The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  When the house lights dimmed and the curtain went up, Don Edy said Belgian airman Bobby Laumans made a beautiful Elaine D’Argent in Arsenic and Old Lace, and New Zealand officer Michael Ormond won storms of praise for his “Connie Boswell” act in a revue. Meanwhile, John Dowler made a fitting Frankie in George and Margaret, and Kenneth Mackintosh was stellar as Lady Macbeth. Edy remembered playing a lowly executioner in Saint Joan, but Malcolm Freegard was memorable in the starring role; and, he remembered, Tony Pengelly was a perfect Clara Popkiss in Rookery Nook.

  Flight Lieutenant Tony Pengelly claimed that time was a kriegie’s cheapest commodity. He expended a lot of it at the theatre as stage manager, producer, and cast member. He most enjoyed memorizing his lines, walking through his roles in rehearsal, and, when it came show time, using makeup, prostheses, wigs, costumes, and a higher register voice to transform himself into countless female characters on the theatre stage. He played ingénues, young wives and old, dancers, singers, goddesses, and witches. Like so many of the men taking on those alter egos on the theatre stage, Pengelly was creating a gift for his fellow POWs and a fanciful distraction from the realities of life in a wartime prison.

  “I spent most of the Second World War in drag,”[51] Tony Pengelly later joked.

  Still, Pengelly performed his most vital roles elsewhere at Stalag Luft III. From the moment he arrived in the compound outside Sagan—and under the escape committee’s direction—he began to pool kriegie artists, calligraphers, cartographers, photographers, and printers to generate a whole array of forged papers. Beginning with documents, letters, and fake identification cards, he worked with four officers. He led ten others drafting the maps that escapers would need once they got beyond the Sagan area. They started their forgery—an hour or two every day at first—making sure that every detail was noted and replicated with utmost accuracy. If a forger happened to use the wrong colour for a forged rubber stamp, he could ruin a year’s worth of work. By the time the Dean and Dawson forgery group was operating at capacity, Pengelly had 137 on his staff. Naturally, Pengelly controlled any and all incoming items that might offer information or technology required for the forgery shop. At one point he oversaw the smuggling of an entire typewriter—one piece at a time—into the North Compound.

  This led to another of Pengelly’s high-priority responsibilities: acting as a chief parcel officer. Almost from the very beginning of the war—when Wings Day was first SBO at Dulag Luft in late 1939—British and Canadian kriegies had decided to pool and redistribute the contents of the Red Cross parcels.[52] In this way the older prisoners of war gave up their seniority for food and toiletries in favour of new arrivals, who had just been shot down, interrogated, and shipped to the prison compound with nothing but what they had on their backs. When parcels arrived at Stalag Luft III, they were not immediately distributed for consumption; they were stored in the building that housed the sick quarters in the Vorlager adjacent to the compound.[*] On average, each week a POW received the equivalent of a full parcel—from the US, the UK, or Canada. Generally, the parcel contents consisted of basic ingredients (what the British called “housewife treats”) such as soup, cheese, corned beef, salmon, sardines, raisins, pudding, coffee, tea, butter, jams, biscuits, powdered milk, and occasionally sweets such as chocolate or candy. Since Pengelly was also on the front lines of kriegies taming bribery prospects among the guards, his work, of necessity, required bait to entrap the prospects, or, as he put it, to “oil the machine.” Pengelly had the authority from Roger Bushell himself to confiscate any and all parcel items.

  “Big X had full control over everything that came into the camp,” Pengelly said. “Each [Red Cross] parcel received bore with it a list of contents, and from those lists, Big X commandeered anything he thought the organization could use.”[53]

  Consequently, civilian shirts, sports jackets, plain blankets, and sheets became fair game for X Organization’s tailoring group. Picture books, pen and ink, toilet paper, coloured wrapping paper, and even newspaper clippings helped supply the forgery group. Meanwhile, chocolates and any item considered rare in wartime Germany went right into the hands of those blackmailing the guards. In one instance, Pengelly said, they had one guard so well tamed they asked for his passport for an afternoon; the kriegies promised in turn that the guard would not be caught without it and that it would be back in his hands by nighttime. It was, and the guard got a gift for his trouble.

  “The camp Kommandant’s secretary had a boyfriend, a German guard we had tied up pretty well,” Pengelly remembered. “The secretary would get correspondence files from the Kommandant’s desk, give them to her boyfriend, who would give them to us. Big X would read them and then send them back along the same route.”[54]

  That autumn, fighter pilot Don Edy signed up for a couple of productions at the North Compound theatre—a small part in the operetta Messalina and some parallel bar gymnastics in a show called Six to the Bar. He had been a POW for just under two years. That November, bomb-aimer George Sweanor acknowledged his twenty-fourth birthday. Back in June, he’d been buoyed by a letter from Joan telling him she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl she named Barbara. More than once Sweanor found himself seated on a stump in the compound, glaring at the barbed wire and vowing he would survive and one day return home to his wife and daughter. He had been a prisoner of war for eight months. Meanwhile, Roger Bushell also got involved in the kriegie theatre productions. Partly to draw the Germans’ attention away from his escape committee activities, and no doubt to seek psychological escape from the summer setbacks of 1943, that fall Big X appeared in a production of George and Margaret. At age thirty-three and more than three years a captive of the German stalag system, Bushell agreed to prepare the part of Professor Higgins for an upcoming production of Pygmalion. He would rehearse periodically through the coming winter in anticipation of an opening night scheduled for March 24, 1944, a night during which he would ultimately be otherwise engaged.

  Like so much else at Stalag Luft III, the theatre, while appearing to offer harmless and distracting entertainment to young POWs awaiting the war’s outcome, became a disguise for greater pursuits.

  * * *

  * George Sweanor cited statistics from his own research indicating that the life expectancy for a Bomber Command aircrew was five operations, and that of those shot down only 17 per cent survived.

  * In interviews and analysis compiled in 1946 by an RAF War Crimes Interrogation Unit, and under the auspices of the Judge Advocate General at the War Office in London, England, authors of the report ask: “Was it a matter of high policy that, in the view of the reprisal measures already planned and in operation in the form of the ‘Stufe III’ order and the ‘[Aktion] Kugel’ order, at least one major camp break-out was not to be discouraged?”

  * According to George Sweanor, the Canadian government took thirty-five dollars a month (deducted from his Canadian pay accumulating in Canada) and transferred the funds to the Germans so that Canadian POWs could rent theatrical costumes and musical instruments; similarly, in Canada, German POWs used their allotment to order by mail from the Eaton’s catalogue.

  * While kriegies generally endorsed Wings Day’s edict of pooling the Red Cross parcel foods, Canadian F/L Ted Kipp and RAF F/L Ken Toft (fellow-POWs at Warburg) founded Foodacco, an inside-the-wire emporium, which used cigarettes as the primary currency to purchase additional food or delicacies they accumulated. Controversy emerged over whether Foodacco should be free enterprise or non-profit; there was a referendum, but it was overruled by SBO Day, who nationalized the Kipp-Toft free enterprise operation to run as a co-op.

  7

  THE PLAY’S THE THING

  * * *

  IT SEEMED a world away and it was, but that fall of 1943 the Harlem Globetrotters maintained their winning ways— 2,163 victories versus 162 defeats in fifteen seasons. The war was, however, having an impact on the calibre of all professional sports back in North America. At the end of the 1942–43 NHL s
eason, Boston’s entire Kraut line of Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart enlisted in the forces, which prompted Bruins coach Art Ross to say, “the best forward line today couldn’t make the Bruins’ third line a couple of years ago.”[1] And that fall the New York Yankees won the fortieth World Series, four-games-to-one over St. Louis. The Cardinals committed ten errors in the series. Ironically, pro baseball’s commissioner promised the game would go on as long as there were at least eighteen men left to play.[2]

  For perhaps that one season, members of the Canadian All-Star Baseball Team, playing games inside the wire at Stalag Luft III, could have thumped the ’43 champion Yankees. They had that much talent in their lineup. With the Canadians and Americans housed in separate compounds (since September 1943), contact between the two nationalities of air force officers was limited. That changed, however, when the Americans asked the camp Kommandant if they could meet their Canadian rivals in a challenge for softball supremacy.

  “The Americans always figured they were better ballplayers than the Canadians,” Flying Officer Art Hawtin said. “They were just next to us in the [South] Compound and they got permission to bring their team over.”[3]

  While baseball was a sport Art Hawtin had enjoyed in the 1930s (he had a Babe Ruth baseball card in his collection), it would not have been his first choice. The fifth of six children born on a farm near Kinmount, Ontario, Art did his fair share of chores, but his favourite physical activity was pole-vaulting; in fact, he stayed in Beaverton High School an extra year as a junior athlete to accumulate more victories and won ten track events in 1938. Along with his blue ribbons, Art gained a valuable skill landing repeatedly in all those high school pole-vaulting pits. On the night of May 13, 1943, as a navigator on a 405 Squadron bombing mission to Germany, Hawtin’s Halifax was shot down; he bailed out of the crippled aircraft and landed in the Dutch countryside.

  “Landing with a parachute or pole-vaulting over a bar ten or twelve feet high is just about the same,” Hawtin said. “I came down in a farmer’s field near Dedemsvaart, Holland. . . . I was completely relaxed and I landed safely.”[4]

  With the likelihood that any Dutch family hiding an evader would be shot, Hawtin agreed to turn himself in. A week later he came walking through the main gate at Stalag Luft III and was assigned to the same room as John Colwell, the dedicated diarist and tin-basher originally from Vancouver Island. Hawtin and Colwell had both served as navigators with 405 Squadron stationed in Yorkshire, so Colwell was able to vouch for his friend in front of the compound SBO. Hawtin’s kriegie card identified him as a student. And when he was asked about participating in escape committee activities, he readily volunteered to work as a penguin. But on the day the Americans decided to show the Canadians the finer points of their softball prowess, Art Hawtin turned out to be a pretty agile, hard-hitting left fielder on the Canadian All-Star Baseball Team roster.

  Before F/O Hawtin arrived on the scene, baseball had already become an all-consuming pastime at most of the prison camps where North American POWs were incarcerated. Originally, the prisoners of war played sandlot baseball. The game didn’t require a lot of equipment, so the kriegies improvised by using bedposts as bats and baseballs fabricated from old shoes or scraps of leather wrapped together with the rubber seals from empty coffee cans. Eventually, the YMCA back home shipped bats, balls, and some gloves into the camps so that the games at least looked like legitimate softball competitions. Initially, barracks hut played against barracks hut, senior officers versus junior officers, married men against bachelors.[5] The games took on greater significance when the editors of the Gefangenen Gazette camp newspaper began publishing box scores and commentary. Eventually, across the six compounds of Stalag Luft III, there were as many as two hundred teams playing on the improvised baseball diamonds of the various sports grounds.

  “The Americans made arrangements to play us twice,” Hawtin said. “But we had Bill Paton pitching for us. He’d pitched senior ball for the Beaches League in Toronto. They had a pretty good pitcher too . . . but Paton [struck] out sixteen batters.”[6]

  About the fifth or sixth inning of that first game, umpire Larry Wray went out to the mound to have a confab with Paton. Wray was Senior British Officer and also a Canadian, but he wanted the game to be more competitive. The Americans hadn’t hit the ball out of the infield to that point.

  “Please let them hit, Bill,”[7] Wray pleaded.

  “One ball was hit into the outfield in that game,” Hawtin said, adding that the most strenuous part of the game for him was walking to and from the outfield. “The first game we didn’t get many runs, but we got enough to win. The second game wasn’t even close. I think we won fourteen to one.”[8]

  Not ones to miss out on such sporting spectacles, the German guards gathered along the baselines to witness the games too. Art Hawtin wasn’t sure for whom the Germans cheered—the Americans or the Canadians—but Colonel von Lindeiner was frequently seen beating his cane on his leather boots enthusiastically.[9] While he was quite content to leave the rules on the diamond up to Allied air force officers, the colonel nevertheless kept tight control on other aspects of kriegie baseball, no matter who was winning or losing. Art Hawtin noted in his diary some of the rules the Kommandant wanted obeyed rigidly in and around the barracks, but especially near the warning wire.

  “Care must be taken that no window panes are broken,”[10] Hawtin quoted from one rule. “Panes broken through carelessness will not be replaced.”

  “Opportunity will be given twice weekly under the supervision of an interpreter to collect small balls from between the warning wire and the fence,” stated another rule. “POWs must furnish a man to collect balls. . . . He must wear some mark which will be easily seen and readily distinguishable at a distance by the guards.”

  As awkward and silly as the wording of the ball-reclamation rule seemed, its application occasionally proved deadly. Phil Marchildon, from Penetanguishene, Ontario, pitched seventeen winning games for the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1942 major league baseball season before enlisting in the RCAF; a pilot officer and tail gunner aboard a Halifax bomber, he was shot down in 1944. During a kriegie baseball game he witnessed, a ball bounced over the warning wire. A Canadian asked permission from a guard to retrieve the ball; Marchildon wrote that the guard waved the POW to get the ball, but “when the Canadian [was] no more than a foot over the fence [the guard] shot him dead.”[11]

  And there were flying objects other than fly balls that could get kriegies into trouble near the warning wire. Canadian Frank Sorensen had been a regular “circuit basher” when he first got to Stalag Luft III, walking along the safe side of the warning wire with Roger Bushell, teaching him Danish. But later, when his Danish relatives sent him a glider kit, he test flew the model with its seven-foot wingspan and worried more about its landing than its flight.

  “I’m afraid to tow it too high, as it might hit a window or fly over the wire,”[12] he reported in one of his letters home. In fact, on its maiden flight from the appell grounds, the glider caught a gust of wind and flew over the fence. Fortunately, the guard outside the wire wasn’t as volatile as some, and tossed it back into the compound.

  Meanwhile, letters posted the other way—from his Danish family connections—helped keep Frank Sorensen and fellow kriegies up-to-date on wartime events closer to the front lines. He learned, for example, about the so-called “clearing murders,” in which civilians such as Danish author Kaj Munk[13] were executed in retaliation for Danish resistance murders of German soldiers. BBC broadcasts received on the kriegies’ hidden wireless were also a lifeline to the Allies’ progress in 1943. The balance of the war was tipping in their favour. They learned about Montgomery’s pursuit of Rommel at El Alamein in January, the eventual victory of Soviet forces over the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad in February, the successful Bomber Command attacks on Ruhr River dams in May, and the capitulation of the Italian army to joint Canadian-British-American forces in Sicily that summer
.

  Not surprisingly, there was more at stake on the kriegie baseball diamonds than just the Canadian All-Stars beating the Americans at their favourite pastime. The escape committee took full advantage of the movement of people and sports gear around the compound to camouflage its activities. Some camera and radio receiver parts were small enough to be smuggled inside baseballs, and if a bat were hollowed out, it too could help X Organization deliver contraband between compounds. In addition, prior to the discovery of tunnel “Tom” in Hut 123, in September 1943, American paratrooper Jerry Sage’s scheme of mingling penguins and fans helped disperse tons of sand along the sidelines of kriegie football scrimmages, soccer matches, track meets, and baseball games. But with the first snows and nighttime temperatures below freezing in November and December, only the Canadians’ maintained outdoor activities, either circuit bashing or playing shinny hockey on the sports grounds. However, neither sand dispersal in the snow, nor above-ground escape seemed practical or inviting during that time of year.

  Across from baseball player Art Hawtin in Room 14 of Hut 120

  lived the man Hawtin called “the Tin Man.”[14] In his diary, F/O John Colwell continued to keep a record of POW activities. More important, he kept fabricating tools and, with those tools, a steady flow of practical utensils—some overt and others covert—made of tin, wood, wire, cloth, glass, and any other raw materials he could scavenge. Colwell had arrived April 12, 1943, but within a few months he had tailored ten pairs of shorts, an airman’s tunic, socks, and a sleeping bag. With the woodworking and tinsmith tools he’d fabricated from scratch, he then became a virtual assembly line, manufacturing useful items for any kriegies in need. Using pieces of tin and steel, and mislaid screws and nails, he built appliances such as coffee percolators, kettles, cooking pots, pie plates, baking pans, toast racks, a fireless cooker, an ice cream freezer, picture frames, a Klim clock, and a metal brace for Group Captain Massey’s injured leg. Then, from any Klim tins left over, he secretly began building a suitcase. It took eighty-one tins, but by November the bag was finished. Somehow, he sensed he’d be going somewhere.