During several years of captivity within the German prisoner-of-war system in the Second World War, an invitation to a kriegie (Kreigsgefanganen) to join sports – cricket, baseball or soccer – inside the Stalag compounds was actually an invitation to join the escape committee. But even imprisonment inside Stalag Luft III – 70 years ago, in February 1944 – couldn’t keep the Canadians (and like-minded Commonwealth air officers) away from their ice hockey.
The first skates used inside the prison compound were entirely homemade. Kriegies took angle irons from benches and screwed the steel to the bottoms of their boots. True to his reputation as a scrounger, Canadian officer Barry Davidson helped make the POW hockey experience closer to the real thing.
“I wrote the mayor of Calgary (Canada,)” he said. “They got skates and hockey equipment and sent them to the camp. We flooded our rinks with buckets and they were regular sized rinks, so it was lots of work.”
Hockey sticks were hard to come by and to maintain. And depending on the callibre of the players and the intensity of the play, keeping the hockey sticks in one piece was a challenge. To protect players from injury, some groups came up with special rules, such as only allowing body checks or shot blocks within a certain distance of the net.
However, there were cases of hockey games, indeed of an entire season at Stalag Luft III, coming to an end when the supply of sticks simply ran out.