by Barris, Ted
“Hello, all you Roskilde boys,”[2] Sorensen began his October 15, 1942, broadcast. “Let me first of all speak to those who were boys with me, friends from school and Boy Scout camps . . . I know that there’s not one who would not consider it his duty and his part of the burden and fight to make Denmark a free country again.”
Just twenty, but already worldly enough to assess what a fascist dictator and his armies had inflicted on the country of his birth, Sorensen blamed German “parasites and thugs” for annexing his homeland, eliminating free speech, and imposing martial law on a passively resistant Danish population. He didn’t profess to understand why an older generation had chosen to resolve Europe’s differences this way. But in his broadcast, he cited his Danish-born brother, now an engineer in the Canadian Army, and himself, a Danish-born fighter pilot in the RCAF, as models for the way young Danes should respond to German occupation.
“I know how fortunate I and my comrades out here are that we are actively engaged in the battle,” he concluded. “For us the problem is simple and straightforward, but . . . it doesn’t pay to wait. Let us young people fight together now . . . [until] the Germans once again are driven out of Denmark.”[3]
A month later, on November 24, 1942, his squadron boarded SS Antenor sailing from Liverpool to Algeria to assist Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery and the British Eighth Army mount a counter-offensive in the North African desert against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. By mid-January of 1943, with the Allies advancing quickly, 232 Squadron had established a landing strip at Tingley in Algeria, from which its Spitfires conducted sweeps and reconnaissance operations. By March the squadron was flying patrols and escorts in and out of Victoria airstrip in Tunisia. In three weeks, Sorensen flew just thirteen operational sorties[4] and was growing weary of harbour patrols, tactical reconnaissance, and escort operations. However, a letter to his brother Eric described a sudden change in the intensity of the squadron’s activity.
“With no more excitement than ground strafing enemy transport once in a while, I welcomed the order by my flight commander one Sunday morning [April 11, 1943] over Tunis to break away and polish off a few Junker 52s flying low over the Bay of Tunis,”[5] Frank Sorensen wrote.
During his descent from an original altitude of twenty-three thousand feet, his flight of four Spitfires encountered enemy fire; one Spit was hit, caught fire, and crashed into the sea. The three remaining fighters in his formation opened fire on the German transport aircraft. Sorensen saw his flight commander fire cannon shells into one of them and looked back to see it crash in a ball of fire; he recalled seeing the troops previously inside the Junker’s fuselage flailing about in water mixed with burning fuel and wreckage. Sorensen then focused on catching up to another of the transports heading north toward Italy.
“I sent two of them crashing in flames into the drink,” Sorensen continued. “Bags of fun, I thought, until I was reminded by half a dozen Me. 109s that crime does not pay. I wouldn’t have met these 109s, if my commander upstairs had not told us to [climb] for I had in mind to go home on the deck [just above the surface of the water].”[6]
As he climbed, the first Messerschmitt attacked him from behind. Sorensen tried out-turning his opponent three times, expending the remainder of his ammunition as he manoeuvred around the sky. Now there were six more Me. 109s. In ones and twos the enemy fighters engaged him and he dodged fire from a dozen of those attacks. The thirteenth attack found the target as a burst of machine-gun fire hit his engine. Oil sprayed across his windscreen. He was too low to bail out, so he quickly decided to take his chances with a controlled crash landing. He’d forgotten, however, that he regularly left his cockpit safety belts loose (only tightening them for landings), so unable to see ahead clearly and not properly secured into the cockpit, Sorensen prepared for a rough landing on hilly desert terrain.
“I closed my eyes,” he wrote. “I hit. I felt I hit again. I could still think and feel. Then I turned a somersault and with a final crash my flying carrier had come to an abrupt stop—upside down. I thought I was dead . . . I took off my flying helmet and goggles, oxygen mask . . . and had a look through a hole in the ground. I had ploughed right into the ground so my cockpit and myself were completely under the ground. I started digging [my way out when] I heard footsteps and then, ‘Hands up.’”[7]
Sorensen had crashed right next to a German infantry post. At gunpoint he was pulled from beneath the half-buried Spitfire, quickly searched, thrown into a vehicle, and hauled off to Tunis for interrogation. The Americans bombed the city heavily overnight, but the next day he was put aboard a transport, not unlike the four German aircraft his squadron had shot down the previous day. He and a British officer shot down the same day were escorted to Italy by twenty German paratroopers inside the aircraft and a flight of Me. 109s outside the aircraft. They travelled through Rome, then on to Munich, and to Dulag Luft at Frankfurt, all the while refusing to offer any information and paying for their resistance by receiving very little food and plenty of solitary confinement. P/O Sorensen arrived at Sagan on April 20, “on Hitler’s birthday, when every house had a flag out,” he wrote.
As it was for so many families on the home front, word of Frank Sorensen’s survival of the crash outside Tunis, his transport through Italy, his interrogation by German authorities at Dulag Luft, and his eventual deposit at Stalag Luft III took weeks to arrive. In the interim came the Department of National Defence letter to Frank’s mother saying he “is reported missing,”[8] then a long gap with little or no information from either the air force or the government about his fate, and finally—a month after he was shot down—word to Frank’s father from the RCAF Overseas office in London that “your son . . . is a prisoner of war.”[9]
Meanwhile, Frank Sorensen’s letters began wending their way to his grandparents in Hjørring, Denmark, to his father in the UK, and to his mother and siblings now living in Kingston, Ontario. His earliest written thoughts from inside German prison camps were predictably melancholy. His first letter from Dulag Luft, just eight days after his capture, said he was happy, enjoying the good company of other “unfortunate chaps,” that he’d asked for his $175-a-month allowance to be sent home to his mother, and that he wanted his father “to write to my squadron and tell them how happy and proud I was to have been one of them.”[10] By his fifth letter, notably, the dispirited tone appeared to be gone. He seemed no more or less resigned to his POW plight, but there was something more substantial contained in his letter home than just the words of a kriegie waiting for his imprisonment to end.
“I find time goes by very fast,” he wrote in May 1943. “I find plenty to do besides reading and studying chemistry and math. . . . There is plenty of exercise we get when we feel like it—basketball, football, discus, shot put, horizontal bar, horseshoes, and walking ’round the perimeter.”[11]
Just as Roger Bushell had done with escape committee section heads Floody, Harsh, and Fanshawe—discussing high-priority issues affecting the progress of tunnelling—by walking the perimeter with newly arrived officer Frank “Sorry” Sorensen, Bushell acquired valuable new intelligence about Erwin Rommel’s defeats in North Africa during the winter of 1942–43 and plans for the invasion of Sicily that summer. But having access to Sorensen on a regular basis actually gave Bushell something he hadn’t expected; Big X was fluent in German, French, and a few Russian phrases, but he was deficient in Danish. And he recognized if he had any hope of talking his way aboard a vessel sailing the Baltic, simple Danish phrases would be essential. So, pounding the exercise circuit inside the warning wire with P/O Sorensen allowed Bushell to pick up everyday Danish.[*] But Big X wasn’t the only fellow officer Sorensen tutored in Danish. Some time later, Sorensen befriended Flight Lieutenant Eric Foster. As a means of expediting his way out of the camp, Foster feigned insanity. But in the meantime, partly because Sorensen knew that Foster had a Danish wife, he tried to help Eric learn some important phrases. It proved to be a frustrating exercise.
Ultimately, Foster’s performance around the North Compound convinced the Germans he was mentally unstable and he was repatriated in 1944. But Sorensen’s impromptu language instruction, if Big X hadn’t already recognized it, illustrated the growing need for X Organization to make conversational training a higher priority among monolingual kriegies. This, in turn, explained one of Frank Sorensen’s repeated requests of his family in his regular correspondence.
Given that each kriegie was rationed to roughly four cards and three letters per month, and that the space on official stalag-issued writing paper—ten inches by five-and-a-half inches—was limited to between two hundred and three hundred words, Sorensen’s priorities must have appeared odd in his letters home. No doubt, the censors would not have found his references the least bit troublesome. But after the weather, his health, and general POW activity, in both his May 18 and July 12 letters Sorensen reserved space to request certain items from home or via a Red Cross parcel. He asked his mother to send summer season underwear, dehydrated meat, fruit, milk, sugar raisins, oatmeal, maple sugar, chocolate, powdered egg, and onion. Finally, in a quick sentence, he asked a favour of his father.
“Dad, would you send me the thesaurus dictionary, please?”[13] he wrote.
Requesting clothing and food items was commonplace, although emphasizing that the foods be high in energy and dehydrated suggested they might be packed more easily for the trip into the compound, or, conceivably, in the pocket of an escaper, out of it. The special request to his father for the thesaurus, however, had little to do with enhancing Sorensen’s literacy or even filling his leisure time with stimulating reading. Contained within the back pages of every thesaurus since its creator, English physician Peter Mark Roget, had first published the book in 1852 was a section called “Foreign Phrases,” translated with reference to the applicable English categories into French, Latin, and German. A thesaurus or two or more might well make their way to the North Compound library and reading room, but their circulation would be less about offering readers a lexicon of valuable synonyms and antonyms than about offering them a guide to phrases used in everyday conversation outside the wire.
Assembling a library of language textbooks, including thesaurus donations from the Sorensen family library, likely helped escape preparations a great deal. But finding officers who could properly pronounce the phrases and then get English-speaking kriegies to parrot those phrases back with some credibility was something else again. In that regard, the escape committee had received a remarkable gift, appropriately the previous Christmas, when a twenty-eight-year-old RCAF officer arrived at the North Compound. Gordon Kidder, born in St. Catharines, Ontario, grew up a scholar. He learned French and could speak fluent German as a result of his studies at the University of Toronto in the 1930s; in fact, in 1937, Johns Hopkins University in the US invited him to finish his master’s degree in German. Instead, he worked in Ontario’s education department and also translated language for an insurance company.[14] When war broke out, he trained as a navigator, and was on his ninth combat operation aboard a 156 Squadron Wellington when it was hit by flak and crashed into the North Sea. Kidder and the wireless air gunner survived in a dinghy until a German minesweeper captured them the next day. Kidder arrived at Stalag Luft III in December 1942.
Flying Officer Kidder was no doubt surprised to find his POW compound not only had kriegies fluent in as many languages as he, but also library facilities to match. Those book rooms became a hub for language classes that not only weren’t disguised, but were also encouraged. Had he wanted to, Kidder could have continued his linguistic studies inside Stalag Luft III. By the time kriegies had moved into the East Compound (in 1942) and North Compound (in 1943), some of the most ambitious among them had established courses in business, social science, and the humanities. The courses proved so sophisticated that examining boards in the UK and Canada allowed prisoners of war to earn full credits. While he was imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, RCAF officer Ian Tweddell, from Lashburn, Saskatchewan, received engineering textbooks from the University of Saskatchewan so that he could advance his studies.[15] Textbooks from the same university helped another kriegie, who’d only received his senior matriculation before the war, complete a credit in political science.[16] College certificates were even available for proficiency in German, Russian, and French. To support the kriegies’ educational pursuits, the libraries began to assemble sizable inventories. Thanks to Red Cross and personal family parcels, the libraries boasted hundreds of texts and reference books, as well as detective novels, westerns, and biographies.[17] The Centre Compound library had as many as nineteen hundred books, which explains why Frank Sorensen’s emphatic pleas for more specific reading materials passed the censors without arousing any suspicion.
“Yes, the thesaurus dictionary,” he wrote on August 11, 1943. “I sure long to get my fingers on that book. No better opportunity learning German, except time and German newspapers. Am studying it though.”[18]
By the time Sorry Sorensen had started teaching Roger Bushell and other kriegies some elementary Danish expressions, Big X was receiving the first reports of progress underground. Within days of completing the trap entry to the chimney in Hut 123, Wally Floody, Robert Ker-Ramsey, and Johnny Marshall had penetrated the topsoil into the yellow-coloured sand beneath it, and had begun to excavate the vertical shaft of tunnel “Tom” about three feet square and down thirty feet. To reinforce the walls of the shaft, when he had dug down about the height of a man, Floody had “borrowed” the bedposts from unused double-decker bunk beds around the compound, bolted them together, and then inserted “borrowed” bed-boards as walls behind the posts to shore up the shaft against the loose sand around it.
“We didn’t have springs [in our beds.] Each bunk . . . had ten or fifteen boards varying in width from three inches to six inches,” Floody said. “We had fifteen hundred officers. That meant fifteen hundred beds. So if you took one board out of each bunk . . . that’s a lot of wood for shoring.”[19]
With each new five- to six-foot section of the vertical shaft, Floody would need more wood to shore up the walls before continuing his descent. To supply the raw materials, the escape committee had assigned Australian officer John E. “Willy” Williams to lead a crew that constantly cruised the barracks on the lookout for available bedposts, bed-boards, and even nails and screws that could be liberated without being noticed by German guards. When Williams’ scavengers liberated the lumber and fasteners, they passed along their found supplies to expert metalworkers and carpenters who engineered the shaft and tunnel construction.
One such expert had come from the same theatre of war as Frank Sorensen. Initially an apprenticed mechanical engineer from Leeds, England, Bob Nelson had branched into aeronautical engineering before joining the RAF in 1937. A talented pilot, Nelson had instructed in Rhodesia until 1941, when he was posted to the Middle East, piloting Wellington bombers against Rommel’s Afrika Korps. On his twenty-second operational flight inland from Tobruk his aircraft was hit. He ordered his crew to bail out and crash-landed the Wellington 150 miles behind enemy lines. He endured three weeks in the Libyan Desert (surviving by licking dew from rusty gas cans[20] ) and was within three hundred yards of the British lines when he was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III in November 1942. A man of his resourcefulness proved invaluable helping to shore up tunnel “Tom” in the spring and summer of 1943.
By late April, “Tom’s” shaft was down thirty feet, “Dick” was nearly that deep, and “Harry” was down about twenty feet. Once Floody had completed the vertical dig in each of the tunnel shafts, Nelson and John Travis, formerly a Rhodesian mining engineer, fashioned a kind of crossroads where the vertical shaft ended and the horizontal tunnel began. At the foot of the shaft, they constructed chambers into three of the walls—one chamber for equipment storage, a second for temporary
storage of sand from the tunnel before dispersal, and a third (about six feet in length) to accommodate an air pump. Through the fourth wall of the shaft was the entry to the horizontal tunnel out of the North Compound. For “Tom” and “Harry,” the engineers had organized a multi-purpose basement workshop, with fresh air drawn by an air pump from the natural flue of the chimney above, down through the shaft, and along to the tunnel face where the diggers were extending the tunnel.
“The air pump consisted of two canvas kit-bags attached to a central wooden valve box,” Nelson wrote. “A reciprocating movement of a wooden frame caused one bag to be compressed in a delivery stroke while the other expanded in a suction stroke. A suction pipeline made from Klim cans [the Red Cross tins about four inches in diameter that had contained powdered milk] ran up the shaft to a fresh air supply and the delivery pipeline was then laid along the floor of the tunnel as it was dug.”[21]