The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  The following day, she brought food and, after 26 of the Allied servicemen had assembled, under the cover of darkness Le Calvez and another guide led them toward La Maison d’Alphonse. Woodhouse experienced some anxious moments, first in the minefield and then while moving along a sunken road when a German patrol unexpectedly appeared above them, which prompted Le Calvez to order the men to scatter. But he was amazed at her grasp of the topography when, in total darkness and after reassembling the group, she led them on a 200-foot course through rough cliffs down to Bonaparte Beach. There, Lucien Dumais handed Woodhouse and another man each a thermos flask filled with brandy—and copies of his action report telling them that if they were intercepted at sea, they “were to throw them overboard and let them sink.” Neither Dumais nor Woodhouse ever realized that they were countrymen. After long minutes of waiting, Woodhouse realized that the little surfboat that would ferry them to the PT-like fast boat was near when, through the sound of the waves lapping the Breton shore, they heard the swishing of muffled oars and then the soft voice of their guardian angel whispering last instructions to the men. The first group silently climbed onto the boat as soon as the crates of weapons and money were unloaded.170

  As he waited anxiously below deck for the second group of men, including Barnlund, to be taken off the beach, Woodhouse marvelled at the sailors who rowed through the minefield in the dark.

  24–25 MARCH 1944, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  Had Hermann Glemnitz not sensed something big was coming, Wally Floody would have been among the first to climb out of “Harry.” In late February, however, Glemnitz shipped him, Kingsley Brown and 17 other men to a satellite camp. Therefore, the first man to climb out of the tunnel onto the snow-covered ground was RAF Flying Officer Johnny Bull, who had been shot down just over four years earlier.

  Hollywood’s The Great Escape takes more than a few liberties with the facts, but it gets right that, instead of making a run for it, Bull immediately climbed back into the shaft and told Roger Bushell that Harry had emerged from the ground 25 feet short of the wood that was to give the escapers cover, a mere 25 yards from a goon box and inside the perimeter walked by the guards.171 With more than 100 men in the tunnel behind them or in Hut 104 ready to climb into it, the decision on whether to go ahead with the break had to be made quickly and turned on the fact that their travel passes and other papers were stamped 25 March 1944. To lessen the chance of the escapers being spotted as they climbed from the 336-foot-long tunnel, a controller who, like the controllers in the tunnel, signalled via a rope when it was safe to move forward, stood behind a fence that hid him from the nearby perimeter guards.

  By the time Tommy Thompson climbed out into the pre-dawn darkness and dashed to the pine trees half a football field’s distance away, six other Canadians had already begun their home runs. One, RCAF Flight Lieutenant William Cameron, immediately preceded Thompson and was his escape partner. Neither they nor the 46 men between them and the group ahead would have got anywhere had RCAF Spitfire pilot Hank Birkland, who was serving as a stationer in the tunnel, not jumped into action when he saw the tunnel collapse around RAF Squadron Leader Thomas G. Kirby-Green, on the trolley being hauled forward. It took Birkland, working in total darkness, about an hour to dig out Kirby-Green and clear and reshore Harry. Dozens of men, including at least four RCAF officers, owed their chance at freedom to another Canadian Flight Lieutenant, George McGill, who upon reaching the wood served as a controller, signalling when the sentry had passed the escape point. Sometime before he was replaced at 4 a.m., McGill froze when one of the sentries stepped into the gap of trees beyond which he was secreted. The sentry unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself before continuing his post.

  Thompson and Cameron stepped into the chilled early morning air near 5 a.m., not knowing that the strengthening light of dawn had prompted the decision to halt the escape stream at number 87. As Thompson and Cameron cleared the wood, back at the shaft, Ottawa-born and -bred RAF Pilot Officer Keith Ogilvie climbed out of the tunnel. A moment later, he and several other escapers took to their heels as a guard who had just noticed several escapers lying face down in the slush as they awaited the rope-borne signal fired his rifle; thanks to another escaper who jumped up and yelled “Nicht schieβen!”—Don’t shoot!—the guard shot wildly.172

  As other guards came running and the alarm went out to the surrounding area and, ultimately, the entire Reich, the escapers tried to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the camp. Even before Birkland climbed out of the tunnel, Flight Lieutenant Gordon A. Kidder and his escape partner, Kirby-Green, had reached the Sagan train station, having walked by the town’s great fountain. In the cavernous station, Kirby-Green’s broken Spanish (and weak German) aroused a woman’s suspicions but was enough to convince the policeman she called over that they were indeed Spanish workers. At 1 a.m. they boarded a train for Breslau.

  James Wernham and the other 11 men in his escape group had a longer walk and wait. Knowing that the sudden arrival at the Sagan train station of a number of dishevelled men speaking poor German would trigger an alarm, Polish-born flight lieutenant Jerzy Mondschein led the group toward another station southeast of the camp. The ticket agent’s consternation when Mondschein asked for a dozen tickets to Boberröhrsdorf (then in Germany but now in present-day southeast Poland) caused a few anxious moments for the escapers, who studiedly looked nonchalant. By the time they boarded their train at 6 a.m., a machine-gun-equipped squad had descended on Hut 104 and the guards were pulling the rest of the would-be escapers from Harry.

  The men arrested in the tunnel and in Hut 104 expected the harangue from the Kommandant, who, after all, would have to explain to Berlin how the Kriegies had dug yet another tunnel through which more than 80 men had escaped. Thanks to a few unsupervised moments in the Kommandant’s office that, a few days earlier, allowed a POW to rifle through the open safe, the Escape Committee knew the gist of the 4 March Aktion Kugel, Hitler’s Bullet Decree stating that escaped POWs were to be turned over to the Gestapo.173 From suborned guards, the POWs also knew that this did not apply to British and American POWs. Thus, even after the arrests began, the Kriegies were not overly alarmed; according to RAF Flight Lieutenant Tim Walenn, “The Germans would never be so unsporting as to shoot prisoners in cold blood.”174

  A year earlier, Walenn would have been correct. But March 1944 was not March 1943. Since then, Italy had dropped out of the war, the Germans had been driven from North Africa and the Russians had pushed the Nazis out of the eastern Ukraine and Belarus (Belorussia). During the last week of February, American, British and Canadian bombers flew almost 7,000 sorties, bombing more than dozens of cities and factory complexes. Berlin was bombed four days in March, the bombing on the night of the 24th explaining Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel’s bad mood at a mid-morning meeting on the 25th. Keitel, who commanded the Wehrmacht, had not planned to bring up the escape. However, Hitler’s satraps constantly angled to wound one another in order to seize more power for themselves. Accordingly, near the end of the meeting, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler raised what he called, with devastating understatement, “Ein kleiner Punkt,” that there had been “another escape from the prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan.” The “small point” quickly grew in importance: first to the fact that “upward of 70 air force officers” had escaped and then to the prediction that “we will have to mobilize 70,000 auxiliaries to deal with the matter.”175

  Hitler exploded in anger. “These officers are an enormous danger. You don’t realize that in view of the six million foreign people who are prisoners and workers in Germany, they are the leaders who could organize an uprising!” After catching his breath, the Führer continued in a way most congenial to the SS chief, whose secret police had long clashed with Abwehr, the army’s intelligence service. “The escaped air officers are to be turned over to Himmler.”

  Knowing that the Bullet Decree exempted British and American P
OWs, Keitel tried to object, which only fanned the flames of the dictator’s ire. “They are all to be shot! All of them—they will not trouble us again!” Himmler, who had overseen the killing of millions in the east and in concentration camps, was not the slightest bit averse to shedding innocent blood but quickly moved to modify Hitler’s position. His stated argument, that shooting all of the escapers “would do harm to our relations with the neutral countries” is hard to credit; what exactly would Spain, Sweden or Hungary do about a few more executions? Rather, it seems as if he raised the point merely to give Hitler the opportunity to continue venting his spleen. “More than half then!” Knowing well Hitler’s lack of interest in the mechanics of his own orders, Himmler seized the moment: “Perhaps fifty would be a suitable number,” he said. When the Nazi leader did not object, Himmler added, “Very well, I shall contact my deputy [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner and have him draft an order.”176

  26 MARCH 1944, NEAR SAGAN, POLAND

  ,!CAMERON’S HALLUCINATIONS CUT SHORT HIS GROUP’S HOME RUN

  As Kidder and Kirby-Green boarded a train for Breslau, where they changed trains for Czechoslovakia—their goal being to reach Yugoslavia—and Wernham’s party of 12 travelled toward the town of Hirschberg, Cameron and Thompson began walking through the forest. At one point, they saw that they were being followed, but when the followers did not start shooting or come running, they realized that the two men were also escapers: RAF Flight Lieutenants Brian Evans and Chaz Hall. Near 4 a.m. on the 26th, the four cold and wet men took shelter in a barn’s hayloft. When Cameron started shaking and talking to himself, the others realized he was hallucinating.

  Cameron’s crisis forced the men’s gut-wrenching decision to turn themselves in. Given the number of troops and police searching for them and how close they were to Sagan, the escapers were surprised that they could not find anyone to whom they could surrender. In the end, they left the door to the barn open so that the farmer would find Cameron, and slipped away.

  Late in the day, while trying to find a freight train to hop, Thompson, Evans and Hall were arrested outside a nearby village. When the Home Guard brought the three to an inn to await transfer to the prison in Sagan, Keith Ogilvie, who had been arrested by a pistol-wielding civilian, was already there. The Canadian made no sign of knowing them, and they did not acknowledge him. Thompson, who yearned to escape because he did not feel that he had pulled his “weight in this war, getting bounced in the first week,” tried arguing that he was a French worker making his way home; his Penetanguishene, Ontario, French made for a less than convincing performance.177

  Cruelly, given the frigid winters he had faced walking to school in Spearhill, Manitoba, Birkland was undone by the cold and waist-deep snow he and two other men waded through that afternoon of the 26th. Like Cameron, he became delirious and started talking to himself. Whatever hope he and the others may have had about the farm family that lived in the house they made their way to evaporated when the door they knocked upon opened to reveal four German soldiers.

  29 MARCH 1944, GÖRLITZ, GERMANY

  TOMMY THOMPSON DROPS HERMANN GöRING’S NAME

  The Canadians and 13 other escapees caught near Stalag Luft III spent a day in Sagan’s prison before being transferred to the prison in Görlitz 50 miles southwest of Sagan. Meanwhile, the dragnet captured more escapees, including Pat Langford and George Wiley, and the Gestapo readied to carry out Himmler’s orders. Kaltenbrunner sent a teletype to every Gestapo district office in Germany, which, after taking the opportunity to rub Keitel’s face in it for a larger audience, relayed the order that 50 of the escapers or almost 60 per cent of them were to be executed instead of being returned to prisoner-of-war camps.

  Surprisingly, only two escapers, Kidder and Kirby-Green, captured as they neared Austria, were tortured before being killed. Germany was in violation of Geneva by holding captured POWs in the civilian prison in Görlitz, but what bothered the men more was the boredom. Hall gave the others in his cell, including Ogilvie, a few laughs by writing on the wall the famed line spoken by gladiators to the Caesars before the games began: “Morituri te salutamus”—We who are about to die salute you. Nor did every interrogation seem all that threatening. RAF Flight Lieutenant T.R. Nelson recalled being held in a room that could have been the setting for a bad film, complete with a bright light shining on him and the strong smell of Gauloises cigarettes—though there were some tense moments and the mention of a concentration camp after his interrogator jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Nelson was Jewish because his mother’s name was Rebecca. Others, however, returned to their cells with more troubling stories. Wiley was told that he would not survive to see his parents.

  Thompson responded, “I don’t care who you are. I’m still protected by the Geneva Convention” after his interrogator told him, “You are not in the hands of military authorities…. Anything might happen to you without that [Geneva] protection—you might never go back to the camp.” The Gestapo agent’s chuckle prompted Thompson to play his best card. “Well I don’t think that Göring would be very happy if anything happened to me. We met once, you know, back in 1939.”178

  Göring was no longer the force he had been in September 1939. The populace now openly ridiculed his Luftwaffe for its inability to prevent Allied bombing raids. Furthermore, the agent knew that, since the Gestapo had been tasked with dealing with the escapers, his boss, Himmler, was in ascendance over Göring. Thus, the German’s apparent dismissal of Thompson’s claim to be under the Reichsmarschall’s personal protection: “Be that as it may, you are in civilian clothes—you are probably a spy.”

  Yet Göring was still head of the Luftwaffe, minister president of Prussia and an intimate of Hitler and hence not a man to cross lightly. Since the Gestapo knew who Thompson was, the female typist’s search of Thompson’s clothing to see if it was air force issue was hardly necessary. This pièce de théâtre concluded with the words “You are fortunate—you have escaped in a soldier’s uniform; therefore you will be tried before a military court. The others will not be so lucky.” Ogilvie’s interrogation ended the same way Thompson’s did. Before leaving the office, Ogilvie saw on the Gestapo agent’s desk a paper on which 20 names were typed. Ogilvie assumed the list was the names of those in the first group of men to arrive at Görlitz Prison.

  31 MARCH 1944

  FOUR CANADIANS ARE KILLED IN THE GROUP OF GREAT ESCAPE EXECUTIONS

  “You lucky bastards. It’s back to Sagan for you,” Ogilvie recalled another POW at Görlitz calling out in the early morning darkness as ten of their handcuffed comrades, including Canadians Birkland, McGill and Langford, strode the same path through the prison that a day earlier Wiley and five other men had taken. Ogilvie asked RAF Flight Lieutenant Albert Hake where they were going. “No idea. I imagine we’ve got another round of questioning ahead of us.”179

  Wiley’s group was chosen by SS-Gruppenführer Artur Nebe, who headed the Kriminalpolizei and who, despite having commanded Einsatzgruppe B, which was responsible for murdering tens of thousands in Poland in 1941, found selecting from among the names disquieting. Looking at one group of cards, he brusquely said to his clerk, “See whether they have wives and children.” But orders were orders, and after some shuffling of cards from one pile to another, he passed a pile of 50 cards to his clerk, who arranged to have the names telegraphed to the appropriate offices.

  By the close of day on 31 March, German firing squads fired 16 times, killing four Canadian and 12 other Allied airmen.

  CHAPTER TEN

  April–May 1944

  Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries,

  The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes

  In wild despair; while yet another stroke

  With strong convulsion rends the solid oak:

  Ah, Heaven!—behold her crashing rib divide!

  She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o’er the tide.

  — WILLIAM FALCONER, THE SHIPWRECK

  6 APRIL 1944, STAL
AG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  FATHER GOUDREAU’S PERSONAL REASON TO PRAY FOR THE SOULS OF THE EXECUTED GREAT ESCAPERS

  In the days following the escape, Father Goudreau’s Roman collar did not exempt him from the extra hours standing on Appell as the Kriegies were counted, recounted and counted again. Anxiety for those still on the run and the captured (none of whom had yet been returned to the general camp population) combined with the heightened religious emotion of the last days of Lent in his prayers for the men, some having taken communion from his own hand.

  Only those members of the Escape Committee who had not shimmied their way through the narrow tunnel knew that, as he knelt in his chapel and prayed for the 86 men, the priest from the tiny village of Saint-Pierre-Baptiste de Mégantic, Quebec, had a very personal reason to thank Jesus. To better their chances of blending in with workers and farmers, escapers wore the best approximations of civilian clothes they could tailor. Alone among the thousands of men in the compound, Goudreau wore civilian clothes; indeed, the camp’s thespians often borrowed his slacks and shoes so that the guards attending the performances would not see their tailoring skills or that the leg portion of their flying boots had been cut away, leaving a fair approximation of civilian shoes. For that reason and because of the length of time Goudreau had been a POW, he was offered the chance to escape. As Father Larivière had three years earlier when the Polish underground arranged for him to escape, Goudreau turned down the offer because it would have meant abandoning his flock in the camp. Like Father Boulanger, who in late 1943 had been offered the chance to be repatriated, Larivière and Goudreau (and les autres religieux) were now called to be not only witnesses for Christ in the fallen world but témoins de l’histoire.