The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (7 page)

Based on maps the escape committee had stowed away in the camp, Scruffy expected the eastbound train would pass through Stettin, which had access to the sea; if the two men could loosen the
train windows and jump from the moving train as it slowed through
Stettin, maybe they could make it to the harbour and stow away on a ship. Everything went according to plan—preparation of the windows, the jump from the train, safe passage to the waterfront, and refuge overnight until they could find a ship leaving the port.
It nearly worked until they ran into an SS officer and were arrested, jailed, interrogated, and shipped off to their intended destination—the Silesian town of Sagan and the new home of imprisoned aircrew,
Stalag Luft III.

“Hello, Darling,” John Weir began his twelfth letter home to
Frances McCormack in the spring of
1942
. “We are now well installed
in the new camp . . . situated in the middle of a reforestation area with lots of fresh air.”
[33]

Scruffy complained that it had been almost two months since he’d heard from anybody in Canada. His fiancée and the Weir family had no idea he had just been shipped from a prison camp where he’d participated
in forty-eight tunnel escape attempts, daily goon-baiting (terrorizing the German Officers or Non-coms, or “goons”), and
then a nearly successful leap to freedom from the prison train.

“We’ve been clearing stumps for a kitchen garden (I only hope
the Germans give us some seed) and for basketball, volleyball, and
tennis courts. . . . Besides that I’m slinging the discus. I hope to be
fairly healthy by the time I get back to you. Then all you’ll have to do is fatten me up.”
[34]

Frances McCormack wouldn’t necessarily have understood what
her husband-to-be was up to, but clearing stumps, gardening, and pursuing sport while inside the wire at this new state-of-the-art prison camp in Silesia were not at all about filling a cold cellar with
fresh produce for POWs’ diets or even about keeping fit. These were the grassroots pursuits of a transplanted escape committee already cultivating its next plan.

“SPIN
E
-
TINGLING
SPORT”

T
REES
used for reforestation, especially pines planted closely
together, are cultivated that way to allow fast growth upward,
not much outward. Stuck into the ground as seedlings perhaps a few feet apart, and with little or no human attention—water or fertilizer—reforestation pines shoot skyward. Their purpose is not to grow freely, but to keep loose, sandy soils from eroding and to create,
overnight, what foresters refer to as a “green wall.” For some years, farmers along the Bobr River near the town of Sagan in Silesia had protected their sandy soils by planting rows and rows of these fast-growing pines. By the
1940
s, thousands of tall, palisade-like pines
appeared to cut off the town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants from the outside world. Whether by accident or design, when Sagan’s new
arrivals—several hundred aircrew prisoners of war—began debark
ing at the train station and marching down the road to their new
quarters, the pine forest seemed to gobble them up for good.

“Situated in the middle of Sagan forest,” one aircrew POW said, “one could never see more than a few hundred yards in any direction, except upwards. . . . The lack of view rather enhanced the fenced-in feeling.”
[1]

In fact, the new prison compound—Stalag Luft III—was carved out of those woods, hundreds of miles from any ocean coastline and even farther from existing battlefields; there was little chance
that an escaper could get far enough west to contact the French or
Dutch Underground, or the other direction to find refuge with Soviet allies beyond the Eastern
Front. For a year before the prison
camp opened in March of
1942
, Russian forced-labour workers
and eventually some of the first non-
commissioned Allied aircrew (whom the Germans could force to work) who were brought there chopped down many of the reforested pines to form a clearing—about three hundred acres of grey-
coloured sandy topsoil. The fine consistency of the soil would pose an obvious problem for tunnellers, while assisting any camp officials thwarting them. Working in the
tunnellers’ favour, however, was the virgin ground, without any previous excavation and (unlike Barth) with a water table hundreds of feet under the surface. In addition, Sagan, less than a mile from the camp, was a busy train terminus with six rail lines
intersecting
in its marshalling yard. And while that meant smoother delivery of prisoners from trains to platforms and then to the compound, for
any observant POW the presence of so many railway lines seemed to provide countless ways to exit town, should he get that far.

The Germans had built two separate and parallel wire fences
around the roughly half-mile-square compound. The double-jeopardy fences each stood about ten feet tall and six to eight feet apart. Atop the fences, like a thorny crown, they had installed a barbed-wire overhang that pointed inward toward the prisoners. And between the two fences they had piled and strung additional barbed wire to impede any passage. Illustrating the immense size of the prison, about thirty
feet inside the outer fence was an inner warning wire, strung about eighteen inches off the ground; beyond the knee-high wire was no
man’s land, and any POW caught in it, they were told, would be shot
without warning. Guard towers were positioned on each corner and
every hundred or so yards along the perimeter of the compound; all
were armed with searchlights and machine guns. Eight barrack buildings were built a further forty yards inside the warning wire (each hut sat several feet off the ground on concrete pillars so that ferrets could inspect beneath them at a glance), as well as a wash house, a cookhouse, a couple of latrines, and a pool for rainwater in case of fire. Meanwhile, outside the entire enclosure, the pine forest had been clear-cut back as
much as a hundred feet beyond the double fences. The message was evident everywhere: this camp was built to prevent escaping.

When the majority of their occupants began arriving on the first day of spring 1942, there were two compounds ready and waiting.
The East Compound contained eight barracks huts; these would house approximately nine hundred air force officer prisoners. The
Centre Compound had a dozen barracks to house approximately sixteen hundred non-commissioned air force prisoners. Every POW
barrack was a wooden, single-storey hut containing twelve good-
sized rooms, and each of those held six double-decker bunk beds and a stove for heat in winter (whenever fuel was provided); before they
became overcrowded, two of the dozen rooms in each hut offered a library and recreation room. West of the Centre Compound was the
Kommandantur
,
[2]
the German administrative compound for the
whole camp. To the northeast stood the
Vorlager
, the utility section
of the camp housing a bathhouse, an infirmary, buildings to store
fuel and supplies, housing for Russian prisoners (the camp’s forced labour), and the notorious “cooler”—solitary confinement cells.

For several days freight trains pulled into Sagan Junction disgorging their human cargo—Allied air force prisoners that none of the German
Kommandants
at POW camps across Germany ever wanted
to see again. Emerging from the “forty-and-eights”—boxcars built for either forty men or eight horses but often fit for neither—were hundreds of the most experienced escape artists the European air
war had produced. German authorities figured it was safer to dump
all the bad apples into one basket, a basket that could contain them,
than to have them causing havoc at thirty different prison camps all over Germany.

Among the prisoners marched into the new facility near Sagan
was the old guard of Royal Air Force men, those who had been locked up in German POW camps for two or three years already. Of course, there was Harry “Wings” Day, who had led 57 Squadron’s Blenheim bombers right from the beginning of the war, but was brought down in October 1939—on a Friday the thirteenth. Perhaps the Germans had been the unlucky ones for shooting him down that day; as Senior British Officer, Day entertained most of the hundreds of escape plans while appearing to toe the line with German camp brass. There was Peter Fanshawe, a Royal Navy pilot shot down June 13, 1940, while
attacking the German battle cruiser
Scharnhorst
. One of the origi
nal kriegies, “Hornblower” Fanshawe had organized the first escape meetings inside Dulag Luft at Frankfurt-am-Main in August 1940.

There were RAF aircrew men such as Blenheim pilot Mike Casey,
shot down over Emden, Germany, on October
16
,
1939
; and Fleet Air Arm flight commander Jimmy Buckley, shot down near Cal
ais, France, six days later on May
29
,
1940
. Buckley and Casey had organized the first breakout attempts even before RAF airmen were
transferred to Stalag Luft I at Barth. From Warburg and Oflag VI-B
prisoner-of-war camp came fighter pilot Douglas Bader (shot down
in August
1941
), whose Lazarus-like recoveries from combat and
crashes had earned him the rank of wing commander, but whose lust for escaping had his German captors threatening to take away both his artificial legs.
[3]
And from Spangenberg prison came Battle of Britain ace and RAF squadron leader Robert Stanford Tuck, shot down January
28, 1942; he had also made numerous individual escape attempts.

Similarly experienced and equally undeterred by the imposing look of the prison camp were the Canadian POWs. In fact, some of the Canuck prisoners being transported from Spangenberg prison to Sagan had become quite notorious, even among the German hierarchy. When Ottawa-born RAF fighter ace Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie was shot down over Lille, France, on July 4, 1941, William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, the British-born fascist who became the Nazis’ chief English-language broadcaster) announced the victory immediately;
normally, processing and publishing such information took days or
even months to accomplish.
[4]
Even earlier, there was the flurry of
attention around the capture of Alfred “Tommy” Thompson, from Penetanguishene, Ontario. Like Ogilvie and Tony Pengelly, the twenty-one-year-old Thompson had packed up for England in the
1930
s to take advantage of the RAF’s Commonwealth-wide enlist
ment option. Posted to 102 Squadron in 1937 and assigned the job of bombing a German target with propaganda leaflets from his Whitley bomber on September 8, 1939, he and his crew were shot down just five days into the war. Tommy Thompson had the dubious distinc
tion of being the first Canadian airman captured in the war and as
such was taken to a special meeting with
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring in Berlin.

“He said they discussed hockey,” Tommy’s son Andrew Thompson
said. “[Göring] liked Canadian hockey. That was one topic they talked about. And [Göring] mentioned that my father had gotten him out of bed the night before, when his bomber had flown over
Berlin.”
[5]

Not only was Thompson exposed to Göring, but also to German
propaganda cinematographers. Shortly after his capture, they shot
newsreel footage and sound of Thompson in his RAF uniform standing at a microphone and speaking about living conditions as a POW.

“Since being taken prisoner here in Germany,” Thompson said haltingly to the camera, “my brother officers and myself have been
treated with every courtesy and consideration.”
[6]

Also en route from Spangenberg prison to Sagan was RCAF nav
igator George McGill, just twenty-three and from Toronto Island.
During a combat operation over Wilhelmshaven in January of
1942
, McGill was ordered by his pilots to bail out of their burning Wellington bomber. Immediately after the premature order, the two pilots managed to put out the fire and keep the bomber aloft all the way back to England
[7]
, leaving McGill to face years as a POW. And from Barth came F/L Henry Sprague, from Nelson, BC, shot down in November of
1941
, when his
96
Squadron began using Defiant aircraft as night fighters.
[8]
Another Barth alumnus was
102
Squadron bomber
pilot Tony Pengelly, as well as Spitfire pilots Hank Birkland from 122 Squadron and Wally Floody from 401 Squadron. Floody’s wing (and tunnelling) mate, Scruffy Weir, would arrive a few days later.

All these men had one thing in common. They had experienced years inside the German stalag system. Sometimes alone, other times in teams, they all had plotted and dug tunnels to escape it, and while nearly every one of their attempts had failed, none of the perpetrators had ever given up. Their jailers felt equally assured they could keep their prisoners inside the wire and, with a few exceptions, they had been successful.

When he arrived at the end of his march from Sagan Junction
train station, on March 21, and surveyed what his German captors had prepared for the officers and NCOs, Pilot Officer Wally Floody
didn’t see all the sophistication of the new Sagan camp so much as
a preventative system. He considered all the German-designed features of the new facility a compliment to the determination and ingenuity of the kriegies’ abilities to find new ways of breaking out.

“It wasn’t a punishment camp,” he said. “It was the one camp they’d built with all the knowledge they’d acquired during two or three years
of holding us prisoners of war. It was supposedly escape-proof.”
[9]

The Germans called the new camp Stalag Luft III. The prisoners called it Göring’s luxury camp,
[10]
but did so sardonically. Even in the earliest days of captivity there, some of the Commonwealth aircrew POWs weren’t prepared to sit still; they set about testing the
weakest
points of the compound right away. On March
21
, the very first day
inside the wire, Wings Day joined two other officers in transforming their
RAF uniforms to look like German Luftwaffe uniforms (the pants
and tunics were not dissimilar in colour), and—being flu
ent German speakers—tried to talk their way to freedom through
the main gate; the bluff didn’t work and the three got the obligatory fourteen days of detention in the cooler.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Buckley re-established X Organization
[*]
inside
the East Compound and began receiving a steady flow of escape
proposals.
One scheme—worked out by Bill Nichols, an American in the RAF, and Irish airman Ken Toft—claimed that the mass of coiled wire between the double fences and the distance between German sentry positions created blind spots along the outer barrier. They theorized if the two of them could get across the warning wire to a blind spot at the main fence, they could cut their way
through the wire before being spotted. All they needed was a diversion. So, Wings Day and the escape committee organized a series of them. There was a staged fight. A prisoner approached a key sen
try box and asked that a phone call go through to the
Kommandant
for an interview. A POW at another sentry box asked permission to retrieve a ball in no man’s land. And elsewhere, one prisoner dumped a bucket of water over
the head of another. All this distracted the guards long enough to allow Nichols and Toft to snip their way through both fences and the obstruction wire in between. Once the two men emerged outside the double-jeopardy fences, other prisoners orchestrated more
diversions to help the escapers get into the pine forest beyond. It all worked. But they were soon recaptured on the run and sent to the cooler too.