The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (16 page)

The day after the summit, “Tom” advanced ten feet and Fanshawe’s
penguins kept pace. The next day, Floody accidentally triggered another
cave-in and had to be pulled out by his ankles before leading a repair of the tunnel frame; they only advanced eight feet
that day. The following day it was the same thing, only this time
hot margarine from a candle burned his leg. Floody seemed cursed. Nevertheless, by mid-June “Tom” was more than a hundred feet in length. At that point the diggers widened the tunnel to create a halfway house about ten feet long and half a foot wider than the tunnel itself. Floody believed the chamber, roughly beneath the compound fencing, would allow a changeover of crews and trolleys so there was less danger of a long tow rope getting tangled or rubbing against the
tunnel shoring and loosening a wooden frame. The engineers calculated that another forty feet would put “Tom” beyond the double
wire and under the woods. Then, at a section meeting to discuss timelines, digger Johnny Marshall suggested gradually sloping the tunnel to the surface. Floody considered that too risky; a rope could break or a trolley might run away on them and inflict a real setback. He was sure they could complete the tunnel before the Germans completed the South Compound and moved the US POWs into new huts there. Big X sided with Floody. It was July 3.

Shortly after dawn the next morning, when the Germans had unlocked the barracks doors, and just about the time POWs were beginning to assemble for appell, two men appeared on the sports
grounds in a costume—the front and hind quarters of a horse. On the
horse’s back was USAAF officer Jerry Sage portraying Paul Revere
with a tricorner hat and knee breeches made of woolen underpants.

“The British are coming!”
[41]
he shouted as he brought the two-
man horse to a halt.

At first startled,
Hauptmann
Hans Pieber went along with the
prank and commenced the roll call, whereupon the American inside the hind quarters poured out the contents of a can of water; the horse was urinating during Pieber’s appell.

“
Zwei und achtzig . . . und ein pferd
,” he shouted to the recorder, noting eighty-two prisoners and one horse.

But they weren’t done, as John Colwell noted. “Yankee Doodle
and his horse . . . then paraded through the huts with a band.”
[42]

Drummers and buglers came marching through the barracks with about forty other US POWs masquerading as native tribesmen on the warpath. While the horse and tribesmen wreaked havoc on the roll
call, Paul Revere, a.k.a. Jerry Sage, and George Harsh threw Roger
Bushell out of bed, sat on him, and offered him a sample of their latest creation. The Americans had scrimped and accumulated their rations of sugar and dried fruit from Red Cross parcels for weeks and distilled them into a raisin-flavoured wine. The party continued all day, ending with many of the officers, including Wings Day, being tossed into
the fire pool during a water fight. It was Independence Day and the American kriegies weren’t going to let it pass without notice.

“The Goons are afraid of something,” Colwell wrote in his diary a few days later. “We are having four appells per day and they’ve been around the last four nights between 1 and 4 a.m.”
[43]
Two days later, he recorded, “Last night, [the Germans] were in the hut several hours. Each room was turned out in turn and searched.”
[44]
Every other day for the rest of the month, Colwell reported searches where “there were dozens of guards and barbed wire used.”
[45]

During one of those staged volleyball matches with penguins gathered around to empty their hidden sand pouches, Glemnitz
came prowling. Bushell and the rest of the escape committee realized he was on to something. Security boss Harsh added he’d seen German guards in the towers all equipped with binoculars. Digger Hank Birkland reported seeing a ferret walking in the pine forest beyond the fences; the German didn’t come out. So Harsh and Junior Clark took a closer look and realized the Germans had strategically placed
blinds in the woods—piles of brush through which they could use
field-glasses to spy on the kriegies without the prisoners realizing they were under
surveillance. This sparked a series of after-dark visits from Hans
Pieber. The ferret barged into Hut
101
, throwing everybody out of
bed with shouts of, “
Aus! Aus!
”

It prompted digger Ker-Ramsey to tell Pieber he was wasting
his time.

“You think I know fuck nothing,” Pieber defended himself in a
broken English malapropism, “but I actually know fuck all!”
[46]

The war of wits continued. Glemnitz resumed the snap searches. He had narrowed his focus to the western perimeter of the compound,
with particular interest in Hut 123. Each time the Germans raided,
the escape committee resealed the trapdoor at the entrance to “Tom,”
waited for the searchers to retreat, and then re-opened the trap and
resumed the digging and sand dispersal. Next, Glemnitz arrived with
Hauptmann
Broili, a member of the
Abwehr
counter-intelligence, and about forty soldiers. Following another hut search, he ordered the troops to dig a trench between Hut
123
and the outer double fencing. They went down four feet, where the ferrets used five-foot steel
rods to probe even deeper. By that time, “Tom,” which was twenty
feet below the probing ferrets, had come within about fifty feet of what the escape committee figured was the safety of the pine forest.
Floody constructed another halfway house and prepared to dig the last horizontal section and finally the vertical shaft to the exit in the
woods. With Fanshawe’s penguins under close surveillance from the forest and towers, he suggested redirecting the sand dispersal
teams to Hut
122
, where Mike Casey and Ker-Ramsey began filling
“Dick” with the sand from “Tom.” The pace picked up; “Tom” was
now two hundred feet long and, Floody figured, within striking distance of the woods.

The ferret chief’s next move was uncanny. It was almost as if he
knew “Tom” was beneath his feet. Suddenly there were workers felling pine trees all along the pine forest directly in front of where “Tom” was heading. The tunnel would have to go another hundred feet to find safety under the trees. But the penguins’ secret weapon, tunnel “Dick,” was running out of room; sand had now filled “Dick’s” horizontal space, and Bushell refused to let Fanshawe’s crew fill the vertical shaft. The next sand dispersal area was dangerously obvious—all the empty Red Cross parcel boxes lying about in the huts—but they would try it anyway.
Five days later, August 21, penguin Colwell noted the inevitable.

“The Goons found over a hundred and fifty Red Cross boxes of sand in Hut
101
,”
[47]
he wrote. And at the end of August, “Long morning appell. They searched all the huts and took hundreds of
Red Cross boxes. Also my soldering outfit.”
[48]

For safety’s sake, the Poles sealed the trap at the entrance to
“Tom” once again. The tunnel was
260
feet long, but forty feet short of the recently extended no man’s land to the woods. Still, the escape committee decided that was far enough. Floody would build the ver
tical shaft to the surface; while potentially out in the open, “Tom’s”
exit might well be far enough away from searchlights to allow men to escape at night. Since April, the hundreds of kriegies had excavated, hauled, hidden, and disguised the dispersal of more than seventy tons
of sand from “Tom” alone. They had built an underground railway
and ventilation system, not to mention a security and intelligence system. And while they hadn’t delivered the mass escape they’d planned,
they had at least escaped detection for more than twenty-one weeks.

Right after appell on September 8, as Wally Floody prepared to send his latest digging crew into “Tom” again to finish excavating the
vertical shaft to the surface, Glemnitz suddenly threw up a wall of
guards around Hut 123 and led a team of ferrets into the barracks. A couple of hours later, the German staff sergeant jabbed a probe into the concrete floor around the hut’s chimney and discovered a chip
in the concrete that revealed the trapdoor to the tunnel. Glemnitz
beamed with pride at his victory. He had thwarted the largest escape attempt the German prison camp system had ever faced. Other German officials saw the discovery of a 260-foot-long escape tunnel at the heart of the inescapable Luft III quite differently.

“They were amazed, appalled, and at the same time very cocky about their discovery,” Bob Nelson wrote. “Nothing like it had been seen. And high officials of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht came into the camp to inspect it.”
[49]

During their inspection, the Germans evacuated the hut and placed a guard at its entrance around the clock. Having unearthed “Tom,” it appeared that neither the Luftwaffe
Kommandant
nor the Gestapo chief knew what to do next. So on September
16
, they
turned “Tom’s” fate over to a demolition team.

“The German sappers entrusted with the job . . . did [it] very effectively,” Nelson continued, “but at the same time blew a hole
through the roof of the hut above the late ‘Tom’s’ trap.”
[50]

“Tom” (if not Big X) had had the last laugh.

That same week in September 1943, the German police and guards completed the move of American POWs to the South Compound. Without missing a beat, X Organization held its next meeting, with Bushell already planning its next move. Anticipating further Gestapo
searches, the escape committee ordered the collection of several
thousand more bed-boards and hid them in the still-empty vertical
shaft of tunnel “Dick.” For the time being, work was suspended on
“Dick” and “Harry.” In Hut
120
, John Colwell, despite losing some
of his tools and soldering gear in the purges, began work on a cuckoo
clock that would amuse his roommates as well as hide his diary.
[*]
And while he had worked diligently as Big X’s personal Danish lan
guage tutor, Sorry Sorensen was stricken with appendicitis that fall and wound up on a dining table used for emergency surgeries; there,
without benefit of anesthesia or sterilized surgical tools, a Russian
doctor (also a POW at Stalag Luft III) performed the appendectomy.

“A dog circled the table [and] was rewarded with the appendix,”
[51]
Sorensen related later. Still, this brush with death didn’t seem to blunt the twenty-one-year-old Canadian’s drive to escape. Writing home to his parents that fall, he said he would refrain from betting on when the war would end, the way his roomies were, but concluded, “I don’t intend being here the winter after this.”
[52]

“SHYSTERS
AND CROOKS AND
CON
MEN”

E
ACH OF THEM
had plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t fall in love, much less get married. Joan Saunders already had a boyfriend, although he seemed noncommittal. Her family
had suffered loss in this war; her cousin and his wife had died in the
Luftwaffe attack on Coventry in
1940
. She had a good wartime job as a
bookkeeper at Lougheed, Berg, and Beck’s, in her hometown of Leamington Spa, about ten miles from Coventry. The British company manu
factured parts for the Royal Navy, including the hydraulics for motor
torpedo boats. Like so many things in the UK then, however, the job
was temporary. The plant could be hit by German bombing attacks
and put her out of work. The contracts from the Royal Navy wouldn’t
necessarily last. She might be called up to enlist in the armed forces. Or, she might only be able to work there until a man needed the job.

“I was an only child,”
[1]
she said, and that meant whatever income she could provide her family was minimal, but important.

George Sweanor was an RCAF airman at an operational training
unit (OTU) in Britain when he met Joan. Born in
1919
in Sudbury,
Ontario, George had grown up through the Great Depression—the
eldest of three children—in Port Hope. He’d idolized his uncles,
both veterans of the Great War, but read anti-war literature and even wrote an essay entitled, “Who Wants War?”
[2]
In spite of that, George was fascinated by aviation, periodically coaxing his father to take him down the road to Trenton, Ontario, to see training aircraft airborne. After high school, he took a job with the bank and volunteered for the militia. By
1941
he had enlisted in the RCAF. By the winter of
1942
, he’d graduated as a sergeant-observer. And by that summer, he had crossed the Atlantic and been posted to train as a bomb-aimer at the
Wellesbourne OTU. On the training course, he got to know a fel
low Canadian, Pilot Officer Pat Porter from British Columbia. They
would later crew up for combat operations, but that summer they
flew training ops and spent time on leave together.

Neither Porter nor Sweanor smoked or drank. They generally avoided the pubs, preferring the dances put on by the towns adja
cent to their OTU station. They felt guilty sometimes, since so many local young British men were away fighting in North Africa or at sea with the Royal Navy and merchant navy. The dances usually featured
a four-piece band playing soft music, which made the atmosphere conducive to having a conversation. Most military men and local women went stag. And the drill was to select a partner (often a wallflower), dance three numbers with her, escort her back to her seat,
then select a different partner.

“If there was one partner you’d like to know better,” Sweanor said,
“you would try to get her in the home waltz, which permitted you to ask if you could walk her home.”
[3]

This particular night, Sweanor and Porter arrived by bus at Leamington Spa in search of the main dance hall. As it turned out, a sign on the town hall announced a special dance to raise funds for Red Cross food parcels to be sent to prisoners of war. Admission
was more expensive than the regular dance, but the two Canadians wanted to help POWs. Coincidentally, local resident Joan Saunders, age twenty-three, and her girlfriend decided to support the dance fundraiser too. Joan was already seated when the two airmen arrived. On his way into the hall, Sweanor nudged Porter. “That’s for me,” he said, pointing to a potential dance partner who had “looks, poise, and figure.”
[4]
And for the rest of the night, he plotted to make sure he got Joan Saunders for the home waltz.

“Everybody knew it was absolutely stupid to get married during
the war,” Sweanor said, “because if you survived, you’d probably be
minus a leg or an arm or an eye, and be a burden to your wife the rest of your life. On the other hand, life is so temporary.”
[5]

Eventually, however, they each realized they had little control over their feelings, and that the war would affect both of them whether they courted or not. In fact, shortly after the couple met, Joan’s office was strafed by a Luftwaffe fighter pilot shooting up
whatever came into his gun sights.

“His bullets came right through the window, right through my office and my boss’s office,” Joan said. “It would have gone right
through my head, if I’d been sitting there. But it was six in the morning and I always got to the office at eight.”
[6]

Meanwhile, George realized how close he was coming to the
death that the war dispensed daily. Early in October of 1942, Bomber
Command was directing Wellington bombers from his
419
Squad
ron against German targets for the first time since the squadron had arrived at its Yorkshire operational stations. On this night Sweanor’s
crew was not on ops. Dressed in his best blues to go to a dance, he stopped to speak to F/O Arthur Morlidge, who was going on the
bombing raid.

“Can I be of any help?” Sweanor asked.

Morlidge pointed to a letter on his dresser and said, “If I decide to stay over there, would you post that letter for me?”
[7]

The letter was addressed to his parents in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. As readily as he’d agreed to Morlidge’s request, Sweanor
admitted to an uneasy feeling as he watched his squadron mates leave the Nissen hut for the flight line and the bombing attack to
Krefeld that night. The next morning Sweanor saw the padre packing Morlidge’s belongings. Bomber Command had lost nine aircraft that night, the one from 419 Squadron had twenty-year-old observer Arthur Morlidge aboard. Sweanor took the letter for posting.

Joan Saunders and George Sweanor were married just after New
Year’s, on January
6
,
1943
. As with most events in the UK at that time, the actual wedding happened when the war dictated. At the time,
419
Squadron (now flying brand new Halifax bombers) was standing down, waiting for what Sweanor called “delightfully foul
weather”
[8]
to clear before it resumed flying. His squadron leader, D. W. S. Clark, loaned Sweanor a bicycle to get to and from Middleton
St. George, where the couple had rented a single room. His wing
commander volunteered his own crew to fly in place of Sweanor’s to give the couple two free nights away from the war as a wedding
present. His aircrew mates bought the couple a chest of silverware. Air force friend and artist Ley Kenyon designed a wedding card. His pilot, Pat Porter, stood up as best man. And as the couple was married,
George Sweanor got a promotion to Flying Officer. Three nights
later his Halifax “K for Kitty” was back in the battle order, dropping mines in German shipping lanes off the East Frisian Islands. But the inclem
ent weather persisted, limiting his combat flights to three in Janu
ary. They made up for the operations scrubbed in January with seven ops in February. Then he was away on a four-week bombing leaders’ course, then back on bombing operations against submarine pens at St. Nazaire and German industrial targets at Duisburg and,
on March 27, Berlin.

Sweanor counted the op to Berlin that Saturday night among numerous “wrong decisions” in his life. In the first place, although
the operation didn’t need their services, pilot Pat Porter volunteered
his crew to replace one with lesser experience. Although they had
flown most operations in Halifax “K for Kitty,” she was in for repairs, so they settled for an unfamiliar bomber “E for Edward.” Sweanor
was sick with stomach flu and could have opted out. As bomb-aimer,
however, he was the most mobile member of the crew—serving as
second pilot on takeoff and landing, manning the front turret, taking astro shots for the navigator, changing fuel tanks for the engineer, and
ultimately lining up and bombing the target. Sweanor didn’t want to let his mates down. A decision not to go would have changed his life. Instead, he joined the op.

Early in their outbound flight southeast of Bremen, their bomber
was hit by flak, knocking out one of the Halifax bomber’s four engines. Unperturbed, Porter felt that they should press on to the target, despite the danger of losing altitude on three engines and
perhaps becoming a target themselves. Sweanor released the bombs at a target near Berlin, muttering “my usual, useless prayer that my bombs hit only military targets,”
[9]
and Porter banked for home. But they’d been sighted by an airborne night fighter that quickly caught up with them and raked their aircraft from behind. The attack set fire to the wireless radio area, and shrapnel wounded several of the crew. With the Halifax losing altitude, hydraulic oil fires breaking out, and wounded aircrew, Porter ordered his six crew members to abandon the aircraft. Sweanor went to the cockpit.

“I don’t know if I’ve got any engines left,” Porter said, working
the throttles.

“Look at the altimeter,” Sweanor said. It was unwinding at a terrific pace. “We’re in a plunge. We’ve got to get out of here.”
[10]
He
made his way to the forward escape hatch so the crew could bail out, but the hatch had been fused shut by the enemy cannon fire. The two gunners aboard reported on the intercom that the rear hatch was fused too, and frozen solid. Sweanor made one more stop in the cockpit to give the pilot his parachute and to open the hatch over his head so Porter could bailout. “Good luck, Pat,” he shouted, and then, with an axe in his hands, Sweanor made his way to the rear hatch to help the rest of the crew get out.

Rear gunner Scottie Taylor, who happened to have been a lum
berjack in Quebec before the war, grabbed the axe from Sweanor’s hands and hacked at the hatch until it fell open. One by one the crew
evacuated the Halifax—Murray Bishop, the flight engineer; Gerry Lanteigne, the wireless air gunner (he hesitated and Taylor pushed him out); Alan Budinger, the navigator; Danny London, the mid-
upper gunner; and finally Sweanor, who paused for a second.

“I knew I was leaving my last ticket home,”
[11]
he said. One further thought haunted him this night: Joan was pregnant with their first
child, and Sweanor revisited the reasons why they shouldn’t have
gone ahead with a wartime marriage. Would he be maimed? Would he a burden to his wife, if he got back? And if he didn’t return, how would his widow and fatherless child manage?

As he fell from the hatch into the night, Sweanor felt a sheet of flame pass over his head. He hadn’t realized how much of the Halifax was ablaze. He pulled his rip cord and immediately felt the jerk of the chute; it was barely open when there was a second jerk as the chute
caught a tree. Had he delayed just a few seconds longer, he quickly realized, he would have ploughed into the ground with the burn
ing bomber; the chute catching the tree as rapidly as it did probably
saved his life. Back in Middleton St. George, in the early hours of
March 28, Joan was awake.

“He used to come in [after a bombing operation] about four
o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I used to reach over and there he was. But this morning I woke up and it was daylight and there was nobody there. And I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s not coming home.’”
[12]

The
419
Squadron padre notified Joan later that day that her husband had, in fact, been shot down. A few days later, the wing com
mander wrote a letter encouraging her to hope he was a POW. The International Red Cross confirmed that to be true on April 19, 1943. By that time, however, Sweanor had gone from downed airman on the run, to police prisoner, to the subject of repeated Luftwaffe interrogations, and, finally, to prisoner of war and inaugurated kriegie in the newly opened North Compound of Stalag Luft III. During that transition he learned that crew mates—Bish, Bud, Gerry, Danny, and Scottie—had all survived the crash with contusions and shrapnel wounds, but that his pilot, Pat Porter, who had apparently
kept the Halifax airborne long enough for his crewmates to chop
their way through the rear hatch and bail out, had died in the burning wreckage.

Later, Sweanor learned that forty-three bombers had been shot down in two nights of Bomber Command attacks against Berlin, and that of 301 aircrew aboard those bombers, only fifteen men had survived to be interrogated at Dulag Luft—six of them from his Hali
fax “E for Edward.”
[13]
Sweanor considered himself fortunate to be among the
5
per cent who survived those end-of-March raids.
[*]
He felt well treated by the civilians who’d captured him, sufficiently respected by the police and Luftwaffe officials who’d questioned him, relieved upon his arrival in Sagan that German civilians hadn’t lynched him, and grateful that his captors promised there would be Red Cross food once he arrived inside the compound.

“Freed from operations, we could cease contemplating how few hours we had yet to live,” Sweanor said. “Our taut nerves could
relax.”
[14]

In spite of the relative ease he felt as he was about to enter the prison camp, Sweanor learned that relief was ephemeral. There
was commotion at the gate as a prisoner was caught trying to escape disguised as a Soviet worker. A dozen German guards marched the
new arrivals into a large shack for a routine naked search. Sweanor remembered he still had some escape aids—a cloth map of Europe,
currency, hunting knife, compass, German-English dictionary
[15]
—
in his pockets; he handed away his jacket to distract the guard and palmed the escape aids as he removed the rest of his clothes. When the guard returned his jacket, Sweanor dumped it on the floor with the escape aids underneath. The final indignities during his introduction to Stalag Luft III were a search of body orifices, a head-and-
shoulder mug shot, and fingerprinting. Passing through the main
gate into the compound for the first time, he realized the might of
the place—its double-fence outer barrier, guard towers, guard dogs, searchlights, and rifle-toting guards. The often-repeated words of Welsh kriegie Shag Rees felt more haunting than humorous.