Look! Through the port comes the moonshine astray! It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook; but ‘twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day.
— BENJAMIN BRITTEN, Billy Budd
Notwithstanding the enticing birthmark just below Marcelle’s hip, Lucien Dumais was having second thoughts about his liaison with her. Though she was a prostitute, morality was not the issue. His fiduciary responsibility for the tens of thousands of francs entrusted to him by MI9 and the security of his mission was. Knowing of his access to seemingly limitless funds, she pressured him to buy her more and more clothes, which risked drawing unwanted attention.
Cutting Marcelle off, however, risked her ire and the possibility that she would whisper Desbiens’s name and address into the ear of an official and collect a handsome reward. Dumais did not know whether Marcelle thought he was simply a sugar daddy or a British agent. But he knew it was the latter when she immediately answered “Non” when he asked her to live with him. In the hall-of-mirrors world Dumais lived in, the very fact that she knew that he was a British agent provided some protection, for she would then know also that he had powerful, if distant, friends. When he moved from Guette’s a few days later, he did not tell Guette where he would be living.
RCAF FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WALLY FLOODY SOLVES TWO TUNNELLING PROBLEMS
Wally Floody was pleased with “Harry.” Closed since the decision to concentrate on “Tom,” Harry need only a few days’ work before men who had signed up to fight from the sky resumed moiling toward freedom.
More perplexing was what to do about the yellow spoil that couldn’t be disposed of on the snow. After much discussion, Roger Bushell, who headed the Escape Committee, decided to risk hiding the spoil under the theatre—since it was built with Red Cross tools and its productions used Red Cross supplies, many thought it had what amounted to parole tool status.161 Bushell knew also that if the Germans discovered the spoil stored in the theatre’s basement, things could become difficult for Father Goudreau, for that’s where his chapel was, though perhaps the chapel’s very presence would dissuade the Germans from searching there.
Another problem was that the Canadian digger Scruffy Weir, who had been sent to Stalag Luft III after recovering from his burns, the sight of which had so shaken Brian Hodgkinson, dug too far to the right, while fellow Canadian Hank Birkland dug too far to the left. To keep Harry true, Floody hit on the idea of scheduling one to dig immediately after the other.
DUMAIS SENDS HIS FIRST SHIPMENT OF “PARCELS” TO BRITAIN
The BBC announcer was no longer concerned about Yvonne’s happiness. Instead, he said “Bonjour tout le monde à la Maison d’Alphonse,” prompting Le Cornec to open a bottle with which he, Dumais and Labrosse toasted what they hoped would be “a busy season.” A few hours later, the Allied airmen who had been hiding in nearby farmhouses arrived at Jean Gicguels’ stone cottage, not far from Geulit Cove. There, at what became known as La Maison d’Alphonse, they met what appeared as just another Frenchman doing his bit to redeem the honour of the country that had collapsed before Hitler in May 1940. Command came easily to the diminutive Canadian, who shocked the escapers by addressing them without the trace of an accent. “Well, fellows,” said Dumais, “this is the last lap of a long journey. It is the last, but the most dangerous one. We are about a mile from the Channel; if everything goes well, you’ll be aboard a British warship in two hours and in England by nine o’clock in the morning.”162
There was no moon that night, so each escaper had to hold the coattail of the one in front of him. The first man in the column held on to 18-year-old Marie-Thérèse Le Calvez’s coattail. Dumais forbade them from smoking or talking, and enjoined from coughing. “When you reach the coast, you’ll have to go down a steep [150-foot] cliff. Lie on your backs and slide down. When you get to the bottom, you’ll be told where to sit,” Dumais told them, skipping over the fact that a few hundred yards on either side of the cliff sat German listening posts.
IAN MACDONALD ACHES FOR MAIL
As Father Desnoyers would write later in the year, to glean every scintilla of life from the paper that came from beyond the wire, Kriegies “read, reread and reread letters.” Words were a balm for the soul, whether from a distant wife, parent or priest who knew you so well that he could say mass in your cadence. The healing quality of letters was so profound that many men let others read their letters so they too could hear voices from far beyond the barbed wire. Yet the happiness Ian MacDonald felt for one Canadian who received a letter turned to gnawing emptiness when he discovered that the letter was postmarked some five weeks after MacDonald estimated his own parents had been given his address.
When he wrote home later that day, instead of dwelling on his disappointment, which would only distress his parents, MacDonald sought to give them a glimpse of his life, affecting a worldly nonchalance about bombing raids: “Life is still much the same as ever, our boys in England supply excitement for us but it’s rather annoying when you have to get out of the bed in the early hrs. of the morn.”
DUMAIS FINDS AN UNLIKELY ALLY IN THE MONTMARTRE MéTRO STATION
Compared with the heart-stopping moments Dumais endured at the checkpoint in the Métro following his return to Paris, the exfiltration of 17 “parcels” from Festung Europa was routine. The inky darkness and sound of the surf hid the men as they slid down the cliff to the beach where the Royal Navy was scheduled to pick them up. It had taken only 12 minutes to unload six crates filled with weapons, ammunition, chocolate, a wireless and four million francs, and then escort the evaders into the boats.
The Montmartre Métro station, by contrast, swarmed with Gestapo and gendarmes, who were checking every suitcase. When he realized that instead of working in pairs the German and French officials were at different tables, Dumais headed for one manned by a young gendarme and tried to disarm him by joking that his suitcase contained grenades and machine guns. The time he took looking for the suitcase’s key gave Dumais the opportunity to say, “If you look in those cases, you’re a dead man … I’m not alone and others have your number.” The threat was believable because the Resistance had recently killed a number of zealous gendarmes, but it left the Frenchman unmoved, as did Dumais’s next words: “All right then, you’re either with me or against me.”163
As Dumais felt his heart beat wildly, the gendarme responded calmly, “The inspectors are watching, so you’d better open them. We’re searching for food” before making a show of lifting a few shirts out of the suitcase. The young policeman kept his composure when he saw the stacks of francs and Dumais told him, “It’s Resistance money.”
FATHER ROBERT BARSALOU JOKES
While the winter had not been cold and there hadn’t been much snow, Father Robert Barsalou wrote his family in mid-January that there had been “much darkness” due not so much to the early sunset but, rather, to the 4 p.m. “obscuration,” a word he assumed they would know from the Blitz. “In Canada, you have no experience of the ‘blackout,’ and I do not wish you to.”164
The POWs were supposed to write in pencil, but on 31 January, Barsalou was allowed to use a pen. That he found this mundane joy “interesting” says volumes about the boredom of camp life. Equally telling is the exuberance with which “l’enfant missionnaire” lists who he sees in the two pictures he had just received: father, mother, brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews and “new additions.” The only rank vacant in “Le Régiment Barsalou” (the use of “Régiment” being another sign of the years he’d spent with the military) was “brothers-in-law.” Their absence explains his plan to create “Sister-in-law’s Day,” which he knew would make his family chuckle and that showing that, after years in a POW camp, he still had his sense of humour.
Twice in the past few weeks, Dumais had reached for his gun. The first time, he handed it to an American with orders to keep watch on a certain “Olafson,” whose weak command of English didn’t jibe with his story of having had radio training in the United States, and his ignorance about the plane in which he claimed to have parachuted out of prompting a message to London. In the end, Dumais couldn’t carry out MI9’s order to “Get rid of him” because Olafson had escaped, though without enough information for the Germans to roll up Dumais’s escape line.
The second time, the gun stayed in Dumais’s hand, pointed at the chest of a man who’d been one of the senior members of Oaktree, the escape line that both Labrosse and Campinchi had worked for. In deference to them (and against his better judgment), Dumais had agreed to allow this man to join the second exfiltration from Bonaparte Beach: Operation Bonaparte II. But not only had the man Dumais called a lunatic, incredibly (given Dumais’s insistence on security), attended a loud farewell party organized by Campinchi, but the “lunatic” came south from Paris with a former helper whom he promised would also be exfiltrated. Worse, on the train they spoke English and smoked English cigarettes. Once in Brittany, the “lunatic” attended still another farewell party, at which, gun in hand, Dumais took him into custody. Dumais refused to allow the second man to join Bonaparte II and made clear what would happen to him if he returned to Brittany. The Canadian MI9 agent was equally blunt with London; if they sent the “lunatic” back to France, Dumais would “shoot him on sight.”165
Bonaparte II went off without a hitch, though Dumais was disappointed that his first Canadian “parcel” was arrested in Saint-Brieuc. “By way of compensation,” he wrote years later, “a British fighter pilot shot down near Boulogne was picked up by a post van, taken to Saint-Brieuc, joined Bonaparte and was back in England five days after he had left!”
SERGEANT MAJOR LISCOMB STANDS UP TO A NEW KOMMANDANT
They knew Stalag VIII-B was getting crowded. Still, the orders to board a train for another POW camp came as a surprise. “It was a strange feeling leaving the camp,” recalls Stan Darch. “Of course, we didn’t like it, but we knew it and we knew the guards and their routines. We knew that ‘Spitfire’ was a son of a bitch, and we knew which guards were gullible enough to supply us with what we wanted.” The going price for a radio tube was a reasonable 1,200 cigarettes. On their march to the train station, the 1,400 Canadians could not help but notice the black muzzles of the automatic weapons pointed at them.
They’d heard and seen the fleets of bombers overhead, and new arrivals had brought news of the victory in North Africa, the defeat of Italy and the Russians’ advances in the east. The train trip was, however, the Canadians’ first opportunity in a year and a half to judge the progress of the war themselves. “We were struck by the civilians that we saw. When they saw us, they did not appear too happy,” says Darch. The winter snows had covered the fields but could not hide the terrible toll the bombers had taken on houses, factories, roads and railways.
When they arrived at the POW camp near Stargard, the Kommandant asked if anyone could speak German. A man named Schillenberg of the South Saskatchewans said he did. “Later,” recalls Darch, “he told us that the Kommandant said to him, ‘That’s a German name. Why are you in the Canadian Army?’ and he answered, ‘I made my bread and butter in Canada. That’s why!’”
The men expected the usual statements about not trying to escape. Instead, Schillenberg told them that, according to the Kommandant, they’d all volunteered to work for Germany and as a result would be eligible for extra rations. As soon as the fetid men who had not yet been fed heard this, they started cursing. After a few moments, Sergeant Major Liscomb of the Essex Scottish stepped forward and the catcalls stopped, and the nonplussed Kommandant must have assumed that the natural order of command had re-established itself. Through Schillenberg, Liscomb told the Kommandant that he and the other NCOs would, quite simply, not be going out to work.
“Are you refusing to work as ordered?”
Liscomb answered, “No. We are not refusing. We [wish] to speak to the Swedish Red Cross representative before we go.”
The Kommandant stood his ground. “You have until tomorrow to make up your minds or you will be shipped to Poland.”
“Then you had better arrange for the train, sir. We could do with a ride anyway.”166 Then he turned his back on the Kommandant and returned to his place in the ranks. In the tense moments that followed, Liscomb wondered if his stand would cost him his life. It didn’t, but the Kommandant cut off Red Cross parcels and ordered a reduction in German rations. Not only did both actions violate Geneva but they degraded the men by underscoring their powerlessness. Were it not for the Canadians’ stock of cigarettes, which they bartered for food with other POWs, Darch and his comrades would have suffered severe malnutrition.
FATHER JUNEAU HAS DOUBTS
As the third anniversary of their capture neared, les religieux’s moods diverged. A month earlier, Father Larivière had written of the men of “doubtful or no baptism” among whom he’d been cast and seen religious ignorance, disinterest and, in some cases, something approaching “paganism.” Father Pierre-Paul Pellerin agreed: “In my two years of imprisonment here, I have not found a single Christian heart. I assure you, the mold is not easy to cast.”
Writing from Austria on 3 March, Father Juneau told his brother, Romeo, that he regretted that “the whole country admires” him (presumably he means the people of Saint-Paulin de Maskinongé, who had read the letters that his family had published in the local paper) because as time went on he felt “less and less up to the task.” In a letter written a few weeks later to his father, Juneau returns to this theme: “The priest in a camp does not have the right to be sad or morose. It is his duty to spread joy from the moment he enters a room…. and repeat: ‘Everything is O.K. All for the best! Carry on, my boys! It won’t be long! Have a smoke, a Canadian “fag.” Nothing but the best!’” The emptiness of these stock phrases is all the more evident because he wrote them in English.
DUMAIS RUNS THE “CROSS-CHANNEL FERRY SERVICE”
The decoder in London must have thought Labrosse had made a mistake when he called for pickups on the nights of 15, 19 and 23 March. With Paris convulsed by the discovery of dozens of dismembered and charred bodies in a house in the 16th arrondissement, it was a good time to move the 75 “parcels” stashed around the city. The discovery that the coast was under an alert prompted Dumais to send Labrosse back to Paris to cancel the pickup on 19 March. Despite the alert, on 15 March, the escape party reached the beach without incident. A moment after hearing over the walkie-talkie that the Royal Navy was a mere four miles away, an explosion rent the night. “We’ll have to pull out for the time being,” the British sailor said, “but we’ll be back.”167 After several nervous hours marked off more by the growing numbness in the arm that held the walkie-talkie to his ear than the watch on his wrist, through the static Dumais heard the code word.
The delay meant that when the boats approached the beach, dawn was close. The naval ratings and Dumais’s men quickly emptied the boats of supplies and loaded the “parcels.” As dawn broke, the ringmaster of what one wag dubbed the “Cross-Channel Ferry Service” could still make out the redoubtable boats, but the German gunners, mercifully, had not seen them.
RCAF PILOT OFFICER KEN WOODHOUSE IS SHOT DOWN AND TAKEN TO PARIS
Ken Woodhouse could not see the man asking, “Avez-vous vu un parachutiste?” But his German-accented French told him how close he was to being captured. The interval between hearing the Frenchman answer “Oui” and “over there, over there”— was just long enough for the RCAF pilot to wonder if he’d blundered by climbing into the coffin-like box on the back of a truck that drove up to him just moments after he bailed out of his Spitfire (on his 65th mission) 60 miles north of Paris.168
Maurice Rendu did not speak English, but his meaning was perfectly clear when, a few minutes after he had warded the German off and after a few more minutes’ drive, he stopped, let Woodhouse out of the box and motioned for him to crawl into a haystack and remain quiet. After Rendu drove off, Woodhouse filed the “Made in Canada” label off his nail clippers, cut the pilot wings off his shirt and cut down his flying boots before taping his dog tags to his ankle.
By dusk the 22-year-old had been moved to the house belonging to Rendu’s father, Wilfred, who warmly if embarrassingly welcomed him by exclaiming, “Mon Dieu, il est un enfant!” (My God, he’s just a child!). Soon, however, “two rough-looking men dressed in typical French farm clothing” stood by ominously as Maurice peppered him with questions that Woodhouse guessed were meant to determine that he was, indeed, an Allied pilot but which he could not answer because of his inability to speak French. As his fear built, one of the two men broke into a smile and said in unmistakable American English, “Hi Mac. Welcome to France.”
Before dawn on the 18th, Woodhouse and the two American airmen were in a truck that picked up three more men before stopping at a door set curiously in the wall of a brick building. The door led to a loading chute; from the white powder on the floor, the Canadian from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, knew they were walking into a flour mill. A second door led them into the living room of a house, where still another evader waited for them. A few hours later, the men were on a truck on their way to see a forger who was readying their identity cards. In the front seat was a gendarme who had thrown his lot in with the Resistance. There were some moments of tension when they came across German troops marching a work detail of British POWs. But, seeing the gendarme, the Germans waved the truck on and the tension lessened, though Woodhouse’s pity for his captured allies did not.
The instructions on how to behave on the train were detailed. No talking, showing that they knew each other or acting like tourists. Smoking had to be done in the French way; that is, by leaving the cigarette in the mouth. Even picking up their tickets was choreographed. Each evader had to pass through a crowded area, in the middle of which someone would slip the ticket into his hand.
Shortly before arriving at Gare du Nord, the two Resistance men shepherding Woodhouse and the American airmen to Paris asked to see their identity cards. The evaders were stunned when their “helpers” ripped up the cards and threw out the pieces, explaining that “the cards were incorrect and it was better to have none at all.” If they were captured, they could now at least pretend to be escaping unaided.
Several pairs of eyes were watching them once they arrived in Paris. Some belonged to the Gestapo. Others were unseen friends who, as the evaders circled the block outside the station, watched to see if they were being followed. Woodhouse was quite unprepared for the helper who picked them up in front of a bakery. Instead of another brawny male, a “little old lady appeared from somewhere, … [she] strutted along without a care in the world, stopped to buy some bread while we waited outside, and eventually delivered us to an apartment—and then disappeared, we never saw her again.”
WOODHOUSE AND TWO OTHER RCAF OFFICERS ESCAPE FROM BONAPARTE BEACH
Between Genevieve Schneegan and Olympe Vasseur, at whose apartment he stayed in Montmartre, and Marie-Thérèse Le Calvez, who, when they arrived in Saint-Brieuc, led Woodhouse and eight other men, including two other Canadians, to a farmer’s shack fitted out with rough-hewn beds, Woodhouse had been in the hands of three helpers. Monsieur and Madame Maurice Cavalier hid Woodhouse and arranged for new identity cards from a forger whose palette consisted of papers, inks, examples of signatures of mayors of hundreds of villages, German officials and numerous rubber stamps.
Mirielle Catherine Herveic led Woodhouse, RCAF officers Russel Barnlund and Ken Lussier, and the six other evaders onto the train from Paris to Saint-Brieuc—and, to ensure that they had their reserved compartment to themselves, threw a proper Parisian fit that cleared the compartment of the squatters. Save for the moment when the American Bob Sweatt unthinkingly lit a German soldier’s cigarette with a Ronson lighter, the trip from Saint-Brieuc to Guingamp was uneventful: because Guingamp was inside the 15-mile Restricted Zone, the evaders expected heavy security. Woodhouse and Sweatt were taken to safe house; in addition to sheltering evaders, Monsieur and Madame Laurent stored arms, ammunition, explosives and radios.
The next evening, Francis Kerambum, whose day job hauling supplies for the Germans provided both cover and much-needed petrol, drove Woodhouse, Sweatt and several other evaders to their meeting place with Le Calvez. To the men’s surprise, she immediately led them “through fields, along hedgerows, past some darkened houses and then, in a final fifty yard dash,” first to a barn and finally to the shelter.169
The following day, she brought food and, after 26 of the Allied servicemen had assembled, under the cover of darkness Le Calvez and another guide led them toward La Maison d’Alphonse. Woodhouse experienced some anxious moments, first in the minefield and then while moving along a sunken road when a German patrol unexpectedly appeared above them, which prompted Le Calvez to order the men to scatter. But he was amazed at her grasp of the topography when, in total darkness and after reassembling the group, she led them on a 200-foot course through rough cliffs down to Bonaparte Beach. There, Lucien Dumais handed Woodhouse and another man each a thermos flask filled with brandy—and copies of his action report telling them that if they were intercepted at sea, they “were to throw them overboard and let them sink.” Neither Dumais nor Woodhouse ever realized that they were countrymen. After long minutes of waiting, Woodhouse realized that the little surfboat that would ferry them to the PT-like fast boat was near when, through the sound of the waves lapping the Breton shore, they heard the swishing of muffled oars and then the soft voice of their guardian angel whispering last instructions to the men. The first group silently climbed onto the boat as soon as the crates of weapons and money were unloaded.170
As he waited anxiously below deck for the second group of men, including Barnlund, to be taken off the beach, Woodhouse marvelled at the sailors who rowed through the minefield in the dark.
Had Hermann Glemnitz not sensed something big was coming, Wally Floody would have been among the first to climb out of “Harry.” In late February, however, Glemnitz shipped him, Kingsley Brown and 17 other men to a satellite camp. Therefore, the first man to climb out of the tunnel onto the snow-covered ground was RAF Flying Officer Johnny Bull, who had been shot down just over four years earlier.
Hollywood’s The Great Escape takes more than a few liberties with the facts, but it gets right that, instead of making a run for it, Bull immediately climbed back into the shaft and told Roger Bushell that Harry had emerged from the ground 25 feet short of the wood that was to give the escapers cover, a mere 25 yards from a goon box and inside the perimeter walked by the guards.171 With more than 100 men in the tunnel behind them or in Hut 104 ready to climb into it, the decision on whether to go ahead with the break had to be made quickly and turned on the fact that their travel passes and other papers were stamped 25 March 1944. To lessen the chance of the escapers being spotted as they climbed from the 336-foot-long tunnel, a controller who, like the controllers in the tunnel, signalled via a rope when it was safe to move forward, stood behind a fence that hid him from the nearby perimeter guards.
By the time Tommy Thompson climbed out into the pre-dawn darkness and dashed to the pine trees half a football field’s distance away, six other Canadians had already begun their home runs. One, RCAF Flight Lieutenant William Cameron, immediately preceded Thompson and was his escape partner. Neither they nor the 46 men between them and the group ahead would have got anywhere had RCAF Spitfire pilot Hank Birkland, who was serving as a stationer in the tunnel, not jumped into action when he saw the tunnel collapse around RAF Squadron Leader Thomas G. Kirby-Green, on the trolley being hauled forward. It took Birkland, working in total darkness, about an hour to dig out Kirby-Green and clear and reshore Harry. Dozens of men, including at least four RCAF officers, owed their chance at freedom to another Canadian Flight Lieutenant, George McGill, who upon reaching the wood served as a controller, signalling when the sentry had passed the escape point. Sometime before he was replaced at 4 a.m., McGill froze when one of the sentries stepped into the gap of trees beyond which he was secreted. The sentry unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself before continuing his post.
Thompson and Cameron stepped into the chilled early morning air near 5 a.m., not knowing that the strengthening light of dawn had prompted the decision to halt the escape stream at number 87. As Thompson and Cameron cleared the wood, back at the shaft, Ottawa-born and -bred RAF Pilot Officer Keith Ogilvie climbed out of the tunnel. A moment later, he and several other escapers took to their heels as a guard who had just noticed several escapers lying face down in the slush as they awaited the rope-borne signal fired his rifle; thanks to another escaper who jumped up and yelled “Nicht schieβen!”—Don’t shoot!—the guard shot wildly.172
As other guards came running and the alarm went out to the surrounding area and, ultimately, the entire Reich, the escapers tried to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the camp. Even before Birkland climbed out of the tunnel, Flight Lieutenant Gordon A. Kidder and his escape partner, Kirby-Green, had reached the Sagan train station, having walked by the town’s great fountain. In the cavernous station, Kirby-Green’s broken Spanish (and weak German) aroused a woman’s suspicions but was enough to convince the policeman she called over that they were indeed Spanish workers. At 1 a.m. they boarded a train for Breslau.
James Wernham and the other 11 men in his escape group had a longer walk and wait. Knowing that the sudden arrival at the Sagan train station of a number of dishevelled men speaking poor German would trigger an alarm, Polish-born flight lieutenant Jerzy Mondschein led the group toward another station southeast of the camp. The ticket agent’s consternation when Mondschein asked for a dozen tickets to Boberröhrsdorf (then in Germany but now in present-day southeast Poland) caused a few anxious moments for the escapers, who studiedly looked nonchalant. By the time they boarded their train at 6 a.m., a machine-gun-equipped squad had descended on Hut 104 and the guards were pulling the rest of the would-be escapers from Harry.
The men arrested in the tunnel and in Hut 104 expected the harangue from the Kommandant, who, after all, would have to explain to Berlin how the Kriegies had dug yet another tunnel through which more than 80 men had escaped. Thanks to a few unsupervised moments in the Kommandant’s office that, a few days earlier, allowed a POW to rifle through the open safe, the Escape Committee knew the gist of the 4 March Aktion Kugel, Hitler’s Bullet Decree stating that escaped POWs were to be turned over to the Gestapo.173 From suborned guards, the POWs also knew that this did not apply to British and American POWs. Thus, even after the arrests began, the Kriegies were not overly alarmed; according to RAF Flight Lieutenant Tim Walenn, “The Germans would never be so unsporting as to shoot prisoners in cold blood.”174
A year earlier, Walenn would have been correct. But March 1944 was not March 1943. Since then, Italy had dropped out of the war, the Germans had been driven from North Africa and the Russians had pushed the Nazis out of the eastern Ukraine and Belarus (Belorussia). During the last week of February, American, British and Canadian bombers flew almost 7,000 sorties, bombing more than dozens of cities and factory complexes. Berlin was bombed four days in March, the bombing on the night of the 24th explaining Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel’s bad mood at a mid-morning meeting on the 25th. Keitel, who commanded the Wehrmacht, had not planned to bring up the escape. However, Hitler’s satraps constantly angled to wound one another in order to seize more power for themselves. Accordingly, near the end of the meeting, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler raised what he called, with devastating understatement, “Ein kleiner Punkt,” that there had been “another escape from the prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan.” The “small point” quickly grew in importance: first to the fact that “upward of 70 air force officers” had escaped and then to the prediction that “we will have to mobilize 70,000 auxiliaries to deal with the matter.”175
Hitler exploded in anger. “These officers are an enormous danger. You don’t realize that in view of the six million foreign people who are prisoners and workers in Germany, they are the leaders who could organize an uprising!” After catching his breath, the Führer continued in a way most congenial to the SS chief, whose secret police had long clashed with Abwehr, the army’s intelligence service. “The escaped air officers are to be turned over to Himmler.”
Knowing that the Bullet Decree exempted British and American POWs, Keitel tried to object, which only fanned the flames of the dictator’s ire. “They are all to be shot! All of them—they will not trouble us again!” Himmler, who had overseen the killing of millions in the east and in concentration camps, was not the slightest bit averse to shedding innocent blood but quickly moved to modify Hitler’s position. His stated argument, that shooting all of the escapers “would do harm to our relations with the neutral countries” is hard to credit; what exactly would Spain, Sweden or Hungary do about a few more executions? Rather, it seems as if he raised the point merely to give Hitler the opportunity to continue venting his spleen. “More than half then!” Knowing well Hitler’s lack of interest in the mechanics of his own orders, Himmler seized the moment: “Perhaps fifty would be a suitable number,” he said. When the Nazi leader did not object, Himmler added, “Very well, I shall contact my deputy [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner and have him draft an order.”176
As Kidder and Kirby-Green boarded a train for Breslau, where they changed trains for Czechoslovakia—their goal being to reach Yugoslavia—and Wernham’s party of 12 travelled toward the town of Hirschberg, Cameron and Thompson began walking through the forest. At one point, they saw that they were being followed, but when the followers did not start shooting or come running, they realized that the two men were also escapers: RAF Flight Lieutenants Brian Evans and Chaz Hall. Near 4 a.m. on the 26th, the four cold and wet men took shelter in a barn’s hayloft. When Cameron started shaking and talking to himself, the others realized he was hallucinating.
Cameron’s crisis forced the men’s gut-wrenching decision to turn themselves in. Given the number of troops and police searching for them and how close they were to Sagan, the escapers were surprised that they could not find anyone to whom they could surrender. In the end, they left the door to the barn open so that the farmer would find Cameron, and slipped away.
Late in the day, while trying to find a freight train to hop, Thompson, Evans and Hall were arrested outside a nearby village. When the Home Guard brought the three to an inn to await transfer to the prison in Sagan, Keith Ogilvie, who had been arrested by a pistol-wielding civilian, was already there. The Canadian made no sign of knowing them, and they did not acknowledge him. Thompson, who yearned to escape because he did not feel that he had pulled his “weight in this war, getting bounced in the first week,” tried arguing that he was a French worker making his way home; his Penetanguishene, Ontario, French made for a less than convincing performance.177
Cruelly, given the frigid winters he had faced walking to school in Spearhill, Manitoba, Birkland was undone by the cold and waist-deep snow he and two other men waded through that afternoon of the 26th. Like Cameron, he became delirious and started talking to himself. Whatever hope he and the others may have had about the farm family that lived in the house they made their way to evaporated when the door they knocked upon opened to reveal four German soldiers.
TOMMY THOMPSON DROPS HERMANN GöRING’S NAME
The Canadians and 13 other escapees caught near Stalag Luft III spent a day in Sagan’s prison before being transferred to the prison in Görlitz 50 miles southwest of Sagan. Meanwhile, the dragnet captured more escapees, including Pat Langford and George Wiley, and the Gestapo readied to carry out Himmler’s orders. Kaltenbrunner sent a teletype to every Gestapo district office in Germany, which, after taking the opportunity to rub Keitel’s face in it for a larger audience, relayed the order that 50 of the escapers or almost 60 per cent of them were to be executed instead of being returned to prisoner-of-war camps.
Surprisingly, only two escapers, Kidder and Kirby-Green, captured as they neared Austria, were tortured before being killed. Germany was in violation of Geneva by holding captured POWs in the civilian prison in Görlitz, but what bothered the men more was the boredom. Hall gave the others in his cell, including Ogilvie, a few laughs by writing on the wall the famed line spoken by gladiators to the Caesars before the games began: “Morituri te salutamus”—We who are about to die salute you. Nor did every interrogation seem all that threatening. RAF Flight Lieutenant T.R. Nelson recalled being held in a room that could have been the setting for a bad film, complete with a bright light shining on him and the strong smell of Gauloises cigarettes—though there were some tense moments and the mention of a concentration camp after his interrogator jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Nelson was Jewish because his mother’s name was Rebecca. Others, however, returned to their cells with more troubling stories. Wiley was told that he would not survive to see his parents.
Thompson responded, “I don’t care who you are. I’m still protected by the Geneva Convention” after his interrogator told him, “You are not in the hands of military authorities…. Anything might happen to you without that [Geneva] protection—you might never go back to the camp.” The Gestapo agent’s chuckle prompted Thompson to play his best card. “Well I don’t think that Göring would be very happy if anything happened to me. We met once, you know, back in 1939.”178
Göring was no longer the force he had been in September 1939. The populace now openly ridiculed his Luftwaffe for its inability to prevent Allied bombing raids. Furthermore, the agent knew that, since the Gestapo had been tasked with dealing with the escapers, his boss, Himmler, was in ascendance over Göring. Thus, the German’s apparent dismissal of Thompson’s claim to be under the Reichsmarschall’s personal protection: “Be that as it may, you are in civilian clothes—you are probably a spy.”
Yet Göring was still head of the Luftwaffe, minister president of Prussia and an intimate of Hitler and hence not a man to cross lightly. Since the Gestapo knew who Thompson was, the female typist’s search of Thompson’s clothing to see if it was air force issue was hardly necessary. This pièce de théâtre concluded with the words “You are fortunate—you have escaped in a soldier’s uniform; therefore you will be tried before a military court. The others will not be so lucky.” Ogilvie’s interrogation ended the same way Thompson’s did. Before leaving the office, Ogilvie saw on the Gestapo agent’s desk a paper on which 20 names were typed. Ogilvie assumed the list was the names of those in the first group of men to arrive at Görlitz Prison.
“You lucky bastards. It’s back to Sagan for you,” Ogilvie recalled another POW at Görlitz calling out in the early morning darkness as ten of their handcuffed comrades, including Canadians Birkland, McGill and Langford, strode the same path through the prison that a day earlier Wiley and five other men had taken. Ogilvie asked RAF Flight Lieutenant Albert Hake where they were going. “No idea. I imagine we’ve got another round of questioning ahead of us.”179
Wiley’s group was chosen by SS-Gruppenführer Artur Nebe, who headed the Kriminalpolizei and who, despite having commanded Einsatzgruppe B, which was responsible for murdering tens of thousands in Poland in 1941, found selecting from among the names disquieting. Looking at one group of cards, he brusquely said to his clerk, “See whether they have wives and children.” But orders were orders, and after some shuffling of cards from one pile to another, he passed a pile of 50 cards to his clerk, who arranged to have the names telegraphed to the appropriate offices.
By the close of day on 31 March, German firing squads fired 16 times, killing four Canadian and 12 other Allied airmen.