The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (5 page)

By the time he’d composed and mailed his Christmas 1941 letter,
ten days later, Weir’s demeanour seemed to have improved. Instead of sounding lost, forlorn, and forgotten, he explained that the Germans had been treating them civilly, that his captors had laid out a skating rink area for hockey (all they needed was ice and skates) and that the entire camp was envious of his colour photo of Frances. In addition to wishing her a Merry Christmas, however, Weir added “as education and entertainment” that he was taking language instruction and that
he had been put into a barracks with other downed airmen.

“There are quite a few Canadians (twenty-eight or twenty-nine)
here,” he wrote, sounding more upbeat. “In fact, my darling, it’s not bad at all. . . . I hope I’ll be on my way back to you soon.”
[12]

Perhaps the last thing John Weir might have found inviting about imprisonment in an enemy POW compound, Frances would soon
learn, was the camp’s education and entertainment facilities. She
knew that as a younger man her fiancé had actually travelled with his family in pre-war Germany. Even so, discovering that he was enrolling in language study in a POW camp must have seemed a bit odd. Yet there it was, his sudden attraction to studying Spanish, French, and German, and even trigonometry and calculus, if he wanted. Perhaps less odd to his fiancée was Weir’s delight that some of his air force mates—Hank Birkland and Wally Floody—were barracked in the same prison hut. Frances would learn later that attending German language instruction inside the camp was preparing her fiancé for life on the run outside the wire, if he could get there. Meanwhile, reacquainting himself with his air force comrades was offering him the means to fulfill that off-handed promise he’d made in his Christmas letter to “be on my way back to you soon.”

Unlike John Weir’s relatively comfortable upbringing in Toronto, Hank Birkland’s background told a tougher, more school-of-hard-
knocks tale. Hank was born in
1917
, one of a carpenter’s seven children,
in Spearhill, Manitoba. Like many of his generation—born around
the time of the Great War and raised during the Great Depression—
Birkland rode the rails, worked for his keep, and chased any and all
opportunities as a farm hand, meat packer, door-to-door salesman,
[13]
and labourer in the ore mines of Ontario and the gold mines of British Columbia. In Sheep Creek, BC, he even returned to one of his favourite childhood pastimes—playing lacrosse. With his size and strength came the nickname “Big Train.” When the Second World War broke out, Birkland’s enlistment might well have offered him as much a way out of the Dirty Thirties—with three square meals a day, a new suit of
clothes, and a paycheque—as it presented a way to defend King and
Empire. At any rate, in the fall of
1941
, Flying Officer Birkland was
in
the RAF and piloting Spitfires with 72 Squadron; during a sweep over the coast of France, German anti-aircraft gunners brought his Spitfire down to a crash landing on the beach and ultimately brought him to the same Stalag Luft I barrack hut as John Weir.

Also sharing that hut was Weir’s former 401 Squadron wing mate,
Wally Floody, shot down just days before him. The six-foot-tall Ontarian was an athlete in every sense. Born in Chatham in
1918
, Floody had grown up mostly in Toronto, but during his boyhood summers he enjoyed the family’s access to farm holidays, camping
out on Toronto Island, and competitive team sports such as basket
ball, football, and baseball. As a teenager in search of work in the
mid-1930s, Floody travelled to north-central Ontario for shift work shovelling mud, rock, and precious ores excavated from mines
near Timmins and Kirkland Lake. But so too did Floody find time to
play for the mining companies’ sports teams
[14]
—the Preston East Dome Mine baseball team and the Lake Shore Mines Blue Devils
basketball team. Floody did not have the matriculation diploma from
high school to gain entry to the RCAF, but a letter from his high
school principal convinced the enlistment officer, and Floody joined
soon after Canada declared war on Germany. In the short span of
eighteen months in 1940 and 1941, Floody got married, graduated from the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, got his commission in the RCAF, and was shipped overseas, only to be shot down on his first op, October 27, 1941.

“I’m having my picture taken . . . in an all-Canadian group,” John Weir signed off his Christmas 1941 letter to Frances.

The photo depicted a short but broad-shouldered jack-of-all
trades, Hank Birkland, aged twenty-four, imprisoned at Stalag Luft I six weeks; a hard-rock miner and natural team leader, Wally Floody,
aged twenty-three, in the Barth camp eight weeks; and the youngest, at
twenty-two, John Weir, a natural outdoorsman with a scruffy attitude
to match, and just a month inside the first prisoner-of-war camp exclusively built for captured British Commonwealth airmen. Since the Luft was run by Luftwaffe, it’s likely the photograph of the three Canadians
was snapped by a German airman, who on any other day would have
been the Canadians’ mortal enemy. But with his prisoners safely contained inside the wire, the Luft guard likely took out a personal camera
and snapped the picture as a gesture of ambivalence and respect.

Behind that ambivalence and respect lay one of the strangest
contradictions of Germany’s prisoner-of-war system. In spite of the racial intolerance and obsessive ideology of Germany’s ruling Nazis,
who systematically brutalized prisoners from the East, the regime appeared to deal with prisoners from the West with a degree of deference. With some exceptions,
[*]
in dealings with POWs from the Commonwealth countries and the United States, the Germans recognized certain clauses of the Geneva Conventions. Early in
the war there was a very practical reason for such regard; some of those same Commonwealth nations, Britain and Canada for example, held German POWs on their side of the battle lines. As well, though the overall responsibility for wartime prisoners lay in the hands of the German supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, control of the camps themselves fell to army, navy, and air force chiefs where the prisons were located. In the case of captured Allied aviators, all camp administration, food and clothing allotment, accom
modation, and day-to-day concerns were governed by the command
of the air district, or
Luftgau
.
[15]
Nor did it hurt downed Allied aviators that
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring held great sway with Hit
ler; it was no secret that Göring had high regard for fellow fliers no matter which side they fought for. And up until 1944 that attitude at the top filtered down and was reflected in all treatment of captured
Allied air officers. It meant, for example, that captured enemy air
men from the Commonwealth or the United States generally did not have to work inside prisons. Allied senior officers would be saluted
by equals and lower ranks on the German side. Allied chains of command would be acknowledged even inside the prison wire. Allied
officers could receive mail (including regular Red Cross parcels) and
send it. They would be entitled to recreation and entertainment of
their own making. That Göring chivalry, a holdover from the Great
War, at least early in Germany’s war with the West, influenced daily
life in Luftwaffe-run POW camps.

When that first photograph of John Weir arrived with a letter at Frances McCormack’s Toronto home, it shocked her. For the first time she saw how severely Weir’s face had been injured when he bailed out of the burning Spitfire near the River Somme in France. She could see that his eyelids were virtually gone. No doubt she also recognized the starkness of conditions at the prison camp—the barren setting, the primitive huts, the wire-bound world that was his home for the foreseeable future. She marvelled at her fiancé’s strength, his sense of humour, and his very clear vision of the future.

“I’ve been playing hockey a little and I’m really in fine fettle,” he wrote, and then added a cryptic note about his living arrangements that may have had more to do with escape activity at the camp than building their future dream home. “I’m still working on a design for our cabin, dear. There are a few architects here who’ll help once I get a decent idea to work on. . . . I still have trouble with the children’s rooms—how many, four?”
[16]

Next to the Britons imprisoned at Stalag Luft I, the Canadians were in the minority and—even inside the prison wire—obliged to
respect the authority of the Senior British Officer and his adjutant. At Barth, Group Captain Harry “Wings” Day was the SBO. Formerly a member of the Royal Marine Light Infantry in the Great War, Day had been awarded the Albert Medal for saving the lives of crewmen
aboard the torpedoed HMS
Britannia
in November
1918
. In the
RAF, as the Second World War began, Day served with
57
Squadron, where he earned his nickname, but was shot down five weeks into the war on a reconnaissance operation near Essen, Germany. His adjutant on the Permanent Staff at Stalag Luft I, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Buckley, had trained for naval aviation and served aboard the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
before the war; however, as British aircrew attempted to provide cover for the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France in May
1940
, Buckley was shot down over Calais. Another member of the Permanent Staff
at Stalag Luft I was RAF Squadron Leader Tom Kirby-Green, who
had piloted thirty-seven combat operations when his Wellington bomber was shot down in October
1941
. Inside the wire at Barth, he assisted the SBO as a one-man welcoming committee by entertaining
newcomers on his bongo drums, offering bits of exotic food from his Red Cross parcels, and delivering lectures in the library room.

Inside Stalag Luft I, Group Captain Day and Lieutenant Commander Buckley appeared quite compliant to German demands—helping inbound prisoners acclimatize to their new surroundings.
Following interrogation by the Germans, a newly arrived POW met with the SBO and his RAF Permanent Staff, received some necessary toiletries from a Red Cross parcel, and was assigned to a barracks hut. The Luftwaffe administration anticipated that the civilized nature of relations between prison camp officials and the kriegies would defuse any hostility inmates might feel and might even invite a POW to allow vital information to slip out. Conversely, the RAF Permanent Staff expected the Germans to think that British Commonwealth prisoners were resigned to their fate to sit out the war without resistance. In fact, Day as SBO and Buckley as “Big X” (chief of X Organization) were hard at work scouring the camp for ideas, arranging the escape expertise, and executing each new plan.
[*]

“I had worked in the gold mines in northern Ontario,” Wally
Floody said. “But if you had [an air force] commission and had worked
in a mine, the Englishmen figured you had to be an engineer, and if
you had worked in a mine you knew a lot about tunnelling in sand.
But there was absolutely no similarity between the two.”
[17]

Thousands of feet below ground level in the Lake Shore Gold Mines near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Floody could pass other min
ers in tunnels that were seven feet high and chiselled through solid Canadian Shield. Sub-surface at Stalag Luft I, escapers dug through unstable sand to create passageways barely two feet wide by two feet
deep; they worked on their backs or their stomachs and faced the threat of being buried alive with every cut into the sand. Nevertheless, the trio of Weir, Birkland, and Floody became the principal
architects and work crew for the first tunnelling expeditions at the Barth prison compound. Since the huts included boards that skirted the exterior walls to the ground, the digging crews simply crawled unnoticed into the two-foot space under the huts. First they built a
trapdoor. Then they excavated a shaft straight down and cribbed it with wood scavenged from the huts. When excavation ended each day, the diggers would simply cover the entrance with boards, pile
sandbags around it, and brush earth on top of the entrance.

Once underground, the dig crews determined where the water table lay; at Barth it was situated just a few feet beneath the surface of
the compound sand. But since it proved extremely difficult to keep a tunnel perfectly level, the digging crew often returned to its work
on a new day to find depressions in the tunnel filled with water. That
forced the diggers to work virtually naked so as not to reveal a pair
of pants or a shirt or a jacket covered in wet sand. Additionally, the farther the tunnel proceeded from the hut, the staler the air became. At first, Floody dug narrow shafts upward to allow fresher air into the
tunnel. Then the tunnel crew designed its first air pump, consisting
of a German jam can with a flop valve and a bicycle pump.

“Geez, if you went down below about four feet you were swimming in fucking water,” Floody said. “And putting up air holes wasn’t a total success either.”
[18]

The Germans discovered the first tunnel when it caved in from flooding and multiple air holes. That prompted a sea change among the Luftwaffe guards running the camp. German work crews began systematically stripping the Luft huts of their skirting boards to reveal
the space between the floors of the huts and the ground. They also began driving heavy wagons around the compound to collapse any
shallow tunnels.
[19]
They organized a counter-intelligence team called
Abwehr
, or “defence,” dressed the men in blue-grey-coloured overalls and equipped them with steel probing rods. The kriegies dubbed them “ferrets” and fought back with a primitive form of security. A prisoner was assigned the job of taking his laundry—perhaps a pair of underwear and socks—close to the front gate of the compound. He would erect a clothesline with a string stretched between two nails to apparently dry his laundry. The moment vehicles, guards, or ferrets
approached the front gate, the laundry man would simply remove
his shorts and socks from the line. That alerted a system of prisoners, bucket brigade style, that there was a potential threat to the tunnel. Digging could be shut down and a tunnel trapdoor concealed in minutes. What emerged from the desolation of the camp and the
persistence of the POWs to work together was an esprit de corps
that went beyond the protocol of squadron barracks in Fighter and Bomber commands. The kriegies had fashioned a prison camp collaboration that knit them together into a single cause—theirs was a bond of wire.