The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (29 page)

At about 8:30 that Saturday evening, Don Edy noted that Wray took a final swallow of tea and stood up to leave. Just then the door flew open and Bill Jennings, the group’s liaison officer, rushed in.

“The camp has to be ready to move out in one hour’s time!” Jennings roared.

Wray absorbed the shock of Jennings’ announcement in momen
tary silence. The senior Canadian officer had come to the wrong
conclusion. The Germans had in fact received orders to evacuate the entire prison camp almost immediately. And all the camp’s officers would be force-marched away, it seemed, sixty minutes later. Group Captain Wray put down his empty tea cup, made his way to the door, and said, finally, “Good night, gentlemen, and good luck.”

“I guess this is the beginning of the end,” one of Edy’s roommates said. “I wonder what’s in store for us now?”
[11]

Then, like every other hut and room inside Stalag Luft III, Edy’s
quarters were thrown into pandemonium. Edy admitted his first gut reaction wasn’t to the forced march per se, but to the reality of being thrown out of his barracks. The last place he wanted to be on
a late January night was outside in the elements. The thought sickened him, but fear propelled him. Edy had a tin suitcase (likely made by Colwell), so he began packing his blanket roll, extra socks, shirts, and a sweater inside. The room that had been cleaned up for Wray’s visit became a shambles. Whatever rations of biscuits, cigarettes,
and chocolate the men had saved were divided equally and thrown about as bunk mates in Hut
119
assembled their survival kits. A former
RCMP officer in the barracks had shown some of the officers how to manufacture backpacks; another man gave out instructions for nailing bed-boards into a wooden box with skis and a tow rope to create a makeshift sleigh. And because their incarceration at Stalag Luft III had taught all kriegies the meaning of resourcefulness, an officer from each hut was dispatched to the library to tear pages of the thinnest paper he could find in the books to serve as toilet paper during the march.

When word of the exodus reached Colwell’s hut, he and his roommates—Bill Hoddinott, Jim Jamieson, Art Hawtin, and John Ache
son—assembled their rations and all their worldly possessions and methodically went about preparing to leave. Hoddinott divided the
so-called “iron rations,” necessities, equally among the officers. Each man had pack boards for their backpacks. Colwell seemed to go into
a trance, as if he had rehearsed his departure from the North Com
pound over and over in his mind. First, he changed into the clothes
he was going to wear on the march. Next, he laid out two blankets on a couple of stools in the middle of the room and began piling his supplies on them. He laid out two shirts, six pairs of socks, six handkerchiefs, razor blades, a shaving set, toothbrushes, pyjamas, two pencils, shoelaces, his logbook, photographs, matches, and a towel. Then, the Tin Man gathered his portion of the food rations—raisins, biscuits, sugar, prunes, cheese, meat, and iron rations—that went into the centre of his pack. Finally, he retrieved a couple of
pounds of chocolate, his sketches of camp life, and his daily diary, all hidden in his Klim clock. By 10 p.m., he was ready to go.
[12]

But departure was delayed by a series of postponements to 10:30, then 11:30, then midnight. Rumours added to the confusion. Someone said the Allies had broken through on a one-hundred-mile front
and the Germans were negotiating for an armistice. Another said
POWs could hide in the bush and take their chances with the Soviets when they arrived. The suppressed panic and the prolonged delay were sapping the officers’ strength. Colwell’s group conferred and it
was decided their colleague Bill Hoddinott was not well enough to
travel. He left for the compound hospital in the
Vorlager
to be liber
ated, he hoped, by the approaching Soviets. Also during the delay, many of the kriegies tried to consume as much nutritional food as
they could find, but couldn’t pack. Remaining members of X Organization had last-minute loose ends to tie up, such as collecting the maps from the library walls in case they came in handy on the march. They also set bonfires to burn old clothes, furniture, and any leftover
escape committee documents. In the rush to destroy anything the
Germans might consider useful, Hut 104 caught fire
[13]
and the last of tunnel “Harry’s” entrance went up in smoke.

At
1
a.m. on Sunday, January
28
, the kriegies began moving through the main gate of the North Compound. Robert Buckham
took a last look back and considered the significance of the moment. In addition to memories of imprisonment and lost comrades, the kri
egies left behind thousands of books in the library; a theatre full of
props, tools, and musical instruments; cupboards loaded with sports
equipment; and
2
.5
million cigarettes.
[14]
As they passed the stores buildings, each man received one last Red Cross parcel; the Ger
mans had stockpiled as many as fifty thousand of them. But since the POWs had packed their kits to overflowing, most of the departing officers just tore open the boxes right there at the gate and hurriedly
selected only items they didn’t have, leaving thousands of partially
opened and tossed parcels “bleeding their contents into the snow,” Buckham wrote.

“I was outside the wire for the first time in twenty months,” he
went on. “Ahead the road disappeared into the darker mass of the for
est, the trees soft in silhouette and taller than imagined from inside
the camp.”
[15]

For the moment, Buckham had forgotten about his empty stomach, as Colwell had forgotten about the scores of utensils he’d bashed
together—a veritable museum of inmate ingenuity in two years of imprisonment—ultimately left inside the wire. Don Edy had fond
memories of his bit parts on stage at the North Compound theatre doing gymnastics in the
Six to the Bar
review and dressed up in a toga in the operetta
Messalina
. There were even photographs as evidence
he had been featured on stage, but they never crossed his mind the
night they left the prison camp. Art Crighton, the North Compound
orchestra leader, said he had played countless solos during North Compound concerts on “a hell of a great instrument,”
[16]
a trumpet the YMCA had sent from Canada, but he somehow felt the trum
pet ought to stay behind. He learned later someone had wrapped it
around a tree in anger. But every memento, every memory faded at
least temporarily as the kriegies marched away from Sagan. Even
Hans Pieber was selective about what he carried out of the camp.
The German duty officer, who’d been perhaps closest to the kriegies going back to their days at Barth in
1941
, agreed to carry the canary—the illegal radio—since he too wanted to know the BBC’s
latest reports on the war.

“Although the sky was covered with clouds, it was quite light
since the moon was up,” John Colwell wrote in his diary. “Although my pack was heavy, I enjoyed the march, especially when we passed
through small towns and villages where there were things to see
besides barbed wire fences and Goon boxes.”
[17]

Kriegies completed their evacuation of the West Compound by 12:30 Sunday morning. The last of the North Compound prisoners
passed through the main gate by
3
:45
a.m. The Centre Compound was empty shortly afterward. By
6
a.m. Sunday, the final group of POWs from the East Compound was on the road. Stalag Luft III—once home to nearly ten thousand prisoners of war—was like a ghost town. Only those kriegies left behind in the compound infirmaries remained in the
Vorlagers
. They were under guard, attended by a doctor, and would wait for the Soviets to arrive to determine their fate. Because of his irregular heartbeat, for example, George Sweanor had been placed back on sick parade. He sat in the North
Compound hospital as his fellow kriegies trekked out of the camp.

Later on Sunday, however, Sweanor, the one-time duty pilot
inside the North Compound gate, got permission from the Germans guarding the hospitalized POWs to retrieve his personal belongings. As he dashed into the compound back to Hut 119, all he could think of were his letters from his wife Joan, his personal photographs, his
books, and the food he’d stashed inside his palliasse. The food and some of his scribblers were gone, but the rest was intact. In fact, he
noticed that some optimistic kriegies had even bundled their belongings and inscribed them with some Russian words requesting their
personal effects be forwarded to home addresses later. The guards
then let Sweanor enter the parcel shed to gather rations for his imminent departure. From rations such as Berger’s Food, condensed milk,
egg powder, dried fruit, and sugar, he cooked up a nutritious concoction and poured it into small tins, sealed the tops with tape, and
sewed the tins into the lining of his greatcoat. Much the way Colwell had assembled his backpack, Sweanor prepared his. Then, on orders from the infirmary doctor to vacate the compound and attend to two
other patients in the process, Sweanor too made his final exit from
Stalag Luft III.

“I glanced back for a last look at the compound that had been my home and where I had met so many fine human beings,”
[18]
he
wrote.

But Sweanor didn’t have much time to reflect on either his nearly two years of imprisonment at the compound near Sagan, or the hundreds of men with whom he’d shared a prison camp bond. He suddenly faced different responsibilities on the road to survival. He was
a patient tending other patients. He had to keep a USAAF officer
with pneumonia comfortable as they marched. And he regularly had
to apply a calamine-like lotion to the oozing sores of a Rhodesian
airman in his care. And when the elderly German assigned to guard the sickly patients en route to a train siding a full night’s march away could no longer carry his heavy rifle, Sweanor agreed to carry it part
of the way. Dick Bartlett carried more than his fair share too. The
Canadian Skua dive-bomber pilot shot down over Norway in 1940, and the custodian of the secret radio, had befriended fellow Fleet Air Arm pilot John Nicholson at Stalag Luft III. Sub Lieutenant Nicholson had been shot down at Dunkirk the same year, but a bullet had
remained lodged in his chest near his heart throughout his time in German prison camps. On the march from Sagan, Nicholson kept
asking Bartlett if he could just stop and lie down in the snow.

“Hang on and keep moving,”
[19]
Bartlett encouraged his friend as he half dragged and half carried the still wounded Dunkirk veteran.

When they did stop, Bartlett would loosen his bootlaces to relieve
pain and swelling in his feet. After the short rest, when Bartlett’s hands were too numb to retie his own boots, Nicholson was able to reciprocate his friend’s care and concern during the forced march
that winter.

Similarly, Edward Nurse and Mac Reilley—two officers who’d
crewed up together in 1943, flown ops together with 405 Squadron,
bailed out together from the same doomed Halifax bomber,
[20]
and vouched for each other upon arrival at Stalag Luft III—turned to each other for support in the exodus from prison camp a year and a half later. In moments when they felt too frozen to continue, too
hungry to find that extra burst of energy, and too exhausted to keep moving, both Nurse, the pilot, and Reilley, the navigator, leaned on each other to keep going.

It was Sunday evening by the time the Germans emptied the satel
lite prison camp at Belaria, a few miles from Sagan. Since February
1944
, just a month before the mass escape, the Belaria camp had been home to three members of the original Stalag Luft III X Organization—
tunnel architect Wally Floody, intelligence specialist Kingsley
Brown, and security boss George Harsh. It hadn’t taken the three RCAF men long to realize that Colonel von Lindeiner’s purge of officers to Belaria had likely spared them the wrath of the Sagan Order and murder at the hands of the Gestapo. Now it was up to
them to fend for themselves as their German guards rounded up kriegies by the thousands to “save us from the Bolshevist terror,” Kingsley Brown remembered a camp officer saying. Brown added that “we found it difficult to appreciate their solicitude,”
[21]
and concluded that their German captors actually hoped to buy their way out of the war using the kriegies as human bargaining chips.

George Harsh imagined the future outside the Belaria prison
and immediately drew several conclusions. Though he had endured twelve years on a chain gang in the United States prison system back in the 1930s, and nearly three more as a POW during the war, when the evacuation order came Harsh recognized his best shot at survival depended on his two resourceful roommates. Floody told Harsh to line the insides of his jacket with newspapers
[22]
for warmth, and to fill his pockets with chocolate for quick energy. Brown told him to stash
cigarettes as barter for food along the way. Each man tied a Klim tin to his belt with a loop of string so that anything liquid, hot, and
edible could be contained in it for a meal. Together, the three men
tore apart a table and stool, and with bed-boards for skis and belts
and blankets for harnesses, fashioned a crude sleigh for transporting their clothing, bedding, and survival food supplies.