Pengelly knew and used his skills in photography, cartography, calligraphy and bribery.
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.”
Most POWs said they wouldn’t have survived wartime imprisonment were it not for the life-saving contents of the 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 (right) at Barth where he was just a regular member of X Organization.
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.
When Brendan Shanahan took his turn parading the Cup, it was a bittersweet moment.
On Saturdays, 35 years ago, Brendan Shanahan the former NHL star forward, travelled to minor hockey games in west-end Toronto with his father. On those mornings at the arena, Donal Shanahan carried a newspaper under his arm; before each game “Father Don,” as he was known, would tap Brendan’s boyhood teammates on the head for good luck.
“For all those times … he got up in the morning (and) took me to the rink as a kid and tied my skates … or drove me to tournaments,” Brendan Shanahan told me in 1997, “I owe him.”
And 1997 was the year Shanahan won the Stanley Cup with the Red Wings. It was the first time Detroit had won the Cup in more than 40 years.
The image of Brendan going to the minor hockey rink a generation ago, and kids like him the generation before that, are what I call “Canadian Gothic,” not unlike the 1930s classic American painting by Grant Wood. Only in this case, the two figures are not a farmer’s wife and a farmer with a pitchfork, but rather a father with a hockey stick and a son or daughter with a hockey bag.
That’s Canadian Gothic, a vision and a symbolism I kept imagining all this past week as Canada’s men’s and women’s national hockey teams won gold medals at the Sochi Winter Olympic Games. Contrary to Don Cherry’s rock ’em sock ’em attitude being credited with the Canadian victories, I’d suggest to you that credit for Canada’s hockey gold medals at Sochi should be given to the players’ moms and dads.
Canadian women’s Team Canada.
Case in point. A few months before the women’s hockey Team Canada left for Russia, the team’s sponsor (Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You Moms campaign) arranged a special bonding dinner for the players in Laval, Quebec. My wife – a senior editor for Zoomer magazine – attended the dinner because she’d learned that the team brass had planned something different for the young women players – a surprise visit from the mothers.
The golden feeling went right round the room, as Anne Apps, who had not seen Gillian Apps since training camp in August, heartily embraced her daughter; as Nathalie Saviolidis caught up with her daughter Geneviéve Lacasse so that the two could share conversation about the goaltender’s prospects against the arch-rival Americans; and as veteran player Hayley Wickenheiser and her mom, Marilyn, talked of hers and Team Canada’s pursuit of a fourth straight gold medal.
“I’ve never met so many young women who appear so comfortable in their own skins,” Jayne MacAulay wrote in Zoomer. “Elite hockey, it appears, is a college for confidence and leadership.”
While not exactly the same – because there are fat NHL salaries attached – I remember at the beginning of February, when the Leafs brass continued an annual tradition of bringing the players’ fathers along for a road-trip to Florida; on the junket the fathers watched their sons play the Panthers in Miami and two nights later the Lightning in Tampa Bay. The atmosphere of the trip some likened to a tailgate party, during which the players roomed with their dads, attended father-and-son dinners and did a little fishing. Toronto Star reporter Curtis Rush talked to Randy Carlyle about the value of such an investment.
“It’s an opportunity where we can use (the players’) dads as a catalyst and say, ‘Hey, play well for your father.’”
The record shows that the Leafs got dumped by the Panthers 4-1 on the Tuesday night. But after the hoped-for pep talk from their dads and a couple of days’ R and R, on Thursday night the Leafs came through with a convincing 4-1 win over Tampa.
Parents and coaches volunteering time and support have as much to do with the game as winning.
Over the past five months or so, I’ve carried on something of a tradition in our family. Back before Donal and Brendan Shanahan’s early Saturday trips to the rink in Mimico, back the 1960s, my dad – despite his newspaperman’s late-night hours – accompanied me to the outdoor rink in Agincourt to watch me play early-morning house-league hockey. Two generations later, this winter, I’ve accompanied my son-in-law as we watch his son Sawyer and his teal-jersey Sharks learn the skills of skating, stick-handling and shooting.
“Just like my own minor hockey days back in Agincourt,” I said to my son-in-law, “we learned it wasn’t about winning, but being there.”
Finally, I guess I should point out the irony of Brendan Shanahan’s NHL championship with the Detroit Red Wings in 1997. His traditional victory skate around Joe Louis Arena, that spring night in 1997, must have felt bittersweet.
“I regret that (my dad) wasn’t able to see me play in the NHL,” Brendan Shanahan said, “or watch me win the Stanley Cup.”
“Father Don” Shanahan, who had always “taken his son to the rink” in Brendan’s minor hockey days, died of Alzheimer’s disease six years before his son won the Stanley Cup.
At Stalag Luft III hockey ice surfaces were created on open ground using a bucket brigade to transport water to the fast-freezing ice surface – very Canadian.
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.
Barry Davidson earned his private pilot’s licence in the 1930s, joined the RAF, but was shot down and turned his air force skills to scrounging inside Stalag Luft III.
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.
Al Wallace never calls himself a hero, though he survived being shot down, 18 months a POW and the long march to freedom in 1945.
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.
This sketch of the North Compound theatre came from the diary of P/O Barry Davidson, aka “the scrounger.”
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.
Wally Floody dug 48 tunnels in attempts to escape Stalg Luft I, but his Tunnel “Harry” at Stalag Luft III delivered 80 POWs under the wire.
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.”
Steve McQueen, Jud Taylor and James Garner – as POWs in Stalag Luft III – celebrate the 4th of July in the movie “The Great Escape.”
About two-thirds the way through the screening of “The Great Escape” movie last weekend at the Roxy Theatre in Uxbridge, there was a scene in which the American POWs break out a batch of potato-based hooch. They’re celebrating July 4, 1943, even though they’re prisoners in the famous Stalag Luft III POW camp.
In the famous scene, actors James Garner, Steve McQueen and Jud Taylor play three shot-down U.S. airmen (in the mostly British Commonwealth prison camp) celebrating Independence Day. McQueen dispenses the booze as he spouts epithets such as “Down the British” and “Up the Colonies,” when Taylor turns to McQueen.
“Representation by population,” Taylor shouts.
McQueen does a double take, knowing Taylor has just delivered an unplanned ad lib, but since nobody broke up during the shooting of the scene 50 years ago, it remained in the film. And the only reason that the Roxy audience caught the ad lib was because our host that afternoon, Mark Christoff, alerted us to watch for it. Taylor’s off-the-cuff comment and McQueen’s response got a bigger laugh last weekend, than the scene probably ever got when “The Great Escape” premiered in 1963. Thanks to Christoff, we enjoyed one of those magical moments that occasionally occur in a movie theatre.
I’ve experienced a number of such moments over the years. They are perfectly spontaneous things, such as the audience shrieking out loud in the final few minutes of “Wait Until Dark,” (1967) when Alan Arkin lunges out of the basement apartment shadows at a defenseless Audrey Hepburn, the blind tenant attempting to defend herself against a murderous invader. I remember the theatre growing cloudier by the minute as illegal pot smokers lit up during the psychedelic re-entry scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s (1968) classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I guess those are kind of iconic movie-audience moments.
But here’s one that could only have happened once. Remember the 70-millimetre IMAX movie that inaugurated the Ontario Place Cinesphere in 1971? The documentary was “North of Superior,” a kind of travelogue – featuring Graeme Ferguson’s classic nearly 360-degree almost wrap-around imagery – showcasing the wilderness north of Lake Superior.
An inferno North of Superior blown out at the Ontario Place Cinesphere.
Well, as I recall the night we all watched it in the brand new Cinesphere, there was that sequence about halfway through the film in which the IMAX cameras take us to the heart of a northern Ontario forest fire. But then almost as quickly as the movie throws us into the heat and flames, the intensity of the blaze and the roar end in a split-second… with a close-up image of a forester’s boot planting a pine seedling in soil still scarred by the fire.
It so happened at precisely that moment – as the movie soundtrack switched from deafening roar to nearly silent close-up of the boot pressing the seedling into the soil – one member of our group in the Cinesphere let go with a loud sneeze. For all the world, it seemed as if his sneeze had blown out the inferno. His timing was perfect. The memory of our laughing at his timing stays with me to this day.
Then, there was one of the climactic scenes in “The Guns of Navarone,” the action war movie, starring Anthony Quinn, David Niven and Gregory Peck among others. The 1961 feature depicts a team of British commandos dispatched to destroy gigantic naval guns guarding a vital channel in the Mediterranean. As the group makes its way up the cliffs and through the Nazi-occupied towns of the Greek island housing the guns, it becomes clear there’s a spy among the civilian guides.
Gia Scala, at the moment her untrue story of torture is revealed in “The Guns of Navarone.”
Suddenly, Anna (played by Gia Scala) the beautiful, young mountain guide (apparently tortured earlier in the war by whipping across her back) is suspect. Someone challenges the back whipping scenario and rips open the back of her dress right in front of the camera. There’s no blood, no scars, nothing. In the silence of the shocking discovery, someone in the movie theatre couldn’t resist speaking the obvious.
“She’s got a gorgeous back!” he said. And the theatre erupted in laughter, totally destroying the drama of the scene. Moments later the Irene Papas character pulls out a revolver and shoots the young girl to ensure the safety of the mission.
James Coburn, in his Great Escape outfit, accompanied by Canadian airman Wally Floody who acted as technical advisor on the movie.
There was one other magical moment we enjoyed during the Roxy screening of “The Great Escape” last weekend. As many of you know, I’ve made a recent crusade of illustrating how much of the extraordinary effort to tunnel out of Stalag Luft III was directed by Canadians. And yet the movie makes mention of “Canada” only once in the entire movie. The scene involves James Coburn creating a diversion while other POWs attempt to break out of the camp. He spontaneously grabs a fellow prisoner’s jacket, winds up to punch him, and shouts: “You rotten Canadian!”
Hollywood never let facts get in the way of filming a good story. But sometimes the magic happened out in the audience as well as on the screen.
The Pearson tarmac showed the ill effects of an ice storm on airline traffic. Courtesy Sun News.
Not so long ago, the talk in our oldtimers’ hockey dressing room turned to the usual grousing. The Leafs likely won’t make the playoffs, one guy moaned. Somebody else complained that township roads weren’t being ploughed quickly or thoroughly enough this winter. Then, Pearson airport became the target. In the recent ice storm, weren’t the delays horrendous? Wasn’t it criminal that travellers were forced to remain on the tarmac for hours?
And, just for good measure, aren’t those sunshine destination airfares outrageous? And I thought about something one of our daughters had said, when I complained about a similar problem, delay or cost.
“It’s a First World problem, Dad,” she pointed out quietly.
“Yes, but…” and I stopped myself. She was absolutely right.
This week, I caught both the federal budget unveiling in the House of Commons and the political and public response. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that he would run the country’s business for about $250 billion, running a $2.9 billion deficit with an additional $3 billion contingency just in case the economy goes south. He suggested he would stay the course “to weather any future global economic storms,” in his speech in the
Commons. I’m sure Flaherty’s done the math, but Canada’s deficit and contingency alone would cover much of the assets of many Third World countries such as Bangladesh, Congo, Liberia, Eritrea and Afghanistan combined. In other words, deficits and contingencies and economic storms are all relative.
I watched Global TV’s coverage of Opposition leader Tom Mulcair assess the budget. The NDP leader complained that there are 300,000 more Canadians looking for work than during the economic crisis of 2008; in particular, he worried that 260,000 young Canadians are still looking for work. Down the hall, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau worried the budget didn’t offer any hope of growth or a vision for the future; he scoffed that it was an electoral budget, promising to balance the books just in time for next year’s federal election.
“We’re not seeing any vision,” Trudeau scolded, but then, that’s what Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s job is – to complain.
This week, I conducted a bit of a state-of-the-union survey among my journalism students at the college where I teach. They decried tuition fees. They wished cell phone rates weren’t so high. They hated the cafeteria food. And when I asked why some of them hadn’t arrived on time for their news reporting class, they said it was scheduled too early in the day.
It was just after 11:30 a.m. and – to some – that was an ungodly hour to be expected to perform thinking, reasoning or any other creative skills. When I informed them that I had originally intended to schedule the class for 8:30 a.m., they responded with such indignation, you’d have thought I’d insulted their family name.
By the end of the tour, the rain and the reality had scared off most of the tourists.
“That’s ridiculous,” one of them said. “How could anybody function under those conditions?”
The reaction gave me pause. I remembered a personal experience that had profoundly affected my sense of perspective. In the summer of 2010, I travelled to Krakow, Poland. I met a guide, who had offered to assist me as I planned a subsequent trip leading a tour of Canadians through that part of Eastern Europe. I asked him if he would get me to a small town just outside Krakow, called Oświęcim, where during the Second World War, the Nazis constructed a prison (Auschwitz) and concentration camp (Birkenau) to systematically exterminate political prisoners and the Jews of Europe.
The railway in did not indicate it was a one-way trip.
“The tour will last three hours,” the on-site guide told us at the Auschwitz interpretive centre. “And I hope you brought umbrellas.”
I hadn’t. But it didn’t matter. The rain was pouring down with such intensity and volume as we began the tour of Auschwitz prison, that most of the people in our group were drenched within the first 10 minutes of the visit. And because the content of the tour was so severe and depressing, only a handful of us remained by the time the three-hour tour had concluded.
Much of what the former prison contained haunted me. The cells in which the condemned spent their last hours depressed me for days. The photographs of the men and women tortured and killed stick in my head even now. And when I got to Birkenau and realized how many thousands of Jews the Nazis had crammed inside those former horse barns, I cried. But what stays with me most of all, was the sight inside one of the prison barns of a lone faucet and basin, the sole washing facility for hundreds and hundreds of prisoners there.
To this day, I cannot turn on a tap, brush my teeth, take a shower or pour a glass of water without flashing back to that solitary faucet and basin. I guess it’s the mental equivalent of reminding myself – anytime I complain – that mine are “are just First World problems.”
