The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (34 page)

Bartlett arrived at the Royal Navy air station at Lea-On-Solent
in southern England on the eve of VE Day with no uniform, no back pay, and no access to the victory celebrations about to begin all over
the UK. Not unaccustomed to scrounging and making do, however, Bartlett liberated a white shirt, collar, and tie that substituted
for his navy whites and he joined the party suitably dressed anyway. Next, Bartlett wondered if he might be allowed to get to Canada. He
learned he was entitled to three months leave, but the rules blocked
his way home.

“Royal Navy personnel are not allowed to take foreign leave in
wartime,” the regulations stipulated.

As it turned out, there was a way around that barrier too. Bartlett’s commanding officer simply arranged to have him posted to Northern Ireland. With Royal Canadian Navy ships regularly passing through the port of Londonderry, his CO surmised that with his “on the job training in escape and evasion,” Bartlett would have no trouble getting aboard a westbound ship. Indeed, he hitched a ride with a North Atlantic convoy corvette and several days later landed in Halifax. He was nearly stopped with insufficient domestic currency in his pocket, did a quick exchange with a stranger, and bought train fare to Regina en route to being reunited with his family in Fort Qu’Appelle.

But that ended Richard Bartlett’s career path of dipping and dodging, since by summer’s end he was back on station in the UK, ready for his next assignment with Fleet Air Arm. The Allies had
secured victory in Europe and it would soon be theirs in the Pacific as well. Bartlett received his full lieutenant commission in addition to a transfer to the Royal Canadian Navy, and in early 1946 he joined the
squadron serving aboard carrier HMCS
Warrior
. By
1947
, he had
married Margaret Falconer and assumed peacetime command of the
Firefly squadron. It didn’t seem to matter. In spite of his exemplary
career in the RCN—from 1946 to 1964—he couldn’t seem to shake
his kriegie past nor the interest from family and friends about his
imprisonment at Stalag Luft III. In 1992, Dick and Margaret Bartlett
attended the Remembrance Day assembly where their grandson, Nick
Dumonceaux, attended elementary school. During the observance,
the students were asked if their grandparents had fought in the Second
World War. Seven-year-old Nick gladly went to the microphone.

“My grandfather spent the war in jail,”
[22]
he announced proudly.

Both the assembly and his grandparents got quite a chuckle out of
Nick’s perception of Dick Bartlett’s POW time from 1940 to 1945. But the youngster grew up to understand his grandfather’s war and,
in a world that offered more than a microphone to express himself, in
2011
, after his grandfather had died, a twenty-six-year-old Nick
Dumonceaux posted a tribute on his Facebook page.

“You are the reason I am here today,” the post said. “You gave so
much and never asked anything in return. You were a part of what
made this country great and we will never forget.”

It took just as long for Frank Sorensen’s three children to understand
his Stalag Luft III experience. They were all at least young adults before the real story of their father’s Second World War air force record—his training in the BCATP, his propaganda speech from
England to the Danish Resistance on Radio Free Europe in
1942
, his posting with RAF
232
Squadron to North Africa, his victories over the Tunisian desert, then being shot down in
1943
, and his eventual participation as a language specialist in the Great Escape—all came to light. The three Sorensen children were born within a dozen years
of the end of the war: Glenn in
1948
, Stephen in
1950
, and Vicki in
1957
. All they knew was that their dad was a successful dentist married to Betty Bodley, a former schoolteacher. But that was the Frank
Sorensen whom most knew outside his Kingston, Ontario, home.

Inside their home, the three Sorensen kids never went without, but they came to know a father who had a short fuse (sometimes sparked
by his weekend drinking) and who seemed haunted by something or someone. At night Glenn, Stephen, and Vicki all recalled their par
ents suddenly shouting—their father screaming at demons of some
sort, their mother trying to wake him with the assurance he was safely
in bed in his own home. The three children were specifically told
never to stand in a doorway where their father slept because he might
suddenly attack the silhouette by kicking the door closed without
realizing a family member was standing there.

“Things got worse as we all grew up,”
[23]
Stephen said. “Glenn and I [had bedrooms] in the basement. We could hear all the fighting and bickering through the basement wall. Vicki was literally across the narrow hallway next to my parents’ bedroom.”

“I asked my mom, ‘Why did you stay [with him]?’”
[24]
Vicki said.
“And she told me with the veterans returning from the war . . . all the women knew they would be traumatized, but they had a sort of unspoken
pact, that they were going to stand by them no matter what.”

“When I was a teen,”
[25]
Glenn said, “to suggest that [my dad] get
psychiatric help would be admitting he had problems. . . . It was never really addressed throughout his lifetime.”

In school in the late
1950
s, Stephen read Eric Williams’
The Wooden Horse
, the fictionalized version of his own escape, with Michael Cod
ner and Oliver Philpot, from Stalag Luft III in 1943. Then, when
The
Great Escape
Hollywood movie was released, Frank
Sorensen took Stephen to see it at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, just the two of them. Little by little, Frank began to share some of his own Great Escape remembrances with his two sons—the food he ate, his work as a pen
guin dispersing sand, teaching Roger Bushell conversational Danish on the circuit, even the horrors of the forced march in the winter of 1945. The boys eventually learned about their father’s extraordinary athleticism at Stalag Luft III, such that he could throw a golf ball farther than almost every other kriegie in the North Compound.

“[Dad] was very thin at the end of the war,” Stephen said. “When
he got out [of the service,] he started lifting weights, building his body back. There are pictures in which he looked nicely chiselled and cut. But my mother never had any interest . . . in his physique.
He would say, ‘I married the wrong woman. She didn’t appreciate it when I started putting muscles back on.’”

In some respects it took a discovery after Vicki’s father died to put him, his wartime past, and his postwar life of torment into focus for her. Like her brothers, Vicki had absorbed the passed-down stories about her father’s career as a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war, but
she said it was all a bit like watching a sub-title without any detail. Then, late in
2010
, she gained access to some photographs of her
father in the air force and the letters exchanged between her father and family members while he was a POW at Stalag Luft III.

“[From his letters] I learned . . . he was keen. He wanted to serve his country. . . . One of his greatest fears was not being posted overseas. He never complained about doing what was asked of him. He
was fearless.”

Since reading the correspondence and viewing the photos, Vicki Sorensen has willingly dedicated countless hours on the phone,
on the internet, and on her own time to discovering as much about her father’s role in the Great Escape as she can. She methodically contacts other former kriegies or their families all over the world in pursuit of any details about her father’s time in the prison camp. Perhaps what motivates her most is a drive to understand Frank Sorensen’s decision to trade his position on the escape list; since she surmises her father gave his spot to either James Catanach or Arnold Christensen (both
shot by the Gestapo), she believes that the demons he experienced
came from knowing he survived and they did not.

“My father never let go of the guilt, saying, ‘That should have been me,’” she said. “My father never got over the execution of the
fifty. . . . A good friend of his told me when he was visiting, my father
showed him the Tunnel Martyrs memorial picture and said, ‘These
were my buddies. They’re all gone.’”

Family correspondence continues to shed light on the silent battle
that Frank Sorensen waged as his wife and children struggled to understand him. Among the passages Vicki Sorensen turns to for
explanation and comfort is her grandfather’s assessment of Frank at an early reunion as the war was ending.

“There he was tall and smiling,” her grandfather noted in his diary.
“He was in his battledress with a kitbag under his arm, thin and tanned. We had lunch and got out for the table some of the things we
have been saving up just for this occasion. His appetite is not great,
but it is growing. He needs building up. His spirits are rising and he has improved much . . .”

A final observation from Vicki’s Uncle Ben about his brother concluded
that “after the war Frank was . . . without his former zest for
life. He suffered [from] post-traumatic stress syndrome, which in my opinion affected the change in Frank from his youthful exuberance to
essentially an unhappy life and old age.”

As she grew up in London, Ontario, in the 1960s, Barbara Edy recognized her father Don Edy had two careers. She knew he was involved
in business, earning a living, paying the bills, and raising a family.
But her dad had also devoted plenty of time to an equally important avocation—getting his wartime memories off his chest and down on paper. The resulting book, called
Goon in the Block
, was published in 1961
and it recounted Don’s experiences inside Stalag Luft III from
his arrival there in November 1943 until the kriegies were marched
out of the compound and across Germany in the winter of
1945
. When
The Great Escape
movie hit the theatres in
1963
, for the first time in her life, Barbara could see (even if distorted by Hollywood
fabrication) “a visual perspective”
[26]
of her father’s war inside German
prison wire.

Unlike the children of other kriegies, who wouldn’t (or couldn’t)
talk about their POW experiences, Barbara and her four older siblings grew up hearing about Stalag Luft III as told and written by their father. Not only did he record the events with precision, Barbara noted that he told the stories with the flair of a raconteur. What’s more, word of
Goon in the Block
had spread and more than just Don Edy’s family members wanted to read it; but there weren’t any more copies of the book around and Don had no interest in a reprint. That’s when Barbara sensed he was passing the torch. She
felt compelled to help her father stay in touch with his wartime comrades at the same time she wanted and keep his stories in circulation
among historians and journalists. She became Don’s “information
gal.” More than that, her work became a personal crusade.

“The families and offspring of the kriegies all express the same sentiment,” Barbara said, “to carry on the memory of not only the
fifty [escapers] whom Hitler ordered murdered, but, as well, the two
hundred, huddled in Hut 104 waiting their turn to escape, the hundreds [of others] who assisted, and all the men of Stalag Luft III and its famous, proud, spectacular distraction to create havoc in the midst of Germany’s war effort.”
[27]

Via correspondence and personal contact, Barbara has built a rap
port with ex-kriegies and their children in Australia, New Zealand,
the UK, the US, and Canada. In 2012 she and her sister Jane Hughes helped to recover and restore a collection of published photographs
originally compiled in a book of remembrances and reflections, called
Wire Bound World
, to redistribute to other survivors of Stalag Luft III. Then, through a series of emails, she initiated an internet exchange of information called
The Beginning of List
200
, designed to pool stories,
images, biographies, and communications about the two hundred
men on the original escape list.

Along the way, like other kriegie offspring, Barbara believes she
has learned how that “proud, spectacular distraction” succeeded in
binding her dad and the rest of the Commonwealth flyers together,
and why that common bond made the events leading up to March
24
–
25
,
1944
, so significant. Just as bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III
forger Tony Pengelly had deduced when he was first imprisoned at
Barth in
1940
, that “we would have to organize to be successful,”
[28]
Barbara Edy concluded that none of the kriegies’ accomplishments
at Stalag Luft III would have been possible without that large group
of captives working together as one.

“The Great Escape would not have been possible,” she said, “save for the absolute co-operation from over a thousand POWs’ non-stop
secrecy, vigilance, persuasion, distraction, cunning, bravery, spirit, and
talent.”
[29]