The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (30 page)

“As Wally, Brownie, and I marched out the gate our pockets were bulging, but our hands were free,” Harsh wrote, “except for the tins of bully beef we were wolfing.”
[23]

During his pre-war civilian days, Kingsley Brown had enjoyed his life as a journalist gathering and publishing stories for newspapers in Toronto and Halifax. When the X Organization at Stalag Luft III learned of his researching and writing talents, it immediately dispatched Brown to gather intelligence information from library newspapers and magazines for the Dean and Dawson forgery section. By
his own admission, Brown did most of his gathering for the escape
committee, not for himself. In the mad dash at Belaria to assemble
his own survival gear before he marched out the gate, however, he allowed himself the luxury of salvaging one keepsake: a German
beer stein with a delicate silver top. But the first hours of marching through drifting snow and penetrating cold imposed a sudden
reality among the prisoners. Out in the elements and in the POWs’ weakened state, the supply sleighs became heavier by the hour. The kri
egies began to unburden themselves of extra tins of food, packs of
cigarettes, and blocks of chocolate—all but the absolute minimum luggage needed to survive.

“The beer stein . . . was my one souvenir of my prison years,”
[24]
Brown wrote. “But I tossed it into the ditch. The ditch was strewn with violins and guitars, books, trumpets, framed family pictures—
precious items in a prisoner’s ‘life savings.’”

Though his colleagues often called him a loner, Wally Floody left Belaria in close company with his two tunnel co-conspirators,
Harsh and Brown. Aside from survival supplies, however, the only mementoes he took with him were a small journal and a photograph of his wife, Betty, whom he hadn’t seen in almost four years. Leaving Belaria prompted mixed emotions for the Tunnel King. Still bit
ter about the way German authorities had hauled him away from
the North Compound and potential escape through the tunnel he had designed, excavated, and protected, Floody recognized that the twist of fate had likely extended his life. And as costly as the Gestapo reprisals had been, he continued to insist the escape had achieved
its ultimate objective. When news of the mass escape reached the German population, Floody continued to point out, it was the first time since the war began in
1939
that every German in uniform had been called back from leave. Every fifteen minutes on German radio
authorities broadcast the latest on the escape of the
Terrorflieger
(terror flyers).

“The slowdown of the German economy caused by the tunnel and the breakout had been the equivalent of dropping a couple of divisions of paratroopers into German-occupied Europe,” Floody
reminded his comrades. “I think the cost was worth it.”
[25]

Only outside the wire did Commonwealth air officers come face to face with the other realities of the war. Most of the east-west highways had become the exclusive domain of Germany military traffic,
moving troops and weapons to and from the rapidly approaching
Eastern Front. So the kriegies and their guards made their way along secondary dirt roads, where they were soon caught in the backwash of the war. Roads were clogged with slave labourers from occupied countries, starving civilians pushing carts of their moveable possessions, homeless women and children huddling from the cold, nuns and priests uprooted from their parishes, and domesticated animals wandering beside the traffic. The kriegies told the civilians where they could find thousands of Red Cross boxes of provisions abandoned in the Sagan pine forest. For at least the moment, the former inmates of Stalag Luft III had the advantage of provisions they had
packed in their pockets and packs, but as one kriegie noted, on the road “we were just people now, all members of the human race . . . sharing common levelers of cold, lice, misery, and despair. . . . This
was truly
Götterdämmerung
.”
[26]

The first night outside the wire, the aircrew officers and their guards coped with temperatures well below freezing. Few prisoners had the kind of winter gear the conditions demanded. Greatcoats proved too
thin. Summer boots cracked and leaked in the cold and snow. Mitts and scarves were in short supply. In addition, though the moon had
originally cast some light en route, before long the weather closed in and the men were marching through falling snow that deteriorated into nearly white-out conditions. Marching into the teeth of a blizzard slowed everybody down, and within a few hours the columns of POWs stretched over twenty miles of road.
[27]
Stragglers feared they
would be shot. Even as the kriegies marched from the Stalag Luft III camps, the BBC was broadcasting an order each afternoon that the officers and men should not risk escape attempts, and further,
that they should try to stay together for safety in numbers and better identification.
[28]
But the German guards fared no better. Most were older men who grumbled about having to escort
Luftgangsters
across
the frozen countryside. It appeared the guards were constantly in
search of shelter for themselves and their prisoners.

Sometimes, survival on what kriegies soon dubbed “the Death
March” came down to the individual strength of fellow air officers rising to the occasion. Musician Art Crighton said the cold wasn’t nearly
as penetrating when he was walking; when his body was moving, his circulation seemed to fend off the freezing temperatures, the winds,
and the driving snow. But when the columns had to stop and he had
to stand for hours out in the open waiting for congestion to ease or an order to be issued, he could feel himself going numb at the extremities.
That’s when Crighton remembered Scruffy Weir coming to the rescue.

“Wave your arms!”
[29]
Weir shouted as he ran up and down the columns of men. Then he’d cuss and add to his call to action: “Wave your legs!”

Later in the march, Crighton said his German guards occasionally found shelter for their prisoners in empty or nearly empty barns. Hungry, exhausted, and sick, the kriegies were jammed like sardines into stalls, troughs, and lofts of straw for the night. At one end of the barn, the guards placed a rain barrel full of water. They were fearful of the possibility of fire ignited by careless prisoners sneaking a smoke during the night. Next to the rain barrel was also the spot where prisoners could relieve themselves in an emergency. One night in just such a setting, Crighton got an attack of “squitters,” prompting him to dash from his straw bed through the dark to the relieving spot next to the rain barrel.

“In pitch black, I stumbled . . . down the hall and crashed into the rain barrel. I fell head first into two feet of icy water. Then I collapsed on the floor. Losing control, disaster followed,” he said. “I remember nothing more [except] my comrades wiped me clean and dry and laid me on my straw bed.”
[30]

Over the next few days, all of the prisoners from the various Stalag Luft III compounds—as many as ten thousand airmen of the Allied air forces—made their way via back roads south from Sagan and west about fifty miles to the German rail centre at Spremberg. Men from the South Compound, finding ample shelter at a brick factory along the way, arrived first on January 29. Two days later, the kriegies from
the West Compound made their way into the town. A group of five
hundred Americans from the Centre Compound had joined up with
POWs from the East Compound by the time they reached Spremberg on February
4
. Of the larger groups, the last to arrive at the
railway yards were the North Compound air officers. At Spremberg, German authorities divided the prisoners into new groups, loaded them into boxcars, and sent them in different directions—the Ameri
cans to Stalag XIII-D outside Nürnberg; those from Centre and
South Compounds to Stalag VII-A near Moosburg; the POWs from the Belaria Compound were transported to Luckenwalde, a prison camp southwest of Berlin; and prisoners from the North Compound
(including most of the six hundred Canadian kriegies) travelled to
Marlag-Milag, a naval facility in northwestern Germany.

In that first week of February 1945, the ancient locomotives and
boxcars—the infamous “forty-and-eights”—threaded their way from
Spremberg westward across Germany, away from Soviet armies advancing from the east and toward Allied armies advancing from
the west. Apparently dodging higher priority military trains and both daylight and nighttime air raids, the POW trains chugged from one
marshalling yard to the next. The lack of food and water were bad enough, but darkness and confinement compounded everybody’s anxiety and ailments. Occasionally, when the trains pulled into sidings, guards unlocked the doors and allowed the prisoners to exit, stretch, and relieve themselves. John R. Harris was positioned at a
boxcar door when it was suddenly thrust open.

“I had no sooner alighted from the car than I promptly fainted,”
[31]
he said. “The others picked me up, but . . . I keeled over once again.
This time, I was carried back to the [box]car. Someone brought me a cup of water. I don’t know where it came from. . . . It was full of rust particles, so it could have come from the train’s engine.”

In his boxcar, Robert Buckham’s group also had to do without
water, artificial light, or straw for bedding, but they found a margarine lamp and lit it. The kriegies tried to make the best use of the lack of space. They hung bags and sundry gear on the walls and from the ceiling of the car. Any available blankets were spread on the floor so they could take turns resting in a prone position. Others slept sitting. The rest stood, attempting the same. When his train got to Hanover,
Buckham and his group could see water being rationed to the two
cars ahead of theirs. The Canadians began shouting and banging on
their boxcar door to get a water ration too. Through a crack in the
door, they could see a guard approaching with a bucketful of water. He unbolted the door and slid it back a few inches. But before the kriegies could reach the water, the train lurched forward. The door
slid shut. The guard re-bolted the door and tossed the water away. To add to his discomfort, Buckham ended up beside an Australian
airman who screamed and groaned through the night and banged his fists on the boxcar door during the day.

“We could do little for him. Dysentery,” Buckham said. “A Red
Cross box served as his toilet, barely ten inches from my head. Endurance
was our only resource.”
[32]

The trio of Canadian kriegies from the Belaria compound had stuck together all the way to Spremberg, and even as the Germans
divided the prisoners into groups for train transit, Kingsley Brown, George Harsh, and Wally Floody managed to get aboard the same
boxcar. That was about the only redeeming aspect of the trip. Fifty
men were crammed into their railway car and struggled to get comfortable in the shared space. There was a bit of straw on the floor and
a single wooden box in the middle of the car to serve as its latrine.
There was no food and no light except what entered through cracks between the wallboards. A determined group of card players enlarged a crack in the wall with a penknife so that they could carry on their game. And when night came, so did the endless struggle to organize arms, legs, and heads into any degree of comfort to sleep. The odour of fifty unwashed bodies mixed with the stench of the “thunderbox.” And when the train stopped on a siding to wait out a Bomber Com
mand attack some distance away, the assault on the senses height
ened the claustrophobia, fatigue, and fear. Several nights into their
trip west, men awoke to cries in the darkness of the boxcar.

“I want my mother,”
[33]
a man called out. When he heard the plea again, George Harsh knew it came from one of the youngest airmen
among the prisoners. Just twenty, with several kills in the Fighter Command books, the fighter pilot had been shot down over France
in 1942. Otherwise a dynamic and bright young warrior, this night he called out like small child for his mother.

“Okay, boy, okay,” a voice answered from across the boxcar. The
consoling response came from a man making his way through the
tangle of arms and legs and bodies. “It’s all right now.”

“I want my mother,” the first man repeated, nearly weeping.

“We’ll get you to your mother,” came the assurance. It was Wally Floody. The big former Spitfire pilot and X Organization leader had
reached the younger man in the dark and was rocking him gently in
his arms. “There now. Get some rest.”

In the three years George Harsh had known the hard-driving
tunneller with nine lives, he had never seen this caring side of Wally
Floody. Like John Weir shouting encouragement up and down the
columns of men in the cold, George Sweanor nursing two fellow
patients’ medical needs while trying to stay alive himself on the forced march, and those who had cared for Art Crighton during
his dehumanizing bout of dysentery, Floody playing mother to a distressed young pilot on a prison train in the middle of Germany illustrated the brotherhood that bound these longtime prisoners of war together. If
one were going to make it safely to the end of this long road, each man would somehow try to ensure that everybody else did as well.
Harsh witnessed further proof of such loyalty even as the numbers of the POWs trekking west from Belaria dwindled to less than one hundred. One morning, weeks into their overland marching and gruelling boxcar transit to an unknown destination, Harsh and Floody
found themselves “sleepwalking, silently lost in our own personal
miseries”
[34]
as a twosome. It slowly dawned on them that their number three, Kingsley Brown, was missing. For as long as they could
muster the strength and not drawing unnecessary attention from
their guards, the two kriegies searched high and low for their absent comrade. They had all but held a requiem for their missing friend
when he suddenly reappeared.