The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (4 page)

At approximately ten o’clock, Pengelly and Moyle, his co-pilot, homed in on their Berlin-area objective and released their bomb
load. They then decided to make a second pass over the target so that the Whitley’s newly mounted cameras could record the accuracy and damage of their attack. That’s when German anti-aircraft batteries around Berlin found their mark. Flak penetrated one of the bomber’s two engines and ignited a fire, just as it had two nights earlier aboard Cheshire’s Whitley. Pengelly reacted quickly, shutting down the engine in an attempt to prevent the fire from spreading to the fuel tanks inside the wing. Desperately, he turned the aircraft westward for home, but he knew the odds were prohibitive. The loss of one of his Merlin engines effectively cut his power in half. And the results were as predictable as a mathematical equation. Cheshire’s heroic dash for home on November 13 had succeeded because he still had two serviceable engines. Pengelly knew the technical specifications of his now one-engine Whitley—even empty of bombs—would prevent him and his crew from making it to friendly soil in England.

To his credit, the experienced bomber pilot did manage to keep
the crippled bomber airborne long enough for his crew to prepare
for the end. The extra minutes in the air gave each crewman enough
time to tighten harnesses, secure parachutes and survival kit, and
open escape hatches for evacuation. An hour west of Berlin, the radio
operator tapped off an SOS on the wireless to alert RAF Coastal Command of their final descent. Five hundred miles from home, flying on one engine over German-occupied territory in a heavy
bomber destined to crash or be shot down, and with just enough altitude to bail out successfully, Pengelly ordered his crew to abandon the aircraft. Then, just as the procedure manual stated, and as they had practised regularly on the ground at Topcliffe, first Moyle the co-
pilot crouched and fell backward through the forward escape hatch,
next Followes the observer-bombardier, then Radley the wireless
radio operator (as well as Michie the tail gunner on his own out the
rear hatch), and finally, Pengelly, the skipper, bailed out of
the nose of their crashing Whitley. All got out safely.

When Tony Pengelly ran away from his Canadian home in Weston, Ontario, in 1938, two-and-a-half years earlier, to join the Royal Air Force, he’d resigned himself to the RAF life. It meant dedication to a life of service of indeterminate duration. Typically in the Common
wealth air forces, thirty combat operations or about two hundred hours were considered a complete tour of duty. But reaching that plateau merely entitled an airman to a six-month rest from opera
tions (often instructing at a training station during the break) and then a return to combat. Early in the war, when 102 Squadron accumulated the third-worst casualty rate in the RAF, fewer than half all bomber crews were surviving a single tour.

Miraculously, by the night of November 14, 1940, Pengelly had completed thirty-one ops. Had he made it home that night, he might have been entitled to some leave time or at least service behind the lines as a respite. But at that stage of the war, Pengelly’s oath of service meant he was in for the duration. The expatriate Canadian had chosen life and loyalty to a centuries-old system of King’s Regulations that governed British society, commerce, and military service. And in the Royal Air Force, Pengelly had sworn to uphold its list of directives when serving in a theatre of war. If nothing else, Pengelly was a master of detail, and even as he floated to earth in Germany, he considered his actions methodically and exactly.

“I took my chute off and buried it,”
[7]
Pengelly said. “Being very
optimistic—which you were at twenty—I was going to head west and walk to England, probably try walking on the water.”

With equal naïveté, Pengelly started to travel on the wrong side of a public road and nearly collided with a volunteer police officer on his bicycle. Before long he was in the custody of two policemen, in a car, and en route to a local Luftwaffe station. He learned from his captors that they had detained at least two other “M for Mother” crew members, but because Pengelly was an officer, he was destined
for a train ride to the district
Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe
(Dulag Luft)—interrogation centre—in Frankfurt-am-Main. Inside a cell with no window on the door, but a view through bars to a nearby
wooded area and wire fence, Pengelly again reflected on the appropriate actions as he prepared for his first interrogation. They were lines he’d memorized among the King’s Regulations and Air Crew Instructions at initial training school, reminding him “to protect the Security of the Royal Air Force by every means.”
[8]

His captors brought him coffee and bread, probably to invite his co-operation. He felt unkempt. He hadn’t shaved. He was still in his flying suit. Then a German interrogator entered the room. Pengelly thought he looked as if he’d just stepped from a tailor’s shop and was terribly polite.

“Good day, Flight Lieutenant Pengelly,” the man said in plain
English. “How’s life in 102 Squadron?”

Pengelly hadn’t recalled giving anybody his squadron number.
The reference in the regulations to the Geneva Conventions of 1929 came back: “a prisoner of war is only required to give his name, rank, and number.”
[9]

The interrogation officer offered descriptions of other members
of Pengelly’s squadron; it proved he knew their names and some of
their activities. It also suggested the captor actually knew everything and needed nothing from the prisoner.

Pengelly would have to, as he recalled from the interrogation manual, “stand correctly to attention, maintain rigid silence, avoid attempts to bluff or tell lies, address any officer senior to himself as
‘Sir’ and . . . don’t fraternize; the enemy is not in the habit of wasting his time, whisky and cigars on those who have nothing to give him in return.”
[10]

The interrogation officer explained to Pengelly that he had been
a professor in Austria, had majored in British history, and had even travelled widely in England. And, oh, by the way, he happened to have English cigarettes apparently captured from the British Expeditionary Force during its hasty
withdrawal from Dunkirk.

As attentive to the interrogator’s methods as Pengelly felt he was, every time his captor edged toward sensitive information, Pengelly reminded himself of the regulations that required him not to try “to
fool your interrogators; they will be experts at their job, and in any
battle of wits you are bound to lose in the end.” Pengelly repeated that he did not have to tell the man anything.

“That’s all right,” Pengelly’s interrogator insisted. “I’ll find out
some way or other. We’re shooting lots of you chaps down.”
[11]

He couldn’t let on, but Pengelly was amazed by the volume of
information his interrogator spouted, including turnover figures on the squadron, casualty numbers, and that on one of his combat operations, Pengelly had flown to Italy and back.

Even though the interrogation had ended, and Pengelly felt some relief at having emerged without divulging any secrets of the Service, there were still other parts of that RAF manual at play. Yes, he had offered only his name, rank, and number. Yes, he had seen through the German officer’s offer of food and idle chatter and not shown his surprise at how much the German knew about 102 Squadron and its crews. Yes, he had rebuffed the interrogator’s attempts to fraternize with him, no matter how good those cigarettes might have smelled. But no, he had not yielded any data about his squadron, where it was stationed, what its strength was, or about the performance of any new designs in aircraft or armament. He hadn’t revealed a speck of information about air force training, tactics, or defence systems. F/L Pengelly had indeed lived up to all the King’s Regulations stipulated and memorized . . . except one.

All the regulations, while never specifically saying so, implied that included in an airman’s duty to King and country, particularly when captured and imprisoned on enemy territory, was an obligation to escape.

“Don’t betray those who help you to escape,” the RAF document stipulated. It added, “Do keep your eyes and ears open after capture. You may learn much which may be of value both to your country and yourself if you succeed in escaping.”
[12]

Escaping was a military obligation for which Pengelly admitted there had been no training. None of his instructors at initial training, elementary, or service training in the RAF had explained how to cut barbed wire at night, steal timely documents that would allow him to travel undetected, disguise himself as a German civilian, or dig a tunnel under a fence. All this and more—if he cared to live up to all the obligations of his contract with the King—he would have to learn by trial and error. But Pengelly was a quick study. After just four months in England, in the summer and fall of 1938, he had earned his “certificate of competency for private flying machines”
[13]
which meant he could fly “all types of land planes.” In addition, within his first year in the UK Pengelly had earned his commission as a flying officer in the RAF, making him equally capable in the cockpits of all military aircraft of the day.

Later that first full day in German captivity—November
16
,
1940
—F/L Pengelly was moved from the interrogation centre to the Dulag Luft prison camp. Curiously, as far as Pengelly was concerned, everybody inside the wire gathered at the gate to see the
latest arrival. Among the greeters was a great surprise for Pengelly: the Senior British Officer (SBO) in the camp, Group Captain Harry
“Wings” Day. Pengelly hadn’t seen his wing commander for over a year; a decorated veteran of the Great War and already age forty
when the Second World War began, Day had been shot down on his first op on October 13, 1939. The welcome from Wing Commander Day provided Pengelly’s first official lesson as a prisoner of war: each incoming POW had to be scrutinized to verify he was who he said he was. Because his wing commander knew Pengelly and could prove it, any suspicion was immediately lifted about his identity.

But Pengelly’s reacquaintance with Day initiated the next phase of his POW education. At Dulag Luft, the German prison camp officials had designated Day as Permanent Staff. They assigned him the responsibility of acclimatizing incoming captured aircrew to their
new POW lives. It turned out to be a perfect ploy. Together with captured RAF fighter pilot Roger Bushell and Fleet Air Arm pilot
Jimmy Buckley, as well as Middlesex Regiment infantryman Johnny Dodge, Pengelly would help cover Day as he dug a tunnel out of the camp from beneath his prison bed. A precedent had been established.

In June 1941, eighteen POWs broke out of Dulag Luft; all were
recaptured, but the effort was the first mass escape of the war.
[14]
A
few months later, when the Germans had transferred all the RAF POWs to
Stammlager Luft
I—or, more commonly, Stalag Luft I—in Barth, the ad hoc escape committee, dubbed “X Organization,” masterminded another tunnel breakout of twelve officers. Again the
prisoners were recaptured. But by then the escape committee had started pushing back. The Canadian bomber pilot who’d prepared his crewmen carefully should they have to evacuate their crashing
Whitley now began preparing to overcome the next adversity.

“Active participation in [escape] work and planning for escape became the most important thing in my prison camp life,”
[15]
Pengelly said. “The two and a half years I spent behind barbed wire before we began to plan the big escape was all training for that opportunity.”

For Pengelly and the others, intent on living up to that final obli
gation of their Royal Air Force service, the trial-and-error period would seem horribly long, tedious, and frustrating. Pengelly was an officer, a skilled bomber pilot, capable photographer, and born
leader. But for him the air war was finished. He would have to focus
his talents on the new tasks at hand. Over the next year and a half,
the escape committee at Barth successfully dug forty-eight tunnels. Their German captors found every one of them and thwarted every escape.

“That was because at Barth escaping was strictly private enter
prise,” Pengelly said. “[But] a man can’t forge his own identity papers, dig his own tunnel, make his own wire clippers, escape clothes, maps
[and] compasses. . . . From our futility, we knew we would have to
organize to be successful.”
[16]

BOND
OF
WIRE

F
RANCES MCCORMACK
got her first letter from her imprisoned
fiancé, a downed Spitfire pilot, just before Christmas 1941. She had met John Weir on a blind date a couple of summers earlier, when friends in Toronto arbitrarily matched them for a night of dancing at the Palais Royale on the Toronto waterfront. Weir cursed his friends for tricking him into the double date, but fell in love with
Frances as the pair embraced on the outdoor terrace dance floor
overlooking Lake Ontario. The war broke out in the middle of their
courtship and because the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) sent
John to Winnipeg for elementary flight training, the couple began a long-distance relationship by correspondence. Even when John successfully soloed and graduated to service flight training, the air force
posted him to Borden, Ontario, more than an hour’s drive north of
Toronto, where Frances lived. Still, the two managed to communicate in creative ways.

On a day when John planned to dodge the curfew at the training station and drive to Toronto for an evening date with Frances, he decided to alert her to his plans for a rendezvous. During the
day’s instructional flight near Toronto, the young pilot trainee simply detoured over the Forest Hill area of the city and “bombed” his girlfriend’s residence with a message wrapped in a handkerchief. Neigh
bours picked up the note attached to a small parachute and rushed it to the addressee: Miss Frances McCormack, 61 Heathdale Road.

“Be down about 8 o’clock or 8:30. If not, I’ll phone,” Weir said in the note. “No news about a 48 [hour leave of absence]. P.S. Don’t say anything about this to anyone.”
[1]

“You should be a bomber pilot, not a fighter pilot,”
[2]
Frances later told him.

As much as Weir’s after-hours dash to Toronto illustrated his youthful exuberance and ingenuity, it nearly ended his air force career. His Borden flight instructor found out about his student’s illegal antics. He
lambasted the sprog (novice) pilot about his disregard for the King’s
Regulations and lack of respect for his fellow pilots. Then he told Weir
he’d be reassigned—i.e., washed out of pilot training. When Weir pleaded his case, the instructor decided to redirect his student away
from the multi-engine training that would have streamed him toward
becoming a bomber pilot. Instead, Weir would train to eventually fly the single-engine, solo cockpit Hurricane fighter aircraft. John Weir couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate punishment.

Collisions with authority and protocol seemed routine for Weir, but they never clouded his drive or independence; among many things, he was an avid outdoorsman capable of fending for himself
if and when he had to. Later that year, during an instructional flight at Trenton, the young trainee had struggled to bring a Fairey Battle bomber with a burning engine down to earth safely. The episode left his uniform singed, covered in grime, and stinking of glycol from the Battle’s burst coolant system. No one bothered to acknowledge that young Weir had chosen to save the King’s property and put his own personal safety at risk; nevertheless, when a visiting RAF officer spotted him in a parade lineup with a glycol-stained uniform, he pointed him out as “a rather scruffy looking individual.”
[3]
The nickname stuck.

Frances McCormack felt so moved by Scruffy’s passion to join up
and serve his country that she decided to resign her paying job as a
personal shopper at Simpson’s department store to look for war work herself.
[4]
She found it at Research Enterprises, the company manufacturing ASDIC, the navy device that used sound waves to detect other
ships—principally enemy submarines—at sea. Frances knew how to drive so she landed work as the company chauffeur and took great
pride in contributing to the war effort this way. Meanwhile, the couple received their parents’ blessing to marry and were engaged October
2
,
1940
, a few weeks ahead of Weir’s overseas posting. The two travelled with friends to Ottawa and shared final words at the train station. Frances knew her fiancé felt an allure for the excitement of the war.

“John, I just hate you going away to this war,” she recalled saying to him before he embarked.

“Fran, I’ve had everything my own way all my life,” he had told
her. “I’m not concerned in the least.”
[5]

Partly to prove himself and partly because it was serious now, Weir moved deftly into the cockpits of Hurricanes in operational training at Sutton Bridge, northeast of London. Then he moved to active duty with
1
RCAF Squadron, the first Canadian squadron in
Fighter Command that daily joined RAF squadrons scrambling to beat back German Dornier bombers during that historic Battle of Britain
summer. By the time Weir went operational with 1 Squadron, it had
logged an impressive record—
1
,
694
sorties,
29
downed enemy aircraft, another
43
damaged or destroyed—and its
Canadian fighter pilots had
earned three Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFCs). However, losses had also been severe—three killed in combat, two in accidents, and
ten wounded—and it was generally acknowledged that life expec
tancy of green pilots was six hours of combat or less. Nevertheless, a primed and combat ready Flying Officer (F/O) John Weir reported for active service in October 1940, just as 1 Squadron relocated to Thurso, Scotland, to protect the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.

With 1941 came changes. The squadron had replenished its core of experienced fighter pilots. RAF Fighter Command had relocated its aircrew to Digby, in east-central England, and then Biggin Hill
south of London. The Canadian squadron had been renumbered
401
and taken into service its first Supermarine Spitfire fighter air
craft. John Weir had also reconnected with one of his oldest pals from Toronto, Hugh Godefroy. Their families had been close. They had grown up, played shinny hockey, and attended school together. They had both enlisted the same day, September 3, 1939, and for the same reason—the German torpedoing and sinking of the passenger liner
SS
Athenia
. They had been posted overseas within months of each
other, and they arrived at Digby together. They paired up in combat
formations to look out for each other and at Biggin Hill flew their
maiden Spitfire sorties together. And they got their baptism of fire over the Channel together. But as uplifting as banding together this squadron of eager young Canadians felt, Fighter Command victories
were few and far between that fall. On October
27
,
1941
, a Biggin
Wing sweep over Dunkirk and the resulting dogfight with scores of Messerschmitt Bf 109s produced an all too frequent result.

“The ground crew from ‘A’ Flight came into the dispersal hut
and sat around in dead silence. None of their aircraft had returned,” Godefroy wrote. “We had lost Wally Floody, Johnny Small, Blake
Wallace, Stan Thompson and Brian Hodgkinson.” Three of them
had been shot down “on their first ever sweep.”
[6]

It got worse in November when, during the first week of operations into France, the Biggin Wing lost ten of twelve fighter pilots.
Then, on November
8
, a flight of Spitfires from
401
conducted a
sweep over the River Somme Estuary, where German fighter aircraft
swooped down and broke up the Spitfire formation. Godefroy was chased by four Bf
109
s. He twisted, turned, and threw his aircraft around the sky to the point of near exhaustion, all the while firing
at whatever he saw until his ammunition ran out. He barely made it home in one piece. At the dispersal hut he turned in his escape kit and gave his combat report to the duty intelligence officer (IO).

“Weir and Gardiner are missing,”
[7]
the IO said.

“Weir missing?” Godefroy shot back, admitting he’d never worried about his friend not returning.

“Blakeslee
[*]
reported seeing two Spitfires astern, both on fire,”
the IO added.

It was Wally Gardiner’s first ever sweep, but John Weir had accu
mulated a thousand hours in operational flying. To Godefroy, not seeing the “tough as nails and perpetual clown”
[8]
John Weir home
safe for a celebratory drink and slap on the back “seemed impossible.” Nevertheless, the job of informing Weir’s parents and Frances
McCormack, his fiancée, fell to Godefroy. Of course, the air force
would send the obligatory “we regret to inform you” form letter, but Godefroy worried that whatever words of sympathy and explanation he might cobble together would fall short. Nothing seemed appro
priate or adequate. And the silence that followed proved equally painful. Later, Frances would learn that when her fiancé’s Spitfire was attacked at an altitude of twenty-six thousand feet over Caen, France, Messerschmitt shells had ignited one of his fuel tanks. The
resulting fire had burned his hands and face, nearly fusing his eyelids shut. A combination of adrenaline and shock must have masked any pain; he’d managed to bail out and, once on the ground, he’d immediately set about burying his parachute and attempting to disappear into the countryside. To no avail. Soon after, F/O Weir was captured, processed at the Dulag Luft, and became a prisoner of war—
Kriegsgefangenen
or “kriegie”—en route to the airmen’s prison at Barth.

Luftwaffe-run prison camps, such as Stalag Luft I, housed captured
air force personnel. As opposed to the
Offizier Lager
or
Oflag
prison for non-commissioned officers, the Luft camps generally
imprisoned Commonwealth officers shot down in bombers or fighters. As a rule, those officers, even as POWs, were treated with respect. The morning after he was shot down over Boulogne, France, in Janu
ary
1942
, RAF Spitfire pilot Robert Stanford Tuck was wakened by a German lieutenant, who first saluted him smartly. “We are tak
ing you by train to Germany,” the young German officer said. “You are regarded as an important prisoner . . .”
[9]
Throughout his trip to Dulag Luft, Stanford Tuck was fed hot drinks, soup, plenty of bread, and potatoes. He was, after all, a squadron leader.

The architects of Germany’s military prison camps could not have
conceived of a better containment area than the facility on the out
skirts of the medieval town of Barth. Situated on a peninsula jutting
out into the Baltic Sea on the north coast of Germany, the grounds and location of Stalag Luft I alone posed a deterrent to escape. Its
sandy soils lay flat and virtually without contour; sightlines were perfect for prison guards. A lagoon to the southeast and the open sea to the northeast meant the water table would be relatively high, only six to eight feet underground; so any thoughts of deep tunnel digging appeared to be out of the question. Some pine tree growth beyond the camp perimeter broke the skyline, but not the flow of frigid north winds off the Baltic.

The man-made containment, built in the summer of
1940
, consisted of barbed-wire fencing with watch towers manned around the clock by armed German guards. Initially, the camp was a dusty
cage, roughly one hundred yards long and seventy yards wide.
[10]
The perimeter was further accentuated with a ditch excavated just inside the outer wire. Then, just inside that ditch, a second line of wire was strung—at about boot-top level. This wire marked the bound
ary between the inner camp and a no man’s land; prisoners were
warned if they ventured beyond the inner wire they would be shot. The compound housing, initially built to hold about two hundred prisoners, was spartan at best. The Germans had hastily constructed low, wooden barracks huts, some with partitioned areas (rooms) con
taining double-decker bunks for nine to a dozen men (changed to triple-deckers as the number of POWs swelled). The huts lacked
insulation, which meant the inside temperature matched the outside in summer and winter, unless the room offered a stove with a modest amount of fuel. And if the chilling winds and primitive accommodation weren’t demoralizing enough, the knowledge that just forty miles northwest, out in the Baltic Sea, lay the international border between Germany and Denmark, made Stalag Luft I the epitome of frustration.

“My darling, here I am safe and sound in Germany,”
[11]
John Weir
eventually wrote in the first letter to Frances, in mid-December
1941
.

The letter was written on a single, prison-issue, skin-thin piece of paper, which was the allowable limit for POWs. The page measured ten inches by five-and-a-half inches—enough for about three hun
dred words—and folded in thirds for mailing. Weir wrote that his
letters wouldn’t be frequent or very explicit, what with the Germans censoring everything. He appeared to be cut off from the rest of the
camp, likely in some kind of solitary. He was not the usual upbeat “Scruffy,” kidding and romanticizing about things, and he encouraged Frances and the Weir family back in Canada to contact Red Cross authorities to send him parcels because, he wrote, he really
needed socks and a shaving brush. Finally, perhaps to ease her mind, he wrote that he had her photograph close by.