As distant as the 2,000 air officers inside the North Compound at Stalag Luft III felt from their original wartime British air stations thousands of kilometres to the west, on the eve of their historic breakout, the POWs were remarkably close to the U.K. by air waves… thanks to Canadian Richard Bartlett.

Born and raised on a dairy farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, Bartlett raised silver foxes, the assets of which provided him with passage to England and entry to the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm by 1938. Posted to 803 Squadron and flying Skua dive-bombers in the spring of 1940, S/L Bartlett flew in the futile defence of Norway against the Nazi invasion. That June he was shot down and was shipped off to POW camps in northern Germany and Poland. He got involved in clandestine work right away.

“Through friendly relations with Polish labourers at (Stalag Luft I), we bribed one of the Poles to sneak the components for a small radio receiver into the camp.”

And the resulting wireless set allowed the POWs to hear BBC broadcasts. Then, to ensure that the crystal set was never discovered by German guards, Bartlett regularly disassembled the crystal set and placed its parts inside a medicine ball. The ball, a bit larger than a basketball and usually weighted with sand, was used by prisoners of war for calisthenics and other sporting pursuits.

“That way, the radio-equipped medicine ball subsequently travelled from camp to camp (becoming) a continuous source of war news and intelligence,” Bartlett pointed out. In this fashion, by the time the Commonwealth aircrew men had arrived at Stalag Luft III and throughout their stay there, kriegie Richard Bartlett served the escape committee as the custodian of the canary.

For the better part of three months, X Organization diggers had worked on their bellies, their sides, or their backs excavating the horizontal section of Tunnel “Harry” roughly 22 inches tall and 22 inches wide. But by March 12, 1944, the dig had returned to the vertical. Gingerly, just as Wally Floody had done downward in April 1943, they crafted an upward shaft that would give the escapers an exit from “Harry” into the woods beyond the wire.

At the upper end of their vertical shaft, Hank Birkland and the other diggers built a final solid box frame around four bedposts and a wooden ceiling. It was positioned right below some pine tree roots, to remain in place until the night chosen for the breakout.

They had tunnelled for eleven months – from April 11, 1943, to nearly the end of the second week of March 1944. They had removed and dispersed several hundred tons of sand from three major tunnels. Scrounging from every corner of the North Compound, kriegies had incorporated more than 4,000 bed-boards, 90 double bunk beds, 1,212 bed bolsters, 1,370 battens, 1,699 blankets, 161 pillow cases, 635 mattresses, 192 bed covers, 3,424 towels, 76 benches, 52 twenty-man tables, 10 single tables, 34 chairs, 30 shovels, 246 water cans, 1,219 knives, 582 forks, 478 spoons, 1,000 feet of electric wire, 600 feet of rope, and 69 lamps into “Tom,” “Dick,” and mostly “Harry.”

According to the measured ball of string the diggers unraveled in the tunnel, “Harry” covered 336 feet (nearly 400 feet including the two vertical shafts). The escape committee was just six inches away from the sod and roots of the forest floor, well outside the wire – six inches to freedom.

With two of the principal Great Escape diggers – Wally Floody and John Weir – out of the mix, and with a big push on to complete “Harry” by late March 1944, the bulk of the work fell to stalwart tunnellers, such as Hank Birkland.

At age 27, the Canadian carpenter’s son, former farmer, one-time salesman, itinerant miner and lacrosse player, had seen his share of hard labour and unexpected responsibility. During the Depression, when the family farm in Western Canada fell on tough times, Birkland worked to keep the enterprize afloat, while keeping his studies up at high school. But when the war broke out, he was quick to enlist – trained as a fighter pilot in 1940-41, on ops with 72 Squadron through the fall of 1941, and shot down Nov. 7.

By the time their German captors had installed them at Stalag Luft III, Floody had teamed up Birkland and Weir as co-tunnellers. Floody learned that when “Scruffy” Weir dug in “Harry” he tended to veer to the left and when “Big Train” Birkland dug, he veered to the right. So Floody made sure the two worked on back-to-back shifts to compensate.

According to Canadian historian Jonathan Vance (A Gallant Company), Birkland wrote family in the last days before the breakout: “I got a letter last month to which I will not be able to reply,” Birkland wrote. “I am not in a position to carry on a letter-for-letter correspondence for long.”

Just nine days after the tunnellers’ nemesis, Karl Griese (Rubberneck), went on leave – on Feb. 29, 1944 – Tunnel “Harry” had been extended the 100 feet that – based on underground measurements – the escape committee figured put its main escape route beyond the wire, beyond the road and well into the pine forest. Thus, on March 10, 1944 the diggers carved out what would be the base of the vertical shaft soon to be dug to the surface about 30 feet above them.

But the configuration of the digging team had changed dramatically since it first broke through the chimney foundation in Hut 104 almost a year before. Wally Floody, the tunnel king was gone – purged to Belaria POW camp on Feb. 29.

And John Weir, the digger from Toronto, was gone – off to a German hospital near Frankfurt-am-Main where he underwent skin-graft surgery to reconstruct his eyelids (burned off when his Spitfire was hit by enemy fire in November 1941).

Since December 1941, Flying Officer John Weir had been writing regularly to his fiancée Frances McCormack in Toronto. Naturally, Fran had become accustomed to his words of love and longing to be with her. But she also began to understand he wasn’t sitting idly by waiting for the war to end. He had told her of his German language lessons, sent her pictures of himself and his Canadian fellow kriegies. But John Weir had also sent Fran a coded request.

“The pajamas you sent in the July parcel just came in time,” he had written in 1942. “My others were sort of on their bum ends.”

And when he kept asking for more pairs of silk pajamas, and she obliged, she sensed her fiancé was up to something. Indeed, in place of street clothes or digging naked (both of which could reveal yellow stains or scratches sustained by tunnelling activity), Weir’s silk pajamas served as easily disposable, very resistant to sand stains, digging outfits for the tunnellers. And Weir’s fiancée – though not sure how – was a willing and able accomplice to her husband’s escape activity at Stalag Luft III.

Yesterday afternoon, in the town of Port Carling, Ontario, members of the Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 529, gathered and exchanged stories relating to the Second World War and the Great Escape. Among them, Philip Gunyon remembered, at age 7 in September 1939, that he and his mother had survived the U-Boat torpedo attack against the S.S. Athenia the first British ship sunk by Nazi Germany in the war. And Jack Patterson, a veteran of the famed Algonquin Regiment from Central Ontario, recalled being captured during the Falaise campaign in July 1944, and ending up at Stalag VII-A near Munich.

Gord Kidder recalled his namesake, Gordon Kidder, the German scholar at Stalag Luft III and the roles he played familiarizing fellow kriegies with the idiosyncrasies of the German language.

Among his accomplices in the instruction was fellow-kriegie Frank Sorensen. Following his capture during the 1943 North African campaign, in letters home, P/O Sorensen wrote about his melancholy, but not with purpose.

“Although we are rationed to four cards and three letters, I think it extremely difficult to fill in a letter to you,” Sorensen wrote in May 1943. “The last letter I wrote to you from North Africa was a very short one… Dad, would you send me the Thesaurus, please?” And just two months later he again wrote, “Would like Thesaurus sent out.”

Examination of an average thesaurus, first published by English physician Peter Mark Roget in 1852, reveals that each dictionary of synonyms contains a section called “Foreign Phrases,” which translated common expressions of the street in such languages as French and German.

And since German Luftwaffe guards at the North Compound encouraged their imprisoned enemy officers to spend their leisure time listening to music, watching theatre or reading in the library, the arrival of numerous volumes of Roget’s Thesaurus among the POWs’ packages from home seemed completely innocent.

In the hands of scholar Gordon Kidder, his nephew Gord Kidder reinforced yesterday, the thesaurus wasn’t so much a celebration of German culture, but tangible preparation. When the designated escapers of the planned breakout reached railways stations, border crossings or seaports, it was hoped they could rely on Kidder’s “Foreign Phrases” classes to help get them through.

While John Sturgis, producer-director of the movie “The Great Escape” and his script writers generally played fast and loose with the history of the event, they did attempt to include vital elements of the escape committee business leading up to the breakout on March 24/25, 1944.

For example, they fabricated a character named Dai Nimmo (played by Tom Adams) who organized “diversions” within the movie plot.

Among the actual diversionary geniuses inside the North Compound, however, 25-year-old RCAF navigator George McGill (from Toronto,) helped to orchestrate boxing matches and other sport events to distract German guards and allow the penguins to disperse sand among the spectators. And 29-year-old Gordon Kidder RCAF navigator (from St. Catharines, Ontario), taught conversational German to the soon-to-be-escapers.

By rights that winter of 1944, F/O Kidder should have been attending Johns Hopkins University in the United States (the institution had invited him there in 1937 to finish his master’s degree in German). Instead, in the late 1930s, Kidder joined the air force, trained as a navigator, flew nine operations in the fall of 1942, was shot down and was processed to Stalag Luft III in December.

By all accounts a reserved POW, Kidder in the final weeks of X Organization planning is paired with Tom Kirby-Brown as an escape partner; they would have documents and a story worked out that portrayed them as Spanish labourers in transit. While he and Kirby-Brown worked out their patter for the escape, inside the North Compound Kidder conducted “culture appreciation sessions” in the theatre library.

To German captors the sessions feigned compliance to imprisonment; to Kidder’s audience they more likely helped escapers (with some linguistic ability) improve the fluency of their conversational German once outside the wire.

At the end of the first week of March 1944, the inner circle of X Organization was buoyed by progress reports from diggers up Tunnel “Harry.” Based on underground measurements, the tunnel was over 300 feet long, putting the face of the excavation nearly beyond the North Compound wire.

And though department heads could not share specifics of “Harry’s” progress, any of the kriegies who saw the continuous parade of penguins hauling sand to the theatre late at night, knew the escape project was making critical headway.

For some who had been inside German POW camps for years, completing the job couldn’t come soon enough. Hurricane pilot Don Edy considered himself in that category. In February of 1942 – while strafing a truck convoy near Msus, Libya – he took return fire, crash-landed and was captured. First imprisoned in Tripoli, then in Sicily, then Stalag VII-A at Mossburg, Oflag V-A at Weinsberg and finally Stalag Luft III, Edy articulated what perhaps many inside the wire could not.

“I doubt if there is a lonelier feeling in the world than when taken prisoner,” Edy wrote in November 1943. “Everything seems completely hopeless and the thought of being behind barbed wire for God knows how long, maybe years, brings on an immediate depression.”

Most kriegies recognized in themselves and fellow POWs the pent-up frustration of extended imprisonment in the German Straflager system. When life boiled down to twice-a-day roll calls, scrounging for food, and shivering inside poorly insulated barracks, men saw comrades become “barbed-wire happy,” obsessed with getting out.

And so, Don Edy fought off his demons by taking on the role of permanent cook in Room 11 of Hut 123 – preparing meals, working out rations from Red Cross packages, and building kitchen utensils, including a coffee percolator that lasted a year! He also joined numerous casts in stage productions at the theatre. Edy considered his focus on kriegie work a life saver.

Among the unique elements of X Organization and its various departments – tunnel construction, sand dispersal, security, intelligence, diversion and manufacturing – was its ability to function in complete secrecy inside Stalag Luft III.

POWs recorded their individual roles as those of a digger, a penguin, a stooge or a forger without really having much knowledge of any other department. The system operated on a “need to know basis,” or with the understanding that the entire operation was safer if all any one man knew was his own job and nothing more.

John Colwell, the tin-basher who worked initially fabricating kitchen utensils for his barracks mates and digging tools for the tunnellers, had no concept of where the sand was going, until the day he joined a friendly game of horseshoes in the spring of 1943.

“Suddenly, these two Dutch POWs came along and sort of scuffed around in the middle of our game,” Colwell said. “I remember thinking it wasn’t very considerate of them. And then I saw the sand trickling out of their pant legs and I realized what was going on.”

Meanwhile, Albert Wallace, a penguin carrying sand to the trapdoor in row 13 at the North Compound theatre in the winter of 1944, said he initially knew nothing about the escape plan. Originally assigned to Hut 101 when he arrived at Stalag Luft III in 1943, Wallace was shortly afterward transferred to Hut 104, in Room 23, next to the most important stove in the compound.

“I had no idea it was the tunnel room,” he said. “I didn’t know for weeks that goddamn tunnel was seven feet from my bunk bed (under that stove).”

In addition to his penguin duties, Wallace had one additional task – it was his and his alone – as each morning after roll call he dashed to the compound dump in search of one vital commodity – solder, enough solder to help patch together the Klim cans that formed the air-ventilation shaft under the trolley tracks in Tunnel “Harry” … a need to know basis.

Peacetime commercial artist Robert Buckham had little choice what function he’d fulfill with X Organization. Shot down by a night fighter in April 1943, F/L Buckham at Stalag Luft III was immediately recruited into the forgery section (named after the British travel agency Dean & Dawson) reproducing documents for the coming breakout. He credited the quality of his forgeries to one of his mentors, Canadian artist Arthur Lismer (of The Group of Seven).

“I said I was going to major in art (at Stalag Luft III,)” Buckham said. “And I did.”

The team of Dean & Dawson forgers replicated an entire inventory of documents the escapers would need to travel inconspicuously across Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the forgeries were grey identity cards (Kennkarte) or better, visas (Sichtvermerk), plus a pass (Ausweise), and likely a brown card (Dienstausweise) legally allowing the holder to be on Wehrmacht property.

In addition, if a POW were disguised as a foreign worker, he would require Polizeitliche Bescheinigung, a police permit authorizing him to be in a specific area; Urlaubsscheine, a yellow paper entitling the holder to be on leave to get there; or, Rückkehrscheine, a pink-coloured form that signified a worker was legally en route to his home country.

Buckham worked in a team of more than 100 artists and calligraphers under Tim Walenn and Tony Pengelly delivering credible reproductions of documents they hoped would convince authorities outside the POW camp their holders were legitimate travellers.

Buckham worked in a team of more than 100 artists and calligraphers under Tim Walenn and Tony Pengelly delivering credible reproductions of documents they hoped would convince authorities outside the POW camp their holders were legitimate travellers.

In early March, with excavation in Tunnel “Harry” at full throttle, a number of factors played into and out of the escape committee’s hands. With fewer daylight hours, Group Captain H.M. Massey convinced the camp Kommandant to ease the outdoor nighttime curfew; kriegies were allowed to walk between barracks huts until 10 p.m. (which simply meant more penguins could transport more sand later each night to the theatre disposal site).

Still, the sand-dispersal crew had to ensure spillage in the snow during the night didn’t reveal a telltale trail the next day. There were also moonlit nights during which production ceased.

RCAF navigator George Sweanor served as a security stooge throughout this nerve-racking period. Born and trained in Canada, Sweanor had arrived in the U.K. halfway through 1942 and was posted to Bomber Command with RCAF 419 Squadron.

He met Joan Saunders. They fell in love and were married Jan. 6, 1943. Just over two months later, his Halifax bomber was shot down and he was processed to Stalag Luft III. He soon joined X Organization’s growing security staff on nighttime duty.

“Penguins could now carry full bags of sand concealed by darkness,” Sweanor wrote, “(but) darkness also concealed (anti-tunnelling) ferrets, so we stooges had to be even more alert. At the gate, I had to watch for the slightest sign that guards were about to rush in for a surprise search.

“We (had) a 20-second drill for sealing ‘Harry’ with diggers still down there; this would suffice for casual inspections. But for appells we had a lengthier drill with numerous ruses for delaying the Germans so we could empty the tunnel before sealing it.”

During one of Rubberneck’s late February snap security checks, Sweanor found himself carrying a metal file and escape map. Out on the appell grounds and standing in snow, Sweanor chanced dumping the incriminating evidence into the snow to be retrieved later. When Rubberneck and fellow ferrets descended on Hut 110, about that time, they discovered a secret wall panel. “Rubberneck eagerly snatched a piece of paper it held,” Sweanor said. “It read, ‘Sorry, Rubberneck, you are too late.’”