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.
View across the southwest corner of North Compound, 1943.
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.
Frank Sorensen’s letters reflected his disappointment being a POW, but still played a role in the prisoners’ designs.
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.
Gordon Kidder, by rights, should have been studying German in a master’s program, but the war had him shot down and imprisoned at Luft III.
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.
Beneath that official-looking exterior, Gordon Kidder loved language and culture.
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.
Don Edy outside his RAF squadron tent in North Africa.
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.
Don Edy (second from right) performs at North Compound Theatre in “Six to the Bar.”
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.
Anti-tunnelling guard displays captured penguin sand-dispersal bags after the escape.
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.”
Replica of the stove in Room 23, Hut 104, that concealed trapdoor to Tunnel “Harry.”
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.
George Bernard Shaw earned the Nobel Peace Prize for literature (1925), but didn’t make many friends among teachers.
Stepping up to a music stand, last Saturday night, I realized it was the worst possible phrase to use. And it was the best possible phrase to use. I wanted to draw the audience in. I wanted to provoke it a bit too. I wondered how best to capture the essence of the evening. Then it hit me. I glanced down at my script on the music stand, and I finally blurted it out in one of my introductions.
“You know that old George Bernard Shaw quote?” I asked. “It says, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’”
The audible groan was entirely predictable. The St. Andrew’s Chalmers Presbyterian Church on Toronto Street was full of music-loving parents, music-practising youngsters and music-teaching instructors. It was the annual winter concert to raise funds for the Uxbridge Music Scholarship Trust, on this occasion featuring some of our community’s top-notch music teachers – including Rebecca and Tim Bastmeyer, Michelle Charlton, Carlie Laidlaw, Susan Luke, Jennifer Neveu-Cooke, Cynthia Nidd, Chris Saunders and Amy Peck. But this time they were performing, not professing. And the partisan audience didn’t like Shaw’s cryptic quotation one bit. Nor did I.
“Frankly, I think that’s hogwash,” I added. And then I went on to introduce Carlie Laidlaw, the lead singer with a group called Parental Discretion Band and another called Saunders Road. I continued by explaining that she’s the vocalist responsible for singing the national anthem at events around town and for recording a CD called “Hummingbird,” whose proceeds fund three hospitals around the GTA. I pointed out that Laidlaw provided warm-up for a concert headlining Murray McLauchlan. Finally, I reminded everyone, she also teaches music.
“Stick that in your pipe, G.B. Shaw, and smoke it,” I thought.
Then, I began to think about all the teachers in my life who’ve offered me those three vital dimensions of the teaching/learning equation. First, they knew what it was they needed to teach. Then, they understood how to explain it to others. Finally, they knew how to show others exactly the way it was done with the simplicity of kindergarten teacher, but with the expertise of a professor emeritus. Contrary to Mr. Shaw’s perception, teachers I’ve known could both teach and do.
Probably the earliest teacher in my life on those counts was the man who taught me both Grade 5 and Grade 7 at elementary school. Mike Malott couldn’t have been more than 10 years my senior, but he knew the pathways to hearts and minds of my classroom of 11-year-olds and then 13-year-olds better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. He inspired our fascination for history by showing us its characters. And on the sports playground, Malott imparted the skills of baseball and soccer by making us believe in each other as teammates and because we knew he could play any one of the positions around the field better than anyone in town. We knew he could show us as well as tell us anything the game had to offer.
At Ryerson, I experienced the brilliance of broadcast writer Christina MacBeth. She taught the craft of writing for advertisers, by showing us how they determined consumers’ needs. She delivered the basics of writing to time, by helping us see the language not just as bits of copy, but as split-seconds of a ticking clock. And she made us respect the vitality of English by forcing us not to write passively, but to construct images actively. I remember the day she came into a class, told us all our assignments were lame and boring, and then took away the best crutch we’d ever known – the passive verb “to be.”
“For the rest of the semester you cannot use any form of the verb ‘to be’ in any script assignment you hand in,” she said.
And we thought she was crazy. She was. Crazy like a fox. By the end of the semester, because MacBeth had forced us to employ words of action and impact, we were writing the best copy of our lives, all because she knew from doing it, how to teach it.
And I guess I need to thank my father – the greatest teacher of my life. I’ll never forget that day in elementary school, when, after typing my umpteenth essay to help me get a passing grade, he put his foot down.
“That’s the last one,” he said. “From now on you do the typing.”
By understanding I needed to learn by doing it myself, he forced me to sit at the practise pads. He showed me the concept of touch-typing. And he illustrated that axiom our entire family of writers has come to live by. “Nothing ever gets done,” he always said, “until the seat of the pants hits the seat of the chair.” Classic words from a man who knew how to teach, but even better, how to do.
Rob Buckham documented much of everyday life inside Stalag Luft III in sketches and paintings.
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.
George Sweanor had always said the last thing he’d do would be to fall in love during the war.
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.
Joan Saunders met George at a dance raising funds for U.K. POWs.
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.’”
Don McKim, pictured at his navigation table, endured the cold of being shot down in winter and of being imprisoned in winter.
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.
Frank Sorensen’s efforts to teach Danish to Big X, required it be done outside along the warning wire during the winter of 1943-44.
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.
