The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (13 page)

All three received the Military Cross. For Eric Williams, how
ever, it was small compensation. His wife had died in Liverpool during a German air raid, and two of his three brothers serving in the
Royal Air Force had been killed in action.
[30]
A year of his life lost, caged as a POW at Stalag Luft III, somehow seemed a smaller price
to pay.

SERVANT
TO
A
HOLE
IN
THE
GROUND

F
rank sorensen
served his adopted country in deed, with oratory, and to carry on a military tradition. Born in Denmark in June of
1922
, he moved with his family from the Danish
town of Roskilde to Canada just a week before the Second World
War broke out. Frank’s father, Marinus Bonde Sorensen, had served
in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Great War, mar
ried Frank’s mother, a wartime nurse, and in August of 1939 escaped Denmark and settled the family—two adults and six children—on a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
[1]
However, the war drew several Sorensen family members back overseas: Marinus represent
ing Canadian and Danish interests in Britain; Eric, Frank’s older
brother, in the Canadian Army preparing for the invasion of Italy; and Frank as a Spitfire pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force with 403
Squadron in Suffolk, England. Just days before he was trans
ferred to RAF 232 Squadron en route to combat operations in North
Africa, Frank Sorensen became a voice of freedom on the public
airwaves. Because of Marinus Sorensen’s Danish ancestry, his status
as a Canadian Pacific Railway agent, and his connections with the BBC, his son, air force pilot Frank Sorensen, was invited to speak to Danes in occupied Denmark via the BBC’s Radio Free Europe broadcasts.

“Hello, all you Roskilde boys,”
[2]
Sorensen began his October 15, 1942
, broadcast. “Let me first of all speak to those who were boys
with me, friends from school and Boy Scout camps . . . I know that there’s not one who would not consider it his duty and his part of the burden and fight to make Denmark a free country again.”

Just twenty, but already worldly enough to assess what a fascist dictator and his armies had inflicted on the country of his birth, Sorensen
blamed German “parasites and thugs” for annexing his homeland, eliminating free speech, and imposing martial law on a passively
resistant Danish population. He didn’t profess to understand why an older generation had chosen to resolve Europe’s differences this way. But in his broadcast, he cited his Danish-born brother, now an engineer in the Canadian Army, and himself, a Danish-born fighter pilot in the RCAF, as models for the way young Danes should respond to German occupation.

“I know how fortunate I and my comrades out here are that we are actively engaged in the battle,” he concluded. “For us the prob
lem is simple and straightforward, but . . . it doesn’t pay to wait. Let
us young people fight together now . . . [until] the Germans once
again are driven out of Denmark.”
[3]

A month later, on November
24
,
1942
, his squadron boarded SS
Antenor
sailing from Liverpool to Algeria to assist Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery and the British Eighth Army mount a counter-offensive in the North African desert against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika
Korps. By mid-January of
1943
, with the Allies advanc
ing quickly, 232 Squadron had established a landing strip at Tingley in Algeria, from which its Spitfires conducted sweeps and reconnaissance operations. By March the squadron was flying patrols and escorts in and out of
Victoria airstrip in Tunisia. In three weeks, Sorensen flew just thir
teen operational sorties
[4]
and was growing weary of harbour patrols,
tactical reconnaissance, and escort operations. However, a letter to his brother Eric described a sudden change in the intensity of the
squadron’s activity.

“With no more excitement than ground strafing enemy transport once in a while, I welcomed the order by my flight commander one
Sunday morning [April
11
,
1943
] over Tunis to break away and polish off a few Junker
52
s flying low over the Bay of Tunis,”
[5]
Frank
Sorensen wrote.

During his descent from an original altitude of twenty-three
thousand feet, his flight of four Spitfires encountered enemy fire; one Spit was hit, caught fire, and crashed into the sea. The three remaining fighters in his formation opened fire on the German transport aircraft. Sorensen saw his flight commander fire cannon shells into one of them and looked back to see it crash in a ball of fire; he recalled
seeing the troops previously inside the Junker’s fuselage flailing
about in water mixed with burning fuel and wreckage. Sorensen then focused on catching up to another of the transports heading north toward Italy.

“I sent two of them crashing in flames into the drink,” Sorensen continued. “Bags of fun, I thought, until I was reminded by half a dozen Me.
109
s that crime does not pay. I wouldn’t have met these
109s, if my commander upstairs had not told us to [climb] for I had in mind to go home on the deck [just above the surface of the water].”
[6]

As he climbed, the first Messerschmitt attacked him from behind. Sorensen tried out-turning his opponent three times, expending the remainder of his ammunition as he manoeuvred around the sky. Now
there were six more Me.
109
s. In ones and twos the enemy fighters
engaged him and he dodged fire from a dozen of those attacks. The thirteenth attack found the target as a burst of machine-gun fire hit his engine. Oil sprayed across his windscreen. He was too low to bail out, so he quickly decided to take his chances with a controlled crash landing. He’d forgotten, however, that he regularly left his cockpit safety belts loose (only tightening them for landings), so unable to see ahead clearly and not properly secured into the cockpit, Sorensen prepared for a rough landing on hilly desert terrain.

“I closed my eyes,” he wrote. “I hit. I felt I hit again. I could still
think and feel. Then I turned a somersault and with a final crash my flying carrier had come to an abrupt stop—upside down. I thought I
was dead . . . I took off my flying helmet and goggles, oxygen mask . . .
and had a look through a hole in the ground. I had ploughed right
into the ground so my cockpit and myself were completely under the
ground. I started digging [my way out when] I heard footsteps and
then, ‘Hands up.’”
[7]

Sorensen had crashed right next to a German infantry post. At gunpoint he was pulled from beneath the half-buried Spitfire, quickly searched, thrown into a vehicle, and hauled off to Tunis for interrogation. The Americans bombed the city heavily overnight, but the next
day he was put aboard a transport, not unlike the four German air
craft his squadron had shot down the previous day. He and a British
officer shot down the same day were escorted to Italy by twenty Ger
man
paratroopers inside the aircraft and a flight of Me.
109
s outside the aircraft. They travelled through Rome, then on to Munich, and
to Dulag Luft at Frankfurt, all the while refusing to offer any information and paying for their resistance by receiving very little food and plenty of solitary confinement. P/O Sorensen arrived at Sagan on April
20
,
“on Hitler’s birthday, when every house had a flag out,” he wrote.

As it was for so many families on the home front, word of Frank Sorensen’s survival of the crash outside Tunis, his transport through Italy, his interrogation by German authorities at Dulag Luft, and his eventual deposit at Stalag Luft III took weeks to arrive. In the interim came the Department of National Defence letter to Frank’s mother
saying he “is reported missing,”
[8]
then a long gap with little or no
information from either the air force or the government about his fate, and finally—a month after he was shot down—word to Frank’s father from the RCAF Overseas office in London that “your son . . . is a prisoner of war.”
[9]

Meanwhile, Frank Sorensen’s letters began wending their way to his grandparents in Hjørring, Denmark, to his father in the UK, and to his mother and siblings now living in Kingston, Ontario. His earliest written thoughts from inside German prison camps were predictably melancholy. His first letter from Dulag Luft, just eight days after his capture, said he was happy, enjoying the good company of other
“unfortunate chaps,” that he’d asked for his $
175
-a-month allow
ance to be sent home to his mother, and that he wanted his father “to
write to my squadron and tell them how happy and proud I was to have been one of them.”
[10]
By his fifth letter, notably, the dispirited
tone appeared to be gone. He seemed no more or less resigned to his POW plight, but there was something more substantial contained in his letter home than just the words of a kriegie waiting for his imprisonment to end.

“I find time goes by very fast,” he wrote in May
1943
. “I find plenty to do besides reading and studying chemistry and math. . . . There is plenty of exercise we get when we feel like it—basketball, football, discus, shot put, horizontal bar, horseshoes, and walking
’round the perimeter.”
[11]

Just as Roger Bushell had done with escape committee section
heads Floody, Harsh, and Fanshawe—discussing high-priority issues affecting the progress of tunnelling—by walking the perimeter with newly arrived officer Frank “Sorry” Sorensen, Bushell acquired valuable new intelligence about Erwin Rommel’s defeats in North Africa during the winter of 1942–43 and plans for the invasion of Sicily that
summer. But having access to Sorensen on a regular basis actually
gave Bushell something he hadn’t expected; Big X was fluent in German, French, and a few Russian phrases, but he was deficient in Danish. And he recognized if he had any hope of talking his way aboard
a vessel sailing the Baltic, simple Danish phrases would be essential.
So, pounding the exercise circuit inside the warning wire with P/O
Sorensen allowed Bushell to pick up everyday Danish.
[*]
But Big X
wasn’t the only fellow officer Sorensen tutored in Danish. Some time later, Sorensen befriended Flight Lieutenant Eric Foster. As a means
of expediting his way out of the camp, Foster feigned insanity. But in the meantime, partly because Sorensen knew that Foster had a Danish wife, he tried to help Eric learn some important phrases. It
proved to be a frustrating exercise.

“I tried teaching him Danish,” Sorensen wrote, “but for all he
learnt, I might as well have taught a horse.”
[12]

Ultimately, Foster’s performance around the North Compound convinced the Germans he was mentally unstable and he was repatriated in 1944. But Sorensen’s impromptu language instruction, if
Big X hadn’t already recognized it, illustrated the growing need for X
Organization to make conversational training a higher priority among
monolingual kriegies. This, in turn, explained one of Frank Sorensen’s
repeated requests of his family in his regular correspondence.

Given that each kriegie was rationed to roughly four cards and
three letters per month, and that the space on official stalag-issued writing paper—ten inches by five-and-a-half inches—was limited to between two hundred and three hundred words, Sorensen’s priorities must have appeared odd in his letters home. No doubt, the censors
would not have found his references the least bit troublesome. But
after the weather, his health, and general POW activity, in both his May 18 and July 12 letters Sorensen reserved space to request certain items from home or via a Red Cross parcel. He asked his mother to send summer season underwear, dehydrated meat, fruit, milk, sugar raisins, oatmeal, maple sugar, chocolate, powdered egg, and onion. Finally, in a quick sentence, he asked a favour of his father.

“Dad, would you send me the thesaurus dictionary, please?”
[13]
he wrote.

Requesting clothing and food items was commonplace, although
emphasizing that the foods be high in energy and dehydrated suggested they might be packed more easily for the trip into the compound, or, conceivably, in the pocket of an escaper, out of it. The
special request to his father for the thesaurus, however, had little to do with enhancing Sorensen’s literacy or even filling his leisure time with stimulating reading. Contained within the back pages of every thesaurus since its creator, English physician Peter Mark Roget, had first
published the book in
1852
was a section called “Foreign Phrases,” translated with reference to the applicable English categories into
French, Latin, and German. A thesaurus or two or more might well
make their way to the North Compound library and reading room,
but their circulation would be less about offering readers a lexicon of valuable synonyms and antonyms than about offering them a guide to phrases used in everyday conversation outside the wire.

Assembling a library of language textbooks, including thesaurus donations from the Sorensen family library, likely helped escape preparations a great deal. But finding officers who could properly pronounce the phrases and then get English-speaking kriegies to parrot those phrases back with some credibility was something else again. In that regard, the escape committee had received a remarkable gift,
appropriately the previous Christmas, when a twenty-eight-year-old
RCAF officer arrived at the North Compound. Gordon Kidder, born in St. Catharines, Ontario, grew up a scholar. He learned French and could speak fluent German as a result of his studies at the University of Toronto in the
1930
s; in fact, in
1937
, Johns Hopkins University in the US invited him to finish his master’s degree in German. Instead, he worked in Ontario’s education department and also translated language for an insurance company.
[14]
When war broke out, he trained as a navigator, and was on his ninth combat operation aboard a
156
Squadron Wellington when it was hit by flak and crashed into the North Sea. Kidder and the wireless air gunner survived in a dinghy until a German minesweeper captured them the next day. Kidder
arrived at Stalag Luft III in December
1942
.