The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “A roar of cheers; crudely made flags waving; laughter and tears mingling; the guards running off, weaponless; men climbing the wire to run to the tanks; men embracing each other, shouting incoherently; men kneeling to pray; men staring vacantly, bewildered; thousands of men in a state of hysterical, blessed release. It continued for minutes,”[52] he wrote.

  The first Allied officer dispatched to enter the prison near Lübeck to liberate the thousands of Allied POWs, including hundreds of Commonwealth air officers, arrived after 6 p.m. that day. The kriegies watched with some sense of irony as finally the tables turned. All German troops captured there were paraded in the square, without gear, and marched off. The liberators found a German general hiding in the basement and took him away too. But the kriegies were told they would have to stay in the prison ten more days, until arrangements for flights to Britain could be arranged.

  “We have been liberated,” Buckham wrote, “but we are not free.”

  Liberation proved equally bittersweet for George Harsh, Kingsley Brown, and Wally Floody, who had trekked and trained across Germany from the satellite prison camp at Belaria to one of the worst Wehrmacht prison camps in Germany, at Luckenwalde, south of Berlin. When the three RCAF officers were incarcerated there at Stalag III-A, in February, they were already hungry, filthy, and in a generally weakened state.[53] And conditions at the prison didn’t help. For most of the winter they had survived on a ration of a cup of soup and a few slices of bread a day. They had slept in bug-infested bunks and had heated their quarters by burning twigs and bed shavings in a tin can. Then, on April 22, 1945, two days after Adolf Hitler’s birthday, Soviet Army troops pushed the Germans out of Luckenwalde and the prison camp. However, the Canadians (along with other Allied air force officers) were separated from civilian prisoners at Stalag III-A, and kept for another six weeks while the Soviets negotiated with the Americans on the west side of the River Elbe to be traded for an equal number of Soviet prisoners the US Army had liberated.[54]

  Finally, at the end of May 1945, the three Canadians arrived at the pontoon bridge over the Elbe where they would be exchanged for three Soviets. Harsh led the trio, followed by Brown and Floody. When they reached free soil at the west end of the bridge, an American infantry colonel greeted them.

  “Here you are, chaps,” the American said in an exaggerated British accent. “Right this way to Tokyo!” And he waited a moment for their reactions.

  “Fuck you, Jack,” retorted the American-born George Harsh. “And the same . . . for any friends you may have in California.”

  Brown just leapt down from the bridge and shook his head in disbelief. Then Floody, with greater reverence for the significance of the moment, joined his two ex-kriegies on the ground and said, “By God, we made it.”[55]

  Meanwhile, Tony Pengelly’s liberators nearly killed him with their kindness and efficiency. Once in the hands of the British Army, north of Marlag-Milag, Pengelly and the rest of his group of Commonwealth officers became just another lot of freight that had to be dealt with. When army drivers arrived at the frontlines, they simply unloaded ammunition and other battle supplies; then with equal dispatch they loaded POWs into the empty space and made the return trip. Similarly, once inside an Allied military base, British officials were convinced the Commonwealth air officers had typhus and had them deloused.

  “They assumed we were totally contaminated,”[56] Pengelly said. “So they took all our clothes, burned them . . . and we took hot showers using special lice soap.”

  The next day, the kriegies were moved to a new location. They were stripped again and their new battledress from the day before was also burned, while their bodies were deloused with hot showers and lice soap yet again. On May 7, the day before V-E Day, the Commonwealth officers, who hadn’t been airborne in several years, boarded Lancaster bombers and were flown back to England.

  “We landed at a big reception field,” he said. “And they assumed we were all lousy and they did the same routine. Took our army battledress, burned it, and gave us air force battledress.”

  Then, the British reception centre greeters led the former kriegies into aircraft hangars filled with card tables and chairs for an afternoon social. Local community ladies, Red Cross women, and nurses soon descended to entertain the officers over tea and gin rummy.

  “From seeing no women for four years to being swamped—hundreds of them—and here we were with teacups and scones. It was the most absurd scene.”[57]

  Now ex-kriegies, the air force officers of the Commonwealth who had somehow succeeded in surviving to this first week of May 1945 marked the achievement in personal ways. George Sweanor, penned up in a barracks in Moosburg, Germany, remembered his best friend Pat Porter[58] , who had kept their Halifax aloft long enough for the crew to bail out two years before. When Don Edy arrived at the rehabilitation centre in Bournemouth, England, he took the small tin suitcase in which he had carried his belongings for more than three years—from the first POW camps in Italy, to Sagan at Stalag Luft III, and throughout the forced march across Germany—and chucked it under his bed for good; he was shipping out to Canada and the tin case “looked silly and rather childish.”[59] Art Hawtin, who credited his dedication to staying physically fit for his survival, salvaged one souvenir of his POW experience—a photograph of the Canadian All-Star Baseball Team that had routed the Americans in that summer tournament of 1943.[60] Darrell Larlee saved a photo too, one depicting the POW roommates for whom he had cooked; the picture hung on a wall at the family home in Campbellton, New Brunswick, as a constant reminder to be thankful and frugal—to the point that his son, Peter, said, “nothing would get thrown out. Everything got put back in the fridge. . . . We’d eat Sunday dinner until Thursday.”[61] Alan Righetti, an Australian air force officer, carried a piece of Canada with him almost all the way home. On the night of the breakout, his roommate, RCAF fighter pilot George Wiley, had entrusted Righetti with his watch in the event he didn’t make it. En route home to Australia in 1946, Righetti stopped in Windsor, Ontario, to fulfill the promise and delivered the watch to Wiley’s parents and sister.

  The memento snapshots, the jettisoned belongings, the lost comrades, the legacy of the murdered fifty, and the recollection of a thousand other experiences in airborne combat or inside the compound wire stayed with the ex-kriegies—sometimes by design, often not. Most former POWs returning to Canada chose to leave any tangible evidence of being shot down or being imprisoned tucked inside flight logs, shoeboxes, or basement cupboards. Best forgotten, they thought. Phil Marchildon returned to Penetanguishene, Ontario, walked the familiar streets of home, and noted that everything looked exactly the way he remembered, “as if the war had never happened.”[62] As with other returning vets, the former air force POWs tried to get their lives back on track—retooling in school, returning to jobs that had been held for them, and restoring relationships with families and friends. For many ex-kriegies, there were understanding spouses who learned to tolerate their nighttime outbursts, idiosyncratic eating habits, or their need to sleep in a single bed. Often there was little or no other post-trauma help. When enough time had passed, there were air force reunions they might join, Remembrance Day observances they might brave, and special POW gatherings they might attend. During a memorial service held in London, England, several months after the spring breakout and Gestapo murders in 1944, a chaplain offered an assessment of the kriegies’ plight: “Their sacrifice was touched by the finger of God,” he said. “Their freedom in a measure lost, they fought on, doing their duty twice over.”[63]

  Volunteers, they had trained for war, served in aerial combat, been blown out of the sky, withstood interrogation for secret intelligence, and been imprisoned for the duration. Prisoners of war, some had joined The Great Escape to spite their captors or stave off boredom, others out of a sense of duty. Still others viewed the plot to dig to freedom as simply futile. But all faced its brutal aftermath. Ultimately, as hostages to a dying regime, the air force off
icers faced one last test of their fortitude and sense of duty, trekking toward a liberation that always seemed just one more day away. Theirs was service many times over.

  11

  “A PROUD, SPECTACULAR DISTRACTION”

  * * *

  THE IRONY of his May 8th experience took a while to sink in. RAF pilot Philip Gray had spent most of the previous four years preparing for, enduring, and feeling grateful for surviving the nightly combat operations of Bomber Command. He flew his sixteenth and final bombing raid against a marshalling yard between Bremen and Hamburg, Germany. It was not a piece of cake. En route home, Gray’s Lancaster had to evade heavy anti-aircraft fire. The crew discovered one five-hundred-pound bomb still hung up in the bomb bay, but safely released it over the North Sea. Then, on final approach to his home airfield, Gray grappled with falling pressure in the landing-gear brakes. But when he brought the Lanc to a dead stop halfway down the runway, it dawned on him. His war was over. The tension of living life on the edge was gone. Any anxiety about surviving evaporated. One day, Bomber Command’s strategists led an all-out bombing campaign, dispatching hundreds of aircrews and their four-engine bombers from aerodromes all over the country. The next—May 8, 1945—with all those airmen and their aircraft on hand, there was nothing for them to do.

  Suddenly, Gray received a briefing on Operation Exodus, an overnight solution to a problem he and his RAF bomber crew hadn’t even known existed. Air officers and men by the thousands[*] had been cut loose from prison camps all over the Reich. They were holed up in former prisons, fenced compounds, hospital wards, warehouses, and makeshift tent cities next to recaptured aerodromes waiting for a ride home. Learning of their plight, Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave their repatriation the highest priority. The luxury of commanding such a well-organized machine as Bomber Command, its ready aircrews, and now all its available aircraft, seemed too good to ignore. Nearly five hundred round trips of Lancasters, Halifaxes, and other heavy bombers would do the job.

  “[We were] ideal magic carpets to whisk the ex-POWs back to freedom in a hurry,”[1] Gray wrote.

  Not unlike each of his bombing runs over Europe, Gray’s first flight bringing kriegies home to Britain proved instructive, if a bit unsettling. Serving in the war as “Lords of the Air” and never having experienced the daily task of survival in a POW camp, Gray admitted that he was ignorant of the trauma the former prisoners of war had known. Only when he loaded twenty-four passengers that first day of Operation Exodus did he learn that some of them had been four, five, and six years in enemy stalags, mostly cut off from the Allied war effort, and all of them entirely reliant on their own resourcefulness to make it through the war. To learn that freedom and home were less than an hour’s flight away proved overwhelming for the physically weakened and emotionally drained ex-kriegies.

  “The sun was shining during that first Exodus touchdown,” Gray wrote as he watched the POWs step from his Lancaster onto the tarmac at Westcott Airfield in Buckinghamshire. “Some got down on their hands and knees and kissed the concrete. Others simply burst into tears where they stood, while others lay on the grass and sobbed. I was thunderstruck . . .”[2]

  With an awakened recognition that these former prisoners of war needed time and space—even aboard their flights back to Britain—Gray had a greater sense of empathy at the controls during his second Exodus sortie. He dropped his jovial “we’ll-get-you-home” act. He simply nodded and smiled as they climbed aboard. He let them be by themselves. He made sure that he and his crew delivered as smooth and uneventful a ride home as possible. He merely wondered about “the stories that lay behind the eyes, the docile manner, the resigned, rather sad, expressions that [came] back at me from these men, stories which would possibly never be told in full.”[3] Never, indeed.

  The pilot of the Lancaster bomber with ex-kriegie Kingsley Brown aboard that first week of May embellished passage to England slightly more. And the former Nova Scotia journalist soaked up the trip like a kid on a carnival ride. For his flight back to the UK, Brown got a front-row view, seated in the bomb-aimer’s bay. Leaving the Belgian coast, the Lanc pilot brought the bomber down to a few hundred feet off the North Sea as he followed the coastline and flew right over the French port of Dunkirk. Brown recognized the burned out vehicles and the sunken hulls as the sight of the British Expeditionary Force retreat in 1940. Then, on the opposite side of the Channel, the Lanc made an equally dramatic flypast over the white cliffs of Dover.

  “To me they seemed a little blurred,”[4] Brown wrote, “but actually they hadn’t changed a bit.”

  Later stationed at Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, Brown and his forced-march comrade George Harsh waited for the RCAF repatriation system to process them home to Canada. Not surprisingly, the bureaucracy didn’t move quickly enough for either of them. So Brown, the former intelligence expert for X Organization, and Harsh, the former security boss for tunnels “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry,” hatched a plan to solve their immediate problem. They decided to liberate a local rowboat and paddle out to a four-engine RAF Sunderland flying boat[5] moored in the harbour at Poole. The fact that Brown had only piloted twin-engine Hampdens and Harsh had served as a tail-gunner didn’t seem to faze them. They crept aboard the Sunderland and had gotten one engine started when the military police arrived. It took the pull of two decorated wing commanders to spring Harsh and Brown from jail, and a week or so later the two veterans had been booked aboard Île de France for their trans-Atlantic passage.

  Back home and back in civilian life, George Harsh chose big city publishing while Kingsley Brown appeared to avoid contact with a lot of people in a confined space. He took over his great uncle’s general store in the community of West Jeddore (population two hundred) on the south shore of Nova Scotia. By 1950, he had returned to life as a professional communicator—in public relations, then reporting and editing, and eventually the civil service as a special assistant to Ellen Fairclough, Canada’s first woman cabinet minister in the John Diefenbaker government.

  Perhaps because he’d been a journalist first, Brown eventually put his memories of Stalag Luft III to paper—from harnessing bumblebees with propaganda on onion skin paper, through several escape attempts, to his role in stockpiling intelligence for the forged documents, and eventually the forced march across Germany with Wally Floody and George Harsh. When he finished his account of the experience he titled Officers Travel First Class, he sent the manuscript to publishers, but kept receiving rejection letters. In the late 1980s, Brown had given up. “I never expected to see a book of mine make the light of day. And this proves it,”[6] Brown told his wife, Marion. “Nobody is going to buy this manuscript. Nobody.”

  “That’s not true,” Marion interrupted. “Be patient. Someone will buy it.”

  “Who?”

  “I will,” Marion said. “I’ll buy it.”

  “And just how much are you prepared to pay for the manuscript, Angel?”

  “Five hundred dollars,” she said without hesitation.

  “Then consider it sold to Marion, the highest bidder.”

  Kingsley signed over the work to Marion, and in February 1989, his story of life at Stalag Luft III, renamed Bonds of Wire, was published by Collins in Toronto. His daughter Ethel recalled watching Kingsley flip through books at home as if he were speed reading. When she asked him what he’d read, he illustrated chapter and verse how well and how much he had digested, perhaps a skill developed in the North Compound library, skimming German newspapers for information that could be used in forged documents for the escapers.

  “He had the intellect of an encyclopedia,”[7] Ethel (Brown) Alle said.

  In one of his last letters home in January 1945, just before the Germans marched their prisoners out of Stalag Luft III, John “Scruffy” Weir remembered he’d better wish his fiancée, Frances, a happy birthday for the upcoming April, just in case the vagaries of the mail system delayed his best wishes until after the fact.

 
; “Perhaps I’ll be there in time to give you a birthday kiss,”[8] Weir wrote. “I find it impossible to visualize what our reunion is going to be like. But I still dream of it.”

  Almost five months later to the day—June 1945—Hugh Godefroy, Weir’s former squadron mate, got word that Scruffy had been shipped home to Canada and would arrive in Lachine, Quebec, for a formal repatriation ceremony. By the time the RCAF officers arrived at Lachine to be marched into an assembly hall and officially released to their families, Weir’s father and fiancée, Frances McCormack, had travelled up from Toronto. First the repatriation was set for 9 p.m. But thanks to air force protocol, it was postponed and then postponed again.

  “Finally, at two in the morning,”[9] Frances remembered, “John and his crew marched in. John was in the front line, about dead centre and he spotted his father. And I was beside his father. Well, John just walked out of the lineup and came to us. Broke up the whole ceremony.”

  But John Weir’s triumphant return to civilian life in Canada still had a few bumps to endure. After the ceremony, they all hopped into Colonel Weir’s automobile and began the drive to the Godefroy home. Minutes into their trip, they got a flat tire; so while Frances sat in the backseat of the car, John and his father jacked up the car, removed the flat, and replaced it with the spare. It was the middle of the night when the trio reached its destination. And while the rest of the household went to bed, John and Frances sat in the household sunroom and talked the night away. “We never drew a breath all the way home,” Frances said of the train ride back to Toronto. “It was like we were [in Toronto] in a minute.”