If the 1963 movie portrayal of The Great Escape succeeds in delivering the drama and tension leading up to the mass breakout planned for late March in 1944, it utterly fails to capture the reality of winter in western Poland.

On March 1, as F/O John Colwell recorded in his diary, six inches of snow fell. Temperatures generally dipped below freezing pre-Christmas and stayed there until April. Even kriegies used to cold winters in Canada, found conditions at the North Compound of Stalag Luft III tough to endure.

Flying Officer Don McKim’s Halifax bomber was shot down over Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in December 1942, in a frigid 185-mile-per-hour wind. Still, on Christmas Eve, having to sleep in the bottom tier of a bunk bed – closest to the floor – McKim said he was never so cold in all his life.

“The mattress was made of bags of wood chips,” he said, “so, the cold would work its way through (and) I put all the clothes I had on. My greatcoat. My mittens. Everything trying to stay warm.” McKim was claustrophobic, so he worked as a stooge, yes, outside in the winter air passing X Organization communiqués.

Equally affected by freezing temperatures, Pilot Officer Frank Sorensen (shot down over North Africa in 1943) wrote of the environment and its impact on him often during his first winter at Stalag Luft III. On Feb. 25, 1944, he wrote to his father, “It’s been very cold here lately (and) as I am very restless, unable to keep my blankets on me at night, I sewed them into a sleeping bag.”

And a few weeks later, he wrote about winter dragging on, “leaving the ground wet and miserable and forcing most everyone to remain indoors. Indoor life in a kriegie camp does not make time go any faster.”

Sorensen contributed in many ways to the escape effort, but among the most valuable required him to be outside. Big X (Roger Bushell) was fluent in German, French, and some Russian phrases, but he was deficient in Danish. Since Sorensen had been born in Denmark, through the fall and winter of 1943-44, the two walked along the circuit (just inside the warning wire where they couldn’t be heard by guards or any other listening devices) as P/O Sorensen taught Big X common Danish phrases that Bushell could use if he escaped and got aboard a vessel sailing from Germany toward Scandinavia.

The purge and transfer of 19 Commonwealth air officers away from Stalag Luft III to Belaria, the satellite prison camp, on Feb. 29, 1944, put several key escape committee department heads – Floody, Fanshawe, Brown and Harsh – out of action.

Ironically, the anti-tunnelling guards did not purge Roger Bushell, apparently on the assumption that Big X had disconnected himself from all escape attempts. Indeed, Bushell made certain he was spotted in innocuous pursuits – attending language classes and rehearsing for an upcoming production of “Pygmalion” at the North Compound theatre. In fact, he extolled fellow kriegies to redouble their escape efforts.

With Wally Floody, the original tunnel king, out of the picture, digger Robert Ker-Ramsey took the lead underground in Tunnel “Harry.” Frustrated by the loss of their compatriots, the tunnellers ramped up their workload.

The crew underground doubled with two diggers at the face of the tunnel and two in each of the two halfway houses – Piccadilly and Leicester Square – moving the sand out even faster. Carpenter Jim McCague had assistance preparing timber for shoring up the tunnel walls and Gordie King’s shift on the bellows pumping air through the ventilation system went to 8 hours.

Flying Officer John Colwell (below left), a peacetime chicken farmer from Vancouver Island, kept a daily and detailed diary of the kriegies’ experience through this period. “March 1. Six inches of fresh snow. They purged POWs to Belaria on morning appell. March 3. Made a pair of wooden chuppils (sandals). March 4. Made baking pan. Saw a daylight raid by USAAF.”

If his diary references seemed clipped, it’s because F/O Colwell, a.k.a. “The Tin Man,” spent most of these early March days and evenings in his other job, receiving sand through the theatre seat trapdoor and disposing of it beneath the raked floor boards of the North Compound theatre. With the volume of excavated sand multiplying exponentially, Colwell’s crew increased in number tamping the sand into every nook and cranny of the theatre basement. They were “disappearing” upwards of a ton of sand every few days.

In the last days of February, when Tunnel “Harry” was 100 feet short of its completed run underground beyond the wire, the escape committee at Stalag Luft III learned valuable information. One of X Organization’s nemeses, anti-tunnelling guard Unteroffizier Karl Griese, was about to go on leave.

In the weeks before his rest time away from the compound, Griese (whom the POWs nicknamed “Rubberneck,”) had been snooping more suspiciously than usual around the North Compound barracks. He had periodically ordered impromptu appells, when POWs had to line up across the sports grounds beyond the theatre for roll calls (presumably to catch any kriegies who might be absent and in a tunnel).

In the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Rubberneck and the POWs, when the spot searches came, the kriegies made sure they dawdled en route to the assembly area, to allow tunnel crews enough time to be pulled from “Harry” and cleaned up before appell.

During this same period – as the end of February approached – Rubberneck sprang a sudden search in Hut 104 (where the entrance to “Harry” was located,) then one in Hut 110. Then, he assembled Wally Floody, George Harsh, Wings Day and Roger Bushell and strip-searched them.

Then on Feb. 29, 1944 (70 years ago today), Rubberneck delivered a nearly fatal blow to the escape committee before taking his leave. That day, during morning appell, the pesky ferret appeared with 30 additional guards. They called out the names of 19 kriegies, including Floody, Harsh, Peter Fanshawe, Kingsley Brown, MacKinnon “Mac Jarrell, Gordon “Nic Nicholl, Robert Stanford Tuck, Jim Tyrie and Gwyn Martin. The 19 were searched for two hours and then marched under guard through the main gate (no time to retrieve any belongings) and down the road to a satellite POW camp at Belaria for good.

“They just wanted to get rid of us,” Floody said. “But they had a pretty good shot at it, because they got the man in charge of sand dispersal (Fanshawe), the man in charge of security (Harsh), an intelligence specialist (Brown) and myself, a tunnel digger.”

By the last week of February, Flight Lieutenant Tony Pengelly had been a POW in the German military prison system for three and a half years. Shot down in November 1940 and imprisoned first at Stalag Luft I (at Barth, Germany) and then transferred to Stalag Luft III (near Sagan, Poland) in 1942, Pengelly had graduated from escape committee member-at-large to leading a forgery section. But since he also handled the distribution of Red Cross parcels, Pengelly took on the added duty of using the premium items in the parcels to bribe German guards.

First step, Pengelly said, involved chatting up the guards, comparing family snapshots and exchanging pleasantries. When the Canadian pilot knew his prey might soon be going on leave, he might offer the guard some coffee (something most Germans hadn’t enjoyed since 1936). To further bait the hook, Pengelly might offer some chocolate for the guard’s children. Often that gift drew the offer of a favour from the guard.

“Can I bring you anything from outside?” the guard might ask.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Pengelly would say. “I’d like a hundred toothpicks.”

Something that inconsequential would be sufficient the first time, but it was oil for the machine With each trip the guard made, Pengelly might repeat the exchange until it got to be habitual. And having broken the rules once, the “tame” guard wouldn’t likely refuse Pengelly’s requests, fearing the POWs might expose him. Coffee and chocolate yielded a camera, developing and printing equipment, and even the short-term loan of passes and visas.

“It was the psychology of binding a man with a thread,” Pengelly said. “They never foresaw where it led … and we paid them in wartime Europe’s vest currency – food commandeered from our Red Cross parcels.”

From its first day of operation in 1942, Stalag Luft III abided by the Geneva Conventions (dating back to 1864) recognizing that air officers in the prison camp did not have to work as force labourers.

And even as late as February 1944, South Compound (imprisoning mostly American air officers) and the North Compound (holding mostly Commonwealth air officers) also received and distributed Red Cross parcels. From their introduction to the POW compounds, the contents of the parcels were pooled so that each officer got roughly an equal ration of parcel foods.

On average, each week, a POW air officer received the equivalent of a full parcel from the U.S., Canada or the U.K. Generally, the parcel contents consisted of basic ingredients (sometimes referred to as “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.

Tony Pengelly, a pilot officer from Weston, Ont., fulfilled a number of responsibilities inside the compound, among them handing the distribution of Red Cross parcel contents equally among the kriegies (POWs). But as a key member of X Organization (the escape committee) as well, Pengelly had the authority from Big X (Roger Bushell) over the parcels.

“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,” Pengelly said.

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.

Key to Escape Committee success underground, was a sense of situation normal above ground. Late in February 1944 – as he had done for nearly four years – Canadian Barry Davidson ensured that life among the kriegies didn’t skip a beat. As indicated in his diaries, Pilot Officer Davidson wrote that inside Stalag Luft III he assumed role of a scrounger.

“I tried digging in the tunnels,” he wrote, “but I got claustrophobic.”

So, Davidson went to work managing the contents of the Red Cross parcels – chocolate, coffee, cigarettes – into a war chest of bribery devices that could help his X Organization comrades “tame” North Compound guards. By putting such valuables into the hands of malleable guards, the escape committee could procure the makings of digging tools, the loan of a camera, and raw materials that would become the basis for an arsenal of forged documents.

An avid sportsman as well, Davidson helped secure sports gear – tennis rackets, baseballs and bats, and – for the winter of 1944 – hockey sticks and skates. Because of his contacts, Davidson helped authorities import hockey gear from the YMCA and Morgan’s department store back in Canada.

The equipment provided kriegies some welcome recreation in a game they loved, but the hardwood from hockey sticks also burned long and hot in the barracks stoves and used skate blades often enjoyed a second life as a cutting/digging tool for the tunnellers. Thus, as the ground froze above the tunnellers, out in the appell/playground, the product of Davidson’s scrounging generated scores of hockey games, making life inside Stalag Luft III look normal … even as Tunnel “Harry” moved closer to completion.

By Feb. 24, 1944, the 2,000 Commonwealth air officers penned inside Stalag Luft III had worked out a foolproof method of disposing of excavated sand from “Harry,” the tunnel through which the Kriegsfefangenen “kriegies” (prisoners of war) hoped to escape in a matter of weeks.

Torontonian, Albert Wallace, 22, had completed 15 operations as a mid-upper gunner aboard a Halifax bomber in RCAF 419 Squadron, when he was shot down in May 1943. After being processed into Stalag Luft III, he found himself assigned to Room 23 in Hut 104, within eye-shot of the entrance to Tunnel “Harry.” Except he didn’t find that fact out for some weeks. That’s how well kept the secret was.

Eventually, as part of the escape committee, Wallace worked as a penguin, hiding excavated sand in his pants to be dumped wherever the subsurface yellow sand could be scuffed into the white surface sand. His destination that winter was more obvious than the Germans figured.

“I remember going into the theatre one night with my bags full of sand,” Wallace said. “I was told where to sit because that’s where the trapdoor was. I sat in seat number 13, pulled my little tickies and out went the sand.”

On an exceptional day that winter, the penguins disposed of 12 tons of sand that way.

Left idle throughout the fall of 1943, Tunnel “Harry” by Feb. 23, 1944, has been reactivated for six weeks. The Escape Committee had decided to institute the autumn digging hiatus because the German anti-tunnelling guards (“the ferrets”) had discovered the Tunnel “Tom” in September. So POWs at Stalag Luft III calculated, by calling a halt to tunnel excavation, they could lull the compound guards into believing they’d nipped the kriegies’ tunnelling efforts in the bud.

However, when work on “Harry” began again in January, a new problem loomed. Previously, “penguins” (POWs packing excavated sand down their pant legs and dispersing the yellow excavated sand into white surface sand) had “disappeared” the sand out in the compound. But with winter snow on the ground, there was no place to hide “Harry’s” deposits.

The air officers of X Organization (the escape committee) hit on a new repository for the sand. The North Compound theatre – built in the summer of 1943 – had a different structure than most buildings in the compound. It wasn’t built on stilts like the barracks huts. It had a bricked in, enclosed basement.

And beneath the raked floor boards of the main theatre lay a beckoning space … room for whatever excavated sand “Harry” could deliver. In addition to the regular carpentry work that went into weekly productions staged at the theatre, crews installed a hidden trapdoor at seat 13 in the 300-seat theatre. That trap would allow penguins to unload even more sand, more quickly and less conspicuously into the basement of the theatre.

“The theatre was a lifesaver,” one Stalag Luft III POW said. While the kriegies staged Shakespeare and Shaw on the proscenium stage in front of audiences that included German officers, beneath the raked floor of the theatre, excavated sand from “Harry” was packed into every nook and cranny. Eventually, 30-50 tons of sand was stashed beneath the most popular location in the North Compound.

For those related to the men of the Great Escape and those working to ensure we always remember, I offer a countdown to the 70th anniversary: “30 Days to the Great Escape.”

By Feb. 22, 1944, Tunnel “Harry,” the third and most sophisticated excavation from inside Stalag Luft III, had advanced more than 200 feet from its trapdoor entrance beneath a stove in Hut 104 of the North Compound… north under the wire towards the pine forest outside the wire.

Since arriving at the German POW camp, 2,000 downed Commonwealth air officers within the North Compound had re-established X Organization (the escape committee) and launched full-scale escape operations, including the excavation of three tunnels 30 feet down and more 300 feet out.

By late February, Wally Floody, the tunnel king, had even constructed one halfway house (a widening of the tunnel) to allow digging crews more working space. Since being shot down in October 1941, fighter pilot Floody, now 25, had dug more than 50 tunnels during his three years of imprisonment. The Canadian tunnel king summed up his work:

“First, you’ve got to find a place to sink a shaft,” he said. “Next, you’ve got to build a tunnel very deep so the Germans can’t hear any digging. You’ve got to dispose of the sand. And most important, you’ve got to be able to do all this under the very noses of the Germans.”