The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (6 page)

“I tried digging in the tunnels,” Pilot Officer (P/O) Barry Davidson said, “but I got claustrophobic.”
[20]

Compared to the other Canadians imprisoned at Stalag Luft I, Davidson, at age twenty-eight, was the old man of the group. He had learned to fly in the middle of the Great Depression and earned his private flying licence on a Tiger Moth at the Calgary Municipal Airport in
1937
. The moment he got the certificate, he wrote a letter to Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek, who was attempting to
repulse attacks from the Imperial Japanese armed forces; Davidson offered
his services to the Chinese “Flying Tigers,” but the general politely
declined. No matter. Next, he travelled to England, joined the RAF, and became a Blenheim bomber pilot with
18
Squadron. In
July
1940
, as the German blitzkrieg gobbled up the Low Countries
and northern France, Davidson’s squadron was dispatched to slow
the enemy offensive.

“We found one of the forward new aerodromes they were building . . . around fifteen miles from Paris,” Davidson said. “So we lined up on the equipment at the end of the aerodrome with two of our two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs.”
[21]

The German anti-aircraft batteries finally responded and shrapnel ripped through the centre of Davidson’s Blenheim, destroying its
wing and tail controls. Disoriented and with a dead stick (virtually
no control over the aircraft’s direction or attitude in the air), he managed to crash-land the bomber on a beach. He hoped it might be a friendly Allied coast. But moments later, his plane was surrounded by
German troops informing him and his crew they were prisoners of
war. His first letter home to family in Calgary was a simple one.

“Looks like I am in cold storage for the duration,”
[22]
he wrote.

But if his talents had not properly been put to the test in the air over France, they more than adequately served him on the ground
inside Stalag Luft I. Davidson quickly blended into the Canadian kriegie contingent and came to understand that the war had deprived the prison guards of much the same amenities it had the POWs. So,
as soon as Red Cross parcels became available to the prisoners of
war, Davidson used some of their contents to advance the priorities of the escape committee. Davidson managed to put parcel staples, such as chocolate, coffee, and cigarettes, into the hands of the guards in return for items that would come in handy for the kriegies. Back came tools for tunnelling, the loan of a camera, and the raw materials
for forged documents. An avid sportsman, Davidson helped secure sports gear—tennis rackets, baseballs and bats, and hockey skates
and sticks—from the YMCA in Morgan’s department store back in Canada. The equipment may well have provided kriegies some welcome recreation, but the hardwood from tennis rackets burned long
and hot in a barracks stove and a used skate blade often enjoyed a second life as a cutting or digging tool.
[23]
From the moment he got settled in the POW compound, P/O Davidson became known as
“the scrounger.”

He wasn’t the only one skilled in the art of scrounging. MacKin
non “Mac” Jarrell, from Armow, Ontario, joined the RAF in
1940
and trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer serving aboard Blen
heim aircraft. In July 1941, on his twenty-second operation, Jarrell was shot down and badly burned in the episode. The hospital where Mac was admitted happened to have a German-born doctor raised
in the United States. Seconded to military medical work, the doc
tor administered to Jarrell’s burns with plastic surgery
[24]
and nursed him back to health. When Jarrell was finally discharged and sent to
a POW camp in central Germany, he joined an escape committee that built a tunnel and, months later, nineteen escaped through it. After his recapture, six days later, Mac was considered high-risk to
escape, so the Germans kept moving him from prison camp to prison camp—eight different camps over the next forty-five months.

Once he was cleared by the escape committee at each prison compound, Jarrell joined a crew of scroungers getting to know the German guards and taming them—i.e., bartering with them for the equipment and supplies X Organization needed for its long-term escape agenda. Among other bribing tools, Mac used the flow of
tobacco sent from home, including cigarette packs from the Ontario Chinese Patriotic Federation. Also sent from Canada, and innocently cleared by the Luftwaffe administration at the compound, were small wind-up phonograph machines and a regular supply of recordings.

“One record called ‘Corn Silk,’” Mac noted in his log, “came in
almost every package. It was terrible and the prisoners hated it.”
[25]

But that was the intention. Eventually, one POW in the compound became so agitated over the horrible sound of “Corn Silk”
that he smashed the record only to discover a map of Germany and area had been hidden inside. Suddenly, Jarrell’s scrounging crew had additional contraband to assist in the long-range escape plans.

Another western Canadian joined the Stalag Luft I escape committee about the same time that Barry Davidson did. Of course, it had never been Dick Bartlett’s intention to become a POW. Born in
1919
and raised on a dairy farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, as a boy Dick raised silver foxes, the assets of which underwrote his passage to England and provisional entry into the Royal
Navy Fleet Air Arm (RNFA) in 1938. By October of 1939, a month into the Second World War, Bartlett had received his RNFA graduation wings and joined the torpedo training unit perfecting airborne sorties against German shipping across the Channel. By the spring of 1940, as the Nazi occupation of northwestern Europe and Scandinavia began, Sub Lieutenant Bartlett was posted to 803 Squadron flying Skua dive-bombers attacking targets in occupied Norway. The Skuas were manned by a pilot facing forward in the cockpit and, right behind, a gunner facing aft. As the sun rose ahead of them on June 13, 1940, during an attempted attack on the German battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
in Trondheim harbour, Bartlett and his
gunner Lloyd Richards took return fire from German Bf 109s.

“A heavy blow [felt like] a kick from a mule,”
[26]
Bartlett explained later.

Machine-gun bullets and cannon-shell shrapnel had penetrated the Skua’s fuselage, its fuel tank, and Bartlett’s flight suit up his left
side. Unable to evade the fighters and rapidly losing consciousness,
Bartlett barely made it over the rooftops of Trondheim, and as the
Skua disintegrated—ultimately losing its engine—he crashed-landed into a field. Only three of the fifteen Skuas had completed the attack. Bartlett and his gunner survived their crash, but even as he received treatment at a Trondheim hospital, it didn’t take Bartlett long to consider his escape options. Two attempts later, he was put under guard and sent to a series of POW camps in northern Germany and Poland, including Stalag XX-A, where he learned an important covert skill.

“Through friendly relations with Polish labourers at the camp,” Bartlett related, “[we] bribed one of the Poles to sneak the components for a small radio receiver into the camp.”
[27]

The resulting wireless set allowed the POWs to hear BBC broadcasts. But to ensure that the radio was never discovered by German
guards or ferrets, Bartlett regularly disassembled it and placed its parts inside a medicine ball; the ball, a bit larger than a basketball
and usually weighted with sand, was used by prisoners of war for calisthenics and other sporting pursuits. Without the guards or ferrets
ever realizing it, the wireless set was always out in the open, being carefully tossed among the “sports enthusiasts,” and consequentl
y under close surveillance by members of the escape committee. Only when the kriegies could safely open the medicine ball was the radio
pulled from its hiding place and assembled to catch the BBC news
from England.

“[That way,] the radio-equipped medicine ball subsequently travelled
from camp to camp [becoming] a continuous source of war news and intelligence,”
[28]
Bartlett pointed out, and always with S/L Bartlett as its custodian. Despite his standing assignment at Stalag
Luft I—protecting the radio—Bartlett was never far from the escape planning among his fellow Canadian POWs.

“I haven’t missed any German lectures yet,” John Weir reported
to Frances in his first letter of
1942
from the Barth prison camp. “I keep myself fairly busy, so the time doesn’t drag too much . . . what with learning to cook and stuff.” Then, in what seemed a Freudian
slip apparently missed by both the German and British censors, Weir concluded that Hank Birkland, Wally Floody, and he “will dig in for the winter;” then he signed off with his now routinely optimistic, “it won’t be long before this war is over and we will be home again.”
[29]

Wally Floody noted from his experience inside several German POW camps that there were only three ways of escaping—over the
wire, through the wire, or under the wire. He, Birkland, and Weir had chosen tunnelling as the safest and most efficient way out. At
Barth, however, the kriegies tried every possible scenario and the RAF Permanent Staff wasn’t about to blunt their initiative. In January
1942
, a prisoner tried to escape by hiding in a cart that had just emptied the compound’s latrines. Several others attempted to disguise themselves in mock-ups of German uniforms. Another jumped into a snow bank, but was spotted when steam rising from the snow where he was hiding gave him away. Later that winter, three airmen
used the cover of a blizzard to cut their way through the wire at
the NCO’s compound, but a guard spotted the trio and shot Sergeant Johnny Shaw, making him the first fatality of the escape campaign.
[30]

Arrivals at Barth continued to mount. During the Battle of Britain, RAF fighter pilots who were shot down most often parachuted to safety on British territory; after Dunkirk and the fall of France,
however, surviving fighter pilots who bailed out over occupied France and Belgium most often became prisoners of war. In
1941
, for example, RAF Fighter Command claimed
711
Luftwaffe fighters shot down,
while sustaining the loss of four hundred Hurricanes and Spitfires, mostly over enemy territory. Similarly, between July of
1940
and January of
1941
, RAF Bomber Command lost
330
aircraft, resulting in fourteen hundred aircrew killed, missing, or captured. Over the course of the entire war, more than six hundred Fighter Command and nearly ten thousand Bomber Command aircrew became
prisoners of war.
[*]
Most of them were captured in Europe and most
came through the Luft containment system.

The flow of downed and captured Commonwealth aircrew—perhaps a dozen or two a month at the beginning of the war—became a torrent of hundreds a month in 1941 and 1942; the tide of downed airmen had grown too with the entry of the United States into the war after the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The impact of this ever-growing prisoner-of-war population on Luftwaffe resources—the availability of trained interrogators, transit guards, and bureaucrats, not to mention food, accommodation, and
living space—became more than one prison facility could handle.
But camp administrators recognized they were facing perhaps an even greater problem—the growing number of dedicated escape artists the camp appeared to be fostering. And with the growing number
of escape attempts,
Kommandants
at POW camps across Germany feared reprisals from their superiors should any of the large-scale
escape plots succeed.

Meanwhile, Wings Day took full advantage of that fear, even if in truth as few as
5
per cent of the POWs might be described as dedicated escapers. Day’s intelligence told him that maybe a quarter of the camp’s inmates considered escape an option. To further motivate kriegie escape attempts, he made it known that escaping
was an “operational function”
[31]
in the camp, reinforcing the perception that attempting an escape was an RAF airman’s duty. The result was nearly a fever pitch of escape activity at Stalag Luft I; or, as Day described it, he’d been incarcerated “in a kennel with a good pack of foxhounds” all sniffing to get out.

John Weir’s letters to his fiancée trailed off slightly in the winter and spring of
1942
. In a few notes during January and February, he wondered if Hugh Godefroy (still flying with
401
Squadron)
had found the gold pin John had purchased for Frances as a Christmas present just two days before he was shot down on November 8
,
1941
. Then, in just a couple of letters in late winter, he explained that hockey was over because the rink had become a mud hole and
that the reduced number of Red Cross parcels had left him in need of basic “clothing—pajamas, sox [sic], shoes, slippers, gloves and cap.”
[32]
Yes, Frances had received her Christmas present, but she sensed her fiancé’s calls for additional clothes were more for a stockpile than his own personal use. He was up to something.

As it turned out, so were the German prison authorities. Scuttlebutt around the Barth compound suggested most of the officers and air force NCOs were about to be packed off to somewhere in Silesia. In mid-March, Stalag Luft I guards instructed the prisoners to pack their belongings, assembled them for parade, and marched them to the trains outside Barth. Along with the instructions came warnings
against any attempts to escape. Roommates Birkland, Floody, and Weir became separated when the Germans loaded POWs into the
train cars alphabetically, but that didn’t dissuade Scruffy. He teamed up with another kriegie named Mike Wood and the two worked out the details of Weir’s escape plan.