Keith Ogilvie won widespread recognition for shooting down a German aircraft about to bomb Buckingham Palace early in the war.
In the last days before the mass breakout, work reached completion all major sections of X Organization activity. Tommy Guest’s tailors put the final stitching and buttons on clothes for kriegies with low numbers and high linguistic capability about to go through “Harry” in the first wave. Al Hake’s assembly line in Hut 103 stowed as many as 250 homemade compasses in Tunnel “Dick” for safekeeping. And Des Plunkett’s team of mapmakers completed mimeographing 4,000 escape maps. One such map was distributed to designated hard-arser Keith Ogilvie.
“I was one of the great majority who (was to go) out in (air force) uniform,” Ogilvie told members of the Ashbury Journal in 1971, “creating a smokescreen to enable the chaps who were better equipped with civilian clothes and passes to get away on the trains. We had maps and our hope was to get into Czechoslovakia.”
Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie was an Ottawa-born RAF fighter pilot, who had been shot down over Lille, France, early in the war. In fact, the Germans scored propaganda points in the event when William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, the British-born fascist who became the Nazis’ chief English-language broadcaster) announced Ogilvie’s capture immediately after it happened on July 4, 1941.
At Stalag Luft III, Ogilvie joined escape committee activity by lifting the wallet of a guard and rushing it to Tony Pengelly’s forgery team for examination. Ogilvie then informed the guard he’d found the wallet on the floor. Worried about the consequences of prison authorities discovering he’d lost his papers while inside the compound, the guard thanked Ogilvie profusely. Another guard had thus been tamed and vital identification papers had made their way to the forgery group for replication.
In this final week of winter in March, Ogilvie recalled his feelings about the looming escape, as “much the same feeling one would have before playing an important football game. (I) was keyed up and anxious for the show to start.”
It’s still the third most popular war movie Hollywood ever made. It’s still can have a movie theatre audience on the edge of its seats 50 years after the film was made. And now, one of Toronto’s most loved bookstores will show you why. On Sunday, April 6, 2014, “The Great Escape” (bookstore) presents “The Great Escape” (movie) at The Fox theatre in the Beach.
Ted Barris, author of the National Bestseller The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, hosts the afternoon screening and talk… because, you see, as compelling as the movie is, Hollywood never let facts get in the way of telling a good story. What’s more Barris sets the record straight – the escape was very much a “made-in-Canada” phenomenon.
Ted Barris is an author, journalist and broadcaster. As well as hosting appearances on CBC Radio and regular contributions to the National Post and Legion, Air Force and Zoomer magazine, he is a full-time professor of journalism and broadcasting at Centennial College in Toronto. He has authored 17 published, non-fiction books. In 2011 he received the Canadian Minister of Veterans’ Affairs Commendation and in 2012 the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Red Cross parcels came to the officers about once or twice a month. Most called their contents “life-savers.”
The Ides of March brought a shift in the escape committee’s manufacturing and preparation. Where they had previously focused on the fashioning of tunnelling tools and manipulation of materiel for underground construction, kriegie engineers began transforming food tins into water bottles for the escapers.
Roger Bushell called for one last levy on the Red Cross parcels, so that a cooking crew in Hut 112 could mix every ounce of sugar, cocoa, raisins, milk and biscuits into a stewing pot to create a concoction of high-calorie fudge for the escapers to consume outside the wire.
John R. Harris realized language wouldn’t help him escape, but having survival gear might.
Unlike the kriegies with higher linguistic capabilities (working with German scholar Gordon Kidder in his so-called “culture appreciation classes”) RCAF navigator John R. Harris prepared himself among the “hard-arsers” masquerading as a Hungarian ironworker in transit. He was number 179 on the escape list, should his turn arrive.
“We spent the (last week) in a frenzy of secret activity,” John Harris wrote, “as we prepared our clothes, acquired quantities of compact, nourishing food, and collected our forged papers,” Harris wrote. “I was provided a with a very official looking Nazi document which affirmed that I was Antoine Zabadose.”
Meanwhile section leaders Robert Ker-Ramsey and Johnny Marshall began assembling the escapers in small groups to explain – when the time came – how to get through the tunnel.
“Most of us had never been beyond the trapdoor at the mouth of ‘Harry,’ Harris wrote, “but we were given a cook’s tour of the tunnel, so that we would have some idea of what faced us once we went below ground.”
Tommy Thompson had assisted the scrounging team since his first imprisonment in 1939.
The escape list largely determined during the March 14 meeting began to disseminate through the barracks huts the next day.
Among those Canadians learning their position on the list, George McGill, who had conjured up diversions during earlier escape attempts and later a tunnel security leader, would be 75th into the tunnel. Gordon Kidder, who with fluency in European languages had taught fellow kriegies how to converse in German on the outside, would be 31st on the list. Hank Birkland, the last of the Canadian tunnellers after the Feb. 29 purge, would exit the tunnel 51st. And Tommy Thompson, the Canadian pilot who’d personally earned the wrath of Herman Göring for waking the Reichsmarschall in the September night he was shot down in 1939, would be 68th out the tunnel.
Weighing on the minds of so many of the active escape committee personnel were the details of duty. As a section head in the forgery team, Tony Pengelly had directed the production of many of the escape documents. He knew their design, detail and delivery better than almost anyone inside the wire. But also wondered whether, on the night of the escape, somebody in his branch of Dean and Dawson should stay behind to check that every identification card was in the right hand s of the right escaper as he entered “Harry” on his way out. Nothing could be left to chance.
George Sweanor had to get home to see his new bride and baby daughter.
“As a prisoner of war… it was the greatest decision of my life,” Pengelly said. “There was this responsibility, and on my acceptance or rejection of it, depended my chance at freedom.” In the end, Pengelly decided to forfeit his spot, number 93 on the escape list.
Meanwhile, George Sweanor, who had even more to hurry home to, including a new bride and a newborn daughter he had never seen, had trepidations about the entire enterprize.
“I argued that a mass escape would cause a desired disruption to the German war effort, yes, because it would take a lot of people to track us down,” Sweanor said. “But there was really little hope of anybody getting home. … I felt relieved (that) my name was not drawn.”
Roger Bushell and the section heads determined the final act of The Great Escape on March 14.
March 14, 1944, proved a crucial day in the history of The Great Escape. Diggers reported the upward vertical shaft, the exit from “Harry,” was complete. The wooden ceiling just beneath the pine-tree roots, presumably in the forest beyond the wire, was secure. That day also marked the return of Unteroffizier Karl Griese, perhaps the most rabid anti-tunnelling guard prowling the North Compound.
Meantime, in Hut 110, the escape committee conducted a two-hour meeting in the library. Big X, Roger Bushell led a discussion about the timing of the breakout. The committee considered three possible dates – March 23, 24 and 25 – the next three nights without potential exposure by bright moonlight. March 25 was a Saturday, which likely meant additional train traffic and potential congestion along some of the railway routes through Sagan; that would affect the first wave of fluent speakers making their way through train stations.
The committee members would wait to see what the weather would bring on March 23 and 24. The section heads debated whether a mass escape in bad weather – with freezing nighttime temperatures and with several feet of snow on the ground – might jeopardize attempts to get away by the hard-arsers, those escaping on foot and relying on survival skills to put distance between them and Stalag Luft III.
Bushell and the X Organization section heads agreed they would go on either Thursday, March 23, or Friday, March 24, depending on the weather. The committee hoped between 9 o’clock on the night of the escape and 5:30 the next morning the tunnel could spring more than 200 kriegies – one every three of four minutes – across the occupied European countryside.
Tony Pengelly felt the tension most as the order of escape was drawn.
The final item on the meeting agenda was drawing the names and determining the order on the list of escapers. The first 30 names selected came from a list of the best German speakers. The next 20 names came from the most prominent escape committee workers. Then, 30 more were drawn from a list of stooges, penguins, tailors, compass and mapmakers and forgers. Finally, all remaining names were pulled from a hat to bring the total number to about 200. Tony Pengelly, a forgery section head, recalled the tension of this moment.
“When the time came close,” Pengelly wrote, “we drew lots intensely, in small groups. Mere slips of paper they were, holding the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of freedom – and for the lucky ones, how long he would be after the first to leave. I drew number 93.”
Dick Bartlett, and his so-called canary, delivered the sound of home to kriegies inside the POW camps.
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.”
A radio operator, a shorthand writing expert and Bartlett guarding at the door of the latrine… delivered daily info from BBC by shortwave.
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.
The Great Escape talk incorporated story of Gordon Kidder, who taught German to eventual escapers. Photo Bev McMullen.
I had just completed one of my talks on The Great Escape. It was about an hour’s presentation at the Legion hall in Port Carling (in Muskoka) last Saturday. I asked someone to turn up the lights, so I could see the audience and take some questions. It’s in those moments that I prepare myself for a tough question and maybe some criticism. And I’m OK with that. Then, a man in the front row put up his hand to speak and the room went silent.
“I spent months in a POW camp just outside Munich during the war,” Jack Patterson said quietly, but steadily. “It was exactly the way you said.”
I walked over to him, shook his hand and asked him to stand and face the audience of about a hundred people. Then I asked if he would explain. He offered an abbreviated story of his capture by German troops in Normandy in July 1944.
Ultimately, he said, he and other members of his Algonquin Regiment (from central Ontario) wound up at a place called Stalag (German for Straflager, or prison) VII-A at Moosburg, near Munich. He was tossed into a prison compound there with Americans, South Africans, British and Arab troops – all prisoners of war. He called the compound “a real league of nations.”
When he was done, everyone in the hall stood and applauded his service. Later, Patterson offered me a number of additional anecdotes – including deprivation, isolation, and near annihilation – as a prisoner of war. I’d heard many of his experiences before. But the one flashback he shared that stood out for me was his liberation. Patterson said the U.S. Third Army under Gen. George Patton freed him and his fellow Algonquins. On May 5, 1945, with the war ending in Europe, all POWs were taken to a German aerodrome for transport back home.
“We boarded Lancaster bombers to take us back to England,” he said. They weren’t made for carrying troops, so I was sitting on a (navigator’s) desk where I could look out a window, and it wasn’t long before I saw the white cliffs of Dover. … It was great to have our feet back in England.”
Another encounter from that very same audience, on Saturday afternoon, occurred when a man approached me with a plastic bag. It contained a book, entitled “Drei Tage I’m September” (Three Days in September), written by German author Cay Rademacher. The man with the plastic bag was Philip Gunyon and the book was about the three days surrounding the sinking of the British cruise vessel S.S. Athenia by a German U-boat on Sept. 3, 1939, the very day Britain declared war on Germany. Gunyon opened the book to the photo section and pointed to an image of a woman and her three children. Gunyon’s family (exluding his father) had all been aboard Athenia when it was torpedoed.
“I was seven when it happened,” Gunyon said.
The book details the events leading up to submarine commander Fritz-Julius Lemp’s decision to fire a torpedo from U-30 at Athenia, mistaking the passenger liner for a British armed merchant cruiser. The ship was sailing with 1,100 passengers aboard (60 kilometres off the coast of Ireland) on a regularly scheduled passage from Glasgow to Montreal. Though the passenger vessel remained afloat for 14 hours after the attack, 98 passengers and 19 crew died in the wreck.
“Liner Athenia torpedoed and sunk,” read the headline in the Halifax Herald on Sept. 4. And across the centre of the page, “Empire at War!”
History records that a Canadian girl, 10-year-old Margaret Hayword, was killed in the sinking. She was the perhaps the first Canadian to die, the result of enemy action in the Second World War. Philip Gunyon, showing me the book in its original German script, pointed out that his mother, two siblings and he had survived.
One more surprise awaited me Saturday afternoon at the Port Carling Legion. After my talk about The Great Escape by tunnel from German POW camp Stalag Luft III, another man approached me to comment on the book.
“My name is Frank Pengelly. I’m a cousin of Tony Pengelly, the man in charge of forging documents in the Great Escape,” he said.
He explained that his cousin, as I described in the book, had led a stable of 100 artists and calligraphers in the creation of phony documents (looking exactly like originals) that would allow the Great Escapers to get through train stations and across borders because they had look-alike passes and visas.
“The story is exactly as you wrote it,” Pengelly said.
Saturday afternoon proved to be one of those remarkable moments one imagines when the stars align. I had chosen to speak in a room where much of the history I was recounting had been experienced first-hand by some of those present. I marveled at the history. I reveled in the coincidence.
As solid as the shaft walls looked, they could be deadly if a single board broke and sand cascaded down on the tunnellers.
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.
Among his many occupations, his work as a miner in B.C. served Hank Birkland well as a POW.
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.”
A cross-section view of Tunnel “Harry” just as the tunnelling efforts neared an end in late March 1944.
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.
