The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (28 page)

Kommandant
Oberst
Braune may well have suspected that news passed along by new kriegies arriving in the North Compound, or indeed from BBC radio reports of Allied successes across Europe, would embolden his prisoners. In September, the new Stalag Luft III administration adorned the walls inside the camp huts with threat
ening posters. In broken English, the lengthy proclamations first accused Britain of instituting “illegal warfare in non-combat zones in the form of gangster commandos, terror bandits, and sabotage troops even up to the frontiers of Germany.” The poster claimed that a captured British booklet, entitled “The Handbook of Modern Irregular Warfare,”
[32]
encouraged the English soldier to be “a potential gangster (with) the sphere of operations (to) include the enemy’s own country . . . and neutral countries as a source of supply.” The poster described the areas of Europe in which English soldiers might consider operating as a “death zone.” Finally, if the message wasn’t clear enough, the narrative concluded with a series of warnings to prisoners “against making future escapes. . . . All police and military guards have been given the most strict orders to shoot on sight all suspected persons. . . . Escaping from prison camps has ceased to be a sport!”

But the
Kommandant
hadn’t finished his propaganda offensive.
Soon after the death zone posters went up came another blizzard of proclamations with a provocative assessment of the war and a most peculiar invitation to “soldiers of the British Commonwealth and the United States of America.”
[33]
The poster began with some apparent revisionist history, turning the retreat of German armies from occupied areas of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into “the great Bolshevik offensive [crossing] the frontiers of Germany.
The men in the Moscow Kremlin believe the way is open for the conquest of the Western world. This will certainly be a decisive battle for us. But it will also be the decisive battle for England, for the United States, and for the maintenance of western civilization. Or whatever today remains of it.”

The posters’ rhetoric painted an even bleaker picture of Europe under Bolshevik domination than under Nazi occupation. Suddenly, German captors appealed to all POWs, “regardless of your rank or
of your nationality,” to recognize “the danger of Bolshevik-Communism” and (in bold type) to see “the consequences of the destruction of Europe—not just of Germany, but of Europe—[and what] it will mean to your own country.” Unable to disguise its inherent racism, the document positioned its authors and readers not as captors and captives, but “as white men to other white men.” Then it laid out a specific offer
to the kriegies: “Whether you are willing to fight in the front-line or
in the service corps, we make you this solemn promise: Whoever as a soldier of his own nation is willing to join the common front for the common cause, will be freed immediately after the victory of the pres
ent offensive and can return to his own country via Switzerland.”

And finally, in bold-type exclamation, the poster completed its call-to-arms with, “Are you for the culture of the West or the bar
baric Asiatic East? Make your decision now!”

George Sweanor remembered that the German press joined the propaganda initiative as well. Every time a
Völkischer Beobachter
or
Frankfurter Zeitung
arrived at the North Compound library, Sweanor
devoured every detail, including the one-sided reports of “Soviet
atrocities.” Then, during one appell that autumn of 1944, representatives of
Kommandant
Braune called for volunteers to help the German war effort against the perceived Communist threat.

“We were surprised when one man volunteered,”
[34]
Sweanor
said, “saying he would be glad to help. But we could not conceal our mirth when they asked him his civilian trade. He answered, ‘Funeral director.’”

Bomb-aimer Sweanor had always considered the mass escape plan to be futile. He had served in the protection and completion of the tunnels from the moment he arrived at Stalag Luft III in 1943, but his highest priority was always survival. Consequently, he rejoined the X Organization service, assisting in the completion of tunnel “George” and preparing his fellow kriegies for the kind of chaos the propaganda posters had predicted . . . or worse.

“We knew that as the Soviets advanced there would be bedlam outside our compound. We would have no Red Cross food. The Germans would be evacuating and leaving weapons behind,”
[35]
Sweanor
said. “I joined a group we were training as commandos. I had had
some army training, artillery training, and so I was put in charge of a small platoon of people to find German weapons . . . so we could provide an armed united group. . . . We decided to use ‘George’ to store the equipment. The tunnel was considered to be our after-Soviet occupation outlet, our last survival exit.”

As the snows of late November began to accumulate around Sagan, tunnellers under the North Compound at Stalag Luft III brought the face of “George” to a position just beyond the east perimeter wire and within feet of the surface. X Organization plan
ners agreed the tunnel would not be used for another escape attempt,
merely, as Sweanor had considered it, an emergency exit from the North Compound, a bolt-hole should either the retreating Germans or advancing Soviets decide to take out their frustrations on the kriegies. Meantime, under SBO Wilson’s direction, the entire compound population was reorganized into sections, platoons, and
companies of the commando self-defence force. The Klim Klub, as it was code-named, prepared for an expected final confrontation with either the camp guards or a hostile invading army.

As it turned out, however, there was a more lethal enemy than either the Germans or the Soviets in the final battle to survive Sile
sia: the natural elements, among the very reasons the creators of Stalag Luft III had located the prison there in the first place.

L
ONG
ROAD
HOME

A
RT CRIGHTON
escaped Stalag Luft III for about an hour in
late 1944. The twenty-five-year-old peacetime musician and
wartime Wellington pilot was about to enter his third winter of captivity at the POW camp near Sagan. To occupy himself, during his first summer inside the wire, he had fashioned a left-handed five iron and golfed a nine-hole course inside the wire with his fellow kriegies. Evenings he had played trumpet in the Commonwealth
officers’ band and eventually led the North Compound orchestra through every musical genre from Beethoven to big band music revues. He’d been dead against escape activity, conducting the orchestra on stage at the theatre even as sand dispersal teams packed tons of earth from
tunnels “Harry” and “George” beneath his feet. But suddenly, on December
4
, eight months after the mass breakout, word arrived
that he was to retrieve his trumpet and report for a detail leaving the compound.

Crighton joined a group of about two dozen officers assigned to participate in an official ceremony commemorating the fifty dead escapers whose remains had been housed in an outdoor crypt just to the north of the North Compound wire. As both the leader of the orchestra and an accomplished trumpet player, F/L Crighton
had been chosen to play “The Last Post” at the memorial. He gladly accepted the assignment, particularly since RAF pilot Les “Johnny” Bull—the first down “Harry” the night of the escape and among the fifty murdered airmen—had been Crighton’s roommate at the North Compound. And yet, as honoured as he felt to be asked to play at the memorial, Crighton recalled something even more indelible about his march to and from the service.

“[It was] my first walk out into the woods,”
[1]
he said. “I was excited as hell. A real tree. I could actually touch it.”

Still surrounded by the pine forest, but beyond the wire, the
members of the ceremonial party included the Senior British Officer, Group Captain D. E. L. Wilson, and fifteen other officers representing the home countries of the executed airmen. No Americans were
permitted to be there. But seven officers from both the East Com
pound and the Belaria POW camp (including Wally Floody) were allowed to attend, as well as two representatives from the Swiss legation and an adjutant from
Kommandant
Braune’s camp staff.

“The memorial is in the form of a large altar table with three
scroll-like stones sweeping up at the back with the [censored] names on it,” Floody wrote to his wife, Betty, that Christmas. “We all lined
up around it while the R.C. and C. of E. padres read a burial service, then ‘The Last Post,’ after which the three group captains put
wreaths on. . . . It was well done. Tell Betty McGill and others it was quite an impressive service.”
[2]

After he had performed his role on the trumpet and stood silent for the wreath-laying, Crighton and the other Commonwealth offi
cers from North Compound were escorted down the dirt road and
back through the main entrance.

A guard began shouting in German to his partner at the gate:
“How many went by?”

“Twenty men,” the guard replied.

“We’re twenty officers,” insisted one of the kriegies, who resented
being downgraded by the compound guards. “Don’t call us men.
We’re officers!
”
[3]

That same week, Flying Officer John Weir started his final let
ter of 1944 from Stalag Luft III to his fiancée, Frances McCormack, back home in Toronto. He began in very much the same way as he’d begun his first letter to her, soon after his Spitfire was shot down over Caen, France, in November 1941.

“Hi darling. I thought I’d end this day the best way possible, by writing you. I’ve had two-hundred-and-forty-six letters from you,” he wrote. “This is my ninety-fifth epistle . . . so near and yet so far—the end of the war and you. I get more impatient every day . . . but it will be soon now.”
[4]

He wished Frances a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and
got her caught up on harmless news from around the camp, news
that he expected the censors wouldn’t blacken out on his letter paper.
Several times in his letters sent during his hospitalization over the previous fall, he had reassured her that the surgery to graft new skin to his eyelids, burned away in the fire when his Spitfire went down, had gone reasonably well; however, he hinted any future portrait photographs wouldn’t be particularly flattering. He kibitzed about his new
roommates’ names—Lorne, Pappy, Sam, Hank, and Pop, as well as his own, Scruffy—sounding “like something out of Snow White.”
But to his now savvy fiancée, he was also passing on valuable information about the state of affairs in the camp. First, he was alerting her to
the whereabouts of the downed air officers now living in his hut, in
case any of their families back in Canada didn’t know. But he was also signalling something else, and Fran would certainly have spotted it.

“The members of our room have changed,” he pointed out, meaning people were on the move. “Lorne Chamber (came in from
the west) and Pappy Plant (also west), Sam Sangster, Hank Sprague,
Pop Collette and Scruffy (that’s me). Wally [Floody] is at Belaria
now. All ye boys are hail and hearty. . . . If the optimism of this camp is right, I’ll beat this [letter] home to you.”
[5]

Suddenly his barracks in the North Compound—previously offering its veteran kriegies fairly spacious sleeping, eating, and liv
ing quarters—were becoming overcrowded with newcomers, he was telling her indirectly. She would certainly have recognized, with five
additional men in her fiancé’s hut room, that living space at Stalag Luft
III had become cramped, restful sleep less likely, and meagre rations
stretched even more thinly than in previous months. His
suggestion of beating the letter home offered more a hint of things being in flux at the camp than his honest belief that liberation was at hand. Then, in the same letter, which turned out to be his second last from Stalag Luft III, John Weir inadvertently acknowledged perhaps a greater threat to the well being of the kriegies than even he realized.

“Darling, it’s so hard to write anything ’cause so little happens
here of interest,” he explained. He commented on an American movie
called
The Spoilers
that had been screened in the theatre; it featured
Marlene Dietrich and a lively bar room brawl. “I’ve been
very lazy the last six or eight weeks, due mainly to bad weather, just reading and doing the occasional circuit [walk].”
[6]

In other words, Scruffy Weir and the rest of the Stalag Luft III kriegies were leading a much more sedentary life without the exer
cise they had all experienced while digging, maintaining, and protecting the tunnels. Their idleness was reducing, if not eliminating,
their higher physical fitness level, dulling their alertness, and certainly taking the edge off their preparedness for the unexpected. And if the officers weren’t able to notice their fitness slipping, they
certainly recognized that the quality of their nutrition was almost
non-existent. George Sweanor, who had taken on the job of training the Klim Klub for potential commando action to the death, woke
up one morning during the fall of
1944
and felt too weak to stand. Half rations, a leg infection, and several physical blows he’d sus
tained playing football were taking their toll on Sweanor’s heart; his pulse was spiking inexplicably to 150 beats per minute. A South Afri
can Army doctor in the compound examined him and deduced that
Sweanor was suffering from a severe case of malnutrition. His condition wasn’t uncommon among the POW population.

Robert Buckham, the Toronto-born artist shot down about the
same time as Sweanor in
1943
, had served the Dean and Dawson forgery factory for a year during the lead up to the mass escape. However, because he had not drawn an escape number on March
24
, he’d been
forced to leave his bunk in Room 23 of Hut 104 as his fellow kriegies
made their way down the shaft under the stove to freedom. After the
breakout, with the need for forged documents gone, Buckham didn’t
stop drawing, but toward the end of
1944
he did begin to write
and sketch in a diary. Some of his first entries noted they’d
heard the population of Sagan had swollen from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand as civilians, fleeing westward, sought refuge
from the fighting and the cold in the town. He noted in early
1945 that the Soviets were steadily advancing. But his more immediate diary subject matter focused on the basics of survival.

“A man’s eyes betray his hunger,”
[7]
he wrote as he surveyed the
faces of his eight roommates. “Watch the eyes recede and narrow as
they probe deeply for the taste of remembered meals. Watch them . . .
comparing the size of portion, measuring the width of bread slice.”

He described the typical daily menu among the Commonwealth officers that January of
1945
. It consisted of one weak cup of Nescafé for breakfast, one cup of turnip soup containing well-boiled white maggots for lunch, perhaps a few slices of bread, and for dinner the
boiled pulp of potatoes retrieved from a waste pile outside the huts.
The tastiest parts of the ration, if they could salvage them, were the potato peelings salted and fried in margarine. If he and his hut mates could acquire a Red Cross parcel, the contents filled in the remaining ration gap. And though there were still a few evenings of deliciously distracting music or drama at the North Compound theatre that win
ter, Buckham noted that his mind ricocheted back to reality when his stomach rumbled with hunger during the performances.

“An empty belly is a very basic thing,” he wrote.

Then, suddenly, on January
22
,
1945
, the bread ration stopped.
The same day, Buckham described seeing a Soviet pilot—still clad in his helmet, boots, and other flying gear—wandering outside the
Vorlager
of the camp. This was followed by a large explosion just
outside the wire. More and more, the approach of the Soviet armies became evident. Reports came to the camp that Breslau was brimming with
evacuees from the east, and that both shelling and minus-eight-degree temperatures were taking a toll on civilians there. Some of the kriegies openly predicted the evacuation of Stalag Luft III and began preparing. Buckham described large crowds gathered at the
cookhouse to read German news bulletins, but “equally large crowds were on the circuit, toughening feet and legs in case the threatened forced march becomes a reality.”
[8]

RCAF navigator John Colwell was as much a barometer of the compound’s focus and tempo as anybody. The Tin Man, who had miraculously supplied the escape committee with so many of its
working utensils the previous year, was busily supplying kriegies with
homemade survival gear—items they would need during the next
phase of their wartime experience. His diary entries became shorter
and shorter, with simple references to the daily-life tools he was
manufacturing or repairing from scraps of metal and wood—potato mashers, cooking pots, water jugs, cigarette containers, and slop pails. He also retrieved his Klim-tin suitcase from a hiding place in the wall of Hut 120.

“Half-soled my boots,” Colwell wrote on January
25
,
1945
.
“Everyone is sewing.”
[9]

That same day, the spearhead of the westbound Soviet armies reached the River Odra at Steinau, just forty miles east of Stalag
Luft III. Though everyone inside the prison camp knew it, both the Germans and the POWs appeared to go about their daily routines ignoring the obvious. The Soviets were getting closer. In the Centre Compound, for instance, the guards carried out a barracks inspec
tion. On January
26
, teams of kriegies in both the North and West
Compounds staged the first hockey games of 1945. Performances in the compound theatres went on as normal; in fact, that evening, the North Compound theatre troupe was in dress rehearsal for the first performances of
The Wind and the Rain
.
[10]
As late as Saturday morn
ing, January
27
,
Kommandant
Braune received orders from Berlin
that the prisoners were not to be moved.

That night in Hut 119, Don Edy and his roommates—Joe Noble, Larry Somers, Ken Rees—had tidied up their room and were seated on stools at the group’s wooden dining table. Fellow officers Barney Barnes and George Smith reclined in their bunks, and Jack Probert fussed with what little food the group had on hand. It was another bitter January night outside. Edy and company anticipated a visit from
the Senior Canadian Officer Group Captain, Larry Wray. When he
arrived, he joined them at their table for tea to ward off the nighttime chill. Wray initiated conversation by posing a few questions about the coming days: What did they think the Germans were up to? How soon before they reacted to the Soviet advance? For about an hour Wray listened to Edy and the others offer observations and opinions. Everybody had his say. Then Wray offered his view.

“Personally, I think the Germans have left it too late to move us,” he said. “Their armies will be around and we could only clutter up the roads. I think they’ll leave us here to be overrun by the Ruskies.”