The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (14 page)

Flying Officer Kidder was no doubt surprised to find his POW
compound not only had kriegies fluent in as many languages as he, but also library facilities to match. Those book rooms became a hub for language classes that not only weren’t disguised, but were also encouraged. Had he wanted to, Kidder could have continued his linguistic studies inside Stalag Luft III. By the time kriegies had moved into the East Compound (in
1942
) and North Compound
(in 1943), some of the most ambitious among them had estab
lished courses in business, social science, and the humanities. The courses proved so sophisticated that examining boards in the UK and Canada allowed prisoners of war to earn full credits. While he was imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, RCAF officer Ian Tweddell, from
Lashburn, Saskatchewan, received engineering textbooks from the
University of
Saskatchewan so that he could advance his studies.
[15]
Textbooks from the same university helped another kriegie, who’d only received
his senior matriculation before the war, complete
a credit in political science.
[16]
College certificates were even available for proficiency in German, Russian, and French. To support the kriegies’ educational pursuits, the libraries began to assemble sizable inventories. Thanks to Red
Cross and personal family parcels, the libraries boasted hundreds of texts and reference books, as
well as detective novels, westerns, and biographies.
[17]
The Centre Compound library had as many as nineteen hundred books, which
explains why Frank Sorensen’s emphatic pleas for more specific reading materials passed the censors without arousing any suspicion.

“Yes, the thesaurus dictionary,” he wrote on August
11
,
1943
. “I sure long to get my fingers on that book. No better opportunity
learning German, except time and German newspapers. Am studying it though.”
[18]

By the time Sorry Sorensen had started teaching Roger Bushell and other kriegies some elementary Danish expressions, Big X was receiving the first reports of progress underground. Within days of
completing the trap entry to the chimney in Hut
123
, Wally Floody, Robert Ker-Ramsey, and Johnny Marshall had penetrated the topsoil
into the yellow-coloured sand beneath it, and had begun to excavate
the vertical shaft of tunnel “Tom” about three feet square and down
thirty feet. To reinforce the walls of the shaft, when he had dug down about the height of a man, Floody had “borrowed” the bed
posts from unused double-
decker bunk beds around the compound, bolted them together, and then inserted “borrowed” bed-boards as
walls behind the posts to shore up the shaft against the loose sand
around it.

“We didn’t have springs [in our beds.] Each bunk . . . had ten or fifteen boards varying in width from three inches to six inches,”
Floody said. “We had fifteen hundred officers. That meant fifteen hundred beds. So if you took one board out of each bunk . . . that’s a lot of wood for shoring.”
[19]

With each new five- to six-foot section of the vertical shaft,
Floody would need more wood to shore up the walls before continuing his descent. To supply the raw materials, the escape committee
had assigned Australian officer John E. “Willy” Williams to lead a crew that constantly cruised the barracks on the lookout for avail
able bedposts, bed-boards, and even nails and screws that could be liberated without being noticed by German guards. When Williams’
scavengers liberated the lumber and fasteners, they passed along their found supplies to expert metalworkers and carpenters who
engineered the shaft and tunnel construction.

One such expert had come from the same theatre of war as Frank Sorensen. Initially an apprenticed mechanical engineer from Leeds,
England, Bob Nelson had branched into aeronautical engineering before joining the RAF in
1937
. A talented pilot, Nelson had
instructed in Rhodesia until 1941, when he was posted to the Middle East, piloting Wellington bombers against Rommel’s Afrika Korps. On his twenty-second operational flight inland from Tobruk his air
craft was hit. He ordered his crew to bail out and crash-landed the
Wellington 150 miles behind enemy lines. He endured three weeks in the Libyan Desert (surviving by licking dew from rusty gas cans
[20]
) and was within three hundred yards of the British lines when he was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III in November 1942. A man of his resourcefulness proved invaluable helping to shore up tunnel “Tom” in the spring and summer of 1943.

By late April, “Tom’s” shaft was down thirty feet, “Dick” was nearly that deep, and “Harry” was down about twenty feet. Once Floody had completed the vertical dig in each of the tunnel shafts, Nelson and John Travis, formerly a Rhodesian mining engineer,
fashioned a kind of crossroads where the vertical shaft ended and the horizontal
tunnel began. At the foot of the shaft, they constructed chambers
into three of the walls—one chamber for equipment storage, a second for temporary storage of sand from the tunnel before dispersal,
and a third (about six feet in length) to accommodate an air pump. Through the fourth wall of the shaft was the entry to the horizontal tunnel out of the North Compound. For “Tom” and “Harry,” the
engineers had organized a multi-purpose basement workshop, with fresh air drawn by an air pump from the natural flue of the chimney above, down through the shaft, and along to the tunnel face where the diggers were extending the tunnel.

“The air pump consisted of two canvas kit-bags attached to a central wooden valve box,” Nelson wrote. “A reciprocating movement
of a wooden frame caused one bag to be compressed in a delivery
stroke while the other expanded in a suction stroke. A suction pipe
line made from Klim cans [the Red Cross tins about four inches in diameter that had contained powdered milk] ran up the shaft to a
fresh air supply and the delivery pipeline was then laid along the floor of the tunnel as it was dug.”
[21]

Nelson explained that a second Klim can pipeline was laid underground from below each trapdoor to the nearest chimney in the bar
racks hut. That provided a hidden outlet to expel used air, which otherwise on cold days would have revealed a condensation trail. This way, the regular chimney of the barracks hut gave the tunnel
operation a natural draught while a bypass valve in the pump allowed the tunnel to ventilate itself naturally even when no one was underground. The ventilation system also made it possible for a team of
diggers, dispersal men, and pump operator to work below with the
trapdoor completely sealed above. It meant the work could progress continuously between roll calls.

Digging the horizontal tunnels presented its own set of problems, including excavating on a level plane and in a straight line. The engi
neers fabricated a level and stole prismatic compasses from the Germans.
[22]
To calculate the distance travelled underground, they came up with primitive tools, including a premeasured ball of cord. They
melted margarine and other combustible fat into candles with pajama string as wicks, ensuring that the sooty by-product went safely up the Klim can chimney; the resulting fat lamps lit the way up each tunnel. Once “Tom” began on the horizontal, Nelson and the other engineers worked with Floody to shore the walls of the tunnel with box frames in a trapezium shape for strength. Each of the bottom and two side boards of the frame, he said, was
21
.5
inches long, while the top board was
20
inches long. Because most of the bed-boards were conveniently that length, and featured tongue-and-slot joints, they fit together like
a prefab floor, ceiling, and walls. The weight of the earth above the
ceiling and against the outside of the walls kept the entire frame rigid.
That meant no nails were needed, nor was any hammering required.

“It wasn’t very difficult to dig,” Nelson said. “[Floody] digging
the tunnel would lie inside the existing frame. He would scoop out the earth and the whole roof would collapse on him, but he’d be
protected by the wood frame. The tunnel sand would collapse into an arch-like shape. All the sand that had fallen out would be packed
behind the wooden frame and the shaft would move forward with
the wooden support. . . . The big problem was the risk of collapse because you could get trapped thirty feet underground.”
[23]

It was about the time the digging team had nearly completed the three workshop chambers at the base of “Dick’s” vertical shaft that near-disaster struck. On a day in late April, just after the 9:30 a.m.
appell, as the digging shift began, Ker-Ramsey joined Floody underground to finish shoring up the storage chamber and the sand dispersal chamber. A third digger, Norman “Conk” Canton, was shoring the pumping chamber with bunk-bed timber. Suddenly, about twenty feet above the men, a bed-board in the shaft wall cracked and broke, then a frame broke and sand began cascading through the gap and down the shaft. Fortunately for the diggers, the ladder up the shaft hadn’t
broken, so Ker-Ramsey and Canton clambered upward through the
spilling sand, with Floody bringing up the rear. In seconds Floody was up to his waist in sand and unable to move. The first two grabbed his arms and heaved him out before the sand smothered him.

“Much sputtering and shrieking on my part,” Floody said, and
he cursed for minutes afterward, but then realized his good fortune. He’d become “a little greyer, a little wiser, and a bit more cautious.”
[24]

It took Floody, Ker-Ramsey, and the others four days to regain the ground they’d lost in the cave-in down the shaft of “Dick.” The same kind of setback occurred in the shaft of “Harry” within a few days. Moreover, digging and re-digging down the throats of “Tom”
and “Harry” not only put tunnellers’ lives in peril, it multiplied
exponentially
the problem facing the sand dispersal teams. German
Staff Sergeant Glemnitz, the chief of the anti-escape guards, had warned all his troublemaking kriegies there was no way to hide the damp, bright yellow-coloured sand from beneath the surface of the
compound unless they could find a way to “destroy” it.

At the outset, that apparently impossible piece of magic had fallen
to Peter Fanshawe, head of the sand dispersal section. Engineers, such as Nelson, had calculated that each stretch of tunnel, roughly
three-and-a-half-feet long by two-and-a-half-feet wide (or twenty-
two-cubic-feet), yielded about a ton of sand. Initially, Fanshawe’s
dispersal men used pots and pans, jugs, washbasins, socks, and makeshift sandbags to dispense with sand in manageable quantities. They
could hide it under huts, in latrines, behind wallboards, and even
inside Red Cross parcel boxes. But with three tunnelling teams excavating in three sites from morning appell to evening appell, in total likely to generate maybe a hundred tons of sand, his dispersers were
running out of places to hide it all. And each time Glemnitz and his
team of ferrets found traces of the telltale yellow sand, they increased their spot searches, added unexpected roll calls, and ratcheted up the tension everywhere. The answer?

“Trouser bags,”
[25]
Fanshawe said at a section meeting of X Organization.

From beneath his tunic and pants, he pulled out a set of suspenders from which hung two cut-off legs of a pair of long, woolen under
pants, looking like two sausage bags. (Suspenders and underpants
had been sent by the score to POWs in Red Cross parcels in antici
pation of the coming cold winter.) A pin was stuck into the lower
end of each sausage. By placing the suspenders around his neck and sticking the sausage bags (full of sand) inside his trousers, he could
pull a string concealed in his pants pocket. It would release the pin
and allow the sand contents of the two sausage bags to flow down the inside of his trousers and onto the ground, where it could be scuffed into the ground relatively unnoticed.

The dispersal team members—now numbering in the hundreds—
could fan out across the compound. They could march across the
parade square and disperse sand as they conducted a drill. They could
cultivate their gardens and hoe the evidence in among the plants. They could even stage fights and mix surface and sub-surface dirt in the resulting dust, and make both nearly disappear. Noting the
way his dispersers tended to waddle with eight or ten pounds of sand
down their legs, X Organization dubbed Fanshawe’s men “penguins.” The trick was to find equilibrium, to ensure that, each day, the penguins could disperse roughly the same volume of sand the
diggers excavated. Wally Floody noted the diggers were clawing
out ten feet of sand per day, while Peter Fanshawe said the penguins could get rid of about six feet per day. One POW noted astutely that kriegies had become servants to an ugly hole in the ground.
[26]

John Colwell joined that servitude in June of
1943
. Not that he had an aptitude for hauling and hiding sand. But Flying Officer Colwell had experience at just about everything else. The son of a medical missionary, John grew up in India through the
1930
s, when his father, a veteran of the Great War in the British Army, decided to move the
family to Canada’s west coast to own and operate a chicken farm.
Riding to and from Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, to take school
and sell the farm’s eggs didn’t appeal, so when the war began Colwell joined the RCAF, where his skills in math and geometry moved him quickly through the air training plan. By
1942
he was posted as a navigator to
405
Squadron and flying operations with Coastal Command, chasing U-boats and guiding rescuers to downed airmen. Grounded due to bad September weather and a broken engine radiator, Colwell
was told replacement parts were a week away.