The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (15 page)

“No matter,” a fellow airman wrote. “John and his crew . . .
scrounged a radiator and did the repairs themselves.”
[27]

By the spring of 1943, his squadron had joined the newly formed 6 Group of Canadian squadrons, with his 405 Squadron flying seven-man Halifax bombers against submarine pens on the coast of France
and industrial targets along Germany’s Ruhr River valley. On April
3, F/O Colwell was navigating one of the lead bombers in the stream
to attack Essen, Germany. They delivered their bombs, but anti-
aircraft flak had damaged Colwell’s astro compass; instead of a path northward away from heavily populated areas and Luftwaffe night-
fighter bases, they were headed west and were shot down near the
Maas River, southwest of Rotterdam.

Colwell’s first entry in his POW diary was a simple one.

“Made my first parachute jump at 11 p.m.,”
[28]
it read. Nine days later, Colwell noted that he and a couple of the officers in his Halifax
crew, pilot Jim Lago and wireless-operator Bill Hoddinott, “arrived in
Sagan about 8 a.m. It was about noon before we were finally allowed
into the compound . . . got our Red Cross parcels to start housekeeping . . . in Room
14
, Block
120
.”
[29]
A few days after he and his roommates figured out who cooked, who cleaned, and who took care of retrieving Red Cross parcels, Colwell began to focus on the
rhythm of the North Compound, its periodic escapes, its scheduled and unscheduled appells, and contributing to the escape committee’s greatest needs.

“Two Americans got out under the south fence. . . . They searched the camp just after 1 a.m., and identified everyone by card and picture,” Colwell wrote on June 17. “We were then moved out into the
hall while they searched the room carefully.
They
lost . . .”
[30]
Three
nights later, “another night search. Jamie [Jim Jamieson], Art [Hawtin], Ach [John Acheson], Mull [W. D. Mullins], and I had our hair all cut off.”
[31]
A day later, he simply noted, “Night search. Started work as a penguin.”
[32]

Colwell learned about the penguin work shortly after arriving at
the compound that spring of
1943
. Since none of the officers was
compelled to work, he enjoyed the notion of joining a friendly horseshoe match after appell one day.

“Suddenly, these two Dutch POWs came along and sort of scuffed around in the middle of our game,” Colwell said. “I remember thinking it wasn’t very considerate of them. And then I saw this sand trick
ling out of their pant legs and I realized what was going on.”
[33]

Colwell’s diary reflected the experiences of an officer newly introduced to Stalag Luft III and feeling his way into the routine of POW life. He sensed his first priority, self-preservation, was a matter of being accepted by his roommates, assuming a role in Block (or
Hut) 120 life, and attending to his health and nutritional needs as best he could. The Allied doctors in the compound recommended that a grown, fairly active man needed three thousand calories in his diet each day; the German rations at best delivered fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred calories in the form of bread, some portions of
vegetables, and even fewer of meat. Colwell noted early on that he
weighed 148 pounds. His lower calorie intake and his penguin activity consumed those limited calories very quickly. For penguins, each
circuit began at the tunnelling hut. One penguin loaded another’s
two inner pant legs with sand; at capacity that could mean columns of sand two feet long and three inches in diameter down each leg. Then, controllers sent the penguin on a casual walk to a specific dumping site. Controllers also directed penguins to various loading points and dumping sites so that the ferrets wouldn’t spot a kriegie repeating a circuit. It was hot, continuous work that summer as Colwell and the other penguins tried to keep pace with the diggers.

Moving sand underground had also become more sophisticated. As each of the three tunnels crept farther and farther from the base of its entry shaft, diggers abandoned their washbasins and jugs in favour of higher-volume transport. The engineers had scrounged the makings of an underground railway system. Willy Williams had retrieved
battens that lined the ceilings and walls of the barracks huts; split
lengthwise, the battens became one-inch-wide rails nailed to the floor of the tunnel. Bob Nelson and the other carpenters built sturdy trolleys—consisting of chassis and detachable boxes built from beech
wood bed-boards, axels liberated from barracks stoves, and wheels
of wood covered in tin from discarded food containers. When a shift started, the first digger would wheel himself on the trolley chassis to the face of the tunnel. A second man reeled the empty trolley back
with its draw rope and wheeled himself forward. The first digger,
facing forward, cut into the face, drew the sand down his body to the second digger, who faced backwards and scooped the sand up his body and into the trolley box. When the box was full he tugged the rope and a third man back at the base of the shaft reeled in the trolley to remove the sand. All the while, a fourth man pushed the bellows in the air-pump chamber, delivering a steady flow of fresher air through the Klim can ventilation system under the railway tracks and floor boards to the face of the tunnel. Gordon King, who had worked as the dish man on the impromptu tunnel to the cookhouse a couple of months earlier, gladly took on the role of air-pump operator.

“I was small and in good shape,” King said. “I could stay on the bellows . . . for a shift of eight hours if I had to. We stopped from time to time to rest. Using the cart with the long rope attached, we could bring the sand out much faster. They even put carpet on top of the rails to deaden the sound.”
[34]

Matching the digging pairs required a bit of psychology and physics. The section bosses matched John Weir with Hank Birkland, for example. First of all, they were both Canadian. More important, they
had dug tunnels together since the first escape efforts at the Stalag Luft I camp back in
1941
. But they also compensated each other’s
work in a unique way. Weir had a tendency to dig harder to the left when he was at the face of “Tom,” while Birkland often veered to the right; by the end of a shift one would balance the other. On other shifts, Floody worked at the face of the tunnel and Weir was his sec
ond, pulling out the bags of excavated sand. The bond these fellow
diggers shared, going all the way back to Luft I at Barth, was paying off.

“One time, Wally was digging and I was passing [the sand] back,”
Weir said. “Suddenly the candle blew out and there was a helluva
wind in my face. I knew damn well what it was. I just went forward as fast as I could and got [Wally] out in a matter of minutes.”
[35]

Birkland preferred to dig fully naked and that aggravated Floody;
he was afraid the ferrets would notice the scrapes on Birkland’s elbows
and knees and start paying closer attention to his activities. To hide any telltale scars, tunnel boss Wally Floody insisted his diggers wear long underwear and vests. John Weir’s fiancée Frances McCormack
might well have wondered why the flow of letters from Weir had slowed that spring; his digging shifts underground increased and
lengthened. Further, she was probably puzzled as to why he seemed to be going through his underclothes so quickly.

“This is my forty-seventh letter and I’ve had a hundred and twenty-
three from you so far,” Weir began his letter of April
30
,
1943
. “You wondered what clothes I need? I could do with some light pajamas.
. . . Five pair underwear and shirts, sox [sic] could be used. . . . I don’t
think another May will come with us separated.”
[36]

Fear of cave-ins, vomiting from pockets of foul underground air, and elbows and knees scraped raw by the sand were just some
of the occupational hazards the diggers tolerated. Fat lamps proved extremely helpful in guiding the tunnellers up to and back from the tunnel face, but they too were a half measure. To address the problem, some of the escape committee’s engineers came up with a partial solution. They calculated that the wiring in the barracks huts probably had some slack, so clandestinely they stripped away sections of the wall and ceiling boards to track down any excess.
[37]
When they finished their wire roundup they had spliced together enough wire to bring electricity and lighting to the mouths of all three tunnels. The
Germans regularly turned power to the huts off during the day, so for
some of the evening tunnel shifts, the electric light was a psychological lift.

Meantime, and suddenly, on June
10
,
1943
, the Russian work
crews—with their axes, picks, and debris wagons—were back at work inside the wire, this time beyond the south fences of the North Com
pound. The then-SBO, H. M. Massey, learned from Colonel von
Lindeiner that the upper command of the prison administration had decided the ever-increasing numbers of American officers flowing through the gates of Stalag Luft III would require a separate com
pound—a new South Compound—to house as many as four or five hundred USAAF POWs. The inner circle of X Organization met in an emergency session. Bushell and Day were feeling guilty that so many USAAF officers had contributed to the design, creation, and protection of the three tunnels, and it now seemed likely von
Lindeiner would complete the South Compound before the kriegies
finished any of the three North Compound tunnels. Big X recognized that a lot of American officers might feel cheated out of their
chance at freedom. He felt obliged to find a solution.

“We close up ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ for now,” Bushell said. “We go full out on ‘Tom.’ . . . We might make it before South Compound is
ready.”
[38]

At that point “Tom” had advanced some sixty feet from Hut 123. There were still at least a hundred feet to cover to get the face of the tunnel beyond the double fence and into the protection of the reforestation pines. Bushell asked Wally Floody how much they might advance the tunnel by September if all three digging shifts concentrated on “Tom.” Floody told him that digging advanced each tunnel about five to ten feet a day with one team, but simple arithmetic meant three digging teams might move “Tom” westward up to thirty feet a day. Fanshawe agreed that the pace would put pressure on the penguins, but it was manageable.

“It was decided that ‘Tom’ should be finished before the Ameri
cans went,” Bob Nelson said. “With the necessity for speed, however, greater risks were taken and the Germans’ suspicions were aroused.”
[39]

With the priority shifting to “Tom,” digging and dispersing sand from the two other tunnels came to a stop. The Polish officers who had so expertly created the invisible trapdoors for “Dick” in the showers of Hut
122
and the rebuilt tile flooring at the entrance to “Harry”
in Hut
104
returned to seal them up as if they’d never been there.
Bushell and Floody then chose the fifteen best diggers, included all of the American diggers available, and divided them into three teams of five for the new push at the face of “Tom.” Wally Floody’s predictions of ten feet per day proved accurate, and so did Fanshawe’s promise to “disappear” the sand as quickly as it came to the surface.

Out of urgency, or perhaps by accident, that summer a number of penguins stumbled on an ideal dumping ground for the now relentless flow of yellow sand gushing from “Tom” like Niagara Falls. And it was incredibly obvious. With few exceptions, neither the Russian workers nor the escape committee “volunteer” officers had disturbed
much of the sub-surface yellow sand during the felling of the pine
forest or the construction of the barracks huts and sports grounds. The one exception was the structure known as the fire pool, which had required a deep cut a dozen feet into the sand and then installation of a solid brick lining to catch and supply rainwater in the event of a fire. While much of the yellow sand excavated from the pool hole had been hauled away, around the edge of the structure some still lay on the surface. But the pool was right in the centre of the compound, under direct and constant observation by goons in the towers and by some with binoculars hiding in the woods spying on every move the kriegies made inside the wire. The pool perimeter suddenly became a focal point for Fanshawe’s dispersers.

“Each penguin nonchalantly sauntered to the edge of the pool with his hands in his pockets,” Bob Nelson said. “On reaching the
edge of the pool, he pulled the cords which opened the bottom of the containers inside his trousers and allowed the sand to trickle slowly out as he walked. . . . During the summer, many tons of sand were disposed of. Although the sand around the pool got gradually deeper, it was very imperceptible.”
[40]

Beyond the edges of the pool, Fanshawe and his legion of penguins created numerous other scenarios for making the sand disappear. Whenever a pine stump was removed, exposing yellow subsoil
on the surface of the compound, penguins congregated. If a new
latrine were dug, penguins would wander by and contribute. One of the American air force officers in the North Compound, Jerry Sage,
who had served as a paratrooper in North Africa, used the sports
grounds to help the penguins keep up with the flow of excavated tunnel sand. One day, he would organize scores of his USAAF officers to kick
up a curtain of dust by demonstrating techniques in unarmed combat. Any and all penguins were invited to participate or spectate; in
the midst of the melee, none of the German guards would notice tunnel sand being emptied and mixed into the surface sand of the sports grounds. Other times, Sage staged volleyball matches with
penguins two and three deep excreting sand as they jumped up and
down cheering on their favourite team.