The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (9 page)

Over a barracks table, Wing Commander Harry Day conducted the question-and-answer session to verify Harsh was who he claimed to be. Once he’d passed the SBO cross-examination, the serious
ques
tioning began. A New Zealand squadron leader wanted to know
everything Harsh had witnessed on his way into Sagan: What were
the trains like currently? What were present procedures at railway
stations? What passes did the guard escort show en route? As Harsh
offered his recollections of what he’d seen and heard, the squadron
leader made notes on a small “chewable size” piece of paper. Finally, at the end of a very long day that effectively returned him to the life he had led for twelve years in the US penal system, Harsh commiserated with himself about a prospect as dim as it had been his first day shackled to a Georgia chain gang in 1928.

“They tell me you’re an American,”
[18]
a friendly voice suddenly
interrupted.

“Yup,” Harsh had said, using his best Gary Cooper impression.

“I’m Wally Floody. I got my monthly letter [from home] from the
Germans today,” he said. “I’m writing my wife, Betty, in Toronto. If there’s anyone in the States you want to know you’re a prisoner, I’ll get her to contact them.” Floody explained that by passing on
the information in this way, Harsh’s family would know he was alive faster than if they waited for official word from the Red Cross or Air Ministry. He was right; Betty Floody was able to notify Harsh’s sister
of his whereabouts and status six weeks before the official air force
form letter arrived with its “we are pleased to inform you” language.

A kriegie friendship and collaboration began in that moment.
Floody’s generosity left an indelible impression on the latest arrival to Stalag Luft III. In the days that followed, Floody and Harsh often walked the perimeter of the camp, up against the warning wire. It was
the only safe place to talk. They shared their histories, their hopes for survival, and the current state of escape committee activity under X Organization. Floody brought Harsh up to date on the growing list of problems facing the tunnel designers and diggers—too much sand to disperse in secret, too many ferrets to track, too many tunnel opera
tions to protect, too limited an inside security force. At the end of
one of their exchanges, Harsh walked right into Floody’s verbal trap.

“Just how the hell do you guys plan to secure [all] this?”
[19]
Harsh asked.

“That’s going to be your problem,” Floody said with a grin. “You, my friend, are going to be in charge of security.”

Harsh was not impressed by being dragooned into the job, or by
what he realized would become a mammoth responsibility. Floody
pointed out that Harsh would be assisted by Canadian officer George
McGill, who had earlier delivered such a convincing escape diver
sion with his impromptu boxing exhibition that the escape committee immediately recruited him for security. Tom Kirby-Green, who spoke myriad languages (including dialects from his homeland of
Nyasaland—now Malawi— in Africa), would become a third member
of the security team. And Harsh’s final security co-chief would be a fellow American. Albert “Junior” Clark had risen quickly in the
military; at age twenty-seven, he was already a lieutenant colonel, and by the summer of
1942
was serving in the RAF. In July he’d been flying a sweep over Abbeville,
France, where Luftwaffe fighters shot his Spitfire down; he’d arrived
at the East Compound of Stalag Luft III in August, a few months before Harsh, and was also befriended by
tunnel designer Floody.

“You know something?” Floody said finally to Harsh. “You’re probably the only man in the world who got a job because he’s an
ex-convict.”
[20]

Another item on the escape committee’s wish list was its own version of MI5, an intelligence service designed to recognize any threat to the secret activity of the escape committee, conceive and organize
defence against that threat, and carry out counter-intelligence to mislead or derail all efforts to discover the day-to-day operations of X
Organization. Some of the expertise the escape committee needed arrived at the Sagan prison in the form of a Canadian airman shot
down over Germany that summer. Born in Toronto and educated in England, Kingsley Brown had two passions as a young man—writing and flying. Beginning in
1928
, he wrote for the
Toronto Star
, the
New
York Herald-Tribune
and the
Halifax Herald
, and while employed at
the latter he learned to fly at the Halifax Aero Club. When war broke out he enlisted in the RCAF and was serving as a Hampden bomber pilot when he was shot down over Bremen, Germany, on July
2
,
1942
.

Brown recalled his first night at Stalag Luft III in the East Com
pound barracks hut adjusting to his new surroundings. As new boy
he’d been assigned a top bunk, so when the German guards locked the hut doors for the night and the prisoners drew the blackout curtains shut, Brown just sat on his bed, legs dangling. He recalled how, with his head near the ceiling, he was nearly overcome by the stench
of body odours and the cloud of smoke from cigarettes and burning candles made of margarine and shoe polish. Despite the haze,
however, he began to notice activity at the opposite end of his room, where the stove had been moved aside to reveal a hole in the floor.

“In this eerie light, I watched naked and half-naked men, their bodies shiny with sweat, slipping in and out of the black hole,”
[21]
Brown wrote.

This was his first exposure to a tunnelling crew, assembling, dis
appearing down the excavation hole, and then emerging with cloth
bags, pails, and tin cans full of sand. Brown was allowed to witness
this parade of diggers entering and exiting the trapdoor for the
night’s excavating only because several kriegies had vouched for him; they
had known him in Toronto or at his Bomber Command aerodrome in
England and knew he could be trusted. After a few days of orientation, Brown was summoned to a meeting with Group Captain H.
M. Massey. Then the SBO, Massey was in his sixties and (before
being captured in 1942) had been appointed to liaise with US strategic bombing personnel in Washington, DC; but Massey had felt he ought to witness a bombing operation over Germany first-hand and was shot down on his inaugural op. Massey knew Brown had worked
for newspapers and concluded his journalism skills might help the
escape committee’s propaganda activity.

Thrilled at the prospect of potentially working in connection
with those underground operations he’d witnessed, or perhaps join
ing clandestine radio transmitting, or assisting in production at a secret printing press, Brown reported immediately to his superior,
Wing Commander Taffy Williams. Brown found Williams alone in his barracks room. He was seated at a table in front of an open window, working with what looked like empty jars, a pair of scissors, and tiny pieces of paper.

“You’re just in time to lend me a hand,” Williams told Brown.
“We’ve got a propaganda job.”
[22]

Williams handed Brown one of the German jam jars he’d procured from a guard. Held inside the jar by a piece of cheesecloth were several bumblebees—very much alive, but not very happy about the arrangement. Williams had a crew of kriegies capturing the bumblebees near the cookhouse and passing them along for propaganda duty. Williams handed Brown a pair of gloves and instructed him to open the top of the jar and gently grab each bumblebee by the wings. Williams then slipped a noose of thread over the abdomen of the bee
to where the abdomen joined the thorax and gently tightened the noose; attached to the thread was a pennant-shaped piece of tissue
paper on which was carefully written, in tiny script, the propaganda Germans later discovering the bees would read. The kriegies hoped the messages would surprise and offend.

“Deutschland kaput,” one side of the pennant said, and on the
other, “Hitler kaput.”
[23]

Graduating from his initiation into the kriegies’ hierarchy to the
escape committee enterprise (with relatively few stings to show for it), Brown moved to a new level of intelligence service. Upon his arrival at the compound, he’d been given a German language textbook that apparently was standard issue to the thousands of non-
German workers transported inside the country to work as forced labour. Language was among Brown’s specialties and he soon learned that his conversational German was an asset inside the wire. Brown
could initiate small talk with the guards to discover valuable bits of
information or to determine which guard might be a potential bribery prospect, a so-called “tame” guard. And that work led to joining
a sub-committee of the X Organization—known as “Dean and Daw
son,” after the British travel agency—which forged such documents as identity cards, travel passes, and labour permits. Dean and Daw
son, led by Briton Tim Walenn and Canadian Tony Pengelly, put
Brown’s
journalist skills to work, assembling a complete card index of police stations,
labour recruiting centres, and industrial addresses for every major
town and city in Germany.

As a consequence, Kingsley Brown became something of a fix
ture in the library or reading rooms in the East Compound. When the latest German newspapers—
Völkischer Beobachter
and the
Frankfurter Zeitung
—arrived in the camp, the former Canadian journalist who was apparently hungry for news (if any guard asked) pored
over each edition of the newspapers’ classified ads, obituaries, and public service announcements. From his daily readings, Brown might
learn the names of real people whose identities could be sto
len, the names of police officials who might sanction travel papers,
and which industries in what locations might be recruiting migrant workers in Germany or any part of the occupied territories of the
Third Reich. While building the card index in the service of Dean
and Dawson, Brown met Gordon Brettell, a British pilot officer from Fighter Command.
They both spoke conversational German. And that helped them
hatch an escape plan for the coming winter.

“The prospect of escape had all the exhilarating fascination of a spine-tingling sport,” Kingsley Brown wrote. “And it was this aspect more than any other that beckoned to captives from the free side of the wire.”
[24]

If digging tunnels, hiding excavated sand, dodging guards and dogs, or tying propaganda notes to the abdomens of bees weren’t
enough of a sporting challenge, some kriegies tried out-and-out theft. In addition to the data that Brown and the rest of the Dean and Dawson volunteers were compiling from newspapers and public service announcements in the library, Keith Ogilvie contributed on his own. Since his official job inside the wire involved handling the Red Cross
parcels
[25]
arriving for the POWs, Ogilvie had regular contact with
the Luft guards and vice versa. One day, he spotted a wallet sticking
out of the back pocket of an older guard’s uniform. Ogilvie silently lifted it, rushed it along to the forgers to copy, and then informed the
distraught guard he’d discovered the wallet on the floor.
[26]
Worried
about the consequences of prison authorities discovering he had lost his papers inside the compound, the guard thanked Ogilvie profusely. In one short, deft act of thievery, Ogilvie had gained temporary pos
session of valuable identity papers and tamed a prison guard; the man was forever in the Canadian officer’s debt.

In spite of the spirited nature of the kriegies engaged in escape attempts, there was no escaping some of the harsh conditions of
prison camp life. When his Halifax bomber was shot down by a German night-fighter aircraft over Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany,
in December
1942
, navigator Don “Tiger” McKim (from Lynedoch, Ontario) jumped into the frigid night sky and a
185
-mile-per-hour wind. In addition to the cold and fear he felt, he smashed his head going through the escape hatch and was temporarily knocked out.
He came to soon enough to activate his chute, but on the ground was
quickly arrested and interrogated at Dulag Luft, arriving at Stalag Luft III on Christmas Eve. His present, on arrival, was a Red Cross parcel and the bottom tier of a bunk bed, closest to the floor and
consequently closest to the outside December air.

“I was never so cold in my life,” McKim said. “The mattress was made of bags of wood chips, so the cold would work its way
through.
. . . I didn’t take off my clothes. I put all the clothes I had on. My greatcoat. My mittens. Everything.”
[27]

Following appell outside each day, McKim could anticipate the kriegies’ breakfast ration—a slice of German black bread, which often had fine wood chips or sawdust inside to make the loaf go fur
ther; the bread ration was a loaf per person per week. There might be a tiny piece of butter or cheese with it and their Red Cross tea or cof
fee. For later meals, meat and fresh vegetables were rare. The Ger
mans doled out either potatoes or kohlrabi (a coarse vegetable that resembled turnips) to make sauerkraut or thin vegetable soup. Generally, the Stalag Luft III officers remained hungry, but had enough
to sustain life and health; in fact, with the aid of Red Cross parcel
staples, they generally digested more nutrition and calories than the Germans guarding them.
[28]