souvenir of my prison years,”[24] Brown wrote. “But I tossed it into the ditch. The ditch was strewn with violins and guitars, books, trumpets, framed family pictures—precious items in a prisoner’s ‘life savings.’”

  Though his colleagues often called him a loner, Wally Floody left Belaria in close company with his two tunnel co-conspirators, Harsh and Brown. Aside from survival supplies, however, the only mementoes he took with him were a small journal and a photograph of his wife, Betty, whom he hadn’t seen in almost four years. Leaving Belaria prompted mixed emotions for the Tunnel King. Still bitter about the way German authorities had hauled him away from the North Compound and potential escape through the tunnel he had designed, excavated, and protected, Floody recognized that the twist of fate had likely extended his life. And as costly as the Gestapo reprisals had been, he continued to insist the escape had achieved its ultimate objective. When news of the mass escape reached the German population, Floody continued to point out, it was the first time since the war began in 1939 that every German in uniform had been called back from leave. Every fifteen minutes on German radio authorities broadcast the latest on the escape of the Terrorflieger (terror flyers).

  “The slowdown of the German economy caused by the tunnel and the breakout had been the equivalent of dropping a couple of divisions of paratroopers into German-occupied Europe,” Floody reminded his comrades. “I think the cost was worth it.”[25]

  Only outside the wire did Commonwealth air officers come face to face with the other realities of the war. Most of the east-west highways had become the exclusive domain of Germany military traffic, moving troops and weapons to and from the rapidly approaching Eastern Front. So the kriegies and their guards made their way along secondary dirt roads, where they were soon caught in the backwash of the war. Roads were clogged with slave labourers from occupied countries, starving civilians pushing carts of their moveable possessions, homeless women and children huddling from the cold, nuns and priests uprooted from their parishes, and domesticated animals wandering beside the traffic. The kriegies told the civilians where they could find thousands of Red Cross boxes of provisions abandoned in the Sagan pine forest. For at least the moment, the former inmates of Stalag Luft III had the advantage of provisions they had packed in their pockets and packs, but as one kriegie noted, on the road “we were just people now, all members of the human race . . . sharing common levelers of cold, lice, misery, and despair. . . . This was truly Götterdämmerung.”[26]

  The first night outside the wire, the aircrew officers and their guards coped with temperatures well below freezing. Few prisoners had the kind of winter gear the conditions demanded. Greatcoats proved too thin. Summer boots cracked and leaked in the cold and snow. Mitts and scarves were in short supply. In addition, though the moon had originally cast some light en route, before long the weather closed in and the men were marching through falling snow that deteriorated into nearly white-out conditions. Marching into the teeth of a blizzard slowed everybody down, and within a few hours the columns of POWs stretched over twenty miles of road.[27] Stragglers feared they would be shot. Even as the kriegies marched from the Stalag Luft III camps, the BBC was broadcasting an order each afternoon that the officers and men should not risk escape attempts, and further, that they should try to stay together for safety in numbers and better identification.[28] But the German guards fared no better. Most were older men who grumbled about having to escort Luftgangsters across the frozen countryside. It appeared the guards were constantly in search of shelter for themselves and their prisoners.

  Sometimes, survival on what kriegies soon dubbed “the Death March” came down to the individual strength of fellow air officers rising to the occasion. Musician Art Crighton said the cold wasn’t nearly as penetrating when he was walking; when his body was moving, his circulation seemed to fend off the freezing temperatures, the winds, and the driving snow. But when the columns had to stop and he had to stand for hours out in the open waiting for congestion to ease or an order to be issued, he could feel himself going numb at the extremities. That’s when Crighton remembered Scruffy Weir coming to the rescue.

  “Wave your arms!”[29] Weir shouted as he ran up and down the columns of men. Then he’d cuss and add to his call to action: “Wave your legs!”

  Later in the march, Crighton said his German guards occasionally found shelter for their prisoners in empty or nearly empty barns. Hungry, exhausted, and sick, the kriegies were jammed like sardines into stalls, troughs, and lofts of straw for the night. At one end of the barn, the guards placed a rain barrel full of water. They were fearful of the possibility of fire ignited by careless prisoners sneaking a smoke during the night. Next to the rain barrel was also the spot where prisoners could relieve themselves in an emergency. One night in just such a setting, Crighton got an attack of “squitters,” prompting him to dash from his straw bed through the dark to the relieving spot next to the rain barrel.

  “In pitch black, I stumbled . . . down the hall and crashed into the rain barrel. I fell head first into two feet of icy water. Then I collapsed on the floor. Losing control, disaster followed,” he said. “I remember nothing more [except] my comrades wiped me clean and dry and laid me on my straw bed.”[30]

  Over the next few days, all of the prisoners from the various Stalag Luft III compounds—as many as ten thousand airmen of the Allied air forces—made their way via back roads south from Sagan and west about fifty miles to the German rail centre at Spremberg. Men from the South Compound, finding ample shelter at a brick factory along the way, arrived first on January 29. Two days later, the kriegies from the West Compound made their way into the town. A group of five hundred Americans from the Centre Compound had joined up with POWs from the East Compound by the time they reached Spremberg on February 4. Of the larger groups, the last to arrive at the railway yards were the North Compound air officers. At Spremberg, German authorities divided the prisoners into new groups, loaded them into boxcars, and sent them in different directions—the Americans to Stalag XIII-D outside Nürnberg; those from Centre and South Compounds to Stalag VII-A near Moosburg; the POWs from the Belaria Compound were transported to Luckenwalde, a prison camp southwest of Berlin; and prisoners from the North Compound (including most of the six hundred Canadian kriegies) travelled to Marlag-Milag, a naval facility in northwestern Germany.

  In that first week of February 1945, the ancient locomotives and boxcars—the infamous “forty-and-eights”—threaded their way from Spremberg westward across Germany, away from Soviet armies advancing from the east and toward Allied armies advancing from the west. Apparently dodging higher priority military trains and both daylight and nighttime air raids, the POW trains chugged from one marshalling yard to the next. The lack of food and water were bad enough, but darkness and confinement compounded everybody’s anxiety and ailments. Occasionally, when the trains pulled into sidings, guards unlocked the doors and allowed the prisoners to exit, stretch, and relieve themselves. John R. Harris was positioned at a boxcar door when it was suddenly thrust open.

  “I had no sooner alighted from the car than I promptly fainted,”[31] he said. “The others picked me up, but . . . I keeled over once again. This time, I was carried back to the [box]car. Someone brought me a cup of water. I don’t know where it came from. . . . It was full of rust particles, so it could have come from the train’s engine.”

  In his boxcar, Rober
t Buckham’s group also had to do without water, artificial light, or straw for bedding, but they found a margarine lamp and lit it. The kriegies tried to make the best use of the lack of space. They hung bags and sundry gear on the walls and from the ceiling of the car. Any available blankets were spread on the floor so they could take turns resting in a prone position. Others slept sitting. The rest stood, attempting the same. When his train got to Hanover, Buckham and his group could see water being rationed to the two cars ahead of theirs. The Canadians began shouting and banging on their boxcar door to get a water ration too. Through a crack in the door, they could see a guard approaching with a bucketful of water. He unbolted the door and slid it back a few inches. But before the kriegies could reach the water, the train lurched forward. The door slid shut. The guard re-bolted the door and tossed the water away. To add to his discomfort, Buckham ended up beside an Australian airman who screamed and groaned through the night and banged his fists on the boxcar door during the day.

  “We could do little for him. Dysentery,” Buckham said. “A Red Cross box served as his toilet, barely ten inches from my head. Endurance was our only resource.”[32]

  The trio of Canadian kriegies from the Belaria compound had stuck together all the way to Spremberg, and even as the Germans divided the prisoners into groups for train transit, Kingsley Brown, George Harsh, and Wally Floody managed to get aboard the same boxcar. That was about the only redeeming aspect of the trip. Fifty men were crammed into their railway car and struggled to get comfortable in the shared space. There was a bit of straw on the floor and a single wooden box in the middle of the car to serve as its latrine. There was no food and no light except what entered through cracks between the wallboards. A determined group of card players enlarged a crack in the wall with a penknife so that they could carry on their game. And when night came, so did the endless struggle to organize arms, legs, and heads into any degree of comfort to sleep. The odour of fifty unwashed bodies mixed with the stench of the “thunderbox.” And when the train stopped on a siding to wait out a Bomber Command attack some distance away, the assault on the senses heightened the claustrophobia, fatigue, and fear. Several nights into their trip west, men awoke to cries in the darkness of the boxcar.