The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (31 page)

“Where in the hell . . . ?” Floody started in on him.

“Never mind,” Brown laughed. “There’s a group of Frenchmen
back there . . . and they’ve got a small cart with ’em loaded with bread.”
[35]
And with that he opened a blanket he’d been wearing like a
shawl to reveal three loaves of German black bread. He informed his buddies he’d swapped his wristwatch for food.

“A Rolex watch for three loaves of bread,” Harsh protested.

“They promised for the next watch to throw in a bottle of
Schnaps
too,” Brown quipped.

“That’s different,” Harsh grinned.

“Jesus,” Floody sighed. “What a set of values!”

After several days cooped up in their boxcars bound for Marlag-Milag, northeast of Bremen, the kriegies from Spremberg arrived in the marshalling yard at Tarmstedt. Peering through cracks in the boxcar walls,
they could see a changing of the guard out in the pouring rain. Since
Marlag-Milag—a naval prison—was to become their new home,
their Luftwaffe guards now handed the Commonwealth air officers
over to German marines. It was a two-hour walk from the railway yard to the gates of Marlag-Milag. There, outside the barbed-wire fencing, along a cinder roadway, the kriegies chain smoked cigarettes and stood “like cattle [with] our backs to the wind and rain,”
[36]
wait
ing to experience a naval guard search of their belongings, one man
at a time. The marine
Kommandant
seemed determined to conduct as thorough a search as any the prisoners had received from the Ger
man air force. But John R. Harris discovered that the marine guards detailed to do the inspection were just as frustrated as the kriegies; a judicious bribe to the guards resulted in a perfunctory search, and the Canadians were admitted to the compound. It still took six hours.

As best they could, Harris and some of his former roommates from the North Compound searched out a barracks block where
they could sleep comfortably. In the following days, they discovered how well off they had been at Stalag Luft III. They now had to live—
fifteen or twenty to a room—in huts lit by a couple of naked light bulbs, with no furniture and no bunks, but plenty of rats. All
they had to sleep on were bags of damp wood shavings. There were very
few stoves and even less firewood to burn in them. So the kriegies
began stripping the floors and walls—not to procure shoring for an escape tunnel, like the old days, but to fuel fires to heat their rooms and cook their meagre rations. Despite the Spartan surround
ings, John Colwell seemed perfectly at home. The morning after
he’d arrived and settled into a room in the Marlag-Milag barracks, the
Tin Man had managed to visit all the dumps in the camp to collect any discarded tin. On that first day, he manufactured a soldering lamp with a blowpipe and bashed together a two-gallon water pail and stew pot.
[37]
By the second day, his fellow kriegies from Hut
120 at Stalag Luft III had cooked a small meal for themselves and a dozen roommates. Meanwhile, Don Edy’s first edible intake at Marlag came from the dregs of his kit bag and some boiled water.

“My powdered milk was gone,”
[38]
he wrote. “And there was only a tablespoon of Nescafé left. So I put it all together with all the sugar I could find and poured in the hot water. It was a good brew all right, but it was too strong for my poor old stomach. Seconds after it went down, I was up and outside, sicker than a dog.”

The infirmary at Marlag-Milag rarely had fewer than a hundred
patients. The sick bay seemed continuously crammed to the four
walls with patients on cots or lying on the floor under any available greatcoats and blankets. There was one shower in the entire camp.
It was located in the ablution shed and consisted of one wall, a tin roof, a cement floor, and a cold-water shower with a pretty much unobscured view of the great outdoors. And the north Germany
dampness seemed to seep into everything. Robert Buckham said the
rain in Tarmstedt would “take first prize in density;
[39]
”
it could pen
etrate broken windows, roofs, floors, and walls, as well as socks and
shoes, no matter how dried out they seemed. The continuous rain
even forced cancellation of numerous appells—remarkable in a naval
prison. The Commonwealth aircrew kriegies, mostly Canadians,
would spend the next ten weeks at Marlag-Milag. At least half their stay occurred under oppressive grey skies that pelted them with rain and snow from the nearby North Sea. The kriegies at Marlag-Milag didn’t see sunshine until March 8.

Clear skies brought a clear view of things other than the farthest
reaches of their prison compound, however. Most of the kriegies
who’d been imprisoned at Stalag Luft III hadn’t been close to an Allied bomber since the day or night they were shot down—often months
or even years ago. But suddenly, in those first days of March, they found themselves in front-row seats for some of the final airborne operations of the war. On March
8
, the kriegies at Marlag-Milag
were witness to a massive nighttime bombing attack on Hamburg. Robert Buckham watched the stream of hundreds of bombers almost circle the camp overhead en route to the target (U-boat construction pens in the harbour). When the visual show seemed over, Buckham
went to bed to get warm, but was thrown back out of bed when the
ground began to shake with the bomb explosions at Hamburg that continued for ninety minutes. The air battle that followed left quite an impression on fighter pilot Don Edy.

“The bomber stream headed home directly over the camp,”
[40]
he wrote. “We were thrilled at the sight and felt very close to those
friends of ours just overhead. Suddenly, we heard the [German] night fighters on the attack. We followed the course of the battle . . .

“We would see a pattern of twinkling lights . . . cannon shells
from the fighters. . . . Then all of a sudden an orange ball of flame as a bomber caught fire . . . then dropped towards the earth in a heart-breaking arc. I saw ten planes shot down that night in as many min
utes. I don’t think any other incident of the war shook me quite so
deeply.”

In contrast, John Colwell was again busily grinding out pots and pans and stools and bunk beds. And because he sensed both the winter and the war were nearing an end, he fashioned a pair of shorts for sitting outside in the sunshine and tore apart his flying boots to make a pair of bedroom slippers.

“The spring is sprung. The grass is riz. I wonder where the armistice is,”
[41]
he wrote in his diary on the first day of spring.

Then, just a few days later, the
Kommandant
called an unscheduled afternoon appell, ordering all the prisoners to pack for a 6:30 p.m. evacuation of the compound. That night, April 9, Colwell reported in his diary that Group Captain Larry Wray instructed the kriegies to break into the compound kitchen, steal as much white soap powder as possible, and write “R.A.F.” and “P.O.W.” in block letters on the sand of the parade ground,
[42]
indicating with a huge arrow their likely march route out of the camp, so that Allied fighters wouldn’t fire on the kriegies in transit. Wray also attempted to delay departure. He’d learned that British ground forces were just seven miles from Bremen. One day’s delay might allow the Desert Rats (British 7th Armoured Division) to overtake the evacuation march and hasten the kriegies’ liberation. But it didn’t happen. The next day, all of the prisoners from Stalag Luft III were on the march again, heading northeast from Tarmstedt and bound for Lübeck.

The first deadly strafing of kriegies happened on the road near the
town of Zeven the next day, April
10
. Several marines were killed when a flight of RAF Tempest fighter aircraft attacked one of the marching columns. They didn’t realize they were shooting at POWs. Other strafings occurred near Harsefeld over the next few days; two kriegies
were killed and seven were wounded. A few days earlier, the group of kriegies that included RCAF officer George Sweanor, housed at
Stalag XIII-D near Nürnberg, were ordered to evacuate. Depending upon which rumour he believed, Sweanor’s group was either en route
to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden to become his per
sonal hostages or toward Dachau, the Nazi death camp just outside Munich. In southeastern Germany too, however, Allied aircraft supporting General George Patton and the US Third Army had virtual air supremacy. In fact, Allied bombing of the bridge over the Danube had stopped Sweanor’s train at Ingolstadt for several hours.

“Kriegies, who still had some cigarettes, bartered them for red
and white paint,” Sweanor said, “and we painted large red crosses on white backgrounds on the roofs and sides of our boxcars.”
[43]

But the POW train had barely left Ingolstadt when the kriegies aboard heard sirens warning of an imminent air attack. Their guards
flung open the doors of the boxcars and the prisoners in the rail
way cars watched the last waves of Flying Fortresses and Liberators bombing Ingolstadt. A flight of P47 Thunderbolts flew low over the
prisoner train, but then climbed steeply, banked, and lined up the train for a strafing run. Sweanor and his kriegie comrades instinc
tively knew the boxcar was the least safe place to be under these cir
cumstances and dashed toward ditches about three hundred feet
away. The Thunderbolts were gaining too quickly, so Sweanor went
to ground and felt their strafing bullets cut a deep furrow a few feet from his prone body. When he tried again to make it to the ditch,
more Thunderbolts began strafing from the other direction. Kriegies
by the hundred were scattering in every direction, Americans among them.

“You God-damn trigger-happy idiots,” one US pilot yelled up at them. “You can see our Red Crosses.”
[44]

Several other kriegies on the periphery of the attack stood and waved their arms wildly as the fighters swooped in for their final
attacks at treetop level. One of the Thunderbolt pilots apparently
spotted the Allied uniforms on the people scattering before him and ceased firing. He climbed to rejoin the rest of his flight, likely
shared his discovery, and the flight raced away before any of the kriegies lying on the ground could record their squadron markings. An American pilot taking fire on the ground had flown with the same squadron over Italy.

“I know those bastards,” he swore out loud. “I’ll have them all
crucified!”

But the damage was done. A South African air officer near
Sweanor had most of his wrist shot away. A doctor in the group sup
plied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and a cigarette to calm the
man, while the surviving German train guards raced around
herding the non-wounded kriegies back into the boxcars. It turned out
the locomotive hauling their boxcars was mortally wounded by the
strafing and barely managed another dozen miles before dying right there on the tracks. Meanwhile, inside the boxcars the kriegies experienced a new ambiance as a result of the air attack.

“At least we could thank the Yanks for the ventilation,”
[45]
Sweanor wrote.

The American Thunderbolt pilots weren’t the only “trigger-happy” airmen in the final days of the European war. On April
19
,
1945
, RCAF pilots flying Typhoons had inadvertently strafed and killed twenty-nine kriegies
[46]
as they marched under German guard
near Gresse, on the road to Lübeck. Among the five Canadians killed
in the attack was Sergeant Robert Douglas, one of Sweanor’s
419
Squadron comrades. During a bombing operation against St. Nazaire in March
1943
, Douglas’s aircraft was thrown on its back and into an inverted spin. Bomb-aimer Douglas managed to bail out, but the pilot
got the Halifax out of the spin and flew the aircraft home; a month
later, the same crew (minus Douglas, who was then in a German POW camp) was shot down over the Skagerrak; all crew were killed. Douglas had survived the near crash, and made it through the rest of the war imprisoned, but he died at the hands of Allied fighter pilots just twenty
days short of German capitulation in Europe, May 8, 1945.
[47]

There were too many close calls for Commonwealth air officers who had come so far, but had not yet been liberated. On April
20
,
John Colwell’s group heading north from Marlag-Milag managed to get makeshift tents erected just before the heavens opened on their campsite near Elmenhorst. Then, during the night, Mosquito night fighters from Bomber Command shot up the town. Colwell and the
others watched cannon tracer bullets coming out of the sky during the attack. With the rain continuing into the next day, Colwell’s group—about thirty-five kriegies—sought shelter in a barn near Neritz, until two SS army officers showed up to move the POWs along.

“
Aus! Aussteigen!
” came the order from the Germans. They wanted everybody out of the barn in ten seconds or they would start shooting.

The kriegies realized how serious the SS officers were and scrambled out through windows and doors as fast as they could. One man missed the top rung of a ladder coming from the loft and slid to the bottom in a heap. Then, the SS men lined up Colwell and the others.