The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  Weir had warned his fiancée he didn’t look the same with his eyelids gone, burned in the descent when his Spitfire was shot down four years before.

  “But it didn’t change him as far as I was concerned,” she said. “He never came to terms with it. I didn’t see what he was talking about. We got married October 2, 1945. Love is blind.”[10]

  There were only a few important women in Don McKim’s life. The youngest of three children, Don had grown up on a farm near Lynedoch, in southern Ontario. At age sixteen, Don was told by his father he would be leaving the farm for a job at the Canadian Bank of Commerce. Just before he joined the RCAF late in 1940, he was working at a branch of the bank in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. There he had enjoyed an acquaintance with Doreen Olson, a telephone company employee, but bank employees were not allowed to marry or else they would have to forfeit their jobs. Still, McKim found creative ways to enjoy Olson’s company. On each day she came to the bank to deposit the cash receipts of her telephone company, he always found a way to be the teller who counted her cash.

  “Did you bounce?”[11] McKim always asked her, meaning was the cash amount different from the total on the deposit slip.

  “Yes,” she would generally reply.

  “I’ll count it again after we close,” he’d say. While he confirmed that the cash and deposit slip balanced, they could have a conversation about anything but money.

  After McKim was shot down in December 1942 and introduced to German air force prison camps, he depended on any supplies his mother would send from home. Agnes McKim was a lifeline for her son, sending clothing, dry goods, and letters. Following his liberation and repatriation to England, McKim finally got passage back to Canada aboard a troopship, where he ran into a Canadian Army corporal named Sid Olson. It was Doreen’s brother, who had also been captured during the war and liberated about the same time Don was. And though McKim’s air force officer comrades frowned on it for a while, throughout the trans-Atlantic voyage home when meals were served, Don would always retrieve Sid from his Spartan third-class accommodations onboard the ship and bring him up to the first-class officers’ dining area to eat.

  Home in Ontario again, Don returned to civilian life and to his teller’s wicket at the Canadian Bank of Commerce. He left Doreen Olson behind, as the bank reassigned him to a branch in Binbrook, Ontario (near Hamilton). There, he connected with a previous acquaintance, Grace Crozier. Soon after they began to see each other, she told him the grim coincidence that had occurred during the war.

  “Grace’s husband was in the air force like I was,”[12] McKim said. “When she heard that I was missing in action [in December 1942], she sat down to write a letter to tell her husband Dave [Crozier] who was also overseas. The very moment she was writing that letter, a knock came at her door. A man had arrived to inform her that her husband was also missing. [She learned later] he’d been killed . . .

  “When I got back, I went to see Grace . . . and I married her,” McKim said.

  Former RAF Spitfire pilot and scrounger at Stalag Luft III Keith Ogilvie finished his war near Bremen, where his forced march had ended in March 1945. Like so many air officers during the trek, he’d survived thanks to employing a buddy system with fellow officer Samuel Pepys. Perhaps what had contributed equally to his survival was that a year earlier, on the morning of March 25, 1944, F/L Ogilvie had been the last officer out of tunnel “Harry” to get away from the North Compound. He was probably the hard-arser who’d covered the greatest distance on foot—about forty miles—before being recaptured by German Home Guards near Halbau, Germany.

  Back in England after VE Day, Ogilvie was hospitalized in Gloucester, as much to ensure that fractures in his arm, sustained in July 1941 when his Spitfire was shot down, had healed, as to aid his recovery from the forced march. Nevertheless, during his convalescence, Ogilvie made up for lost time on a number of fronts. He reconnected with a Canadian friend who had worked with the British Ministry of Information censoring the letters of Canadian servicemen, Irene Lockwood.

  As well, Ogilvie filled out the forms to transfer from the RAF to the RCAF. And finally, he met with British Intelligence officers of MI9 to recount his experiences at Görlitz prison following his recapture from the breakout on March 24–25 , 1944. In question was the German assertion that the Commonwealth air officers had been shot while attempting to escape custody and that, at the time, they had been disguised as civilians.

  During the debrief, a British Intelligence official asked Ogilvie to describe what he witnessed on March 29–30, 1944, from his Görlitz cell.

  “I saw [F/L Mike] Casey, [S/L Ian] Cross, [F/L George] Wiley, [F/L Cyril] Swain, and maybe two others [F/O John Pohe and F/O Al Hake] leave handcuffed under the control of civilians,” Ogilvie said. “After this, other parties also left at night usually in fours or sixes.”[13]

  “What clothes were the officers wearing?” the MI9 man asked.

  “They were almost entirely dressed in Air Force uniform. [F/O Denys] Street for instance, had an RAF officer’s tunic with wings, rank, and buttons.”

  “As far as you [are concerned] had they committed any criminal offences?”

  “Absolutely none!”

  F/L Ogilvie returned home to Canada in July 1945 and married Irene Lockwood in the summer of 1946. He dedicated much of his early return to active service in the RCAF, officially welcoming those aircrew members who returned to Canada through the ports of New York, Montreal, and Halifax. He served in the RCAF another eighteen years. He died in Ottawa in May 1998.

  Ogilvie is remembered largely for his DFC, his eight damaged or destroyed victories as a fighter pilot, and his nearly quarter century of service in the air force. Equally important in the story of the Great Escape, however, was that account given to MI9 . Based, in part, on Ogilvie’s specific recounting of events on March 30 at Görlitz prison, Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Scharpwinkel of the Gestapo and Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux were found to be complicit in the murders of the Commonwealth officers at Halbau and found guilty (in absentia) during the war crimes trials in 1947–48. Scharpwinkel was traced to a prison in the Soviet Union in 1946, and interviewed by Capt. M. F. Cornish of British Intelligence. The Gestapo chief at Breslau never faced trial at Hamburg, but died in a Moscow prison in 1947. Lux died during the advance of the Soviet Army at Breslau in 1944. Ogilvie had at least helped to deliver the promise that the British Foreign Minister had made in June 1944.

  “These foul criminals,” Anthony Eden had said, “will be brought to exemplary justice.”[14]

  The fifty murdered air force officers weighed heavily on Wally Floody’s mind for a long time afterward. Perhaps the impact of those bad memories took away Floody’s impulse to speak about the escape and its aftermath for many years. Unlike other kriegies, Floody the Tunnel King wasn’t liberated until the end of May 1945, when the Soviets exchanged him for Russian POWs the Americans had liberated. Floody had spent his twenty-seventh birthday, April 28, awaiting his freedom. He missed VE Day in England. He was just as glad to get home and leave the war and its experiences behind. Indeed, a year later, when his first son was born, Wally learned he was to receive the Order of the British Empire.

  “Flight Lieutenant Floody . . . became one of the leading organizers and most indefatigable workers in the tunnels themselves,” the OBE citation read. “Time and time again, projects were started and discovered by the Germans, but despite all dangers and difficulties, Floody persisted, showing a marked degree of courage and devotion to duty.”[15]

  The announcement put Floody in the spotlight. Reporters wanted his story again and again. Buckingham Palace wanted him to come to London for the OBE investiture. As far as he was concerned, however, he didn’t deserve the fuss. He never considered his tunnel designing and digging heroic. He turned the invitation down and attended to his chartered air service based on the islands along the Toronto waterfront instead. Eventually, Floody abandoned the flying business altogether.

  “I can still se
e their faces,”[16] Floody told reporters years later, “especially the six Canadians. The Gestapo and SS took the fifty out, two by two and . . . dispatched them with shots in the back of the head.”

  During the time of the trials of those complicit in the murders of the fifty officers, Floody happened to be employed as a marketing manager and living in Britain. There he reconnected with Wings Day, who, after the Great Escape, had been recaptured and thrown into the Sachenhausen concentration camp. The two ex-POW comrades watched with fascination as the work of S/L F. P. McKenna and the RAF Special Investigation Branch yielded convictions of the Gestapo gunmen during trials at Hamburg in 1947 and 1948. Floody steadfastly refused to talk about his memories, even when Paul Brickhill’s book, The Great Escape, was published in 1951. It took another decade before Floody felt comfortable enough to openly reflect on events at Stalag Luft III.

  A phone call from moviemaker John Sturges came when Floody was in the right frame of mind. The Hollywood director requested Floody’s expertise as a technical advisor during the shooting of his $4-million feature film, The Great Escape, in the spring and summer of 1962. Then in his mid-forties, Floody visited the set at Geiselgasteig, in Bavaria near Munich. Initially for two weeks, he offered his impressions and suggestions on many aspects of the production—the way the Commonwealth officers’ uniforms should look, how the underground air pump worked, and in particular the way set designers had reconstructed the tunnel “Harry” for the digging and escaping scenes. At one point, before the filming began, Floody was asked to crawl into the tunnel replica. He noted it had a little too much room, so the production designer lowered the tunnel ceiling to make it believably claustrophobic. Just before Wally and Betty Floody left the film location, they enjoyed a dinner with some members of the production crew, who wondered about the production’s authenticity.

  “I know you’re getting everything right,” Floody said, “because I had terrible nightmares last night.”[17]

  The Great Escape opened in the summer of 1963. Its Canadian premiere in Toronto on July 3 featured a march past by an RCAF band, and attendance by the Ontario lieutenant governor and as many former kriegies as Wally Floody could contact. As well as initiating a successful summer of box office receipts in Canada, the opening netted $10,000 for the RCAF Ex-Prisoner of War Association. Wally Floody regularly participated in POW reunions and memorials in Canada and abroad. One in Toronto in 1970 reunited not only ex-kriegies, but also Hermann Glemnitz, the former staff sergeant at Stalag Luft III. As Floody posed for a Globe and Mail photographer with Glemnitz, the two men offered an exchange for reporter Arthur Moses.

  “I didn’t know anything about any tunnels,”[18] Floody grinned.

  “Come on, Floody,” the former German guard said, “I won’t put you in the cooler now.”

  George Sweanor never fully endorsed the tunnel escape plan. Nor did he feel comfortable with Roger Bushell’s confrontational strategy when dealing with the Luftwaffe guards at Stalag Luft III. Nevertheless, he co-operated fully with every demand the escape committee made of him. Almost from the day the North Compound became home to two thousand Commonwealth flyers, in April 1943, Sweanor had committed to serving X Organization as a duty pilot, making note of everyone who entered or exited the main gate. In addition to those security duties, he had also served as a penguin, dispersing his share of excavated sand, and as a stooge, spying on the ferrets who were spying on the prisoners. As much as anybody else inside the wire, Sweanor felt motivated to get home, where his wife, Joan, and the daughter he’d never seen awaited his return. However, when it came time to draw numbers for the order of escape down tunnel “Harry,” George Sweanor had refused to enter his name.

  “I was all for it initially,” he said. “You were a member of the military. You were expected to carry on degrading the enemy’s ability to make war, and escaping would be . . . degrading their manpower.”[19]

  But somewhere between his drive for survival and his conception of trekking through hundreds of miles of enemy-occupied territory back to England, Sweanor discovered a reality that shaped his days of captivity and the rest of his life. Aside from the obvious confinement, surveillance, and deprivation he experienced at the Luftwaffe prison camp near Sagan, Poland, he came to believe that his existence inside the wire had had a lasting intellectual impact on him too.

  “I consider Stalag Luft III my alma mater,”[20] Sweanor said. “With years to discuss life with intelligent aircrew from well over a score of countries, and with interaction with the enemy, it was evident that people are people—good, bad, and indifferent—in every culture.”[21]

  With the help of textbooks that were specially imported from Canadian universities, Sweanor upgraded his education with a political science course. In the library he read newspapers the Luftwaffe regularly supplied because their content endorsed the German position in the war. Together with the BBC broadcast content passed along by the kriegies operating the wireless radio hidden inside the compound, the library books and magazines helped fill in gaps that his wartime imprisonment had created.

  “We knew much more about the war than the people who were still fighting it,” he wrote.

  And while it was a chore, he dutifully attended German language class, in part to be conversationally capable should the need arise, but mostly for the discipline of attending and learning. He participated as actively in sports in the prison compound as he would have at a Canadian university; he realized, if nothing else, that the physical exertion maintained fitness and health when the lack of adequate nutrition sometimes did not. And while he only assisted in the functioning of the North Compound theatre peripherally, helping out with set construction once in a while, Sweanor felt the regular weekly drama and musical productions constantly boosted the kriegies’ morale.

  George Sweanor also took up the pencil and paper while imprisoned at Stalag Luft III. As with so many other rituals developed inside the wire, writing became a daily habit he has continued throughout his life. When the first edition of his memoirs, It’s All Pensionable Time: Twenty-five Years in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was published in 1967, fully two-thirds of the book’s content was drawn from notes on his experience at Stalag Luft III. And in the years following the war, when he continued to serve in the RCAF—in Interim Force, the Arctic, the Korean Airlift, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, and NORAD at Colorado Springs—he never stopped writing his observations and thoughts. Preparing his journal for publication, assembling articles for periodicals, and composing notes for speeches, he downplayed as “verbal diarrhea,” but as of 2013, George Sweanor, age ninety-three, continues to prepare the monthly newsletter of 971 Air Marshal Slemon Wing of the RCAF Association, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His sign-off is a regular feature of the publication: “Ye Olde Scribe.”

  Richard Bartlett’s landing back in England proved nearly as bumpy as his crash landing in Trondheim, five years before, during the Allied defeat in Norway. After hiding “the canary,” the radio that brought BBC broadcasts to the POWs, Bartlett then survived the forced march to Lübeck and was liberated that first week of May 1945. But as had become the routine on arrival in the UK, ex-kriegie Bartlett had his uniform virtually stripped from him and his body subjected to repeated delousing showers. When Sub Lieutenant Bartlett emerged from the final medical and debugging sessions, he did not receive the appropriate Fleet Air Arm uniform he required, but a British Army uniform instead. Nevertheless, the RAF put him on a plane with three other Royal Navy personnel and sent ahead a message to Portsmouth to the effect that four naval POWs were en route and transport had to be arranged. The Portsmouth officer in charge misinterpreted the note and sent a paddy wagon to meet “the prisoners.” To add to the insult, Bartlett soon learned British authorities had shipped all his uniforms and kit to his family’s Canadian home in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan.

  Bartlett arrived at the Royal Navy air station at Lea-On-Solent in southern England on the eve of VE Day with no uniform, no back
pay, and no access to the victory celebrations about to begin all over the UK. Not unaccustomed to scrounging and making do, however, Bartlett liberated a white shirt, collar, and tie that substituted for his navy whites and he joined the party suitably dressed anyway. Next, Bartlett wondered if he might be allowed to get to Canada. He learned he was entitled to three months leave, but the rules blocked his way home.

  “Royal Navy personnel are not allowed to take foreign leave in wartime,” the regulations stipulated.

  As it turned out, there was a way around that barrier too. Bartlett’s commanding officer simply arranged to have him posted to Northern Ireland. With Royal Canadian Navy ships regularly passing through the port of Londonderry, his CO surmised that with his “on the job training in escape and evasion,” Bartlett would have no trouble getting aboard a westbound ship. Indeed, he hitched a ride with a North Atlantic convoy corvette and several days later landed in Halifax. He was nearly stopped with insufficient domestic currency in his pocket, did a quick exchange with a stranger, and bought train fare to Regina en route to being reunited with his family in Fort Qu’Appelle.

  But that ended Richard Bartlett’s career path of dipping and dodging, since by summer’s end he was back on station in the UK, ready for his next assignment with Fleet Air Arm. The Allies had secured victory in Europe and it would soon be theirs in the Pacific as well. Bartlett received his full lieutenant commission in addition to a transfer to the Royal Canadian Navy, and in early 1946 he joined the squadron serving aboard carrier HMCS Warrior. By 1947, he had married Margaret Falconer and assumed peacetime command of the Firefly squadron. It didn’t seem to matter. In spite of his exemplary career in the RCN—from 1946 to 1964—he couldn’t seem to shake his kriegie past nor the interest from family and friends about his imprisonment at Stalag Luft III. In 1992, Dick and Margaret Bartlett attended the Remembrance Day assembly where their grandson, Nick Dumonceaux, attended elementary school. During the observance, the students were asked if their grandparents had fought in the Second World War. Seven-year-old Nick gladly went to the microphone.