The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “I want my mother,”[33] a man called out. When he heard the plea again, George Harsh knew it came from one of the youngest airmen among the prisoners. Just twenty, with several kills in the Fighter Command books, the fighter pilot had been shot down over France in 1942. Otherwise a dynamic and bright young warrior, this night he called out like small child for his mother.

  “Okay, boy, okay,” a voice answered from across the boxcar. The consoling response came from a man making his way through the tangle of arms and legs and bodies. “It’s all right now.”

  “I want my mother,” the first man repeated, nearly weeping.

  “We’ll get you to your mother,” came the assurance. It was Wally Floody. The big former Spitfire pilot and X Organization leader had reached the younger man in the dark and was rocking him gently in his arms. “There now. Get some rest.”

  In the three years George Harsh had known the hard-driving tunneller with nine lives, he had never seen this caring side of Wally Floody. Like John Weir shouting encouragement up and down the columns of men in the cold, George Sweanor nursing two fellow patients’ medical needs while trying to stay alive himself on the forced march, and those who had cared for Art Crighton during his dehumanizing bout of dysentery, Floody playing mother to a distressed young pilot on a prison train in the middle of Germany illustrated the brotherhood that bound these longtime prisoners of war together. If one were going to make it safely to the end of this long road, each man would somehow try to ensure that everybody else did as well. Harsh witnessed further proof of such loyalty even as the numbers of the POWs trekking west from Belaria dwindled to less than one hundred. One morning, weeks into their overland marching and gruelling boxcar transit to an unknown destination, Harsh and Floody found themselves “sleepwalking, silently lost in our own personal miseries”[34] as a twosome. It slowly dawned on them that their number three, Kingsley Brown, was missing. For as long as they could muster the strength and not drawing unnecessary attention from their guards, the two kriegies searched high and low for their absent comrade. They had all but held a requiem for their missing friend when he suddenly reappeared.

  “Where in the hell . . . ?” Floody started in on him.

  “Never mind,” Brown laughed. “There’s a group of Frenchmen back there . . . and they’ve got a small cart with ’em loaded with bread.”[35] And with that he opened a blanket he’d been wearing like a shawl to reveal three loaves of German black bread. He informed his buddies he’d swapped his wristwatch for food.

  “A Rolex watch for three loaves of bread,” Harsh protested.

  “They promised for the next watch to throw in a bottle of Schnaps too,” Brown quipped.

  “That’s different,” Harsh grinned.

  “Jesus,” Floody sighed. “What a set of values!”

  After several days cooped up in their boxcars bound for Marlag-Milag, northeast of Bremen, the kriegies from Spremberg arrived in the marshalling yard at Tarmstedt. Peering through cracks in the boxcar walls, they could see a changing of the guard out in the pouring rain. Since Marlag-Milag—a naval prison—was to become their new home, their Luftwaffe guards now handed the Commonwealth air officers over to German marines. It was a two-hour walk from the railway yard to the gates of Marlag-Milag. There, outside the barbed-wire fencing, along a cinder roadway, the kriegies chain smoked cigarettes and stood “like cattle [with] our backs to the wind and rain,”[36] waiting to experience a naval guard search of their belongings, one man at a time. The marine Kommandant seemed determined to conduct as thorough a search as any the prisoners had received from the German air force. But John R. Harris discovered that the marine guards detailed to do the inspection were just as frustrated as the kriegies; a judicious bribe to the guards resulted in a perfunctory search, and the Canadians were admitted to the compound. It still took six hours.

  As best they could, Harris and some of his former roommates from the North Compound searched out a barracks block where they could sleep comfortably. In the following days, they discovered how well off they had been at Stalag Luft III. They now had to live—fifteen or twenty to a room—in huts lit by a couple of naked light bulbs, with no furniture and no bunks, but plenty of rats. All they had to sleep on were bags of damp wood shavings. There were very few stoves and even less firewood to burn in them. So the kriegies began stripping the floors and walls—not to procure shoring for an escape tunnel, like the old days, but to fuel fires to heat their rooms and cook their meagre rations. Despite the Spartan surroundings, John Colwell seemed perfectly at home. The morning after he’d arrived and settled into a room in the Marlag-Milag barracks, the Tin Man had managed to visit all the dumps in the camp to collect any discarded tin. On that first day, he manufactured a soldering lamp with a blowpipe and bashed together a two-gallon water pail and stew pot.[37] By the second day, his fellow kriegies from Hut 120 at Stalag Luft III had cooked a small meal for themselves and a dozen roommates. Meanwhile, Don Edy’s first edible intake at Marlag came from the dregs of his kit bag and some boiled water.

  “My powdered milk was gone,”[38] he wrote. “And there was only a tablespoon of Nescafé left. So I put it all together with all the sugar I could find and poured in the hot water. It was a good brew all right, but it was too strong for my poor old stomach. Seconds after it went down, I was up and outside, sicker than a dog.”

  The infirmary at Marlag-Milag rarely had fewer than a hundred patients. The sick bay seemed continuously crammed to the four walls with patients on cots or lying on the floor under any available greatcoats and blankets. There was one shower in the entire camp. It was located in the ablution shed and consisted of one wall, a tin roof, a cement floor, and a cold-water shower with a pretty much unobscured view of the great outdoors. And the north Germany dampness seemed to seep into everything. Robert Buckham said the rain in Tarmstedt would “take first prize in density;[39] ” it could penetrate broken windows, roofs, floors, and walls, as well as socks and shoes, no matter how dried out they seemed. The continuous rain even forced cancellation of numerous appells—remarkable in a naval prison. The Commonwealth aircrew kriegies, mostly Canadians, would spend the next ten weeks at Marlag-Milag. At least half their stay occurred under oppressive grey skies that pelted them with rain and snow from the nearby North Sea. The kriegies at Marlag-Milag didn’t see sunshine until March 8.

  Clear skies brought a clear view of things other than the farthest reaches of their prison compound, however. Most of the kriegies who’d been imprisoned at Stalag Luft III hadn’t been close to an Allied bomber since the day or night they were shot down—often months or even years ago. But suddenly, in those first days of March, they found themselves in front-row seats for some of the final airborne operations of the war. On March 8, the kriegies at Marlag-Milag were witness to a massive nighttime bombing attack on Hamburg. Robert Buckham watched the stream of hundreds of bombers almost circle the camp overhead en route to the target (U-boat construction pens in the harbour). When the visual show seemed over, Buckham went to bed to get warm, but was thrown back out of bed when the ground began to shake with the bomb explosions at Hamburg that continued for ninety minutes. The air battle that followed left quite an impression on fighter pilot Don Edy.

  “The bomber stream headed home directly over the camp,”[40] he wrote. “We were thrilled at the sight and felt very close to those friends of ours just overhead. Suddenly, we heard the [German] night fighters on the attack. We followed the course of the battle . . .

  “We would see a pattern of twinkling lights . . . cannon shells from the fighters. . . . Then all of a sudden an orange ball of flame as a bomber caught fire . . . then dropped towards the earth in a heart-breaking arc. I saw ten planes shot down that night in as many minutes. I don’t think any other incident of the war shook me quite so deeply.”

  In contrast, John Colwell was again busily grinding out pots and pans and stools and bunk beds. And because he sensed both the winter and the war were nearing an end, he fashioned a p
air of shorts for sitting outside in the sunshine and tore apart his flying boots to make a pair of bedroom slippers.

  “The spring is sprung. The grass is riz. I wonder where the armistice is,”[41] he wrote in his diary on the first day of spring.

  Then, just a few days later, the Kommandant called an unscheduled afternoon appell, ordering all the prisoners to pack for a 6:30 p.m. evacuation of the compound. That night, April 9, Colwell reported in his diary that Group Captain Larry Wray instructed the kriegies to break into the compound kitchen, steal as much white soap powder as possible, and write “R.A.F.” and “P.O.W.” in block letters on the sand of the parade ground,[42] indicating with a huge arrow their likely march route out of the camp, so that Allied fighters wouldn’t fire on the kriegies in transit. Wray also attempted to delay departure. He’d learned that British ground forces were just seven miles from Bremen. One day’s delay might allow the Desert Rats (British 7th Armoured Division) to overtake the evacuation march and hasten the kriegies’ liberation. But it didn’t happen. The next day, all of the prisoners from Stalag Luft III were on the march again, heading northeast from Tarmstedt and bound for Lübeck.

  The first deadly strafing of kriegies happened on the road near the town of Zeven the next day, April 10. Several marines were killed when a flight of RAF Tempest fighter aircraft attacked one of the marching columns. They didn’t realize they were shooting at POWs. Other strafings occurred near Harsefeld over the next few days; two kriegies were killed and seven were wounded. A few days earlier, the group of kriegies that included RCAF officer George Sweanor, housed at Stalag XIII-D near Nürnberg, were ordered to evacuate. Depending upon which rumour he believed, Sweanor’s group was either en route to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden to become his personal hostages or toward Dachau, the Nazi death camp just outside Munich. In southeastern Germany too, however, Allied aircraft supporting General George Patton and the US Third Army had virtual air supremacy. In fact, Allied bombing of the bridge over the Danube had stopped Sweanor’s train at Ingolstadt for several hours.

  “Kriegies, who still had some cigarettes, bartered them for red and white paint,” Sweanor said, “and we painted large red crosses on white backgrounds on the roofs and sides of our boxcars.”[43]

  But the POW train had barely left Ingolstadt when the kriegies aboard heard sirens warning of an imminent air attack. Their guards flung open the doors of the boxcars and the prisoners in the railway cars watched the last waves of Flying Fortresses and Liberators bombing Ingolstadt. A flight of P47 Thunderbolts flew low over the prisoner train, but then climbed steeply, banked, and lined up the train for a strafing run. Sweanor and his kriegie comrades instinctively knew the boxcar was the least safe place to be under these circumstances and dashed toward ditches about three hundred feet away. The Thunderbolts were gaining too quickly, so Sweanor went to ground and felt their strafing bullets cut a deep furrow a few feet from his prone body. When he tried again to make it to the ditch, more Thunderbolts began strafing from the other direction. Kriegies by the hundred were scattering in every direction, Americans among them.

  “You God-damn trigger-happy idiots,” one US pilot yelled up at them. “You can see our Red Crosses.”[44]

  Several other kriegies on the periphery of the attack stood and waved their arms wildly as the fighters swooped in for their final attacks at treetop level. One of the Thunderbolt pilots apparently spotted the Allied uniforms on the people scattering before him and ceased firing. He climbed to rejoin the rest of his flight, likely shared his discovery, and the flight raced away before any of the kriegies lying on the ground could record their squadron markings. An American pilot taking fire on the ground had flown with the same squadron over Italy.

  “I know those bastards,” he swore out loud. “I’ll have them all crucified!”

  But the damage was done. A South African air officer near Sweanor had most of his wrist shot away. A doctor in the group supplied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and a cigarette to calm the man, while the surviving German train guards raced around herding the non-wounded kriegies back into the boxcars. It turned out the locomotive hauling their boxcars was mortally wounded by the strafing and barely managed another dozen miles before dying right there on the tracks. Meanwhile, inside the boxcars the kriegies experienced a new ambiance as a result of the air attack.

  “At least we could thank the Yanks for the ventilation,”[45] Sweanor wrote.

  The American Thunderbolt pilots weren’t the only “trigger-happy” airmen in the final days of the European war. On April 19, 1945, RCAF pilots flying Typhoons had inadvertently strafed and killed twenty-nine kriegies[46] as they marched under German guard near Gresse, on the road to Lübeck. Among the five Canadians killed in the attack was Sergeant Robert Douglas, one of Sweanor’s 419 Squadron comrades. During a bombing operation against St. Nazaire in March 1943, Douglas’s aircraft was thrown on its back and into an inverted spin. Bomb-aimer Douglas managed to bail out, but the pilot got the Halifax out of the spin and flew the aircraft home; a month later, the same crew (minus Douglas, who was then in a German POW camp) was shot down over the Skagerrak; all crew were killed. Douglas had survived the near crash, and made it through the rest of the war imprisoned, but he died at the hands of Allied fighter pilots just twenty days short of German capitulation in Europe, May 8, 1945.[47]

  There were too many close calls for Commonwealth air officers who had come so far, but had not yet been liberated. On April 20, John Colwell’s group heading north from Marlag-Milag managed to get makeshift tents erected just before the heavens opened on their campsite near Elmenhorst. Then, during the night, Mosquito night fighters from Bomber Command shot up the town. Colwell and the others watched cannon tracer bullets coming out of the sky during the attack. With the rain continuing into the next day, Colwell’s group—about thirty-five kriegies—sought shelter in a barn near Neritz, until two SS army officers showed up to move the POWs along.

  “Aus! Aussteigen!” came the order from the Germans. They wanted everybody out of the barn in ten seconds or they would start shooting.

  The kriegies realized how serious the SS officers were and scrambled out through windows and doors as fast as they could. One man missed the top rung of a ladder coming from the loft and slid to the bottom in a heap. Then, the SS men lined up Colwell and the others.

  “Terrorflieger,” they shouted at the air officers, criticizing them for bombing women and children. And the more they shouted, the more they flashed their guns.

  “I really thought it was the end,”[48] Colwell told himself. The POWs turned to a pastor who had been trekking with them, but the religious man was frightened to the point of being speechless. Finally, somebody made it clear the air officers were not fugitives, but that they were billeted in barns and sheds in the area under instructions from their guards. They were supposed to be there.

  “We didn’t stir from the barn for the rest of the day. We ate cold meals,” Colwell wrote in his diary. Nor did it make any sense to enter Lübeck. A Red Cross medical officer, the SBO, and a German Kommandant had inspected what were to be the kriegies’ final quarters, but pronounced them medically unfit. In his final war diary entry, on May 2, Colwell wrote, “Goons deserting. Tanks arrived at noon. FREE!”[49]

  Don Edy, John R. Harris and the kriegies in their group were liberated nearby, on the Trenthorst Estate, about the same time. They had occupied a two-storey barn sturdy, stately, and well stocked with dry straw. Edy had set up a kitchen for cooking in the barnyard. Bags of flour from Red Cross parcels arrived and some of Edy’s buddies found a bakery in a village and began baking. The resulting white bread was the first he’d tasted since he’d been shot down in North Africa in February 1942, three years before. On the night of May 1, 1945, Edy heard the British guns booming closer, saw Spitfires overhead, and awaited release. By daybreak the German guards had disappeared.

  “We lined the road west of the estate like children waiting for the Santa Cla
us parade,”[50] he said. “Sure enough, about four o’clock in the afternoon, an armoured car came careening down the road. . . . We cheered like mad and swamped the car trying to shake the hands of the men in it. The demonstration was one of exuberance and relief.”

  Frank Sorensen rushed those same tanks that afternoon. Earlier in the day, May 2, a German guard had handed him a Luger as a sign of surrender. But that paled in comparison to seeing the convoy of Scottish armoured vehicles arrive at Wulmenau farm near Trenthorst.

  “If I hadn’t been so keen to get back to England in a hurry, I would have jumped on the tanks . . . and gone with them through Denmark,” he later wrote his family. “They were some of the happiest moments in my life when I climbed up on the first tank and had my picture taken by the tank commander together with a whole tank-load of yelling and crying kriegies.”[51]

  Robert Buckham, Ley Kenyon, both artists and forgers inside the wire, and Les Brodrick, the former trapführer for tunnel “Dick,” experienced liberation somewhat differently. With no accommodation available for them in any of the barns outside Lübeck, the three air force officers were taken at gunpoint to another prison, this one holding several thousand French officers. In the final days of April they burned straw in a chip heater to cook food, slept in cellars with double bunks, and scrounged for food around the barracks. On May 3, 1945, tanks from Bernard Montgomery’s Second Army clattered out of cloud of smoke and dust. Then a khaki-clad commander emerged from the lead tank and waved at the POWs gathered on the parapet of the prison. Buckham made his last diary entries.