The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “Sprague and Langford were the fastest trap men in the world,” Floody said. “They could open or close the trap in twenty to thirty seconds.”[17]

  Generating some good-natured chaos during the move to the North Compound seemed innocent on the surface. But it too was serving a greater purpose. As the general population of officers moved into new barracks, claimed bunks, and established routines for sharing kitchens, washrooms, and all other facilities under a barracks roof, the inner circle of the escape committee never rested. Bushell and the section heads began looking for any and all weak points in the Germans’ day-to-day maintenance of the stalag. Even the smallest of details—such as haphazard document checks at the main gate in the weeks immediately following the move—might offer the best escape opportunity.

  So it was when the first insect infestation of the barracks buildings occurred in the spring of 1943. All it took was the senior Commonwealth medical officer to alert the German medical officer to an outbreak of lice, fleas, or bedbugs and, with not unexpected precision, the prison system responded. Prisoners living in the infested hut would be paraded in parties of twenty-five to the shower house in the woods—four hundred yards outside the main gate—for hot showers and bug inspection. Meanwhile, a delousing team would move into the hut and fumigate it. On June 11, just after 2 p.m. (immediately following a routine relief of every guard in the compound), a delousing party of twenty-five kriegies (each carrying a towel covering a second set of clothes) and two German Unteroffizier (NCO) guards approached the main gate. Meanwhile, inside the compound in full view of the guards at the gate, two kriegies—Bill Geiger and Henry “Johnny” Marshall—began a fencing demonstration. Tony Pengelly assembled an apparently impromptu audience that began cheering on the fencers.

  “The Germans, who love fencing, had only one eye on business,” Pengelly said. “The delousing party reached the gate, its guards shouted something to the guards on the gate, and off it marched into the woods toward the showers.”[18]

  Before the Germans at the main gate realized anything was wrong, part two of the caper had already kicked into gear. A second group under guard approached the main gate. This time the party consisted of seven Commonwealth wing commanders and group captains and an American lieutenant colonel—allegedly on their way to an emergency meeting with the camp Kommandant—with a German corporal escorting them through. One guard gave little notice to the pass the corporal handed him. A second gatekeeper paused and examined the corporal and his pass more closely. A phone call to the Kommandant confirmed that the emergency officers’ meeting had been fabricated, and a closer examination of the corporal escorting the officers revealed that it was really kriegie Bob van der Stok,[19] a Dutch-born fighter pilot in RAF 41 Squadron shot down a year earlier, in July 1942; as well as the fake German uniform, van der Stok had a dummy gun in a cardboard holster.[20] The camp Kommandant, Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau, was furious. The sixty-one-year-old ex-cavalry officer from the Great War and former member of Hermann Göring’s personal staff was notorious for his quick temper, but also his sense of humour.

  “How do you think of these things? You British!” von Lindeiner said. Then, he began to laugh. He did not attempt to suppress his admiration for the kriegies’ fabricated meeting, nor his sense of satisfaction that his men had discovered it. “But we are too smart for you. . . . Of course, we’ll have to put you in cells for ten days. Rules, you know.”

  Meanwhile, it slowly dawned on the guards at the gate that the two guards escorting the previous delousing party might also have been imposters. Indeed, they were Belgian airmen fluent in German and each equally well outfitted in a mocked-up guard uniform, gate pass, and sidearm.

  “It was all we could do to keep from looking down the road,” Pengelly said. “If there was no commotion there we would know the twenty-seven men were clear—twenty-five who had carried various civilian outfits [maps and concentrated food cakes] wrapped in their towels and two guards, our own men, dressed as German soldiers.”[21]

  Eventually, a guard ran up to the Kommandant and explained he had found towels in the woods and that that shower party had vanished. Von Lindeiner went pale. He immediately dispatched search parties into the woods, had the entire camp population paraded to the sports grounds for roll call, and sent machine-gun armed troops through every hut in the North Compound. Even though it began to rain heavily, he kept the POWs standing on the sports field for five hours.

  What Pengelly referred to as “Operation Bedbug” still did not deliver Bushell’s home runs—escapers who made it all the way back to Britain—but it proved to be the first significant victory in the psychological warfare between X Organization and the Luftwaffe administration of the North Compound at Stalag Luft III. The temporary escape of twenty-seven POWs required the mobilization of additional German troops to track them down; as many of the kriegies put it, the short-term goal of these escape plots was to tie up German manpower. The events of June 11 had also tarnished the otherwise pristine record Colonel von Lindeiner had enjoyed thus far in the war. Worse yet, even if the Kommandant refused to admit it, Operation Bedbug had exposed an important chink in the defensive armour at Stalag Luft III. X Organization’s seemingly endless array of ruses, diversions, and masquerades continued to fool the compound staff, at least temporarily. This time, credit for the successful breakout, beyond the wire at least, went to a simple but very powerful section in the escape committee hierarchy—its tailoring crew.

  RAF airman Tommy Guest and his master seamsters had, in secrecy, manufactured both civilian clothes and convincing German uniforms from little or nothing. Under normal circumstances, the Germans had allowed sewing equipment inside the barracks so that prisoners could repair their own clothing. However, by procuring blankets, sports jackets, and other garments arriving in Red Cross parcels, Guest and his sewing-machine operators had turned a repair room into a veritable men’s garment factory providing the escape committee with all manner of look-alike clothes, from plain business suits to the top hat and overalls of a town chimney sweep. All it took was time, Pengelly added, and “time was our cheapest commodity.”[22]

  If Colonel von Lindeiner thought the bedbug caper represented the oddest diversion his Commonwealth POWs could create, he was mistaken. A combination of available time and the kriegies’ now-expert capability to create something from nothing led to another extraordinary diversion inside the wire. In April 1942, Canadian Flight Lieutenant Arthur Crighton had bailed out of his burning Wellington bomber over Hamburg; all but his tail gunner, Dick Howard, had survived, and eventually the Luftwaffe interrogation and transporting system delivered him to Stalag Luft III. When he discovered, the following spring, that a kriegie had received a set of golf clubs from the YMCA in Norway, Crighton and a number of golf-starved officers in the compound decided to transform a portion of their prison real estate into a nine-hole golf course. One vital element remained missing: golf balls.

  “[The] thin elastic strips used to provide insulation for jam, fish, and meat tins in Red Cross parcels [were] rolled around a pebble,”[23] Crighton wrote. “It was finished by sewing on a protective leather covering from an old shoe [around the elastics].”

  The resulting golf rounds, in which kriegies could smack the makeshift ball up to fifty yards, were played between the huts, amid kriegies walking along the circuit and across the shifting expanses of sand inside the wire. The only hazards the golfers faced were shots that rolled under the barracks huts and those that ended up beyond the warning wire into territory that truly was “out of bounds.” For a while, Crighton and his fellow golfers devised a system that allowed a kriegie with a red scarf on his shoulders to step over the warning wire to retrieve errant fairway shots. Crighton admitted he was never courageous enough to don the red scarf and test machine-gun toting tower guards, but he did face a logistics problem as challenging as manufacturing golf balls from pebbles and elastic bands.

  “I was left-handed and left-handed clubs w
ere not available,” he said. “[We] melted down a leaden Keintrinkwasser jug and fashioned it in a sand mould to become a club head. And a shaft? As factotum of everything musical in the compound, I appropriated the upright staff that supported the lid of the grand piano [in the prison camp]. Thus was constructed the most elegant left-hand five iron in the whole of Kriegiedom.”[24]

  While Art Crighton appeared to fill his time with repeated rounds of golf on the makeshift compound links, during the remainder of his POW time he occupied himself with his second great passion: music. Before the war, he had studied to play the organ and lead choirs; growing up in Calgary he had earned the prestigious Licentiate diploma of the Royal Schools of Music. In peacetime Crighton had become a respected music teacher and proficient on the organ and the trumpet. Inside the wire, he asked to play trumpet in a concert band and later took over as bandleader.

  Since German prison officials appeared to encourage constructive prisoner pursuits, the Germans welcomed Crighton’s requests to bring additional live music to the prisoners when the North Compound opened in April 1943. Then, when he sought permission to purchase such instruments as violins and cellos, Stalag Luft III authorities agreed. Crighton also requested wind instruments for a forty-piece symphony orchestra. They opened channels for the YMCA and Red Cross to send reed instruments, trumpets, trombones, and a tuba. Eventually, Crighton the kriegie music director not only led symphony concerts of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven (which were of course acceptable to the German Kommandant), but also organized band performances, marching bands for outdoor events, and a pit band for productions at the compound theatre when it opened in September 1943. Crighton went so far as to assemble an orchestra wardrobe; if prisoners received new uniforms from home (which was permitted) but didn’t want to wear them, Crighton commandeered them for his musicians. He insisted that orchestra members wear them.

  “The Germans encouraged us,” he said. “They knew if we had an orchestra, we weren’t digging tunnels.”[25]

  Escape fever heated up that summer, and not just at the North Compound. For as long as Commonwealth and, more recently, American officers had been imprisoned in the East and North compounds at Stalag Luft III, a growing number of NCO aircrew (by the summer of 1943 they numbered nearly nineteen hundred men) had been penned inside the Centre Compound. By comparison to the officers’ huts, the condition of the NCOs’ barracks reflected German administration’s neglect and the POWs frustration with conditions. Huts had broken windows. Wiring had been torn from the walls. Latrines had been stripped of wallboards for firewood and for shoring up tunnel projects.[26] That June, the Germans transferred all but fifty of the NCOs to Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania. The fifty who remained at Luft III appeared to be the most respectful of the premises; the German prison-keepers decided these fifty men would become orderlies to the incoming officers. They turned out to be the nucleus of the tunnelling effort well underway that summer. The Germans discovered and destroyed it that September.

  The same summer, a British air force officer, a Royal Artillery officer, and a Canadian air force officer concocted an escape scenario that would take place virtually in plain view of their compound captors. Serving as crew navigator on a Stirling bomber and shot down over Germany in December 1942, RAF Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams had originally been imprisoned in Oflag XXI-B at Schubin. There he met an artillery officer, Lieutenant Michael Codner. They quickly built a tunnel and just as quickly were recaptured and sent to the East Compound at Stalag Luft III. Just weeks inside their new prison camp, Codner had an epiphany.

  “A vaulting horse, a box horse like we had at school,” he told Williams. “One of us inside digging while the others vaulted over it. It’s foolproof.”[27]

  Eventually, the two of them worked out the details of their Trojan horse scheme and sold the idea to the British escape committee. With the help of a carpenter who was legitimately constructing frames for stage flats at the theatre inside the compound, they built a strong wooden vaulting horse with stolen wood for the frame and light plywood taken from Red Cross parcel boxes to sheath the horse. And for the comfort of the vaulters, they used cigarette packaging to fashion a cushion on top.

  The scheme required a dedicated group of accomplices. Flight Lieutenant Edward Nurse, originally from Newfoundland, then an RCAF instructor, and eventually a Halifax bomber pilot shot down in April 1943, joined the plot. Initially, each day early in the summer, Nurse and the others carried the exercising horse to the spot chosen to begin the escape tunnel. Once the Germans got weary of inspecting the horse,[28] the team began to carry it—containing one tunnel digger, his tools, and about a dozen empty sock-like containers—to a corner of the compound next to the warning wire. Coincidentally, it was the same spot where George McGill and Eddie Asselin had staged their boxing match as a diversion for an escape attempt the year before. As Ted Nurse and the rest of the dedicated POWs conducted vaulting exercises over the horse, the tunneller cut into the sand under the horse, built a trapdoor, eventually a vertical shaft, and then a horizontal tunnel. At the end of each vaulting/digging session, Nurse and the others carried the horse containing the tunneller and the day’s excavated sand to a nearby hut to let the tunneller out, dispose of the sand, and plan the next vaulting session.

  In the early spring, Oliver Philpot, a thirty-year-old Canadian torpedo bomber pilot who had been shot down over Norway in December 1941, joined the Trojan horse scheme. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, and a veteran of escape attempts from Dulag Luft, Oflag IX at Spangenberg, and Oflag XXI-B at Schubin, Flight Lieutenant Philpot was left behind in the East Compound when the big move of Commonwealth officers to the North Compound occurred in April 1943. Considered a loner, he approached the concept of escaping from a different direction—build an outside identity first, then build a means of escape. And so, as Codner and Williams worked on their two-man tunnel beneath the vaulting horse, Philpot began manufacturing his outside-the-wire persona—a Norwegian margarine salesman named Jon Jörgensen. By mid-summer, Philpot took on the additional task of helping to disperse the sand that Williams and Codner were packing into bags inside the horse. Before long they invited him to join the tunnelling as well. From then on it became a three-man escape plan. After 114 days, the tunnel (just thirty inches beneath the surface) extended about one hundred feet eastward under the fence and was ready to deliver its diggers outside the wire.

  Escape day was October 29. That morning, the vaulters carried Codner and Philpot inside the horse to the top of the concealed trap to the tunnel. At the end of the vaulting exercise, Codner stayed underground to dig the last leg of the tunnel while Philpot retrieved the last of the full sandbags. At that evening’s appell, the escape committee ensured that it could cover Codner’s absence. Then the vaulters carried three men inside the horse to the top of the tunnel—Philpot, Williams, and a man to close the trap and seal the three men inside. At six o’clock, after dark, Michael Codner broke through the soil outside the wire with his fist.

  “[It was our] first glimpse of the stars . . . in the free heavens beyond the wire,”[29] Williams wrote.

  Moments later the three men, shrouded in dark clothes and carrying bundles that contained their civilian suits, travel documents, and food, made off into the woods, undetected. Philpot (as Jörgensen, the salesman) caught a train from Sagan, arriving twenty-four hours later at the Baltic Sea port of Danzig. A day later he managed to stow himself aboard the Swedish vessel Aralizz. The captain discovered him and almost had him thrown off the ship, but the ship’s sympathetic chief engineer hid him until the Aralizz was at sea bound for Sweden. Meanwhile, Codner and Williams, disguised as French workmen, travelled to Stettin where they managed to make contact with the Danish Resistance. Through its members they gained passage on a ship to Copenhagen, and on to Gothenburg in neutral Sweden. The three Trojan horsemen completed their home runs via the British Legation in Stockholm, arriving in Britain by Christmas. They were the only prisoners of war to successfully e
scape the East Compound.

  All three received the Military Cross. For Eric Williams, however, it was small compensation. His wife had died in Liverpool during a German air raid, and two of his three brothers serving in the Royal Air Force had been killed in action.[30] A year of his life lost, caged as a POW at Stalag Luft III, somehow seemed a smaller price to pay.

  * * *

  * NCOs brought the first radio to the Centre Compound at Stalag Luft III when they arrived from Barth. They had assembled it from parts gathered by bribing guards and hid it in a functioning accordion until it was confiscated during a snap inspection in January 1943. Officers in the East Compound also brought a radio from Warburg or Barth; it was confiscated in July 1942. In April 1943, parts for another radio were smuggled (inside luggage, a medicine ball, and a biscuit tin) into the officers’ barracks. Later, in January 1945, following the evacuation of the POW camp and during the forced march westward, the German Abwehr officer, Hans Pieber, actually carried the radio in his briefcase for the Commonwealth airmen.

  5

  SERVANT TO A HOLE IN THE GROUND

  * * *

  Frank sorensen served his adopted country in deed, with oratory, and to carry on a military tradition. Born in Denmark in June of 1922, he moved with his family from the Danish town of Roskilde to Canada just a week before the Second World War broke out. Frank’s father, Marinus Bonde Sorensen, had served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Great War, married Frank’s mother, a wartime nurse, and in August of 1939 escaped Denmark and settled the family—two adults and six children—on a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.[1] However, the war drew several Sorensen family members back overseas: Marinus representing Canadian and Danish interests in Britain; Eric, Frank’s older brother, in the Canadian Army preparing for the invasion of Italy; and Frank as a Spitfire pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force with 403 Squadron in Suffolk, England. Just days before he was transferred to RAF 232 Squadron en route to combat operations in North Africa, Frank Sorensen became a voice of freedom on the public airwaves. Because of Marinus Sorensen’s Danish ancestry, his status as a Canadian Pacific Railway agent, and his connections with the BBC, his son, air force pilot Frank Sorensen, was invited to speak to Danes in occupied Denmark via the BBC’s Radio Free Europe broadcasts.