by Barris, Ted
“My grandfather spent the war in jail,”[22] he announced proudly.
Both the assembly and his grandparents got quite a chuckle out of Nick’s perception of Dick Bartlett’s POW time from 1940 to 1945. But the youngster grew up to understand his grandfather’s war and, in a world that offered more than a microphone to express himself, in 2011, after his grandfather had died, a twenty-six-year-old Nick Dumonceaux posted a tribute on his Facebook page.
“You are the reason I am here today,” the post said. “You gave so much and never asked anything in return. You were a part of what made this country great and we will never forget.”
It took just as long for Frank Sorensen’s three children to understand his Stalag Luft III experience. They were all at least young adults before the real story of their father’s Second World War air force record—his training in the BCATP, his propaganda speech from England to the Danish Resistance on Radio Free Europe in 1942 , his posting with RAF 232 Squadron to North Africa, his victories over the Tunisian desert, then being shot down in 1943, and his eventual participation as a language specialist in the Great Escape—all came to light. The three Sorensen children were born within a dozen years of the end of the war: Glenn in 1948, Stephen in 1950, and Vicki in 1957. All they knew was that their dad was a successful dentist married to Betty Bodley, a former schoolteacher. But that was the Frank Sorensen whom most knew outside his Kingston, Ontario, home.
Inside their home, the three Sorensen kids never went without, but they came to know a father who had a short fuse (sometimes sparked by his weekend drinking) and who seemed haunted by something or someone. At night Glenn, Stephen, and Vicki all recalled their parents suddenly shouting—their father screaming at demons of some sort, their mother trying to wake him with the assurance he was safely in bed in his own home. The three children were specifically told never to stand in a doorway where their father slept because he might suddenly attack the silhouette by kicking the door closed without realizing a family member was standing there.
“Things got worse as we all grew up,”[23] Stephen said. “Glenn and I [had bedrooms] in the basement. We could hear all the fighting and bickering through the basement wall. Vicki was literally across the narrow hallway next to my parents’ bedroom.”
“I asked my mom, ‘Why did you stay [with him]?’”[24] Vicki said. “And she told me with the veterans returning from the war . . . all the women knew they would be traumatized, but they had a sort of unspoken pact, that they were going to stand by them no matter what.”
“When I was a teen,”[25] Glenn said, “to suggest that [my dad] get psychiatric help would be admitting he had problems. . . . It was never really addressed throughout his lifetime.”
In school in the late 1950s, Stephen read Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse, the fictionalized version of his own escape, with Michael Codner and Oliver Philpot, from Stalag Luft III in 1943. Then, when The Great Escape Hollywood movie was released, Frank Sorensen took Stephen to see it at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, just the two of them. Little by little, Frank began to share some of his own Great Escape remembrances with his two sons—the food he ate, his work as a penguin dispersing sand, teaching Roger Bushell conversational Danish on the circuit, even the horrors of the forced march in the winter of 1945. The boys eventually learned about their father’s extraordinary athleticism at Stalag Luft III, such that he could throw a golf ball farther than almost every other kriegie in the North Compound.
“[Dad] was very thin at the end of the war,” Stephen said. “When he got out [of the service,] he started lifting weights, building his body back. There are pictures in which he looked nicely chiselled and cut. But my mother never had any interest . . . in his physique. He would say, ‘I married the wrong woman. She didn’t appreciate it when I started putting muscles back on.’”
In some respects it took a discovery after Vicki’s father died to put him, his wartime past, and his postwar life of torment into focus for her. Like her brothers, Vicki had absorbed the passed-down stories about her father’s career as a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war, but she said it was all a bit like watching a sub-title without any detail. Then, late in 2010, she gained access to some photographs of her father in the air force and the letters exchanged between her father and family members while he was a POW at Stalag Luft III.
“[From his letters] I learned . . . he was keen. He wanted to serve his country. . . . One of his greatest fears was not being posted overseas. He never complained about doing what was asked of him. He was fearless.”
Since reading the correspondence and viewing the photos, Vicki Sorensen has willingly dedicated countless hours on the phone, on the internet, and on her own time to discovering as much about her father’s role in the Great Escape as she can. She methodically contacts other former kriegies or their families all over the world in pursuit of any details about her father’s time in the prison camp. Perhaps what motivates her most is a drive to understand Frank Sorensen’s decision to trade his position on the escape list; since she surmises her father gave his spot to either James Catanach or Arnold Christensen (both shot by the Gestapo), she believes that the demons he experienced came from knowing he survived and they did not.
“My father never let go of the guilt, saying, ‘That should have been me,’” she said. “My father never got over the execution of the fifty. . . . A good friend of his told me when he was visiting, my father showed him the Tunnel Martyrs memorial picture and said, ‘These were my buddies. They’re all gone.’”
Family correspondence continues to shed light on the silent battle that Frank Sorensen waged as his wife and children struggled to understand him. Among the passages Vicki Sorensen turns to for explanation and comfort is her grandfather’s assessment of Frank at an early reunion as the war was ending.
“There he was tall and smiling,” her grandfather noted in his diary. “He was in his battledress with a kitbag under his arm, thin and tanned. We had lunch and got out for the table some of the things we have been saving up just for this occasion. His appetite is not great, but it is growing. He needs building up. His spirits are rising and he has improved much . . .”
A final observation from Vicki’s Uncle Ben about his brother concluded that “after the war Frank was . . . without his former zest for life. He suffered [from] post-traumatic stress syndrome, which in my opinion affected the change in Frank from his youthful exuberance to essentially an unhappy life and old age.”
As she grew up in London, Ontario, in the 1960s, Barbara Edy recognized her father Don Edy had two careers. She knew he was involved in business, earning a living, paying the bills, and raising a family. But her dad had also devoted plenty of time to an equally important avocation—getting his wartime memories off his chest and down on paper. The resulting book, called Goon in the Block, was published in 1961 and it recounted Don’s experiences inside Stalag Luft III from his arrival there in November 1943 until the kriegies were marched out of the compound and across Germany in the winter of 1945. When The Great Escape movie hit the theatres in 1963 , for the first time in her life, Barbara could see (even if distorted by Hollywood fabrication) “a visual perspective”[26] of her father’s war inside German prison wire.
Unlike the children of other kriegies, who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk about their POW experiences, Barbara and her four older siblings grew up hearing about Stalag Luft III as told and written by their father. Not only did he record the events with precision, Barbara noted that he told the stories with the flair of a raconteur. What’s more, word of Goon in the Block had spread and more than just Don Edy’s family members wanted to read it; but there weren’t any more copies of the book around and Don had no interest in a reprint. That’s when Barbara sensed he was passing the torch. She felt compelled to help her father stay in touch with his wartime comrades at the same time she wanted and keep his stories in circulation among historians and journalists. She became Don’s “information gal.” More than that, her work beca
me a personal crusade.
“The families and offspring of the kriegies all express the same sentiment,” Barbara said, “to carry on the memory of not only the fifty [escapers] whom Hitler ordered murdered, but, as well, the two hundred, huddled in Hut 104 waiting their turn to escape, the hundreds [of others] who assisted, and all the men of Stalag Luft III and its famous, proud, spectacular distraction to create havoc in the midst of Germany’s war effort.”[27]
Via correspondence and personal contact, Barbara has built a rapport with ex-kriegies and their children in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, and Canada. In 2012 she and her sister Jane Hughes helped to recover and restore a collection of published photographs originally compiled in a book of remembrances and reflections, called Wire Bound World, to redistribute to other survivors of Stalag Luft III. Then, through a series of emails, she initiated an internet exchange of information called The Beginning of List 200, designed to pool stories, images, biographies, and communications about the two hundred men on the original escape list.
Along the way, like other kriegie offspring, Barbara believes she has learned how that “proud, spectacular distraction” succeeded in binding her dad and the rest of the Commonwealth flyers together, and why that common bond made the events leading up to March 24–25 , 1944, so significant. Just as bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III forger Tony Pengelly had deduced when he was first imprisoned at Barth in 1940, that “we would have to organize to be successful,”[28] Barbara Edy concluded that none of the kriegies’ accomplishments at Stalag Luft III would have been possible without that large group of captives working together as one.
“The Great Escape would not have been possible,” she said, “save for the absolute co-operation from over a thousand POWs’ non-stop secrecy, vigilance, persuasion, distraction, cunning, bravery, spirit, and talent.”[29]
David Pengelly was three years old in 1938 when his older brother left the family home in Weston, Ontario. At eighteen, Tony Pengelly couldn’t vacate the household fast enough. He had not enjoyed a close relationship with his father, besides which, he had his heart set on a career in the Royal Air Force whether his father endorsed his decision or not. A few weeks later, the older Pengelly son stepped off a cattle boat in the UK and was quickly accepted into RAF training, which had him flying combat operations in Bomber Command from the first week of the war in September 1939. Periodically, Tony sent mementos to his little brother, the first being a picture postcard depicting a Fairey Battle bomber. Tony had addressed the card “To Liney,” since Lionel was David’s middle name. He cherished the card. On David’s fifth birthday, just a few months before F/L Tony Pengelly and his Whitley bomber crew were shot down over Germany, David received a Dinky toy model of a Whitley in the mail.
“From the time I was five,” David Pengelly said, “I adored the thought of my brother. Spitfire and bomber pilots were like rock stars or astronauts flying these wonderful machines.”[30]
In July 1945, Tony Pengelly, former flight lieutenant and forgery chief at Stalag Luft III, came home to Canada. The family made plans to help Tony decompress on Pengelly Island, a one-acre rock outcropping on Sawyer Lake in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario. There was no electricity on the island, nor indoor plumbing, just a family cottage accessible only by boat. With limited accommodation inside the cottage, David and Tony were encouraged to camp outside in a tent. The first night alone together, older brother regaled younger brother with some of his wartime yarns. Then, the boys’ mother prepared a meal with all of Tony’s favourites—roast beef, corn-on-the-cob, and fruit pies—and watched the former kriegie dig into his first home-cooked meal since he’d left Weston in 1938.
“Do you have a little more?”[31] Tony asked when he’d finished his first portion.
“Sure! Sure!” his family all said. And he dove into a second portion and a third until he couldn’t eat another mouthful.
“There’s two or three cobs of corn left,” Tony noticed. “What’s going to happen to those?”
“Oh well, they’ll be cold,” his mother said. “We’ll just throw them out.”
“Don’t do that. I’ll have them for breakfast,” Tony insisted. And he promised he’d do the same with the beef and the pies.
Mementos that prisoners of war brought home were few and far between. Any personal items Tony Pengelly may have carried with him when he was shot down on November 14, 1940, were destroyed in the crash of his Whitley bomber or confiscated during questioning by Luftwaffe interrogators as they processed him for imprisonment in Germany and later Poland. And since he became one of X Organization’s principal forgers, Pengelly would have shown or shared very few of his possessions publicly inside the compound either. In other words, despite helping to win the war, Pengelly had little to show for it outside of service medals and replenished air force insignia. Consequently, when he married and had his own children, Tony came to his younger brother David for a favour.
“Do you still have that Whitley [Dinky toy] I sent you?” he asked.
“Of course,” David told him. It was the favourite memento from his big brother’s service overseas as a bomber pilot during the war.
“Can I have it for a while? I’d like my kids to see it,” Tony said.
David agreed to loan it, but then never saw it again. Some of the other keepsakes that Tony did manage to salvage from his time at Stalag Luft III ended up in a small briefcase passed down to his son, Chris Pengelly. A few RAF certificates, diagrams, letters, newspaper clippings, and photographs of Tony posing in a group in front of barracks huts or on stage at the North Compound theatre survived in the leather case. Of his father’s role in the Great Escape, Chris Pengelly knew just a little. His father had shared more with his Uncle David than with him. Chris was a teenager in 1963 when The Great Escape was released; his mother Pauline reported the movie disrupted Tony’s sleep with recurring nightmares. In contrast, when the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes—depicting life in a mythical German POW camp—appeared on television between 1965 and 1971, Chris recalled that his parents loved the series.
“They watched it all the time,”[32] Chris Pengelly emphasized. “He laughed so hard each time [the farcical German Sergeant Schultz] said, ‘I see nothing. I hear nothing.’ He considered it very funny, but quite realistic. You don’t get shot down and say, ‘Oh, I’ll just take my digital camera with me.’ He knew they had to make things from scratch and bribe the guards for things like the camera . . .
“The Great Escape movie gave him nightmares,” Chris said finally. “The TV show let him laugh about it.”
Very little of the North Compound that the six hundred Canadians knew from 1943 to 1945 exists intact today. On the actual site, just outside the town of Zagan (the Polish spelling of Sagan), the double fencing is gone. So are the watchtowers, the Vorlager, and any above-ground evidence of the cook house, the theatre, or the fifteen barracks huts. All gone. Only concrete pads and some masonry walls remain the way they were when the Commonwealth kriegies were transferred there from the East Compound in the middle of the war. The rest of the former prison camp, the forest and weeds have pretty much reclaimed. Periodically, Polish groundskeepers chop back the brush that pokes through the bricks of the fire pool or the theatre foundation so that visitors passing through each summer can get an idea of what they once looked like.
At the northern edge of the property, a walkway of crushed stone with wooden borders, twenty inches wide, runs 336 feet north-south the full length that tunnel “Harry” did—from the concrete pad where Hut 104 stood to the approximate exit hole just shy of the woods. At the edge of that same pine forest (that stands very much as it did during the war) are sun-faded commemorative plaques. Near the end of the walkway nearest Hut 104 rests a series of flat stone markers with the names of the fifty executed air force officers engraved on them. The markers include the names of Hank Birkland, Gordon Kidder, Pat Langford, George McGill, James Wernham, and George Wiley—the Canadians murdered after the breakout.
To their credit, the volunteers at the Museum of Allied Forces Prisoners of War Martyrdom periodically welcome groups of tourists, school children, and some of the kriegie offspring who occasionally stop to explore and imagine on their own. West of the former prison compound, at the museum site, a replica of Hut 104 gives visitors an approximation of the Commonwealth air officers’ barracks experience. There’s a stove (like the original that covered the trap to tunnel “Harry”) sitting in the appropriate corner of Room 23, as well as bunk beds, a dining area, and the “To All Prisoners of War! The escape from prison camps is no longer a sport!” propaganda poster tacked on the hut wall after the Great Escape. A nearby pavilion contains a small library and an exhibit room. Out in front of the pavilion, a reproduced watchtower lords over a stretch of tunnel containing replica bed boards, trolley, and tracks. This is a facsimile of about fifty feet of “Harry” constructed a few feet down and covered in a see-through plastic ceiling. The replica gives a false sense of accessibility and ease of passage.
Nowhere on the old compound property nor among the museum exhibits can visitors experience the claustrophobia that tunnel designer Wally Floody and diggers John Weir and Hank Birkland knew underground . . . or realize the audacity and skill of scroungers Barry Davidson, Joe Noble, and Keith Ogilvie . . . or recognize the volume of intelligence Kingsley Brown amassed for Dean and Dawson . . . or appreciate the precision of Tony Pengelly’s work forging documents and performing female roles on the theatre stage . . . or witness the speed with which trapführer Pat Langford opened and closed the entrance to “Harry” each day it moved the kriegies closer to a shot at freedom . . . or hear the conversation basics that language trainers Gordon Kidder and Frank Sorensen gave potential escapers . . . or comprehend the nerve that security men George McGill, George Sweanor, and Dick Bartlett exhibited to protect the escape committee’s greatest secrets . . . or understand the efficiency of the penguins, stooges, and duty pilots all running interference at the camp their German captors described as “escape proof” . . . or feel the helplessness the six Canadians murdered by the Gestapo must have known in their last moments.
