The Great Escape: A Canadian Story Read online

  About the Author

  * * *

  Ted Barris is an accomplished author, journalist, and broadcaster. As well as hosting stints on CBC Radio and regular contributions to the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and various national magazines, he is a full-time professor of journalism at Centennial College in Toronto. Barris has authored seventeen non-fiction books. In 2011 he received the Canadian Minister of Veterans’ Affairs Commendation and in 2012 the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

  Also by Ted Barris

  * * *

  military history

  Behind the Glory: Canada’s Role in the Allied Air War

  Days of Victory: Canadians Remember, 1939–1945

  (with Alex Barris, 1st edition, 1995)

  Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 1950–1953

  Canada and Korea: Perspectives 2000 (contributor)

  Juno: Canadians at D-Day, June 6, 1944

  Days of Victory: Canadians Remember, 1939–1945

  (Sixtieth Anniversary edition, 2005)

  Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 9–12, 1917

  Breaking the Silence: Veterans’ Untold Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan

  other non-fiction

  Fire Canoe: Prairie Steamboat Days Revisited

  Rodeo Cowboys: The Last Heroes

  Positive Power: The Story of the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club

  Spirit of the West: The Beginnings, the Land, the Life

  Playing Overtime: A Celebration of Oldtimers’ Hockey

  Carved in Granite: 125 Years of Granite Club History

  Making Music: Profiles from a Century of Canadian Music

  (with Alex Barris)

  101 Things Canadians Should Know About Canada (contributor)

  To air force veteran Charley Fox and military history

  buff Dave Zink—both gone now—who challenged me

  to properly retell this great, great story.

  Contents

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  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: “Heroes Resurface”

  1 The King’s Regulations

  2 Bond of Wire

  3 “Spine-Tingling Sport”

  4 Escape Season

  5 Servant to a Hole in the Ground

  6 “Shysters and Crooks and Con Men”

  7 The Play’s the Thing

  8 “Through Adversity to the Stars”

  9 The Hate Campaign

  10 Long Road Home

  11 “A Proud, Spectacular Distraction”

  Notes

  Photograph Credits

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for the use of published and unpublished works as follows:

  A Gallant Company, Jonathan F. W. Vance, permission from copyright holder.

  Air Force Association video interviews, 1970s and 1989, permission from rights holders National Air Force Museum of Canada, Trenton.

  Bonds of Wire, Kingsley Brown, permission from copyright holder Ethel Alle.

  Forced March to Freedom, Robert Buckham, permission from copyright holder Nancy Buckham.

  Frank Sorensen collection, permission from Glenn, Stephen, and Vicki Sorensen.

  Goon in the Block, Don Edy, permission from copyright holder.

  In Enemy Hands, Daniel G. Dancocks, permission sought through Hurtig, Random House.

  It’s All Pensionable Time, George Sweanor, permission from copyright holder.

  John Colwell diary, permission from copyright holder Harold Johnstone.

  John Weir letters, permission from Mrs. Frances Weir.

  Lonesome Road, George Harsh, permission from publisher W. W. Norton, New York.

  One Man’s War: Sub Lieutenant R. E. Bartlett, RN Fleet Air Arm Pilot, Stuart E. Soward, permission from copyright holder Sheila Soward.

  Serving and Surviving: An Airman’s Memoirs, John R. Harris, permission from copyright holder.

  The Great Escape, Paul Brickhill, permission from rights holders David Higham Associates, UK.

  The Great Escape, Stalag Luft III (from the original drawings made by Ley Kenyon 1943), permission from copyright holders RAF Museum, Hendon, UK.

  The Tunnel King: The True Story of Wally Floody and the Great Escape, Barbara Hehner, permission from copyright holder.

  They Were So Young, Patricia Burns, permission from copyright holder.

  “Tom, Dick and Harry of Stalag Luft III,” Bob Nelson, unpublished manuscript, permission from Sally Hutchison.

  Acknowledgements

  * * *

  THE CONTEMPORARY ROAD to Zagan is nearly as inhospitable and neglected as it must have been in 1942, when the town became neighbour to a prisoner-of-war camp. Even when I travelled on it in 2010, most of the one hundred miles of road southeast of Berlin, primarily in western Poland, didn’t seem to have ever enjoyed priority status. The post-Soviet-era asphalt was still as patchy, the lanes still as poorly marked, and the rough countryside terrain still encroaching the roadside shoulders right to the road surface as it likely had when the Nazis occupied Poland during the Second World War.

  Likewise, the Zagan (the Polish spelling of Sagan) train station at the edge of town looked as if it hadn’t enjoyed any remodelling since it was built in the early 1900s. When I walked inside, I could almost see the first wave of Great Escape fugitives hurrying through ticket queues and platform document checks by guards in the morning gloom on March 25, 1944, to get aboard the Breslau-to-Berlin express train without raising suspicion. And the trees—the omnipotent pine forest to the south—between the railway platforms and the prison camp looked as dense and claustrophobic as they must have been to the air force officers trying to escape a generation ago.

  When I approached the actual North Compound site at Stalag Luft III, now overgrown with mature trees, dense underbrush, and weeds, I could see scattered bricks and concrete pads where the barracks huts had stood on blocks. None of the buildings remained. I could see the foundations of the infirmary, the cooler, and the coal store. Beyond it, farther south, I could see the fire pool, the cement floors of the kitchens (with scorched circles where huge soup cauldrons had boiled every day). Beyond them lay the brick foundation of the North Compound theatre (where a fourth tunnel, “George,” has just recently been unearthed). And finally, on the surface of the still very sandy soil, I walked along a walkway of crushed stone with wooden borders, just twenty inches wide (the same width of the tunnel), showing above ground where tunnel “Harry” had stretched underground—some 336 feet—from the concrete pad beneath Hut 104 to beyond the Stalag Luft III fence, but just short of the woods.

  I imagined about eighty POWs who had all served in one capacity or another in the manufacture of the tunnel excavation and its ancillary requirements (sand dispersal, security, intelligence, forgery, document production, tailoring, language study, compass manufacture, ration supplies, et cetera) making their way from inside the North Compound. I visualized one POW disappearing into “Harry” every three minutes through the night of March 24–25, travelling along the trolley way northbound (beneath where I stood in 2010), and then popping up from the other vertical shaft beyond the prison camp wire. This was the home of the Great Escape, or at least an attempt to cause enough havoc behind German enemy lines to suck away valuable manpower in the search and recapture
of the escapers.

  A few thousand feet away, I came to the cemetery of those who’d died in captivity during their existence at Stalag Luft III. Next to the individual tombstones, I found the stone memorial to the fifty Commonwealth air force officers murdered by the Gestapo after the breakout. Here, too, I sensed the blood of six Canadians, or at least the ashes in urns buried there during a ceremony on December 4, 1944 (the ashes later exhumed and reburied in the military cemetery at Poznan, Poland). This was the home of the Great Escape. This was the place where myth and reality had inspired books, documentaries, and Hollywood movies. Arriving there, walking there, remembering there in 2010, moved me emotionally, and moved me professionally to fulfill a longtime promise to my veteran friend, RCAF fighter pilot Charley Fox, to tell the story of the Great Escape the way it could and should be told—as a Canadian story.

  Not only have I chosen to write this story as an homage to Charley Fox, who died in 2008, but here also I want to offer my gratitude to others who have assisted this labour of love both recently and over many years of preparation and research:

  Among other veterans and their families, I want to thank George and Joan Sweanor, and their daughter Barbara; Albert Wallace and his daughter Barbara Trendos; Don Edy and his daughters Barb Edy and Jane Hughes; John R. Harris; Vicki, Stephen, and Glenn Sorensen, who gave the gift of their father Frank Sorensen’s correspondence; David (and Cathy) Pengelly for remembering brother Tony Pengelly; Chris Pengelly, Tony’s son, for the treasure trove of his father’s personal records of Stalag Luft III; and friends Mary and David Ross (and their trusty Facebook account), who helped track down the Pengellys; Fran Weir for letters written home by her husband John Weir; Margaret Bartlett, and her daughter Anne Dumonceaux and grandson Nick Dumonceaux, for remembering Dick Bartlett; Don McKim, with the assistance of son Al McKim, daughter Wendy Johnson, and friend Bernice Marsland; Catherine Heron, sister of Wally Floody, for the scrapbook and photo files of her brother Wally Floody’s career, and son Brian (and Lorraine) Floody for their interview collections of Wally; Ethel Alle and Kingsley Brown Jr. for access to their father Kingsley Brown Sr.’s memoirs; Barry Davidson Jr. for access to his father Barry Davidson Sr.’s logs; Fred and Susan Bendell, as well as daughter Katie Bendell, for material from Gordon Venables’ experience in the prison camp; Nancy Buckham for access to her husband Robert Buckham’s diaries and sketches; Marjorie Acheson (with help from Kitchener Public librarian Karen Ball-Pyatt) for access to John Acheson’s memoirs; Kim and Kelly Crozier for access to their father John Crozier’s diaries; Sally and John Hutchinson for the gift of her father Bob Nelson’s writings; Harold Johnstone for granting access to John Colwell’s precise images and diary; Keith Ogilvie Jr. and Jean Ogilvie for photos of their father Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie; Ted Nurse for permission to refer to his account of his father Edward Nurse’s experience at Stalag Luft III; Marilyn Walton for assistance in obtainiing US Air Force Academy photos; and Don and Linda Jarrell for stories about Don’s father, John MacKinnon “Mac” Jarrell as a kriegie.

  Thanks to support and data (files and photographs) provided by Marek Lazarz and the volunteers at the Museum of Allied Forces Prisoners of War Martyrdom at Zagan, Poland.

  As well, a debt of gratitude to James Taylor, Parveen Kaur Sodhi, and Sally Richards at the Imperial War Museums in the UK for assistance in gaining access and rights to their Stalag Luft III photo archives. Also in the UK, my thanks to Andrew Dennis and Vinit Mehta at the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon for their help securing the rights to the Ley Kenyon sketches of The Great Escape.

  No one writes who doesn’t also read and recognize the previous work of fellow authors (specific references and permissions are contained in the endnotes). Among those key to my interpretation of this story are Paul Brickhill (The Great Escape), Kingsley Brown (Bonds of Wire), Robert Buckham (Forced March to Freedom), Patricia Burns (They Were So Young), Andrew Carswell (Over the Wire), H.P. Clark (Wire Bound World), Art Crighton (Memories of a Prisoner of War), Daniel G. Dancocks (In Enemy Hands), Ian Darling (Amazing Airmen), Don Edy (Goon in the Block), Hugh Godefroy (Lucky Thirteen), Philip Gray (Ghosts of Targets Past), John R. Harris (Serving and Surviving), George Harsh (Lonesome Road), John Hartnell-Beavis (Final Flight), Barbara Hehner (The Tunnel King), Stuart G. Hunt (Twice Surreal), Harold Johnstone (John Colwell), Phil Marchildon (Ace), Wayne Ralph (Aces, Warriors and Wingmen), Stuart E. Soward (One Man’s War), George Sweanor (It’s All Penshionable Time), Tyler Trafford (Almost a Great Escape), and Jonathan Vance (A Gallant Company).

  In various ways, but drawing on their unique expertise, I wish to thank Susan Hall for her wisdom about music; Dave Zink (who died in 2012) for his encyclopedic knowledge of war history and militaria; Barb and Stuart Blower for their assistance in restoring old photographs; Don Young for his sense of Canadian storytelling; and Marian Hebb for her legal acumen and commonsense approach to getting books from writers to readers.

  In terms of the special assistance of colleagues and friends in journalism, creative non-fiction writing, and publishing, I owe much to authors Malcolm Kelly and Byron Christopher, journalism professors Lindy Oughtred, Stephen Cogan, and Ellin Bessner, broadcaster Rick Cluff, publisher Marc Coté, and editor Don Loney. Special thanks to my neighbour, Navy veteran Ronnie Egan, for her homemade sandwiches that helped me maintain my daily writing quota. I thank my team of transcribers, Octavian Lacatusu and Michael Laing-Fraser. At Thomas Allen Publishers, I’m grateful to editors Janice Zawerbny and Linda Pruessen, to proofreader Ruth Chernia, to marketing team Krista Lynch and Catherine Whiteside, and to my favourite TAP triumvirate of David Glover, Bonita Mok, and Heather Goldberg. Special thanks to Beth Crane for making our photos sparkle. And as he has done for all of my TAP books, Gordon Robertson has contributed his exquisite visual sense to the design of this project.

  And the first shall be last: I thank my wife, Jayne MacAulay, who edits by profession, and thinks clearly by nature.

  —Ted Barris 2013

  Introduction

  “HEROES RESURFACE”

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  AHEAD OF HIM in the distance, lie the Alps. Disguised in a German dispatch rider’s battledress and stahlhelm helmet,

  a fugitive hero brings his motorcycle to a sudden halt in the middle of this back road in wartime Germany. Nervously jerking the bike’s throttle, he wheels his body around in the saddle, searching for his pursuers. A close-up catches his face as his eyes settle on the mountains ahead.

  “Switzerland,” he says under his breath.

  He throttles up, pops the bike back into gear, and roars off. Minutes later, his disguise revealed, the motorcyclist bashes through a checkpoint, peels off the now useless German uniform, and blasts cross-country toward the distant mountains and, he hopes, freedom. Behind him, military trucks, motorcycles with sidecars, and what seems to be half the German Army are in hot pursuit. All the while, Elmer Bernstein’s stirring film score accelerates in tempo and rises with crescendo. Then, in his character’s final moments on the run, actor Steve McQueen launches himself and his 650 Triumph over the first of two barriers of sharp pickets and barbed wire. Unable to make it over the second barrier, US Army Air Force Captain Virgil Hilts crashes into the fence, entangles himself in the wire, tries to break free, then realizes the futility of his struggle and surrenders to the hordes of German troops who’ve now overtaken him.

  These few minutes of flight and pursuit, caught on 35-millimetre colour Panavision film, remain among the most thrilling in the canon of Hollywood war moviemaking and viewing. Indeed, this climactic sequence, among many crowd-pleasing, escalating jolts of action and drama in The Great Escape, earned Hollywood film editor Ferris Webster an Academy Award nomination.* Based on Paul Brickhill’s non-fiction book The Great Escape, published in 1950, the movie became an immediate hit when it was released in North American theatres in the summer of 1963. On the whole, it also garnered upbeat critical reviews.

  “With accurate casting, a swift screenplay, a
nd authentic German settings,” Time magazine raved, “producer-director John Sturges has created a classic . . .”[1]

  Was it a classic? Yes. In 2006, more than forty years after the film’s release, a poll asked TV watchers and moviegoers in the United Kingdom which flick they would most want to view over Christmas. The Great Escape came in third among families, first among male viewers. Was it authentic? In part it was. A group of veterans returning to the site of the escape on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary, in 2009, told journalists reporting the event that Hollywood had depicted much of the life in the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp accurately.

  On the other hand, there was no Captain Virgil Hilts, “The Cooler King,” in the actual Great Escape. Nor were there a lot of Americans in the prison’s North Compound when the breakout occurred. Nor was there a motorcycle chase. When writers James Clavell, W. R. Burnett, and Walter Newman originally scripted the fictitious USAAF Captain Hilts into the screenplay, they had him attempting to escape aboard a train among other fleeing Allied POWs. However, Steve McQueen, contracted by Sturges and the Mirisch Company to co-star in the film, had such a passion for motorcycle racing that he insisted on having the chase scene built into the film.

  Did the movie present authentic settings? Apparently, it didn’t matter to the producers that the actual Great Escape occurred near the town of Sagan in southern Poland, not in southern Germany, near the Swiss Alps. Nor was it relevant to McQueen or the movie’s creators that the escape happened on March 24, 1944, when a metre of snow still lay on the ground, where no motorcycle could easily travel, let alone leap barbed-wire fences.

  Here are the facts of the escape. On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth air officers crawled through a 360-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of the North Compound at Stalag Luft III near Sagan. The intricate breakout, more than a year in the making, involved as many as two thousand POWs, extraordinary coordination, and a battle of wits inconceivable for the time. As dawn broke on March 25, however, German guards outside the compound spotted prisoners emerging from the exit hole, set off an alarm, and over the next few days managed to recapture all but three of the escapers. In a rage over the incident, Adolf Hitler called for the execution of all the escapers; instead, the death list was adjusted downward and fifty Commonwealth air officers were executed, with perpetrators claiming the prisoners were shot while attempting to escape Gestapo custody. Their bodies were cremated and buried in a remote corner of the Stalag Luft III grounds to hide the truth.