The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (2 page)

“HEROES
RESURFACE”

A
HEAD OF HIM
in the distance, lie the Alps. Disguised in a German dispatch rider’s battledress and
stahlhelm
helmet,
a fugitive hero brings his motorcycle to a sudden halt in the
middle of this back road in wartime Germany. Nervously jerking the
bike’s throttle, he wheels his body around in the saddle, searching
for his pursuers. A close-up catches his face as his eyes settle on the
mountains ahead.

“Switzerland,” he says under his breath.

He throttles up, pops the bike back into gear, and roars off. Min
utes later, his disguise revealed, the motorcyclist bashes through a checkpoint, peels off the now useless German uniform, and blasts
cross-country toward the distant mountains and, he hopes, freedom.
Behind him, military trucks, motorcycles with sidecars, and what
seems to be half the German Army are in hot pursuit. All the while,
Elmer Bernstein’s stirring film score accelerates in tempo and rises with crescendo. Then, in his character’s final moments on the run, actor Steve McQueen launches himself and his
650
Triumph over the first of two barriers of sharp pickets and barbed wire. Unable to make it over the second barrier, US Army Air Force Captain Virgil Hilts crashes into the fence, entangles himself in the wire, tries to break free, then realizes the futility of his struggle and surrenders to
the hordes of German troops who’ve now overtaken him.

These few minutes of flight and pursuit, caught on
35
-millimetre colour Panavision film, remain among the most thrilling in the canon of Hollywood war moviemaking and viewing. Indeed, this
climactic sequence, among many crowd-pleasing, escalating jolts of action and drama in
The Great Escape
, earned Hollywood film edi
tor Ferris Webster an Academy Award nomination.
*
Based on Paul Brickhill’s non-fiction book
The Great Escape
, published in
1950
,
the movie became an immediate hit when it was released in North
American theatres in the summer of 1963. On the whole, it also garnered upbeat critical reviews.

“With accurate casting, a swift screenplay, and authentic German settings,”
Time
magazine raved, “producer-director John Sturges has created a classic . . .”
[1]

Was it a classic? Yes. In 2006, more than forty years after the film’s
release, a poll asked TV watchers and moviegoers in the United King
dom which flick they would most want to view over Christmas.
The
Great Escape
came in third among families, first among male
viewers.
Was it authentic? In part it was. A group of veterans returning to the site of the escape on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary, in
2009
, told journalists reporting the event that Hollywood had
depicted much of the life in the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp accurately.

On the other hand, there was no Captain Virgil Hilts, “The Cooler
King,” in the actual Great Escape. Nor were there a lot of Ameri
cans in the prison’s North Compound when the breakout occurred.
Nor was there a motorcycle chase. When writers James Clavell, W. R. Burnett, and Walter Newman originally scripted the fictitious
USAAF Captain Hilts into the screenplay, they had him attempting to escape aboard a train among other fleeing Allied POWs. However, Steve McQueen, contracted by Sturges and the Mirisch Company to
co-star in the film, had such a passion for motorcycle racing that he insisted on having the chase scene built into the film.

Did the movie present authentic settings? Apparently, it didn’t matter to the producers that the actual Great Escape occurred near the town of Sagan in southern Poland, not in southern Germany,
near the Swiss Alps. Nor was it relevant to McQueen or the movie’s creators that the escape happened on March 24, 1944, when a metre
of snow still lay on the ground, where no motorcycle could easily
travel, let alone leap barbed-wire fences.

Here are the facts of the escape. On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth air officers crawled through a 360-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of the North Compound at Stalag Luft III near Sagan. The intricate
breakout, more than a year in the making, involved as many as two thousand POWs, extraordinary coordination, and a battle of wits inconceivable for the time. As dawn broke on March
25
, however,
German guards outside the compound spotted prisoners emerging from the exit hole, set off an alarm, and over the next few days managed to recapture all but three of the escapers. In a rage over the incident, Adolf Hitler called for the execution of all the escapers; instead,
the death list was adjusted downward and fifty Commonwealth air officers were executed, with perpetrators claiming the prisoners
were shot while attempting to escape Gestapo custody. Their bodies were cremated and buried in a remote corner of the Stalag Luft III grounds to hide the truth.

A hint about the accuracy of Hollywood’s version of the story is
evident in one of the movie’s final scenes. It shows the fifty officers
gunned down en masse by a German machine-gun crew in an open field somewhere in Germany. In truth, after their recapture, impris
onment, and interrogation, the officers were taken out and shot in twos and threes by Gestapo death squads hand-picked and given
licence to execute the officers in cold blood by a German High Command edict known as the Sagan Order. The little-known origins of the order add much intrigue to this story.

But was the casting as accurate as the rave reviews said? True, the
hiring of Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, James Garner,
Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, and James Coburn among a cast of hundreds made a lot of sense. The on-screen ensemble of
principal actors represented the cream of Hollywood idols in the early 1960s.
They ensured
The Great Escape
would become among the best box-
office draws of the year. But did the movie escape committee accurately represent the real escape committee?

In an effort to make the movie plot and its characters more invit
ing and palatable to an American audience, the writers invented
Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Bob Hendley, an American in the RAF, as the scrounger inside Stalag Luft III. Sturges cast US screen and TV star
James Garner to play the part. In fact, the scrounger was a twenty-
eight-year-old Blenheim bomber pilot from Calgary, Alberta, named Barry Davidson.

For the key roles of the tunnel designers and diggers, Sturges’s
creative team invented RAF F/L Danny Velinski and RAF F/L Willie Dickes and cast American actor Charles Bronson and British actor/singer John Leyton in the roles. The actual tunnel king was a downed Spitfire pilot, twenty-five-year-old Wally Floody, originally from Chatham, Ontario. His tunnel digging partners were fellow RCAF fighter
pilots: twenty-four-year-old John Weir from Toronto, Ontario, and twenty-six-year-old Hank Birkland, from Spearhill, Manitoba.

When it came to portraying the chief forger—the POW who
designed many of the fake documents used by the air officers dur
ing the escape—the screenplay writers manufactured another British flyer named Colin Blythe and cast seasoned British film and TV
actor Donald Pleasence (who had actually been a POW during the war) in
the role. The actual forger behind much of the document fabrica
tion, however, was twenty-four-year-old Whitley bomber pilot Tony Pengelly, from Truro, Nova Scotia.

Next, the Hollywood production team imagined one of the intelligence chiefs in the camp and parachuted into the script a British air officer named Andy MacDonald, casting Scottish-born actor Gordon Jackson to play him. In fact, among the officers conducting
much of the intelligence activities was thirty-two-year-old Kingsley Brown, a journalist and father of four from the Toronto area.

To portray an officer in charge of the security of the three tun
nels—“Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry”—the movie producers conceived an RAF F/L Sorren and cast British actor William Russell in the role.
In fact, the security team inside the wire at the North Compound included thirty-three-year-old RCAF air gunner George Harsh, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and twenty-four-year-old
RCAF bomb-aimer George Sweanor, from Port Hope, Ontario. And that doesn’t include the air officer in charge of security at the entrance of the main tunnels, the so-called
trapführer
, twenty-six-year-
old Patrick Langford from Edmonton, Alberta.

For organizing what were called “diversions” inside the compound, the movie producers invented RAF F/L Dai Nimmo and then hired English horror and mystery film actor Tom Adams to play him. Among
the actual diversionary geniuses, however, was twenty-five-year-old
George McGill, an RCAF navigator from Toronto; McGill helped
orchestrate boxing matches and other sporting attractions to distract German guards during some of the earliest escape attempts at Stalag Luft III. As well, the escape committee inside the North Compound
had organized diversionary “culture appreciation sessions” in the
prison library, where twenty-nine-year-old RCAF navigator Gordon Kidder from St. Catharines, Ontario, actually taught conversational
German to the soon-to-be escapers. Adding to the real diversionary
linguistics staff was another Canadian, twenty-one-year-old Spitfire pilot Frank Sorensen, who taught the head of the escape committee, Roger Bushell, basic conversational Danish as the two men exercised
on the walking path inside the warning wire at the compound.

In a delicious irony of casting and accuracy,
The Great Escape
screenplay writers chose to change Roger Bushell’s name to Roger
Bartlett. Coincidentally, the man responsible for servicing and hiding an inside-the-camp short-wave radio that delivered nightly newscasts
from the BBC was yet another unheralded Canadian, twenty-four-year-old dive-bomber pilot Richard Bartlett, from Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchwan.

In other words, contrary to Hollywood’s Anglo-American ver
sion of the Great Escape story, the actual mass breakout owed much of its design, execution, and tactical success to an extraordinarily tal
ented crew of air force officers from Canada. Again, the producers’ rationale for stacking the script with US and UK character names
and stars was clear: to help the audience connect to the story and
to
give the marketing and promotional team plenty of recognizable talent to build box office. And it worked. A film that cost roughly four million dol
lars to produce grossed more than eleven million dollars in ticket
revenue during the summer of 1963.

Motorcycles and the Hollywood dream factory aside, recognizing
that the actual Great Escape brain trust was largely Canadian is not the only reason for revisiting this unique war story. The wider picture, occupied by other Canadian air officers shot down during the war and sent to Stalag Luft III, illustrates just how remarkable this escape feat really was. As
Kriegsgefangenen
(prisoners of war)—or, as they called themselves, “kriegies”—the air officers were not required to work inside the wire. They had to report for appell (roll call) several times a day and abide by all the other rules administered by their Luftwaffe (German Air Force) jailers. But beyond that, they were spared the forced labour, wrath, and deprivation of concentration camps or non-commissioned officer (NCO) compounds.

Consequently, the Commonwealth air officers were left to their own devices day and night—feeding themselves, clothing themselves, educating themselves, entertaining themselves, keeping themselves fit, and conspiring among themselves. For the months and years that they were imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, the POWs—many of them Canadian—built, seemingly from thin air, an extraordinarily orderly world inside the wire. There was “the Tin Man,” John Colwell, who built a pot, or chair, or escape tool nearly every day of his imprisonment. There were the extroverted officers, such as James Wernham,
Don Edy, Arthur Crighton, and Tony Pengelly, whose penchant for performing led them to become regulars in the musicals, concerts, revues, and full classical productions staged weekly at the North
Compound theatre. And since plenty of the officers had played international or professional sports—including big league pitchers Phil Marchildon and Bill Paton—the sports grounds at the North Compound buzzed with tournaments on the baseball diamond, football
pitch, or ice-hockey rink, no matter the season. There was even an
inside-the-wire press corps to publish results and colour commentary. But beneath that veneer remained a secret society of officers—about a third of whom were Canadians—intent on breaking out of the camp, or at least disrupting the German war machine sufficiently before being recaptured, sent to solitary confinement for a time, and finally returned to the barracks huts inside Stalag Luft III.

In addition to a review of the existing accounts, telling the Canadian story of the Great Escape has yielded new and disturbing information
about some little-known aspects of the breakout and its aftermath. For one, the struggle for power between the Luftwaffe
and the Gestapo may have doomed the escape plot and escapers long before the breakout on March 24–25, 1944. For another, it appears that no intervention by Red Cross, Luftwaffe prison administrators,
or articles of the Geneva Conventions, could have prevented the murders of the fifty Commonwealth officers, including six Canadi
ans. Conditions of the Sagan Order, and the inbred hostility of those hired to carry it out, meant certain death. Ultimately, as resilient and
innovative as the kriegies proved to be throughout their incarcera
tion, the forced march during the last months of the winter in 1945 and on the eve of their liberation proved a final test of mind and body some could not endure.