IN MAY, ONLY weeks into the digging of Tom, Dick and Harry, two dramatic things occurred on the same day. Work was proceeding slowly in Dick. Three men including Wally Floody were still completing the tunnel’s dispersal area when there was a massive cave-in. Two men shot up the shaft’s ladder as the sandy soil poured into the hole behind them like water at the flood. Floody, last man out, was caught on the ladder, trapped, and overwhelmed. He was almost suffocated. Luckily for him, the two men above were able to reach down, grab the unconscious Floody, and pluck him to safety. Floody proved to possess nerves of steel. The next day, he went back down the ‘rat hole’, as Brickhill called it, and in just four days he and his team had repaired the damage caused by the fall, and resumed tunnelling.
The day of Dick’s cave-in, Wing Commander Harry ‘Wings’ Day arrived back at Stalag Luft 3. Wings had been one of the camp’s original inhabitants, after his Blenheim bomber had been shot out of the sky on a reconnaissance flight over the Rhineland on Friday the 13th of October, 1939. Transferred by the Luftwaffe from Stalag Luft 3 to the Schubin camp in April 1942, becoming Senior British Officer there, Day had been one of thirty-four RAF officers in the Schubin tunnel break. Although all got out of the camp undetected, two escapees had drowned in the Baltic trying to cross to neutral Sweden. The remainder, including Day, had soon been recaptured. After spending weeks in the Schubin Cooler, Day had been sent back to Sagan as part of the transfer of all British prisoners from Schubin. The Germans turned their old camp into Oflag 64, a camp for US Army officers.
Day was offered a bunk in 104, but when he learned that a tunnel was being dug from there he recoiled from the idea. He well knew that a man’s life wasn’t his own when a tunnel was being dug from his block; too much inconvenience and too many security precautions to be able to relax. Day ended up moving into Brickhill’s block, 103. Brickhill was to describe Day as looking like a hungry and unfriendly hawk. But Day had his congenial side, and the pair would over time become firm friends, with Brickhill respecting this determined and resourceful man who’d been a POW for almost the entire war. Because of Day’s seniority, Group Captain Massey appointed him his deputy, and let him run the show day-today. From this point forward, Day was North Compound’s SBO, in effect if not in name.
Wings Day knew how to run a compound, and knew all about daring escapes. Apart from the Schubin break, along with sixteen others he’d earlier dug his way out of Dulag Luft via the first completed RAF tunnel in the Reich. All seventeen escapees had been swiftly recaptured, but Day had learned much from that experience. He would guide X Organisation’s executive, which consisted of Roger Bushell, Norman ‘Conk’ Canton serving as Bushell’s adjutant, senior Fleet Air Arm officer Norman Quill, who’d been at Schubin with Day and been involved in the tunnelling there, and security boss Bub Clark. Collectively, the executive members were known as the Big Four, and Wings got solidly behind their mass escape enterprise.
Day would later say that no more than five per cent of prisoners were like him, spending every waking hour thinking about escape. In fact, contrary to the picture painted by Paul Brickhill and other authors, not every prisoner in North Compound was behind the Great Escape. And, contrary to a later popular belief, there was nothing in King’s Regulations that required a British officer to attempt to escape. Of the 1200 men soon populating North Compound, only half became involved in one aspect or another of the mass escape, and a number of those only did so reluctantly. Day was to reckon about 250 POWs were genuinely up for escape.87 Jerry Sage felt that, in South Compound, the number was no more than 150.88
Many Stalag Luft 3 inmates didn’t want to know about escape, and flatly refused to be involved. Content to await war’s end, they felt escape attempts potentially fatal for participants and likely to bring reprisals on other POWs. Canadian Eddy Asselin, who’d led the Schubin tunnel break – that tunnel had been named ‘Asselin’ after him – had given up escaping and would spend much of the rest of the war running a highly profitable East Compound card game based on IOUs payable post-war from back pay. Some POWs went ‘wire happy’, their behaviour ranging from weird eccentricities to total delusion. A traumatised few who’d survived being shot down in horrific circumstances, or had received ‘Dear John’ letters from wives or girlfriends, attempted suicide. One threw himself on the wire, and was machine-gunned to death. Some, gripped by chronic depression, spent all day in bed, only rising to eat. Brickhill called these men the NI, the not interested.89
By contrast, some POWs were actually enjoying incarceration, organising and participating in sporting contests or putting on regular shows in each compound’s theatre. A number of those involved in these dramas and musicals had been actors and musicians before the war. Not a few relished the opportunity to go on the stage, and some happily put on dresses and make-up to play the female roles among all-male casts. One or two in fact made quite fetching girls. A minority of the kriegies who did work for X Organisation, Paul Brickhill among them, participated voluntarily and with unbridled enthusiasm. Others had at times to be strongarmed into involvement. When Jerry Sage one day urgently called for fifty volunteers from 105 Block for a hurried diversion, only three men stepped forward. Sage had to get tough on other inhabitants, physically dragging another forty-seven men outside for the diversion.
Some prisoners didn’t even know they were being used as a diversion when a hundred-strong choir was formed under the tutelage of forty-seven-year-old Major Johnny Dodge. The choir was assembled in the open to rehearse outside a particular block window. Behind that window lay a secret engineering workshop whose men needed to bash Klim cans to make escape apparatus, and the singing covered the sound. Dodge, an American and cousin by marriage to Winston Churchill, was nicknamed the Dodger for his frequent escape attempts; he knew precisely why this choir was required. But one peeved squadron leader not in on the secret called in through the block window, telling the bashers to pipe down so he and his colleagues could sing undisturbed.
Under Day’s influence, X Organisation became even more efficient, and even more security conscious. Wings suggested that someone be appointed with specific responsibility for tunnel security. Wally Floody said he knew just the man. Floody and American George Harsh had become firm friends in camp. Harsh was a big man, grey-haired despite only being in his early thirties, and with the squashed nose of a regular pugilist. Floody knew that his intimidating friend George was Harsh by name and harsh by nature. From Georgia, Harsh had gone to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. Attached to the RAF, he became a tail gunner with exceptional night vision. His eyesight hadn’t helped him when his Halifax had been locked in searchlight beams over Cologne in 1942. With his bomber crippled by flak, Harsh had bailed out, parachuted to the ground and was captured.
Roger Bushell knew all this. But what he didn’t know, and Wally Floody and two other Georgia natives in the compound did know, was that, not long before he’d gone to Canada, George Harsh had been serving a life sentence in a Georgia prison, for murder. One winter’s day in that prison, a fellow prisoner needed to have his appendix urgently removed. With the prison snowbound, a doctor couldn’t get through, so George had operated, and saved the man’s life. The prison governor had pardoned George for that deed. But George was still a murderer. Not only had he shot dead a clerk in a grocery store robbery that went badly wrong when he was a youth, in prison he’d been in a fight with another inmate over a bar of soap. Disarming the other man of a knife, Harsh had sliced him to death with his own weapon.
In confidence, George had confessed all this to Wally Floody, who thought that such a background made George the perfect candidate for enforcing strict security over his tunnels. Harsh disagreed. He thought any mass escape doomed to fail, and likely to get them all shot. He had absolutely no desire to be involved, and told Floody so, in no uncertain terms. Floody told Bushell, and the next thing Harsh knew he was summoned to a meeting with Massey, Day and Bushell.
Wings Day informed Harsh that he was putting him in charge of security for Tom, Dick and Harry, and, if he met obstructions in the prosecution of that duty from any man in the compound, they would face court martial after the war. The implication was, of course, that Harsh could look forward to a similar fate if he refused his appointment. SBO Massey drummed home this point by telling Harsh that just because men were now behind the wire, this didn’t mean they were no longer subject to King’s Regulations. Bushell admitted that a mass escape was likely to only get a few men back to England. But that wasn’t the point, he said. It was important to cause the enemy as much disruption as possible.
‘We’re going to give these Huns as much trouble as would a division of assault troops landing on the beaches of France,’ Bushell declared.90
Harsh’s resistance buckled, and he agreed to do the job. Secretly, he still thought a mass escape crazy, and would get people killed. Yet, despite his grave misgivings, which he only shared with Floody, Harsh would do his job, with cool efficiency. He recruited two well-built deputies, Canadian George McGill and South African Neville McGarr. The trio went everywhere together. Like Chicago gangsters, they became fearsome enforcers – of tunnelling security. All new prisoners arriving in North Compound were warned by the security trio to completely ignore anything unusual they saw going on around them.
Brickhill overheard Neville McGarr tell a new arrival bunking down in 103, ‘If you see me walking around with a tree trunk sticking out of my arse, don’t stare. I’ll be doing it for a good cause.’91
Harsh also administered a ‘duty pilot’ or DP system. Every day, a different stooge sat near the front gate keeping a log of who came through the gate and when, and the time they left, so that X Organisation knew which German ferrets or officers were in the compound at any time. The ferrets soon cottoned on to this, with some jokingly ‘reporting in’ to the duty pilot as they came and went. What they didn’t know was that Harsh had set up a signalling system, inspired by US baseball team signals from dugout to players on the field, to warn men working in tunnels and workshops of enemy approach.
If ferrets were on the prowl, a stooge reading a book outside 110 would relay a warning from the duty pilot by adjusting shutters on the nearest block window. A man lounging outside 120 would blow his nose, and Harsh in 123 would warn the men working on the tunnel beneath that block to pack up. The same warning process applied to digging operations at 104 and 122, and to activities in the workshops, all of which operated in blocks on the compound’s western side, the SZ or Safe Zone, a good distance from the gate. The eastern side was designated the DZ, or Danger Zone.
Several weeks later, Tim Walenn politely complained to Big X that his forgers had nearly been sprung several times by wandering ferrets looking in windows. The Dean and Dawson artists needed to work together to share scant resources and their knowledge and skills, in good light, near windows. George Harsh decided he required a security deputy whose sole focus was safeguarding the forgers and their work – not a muscleman like himself, but a quick-witted fellow good at organisation and deception. The prisoner appointed as security chief of the forgers’ department was Paul Brickhill.
Brickhill, acutely embarrassed by his panic attack down Tom, readily accepted this responsible post, taking charge of the stooges allocated to Dean and Dawson, becoming one of just a small number of kriegies who knew everything about the mass escape. Working closely with chief forger Walenn, Brickhill devised a complex system of stooge locations and signals that allowed the forgers to work undetected in a library established in 110 Block. Forgers, who included Dicky Milne, a nephew of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne, put in three to five hours a day on their meticulous work. Copying printed documents by hand, they stopped before they tired. A tired forger made mistakes. Dean and Dawson couldn’t afford mistakes. The more complex passes took a month to complete. A mistake meant starting again from scratch.
In his new role, Brickhill became a good friend of his security associate George Harsh. It would be many years before he learned about Harsh’s murderous past in Georgia. Harsh simply told Brickhill that prior to the war he’d been a journalist in Chicago. Brickhill considered him ‘a wild, wild man’ and a ‘rambunctious soul’. When Brickhill asked Harsh how he’d been shot down, the American, lounging on the edge of his upper bunk with his legs dangling over the side, responded, ‘I was sitting on a barn door over Berlin and some bastard shot the hinges off.’92
With Tom just short of the wire, the Germans began clearing the forest beside North Compound, for a new South Compound to house US airmen, including those currently housed in North Compound. To the frustration of X Organisation, this meant that Tom would have to go even further to reach the trees. It also meant that American X-men would miss out on the escape. To enable the Yanks to go out with the rest of the escapees, the Big Four decided to close up Dick and Harry and concentrate on Tom, hoping to complete it before South Compound opened. Soon measuring thirty-five metres in length, with a ‘halfway house’ chamber midway, Tom was resplendent with a little wooden railway running its length to haul earth back to the dispersal chamber.
Meanwhile, the growing quantities of tunnelled earth could no longer be accommodated in the gardens, and the dispersal department took to storing it in emptied Red Cross ration boxes kept beneath beds in barrack blocks. This was risky, and before long a ferret discovered stored earth in Red Cross boxes in 103, Brickhill’s block. Glemnitz and his ferrets turned the compound upside down, without locating a tunnel. But now aware there was one somewhere, they were on heightened alert.
As work continued on Tom, its soil was hidden down Dick. Before long, German sound detectors picked up indications of digging near 123, starting point of Tom. Yet repeated searches of 123 by Glemnitz found nothing. And then the kriegies’ luck ran out. A conscientious ferret named Hermann stumbled on Tom’s entrance. The game was up. The triumphant Germans blew up Tom with explosives. Its loss sent a pall of gloom through the compound, but, at a mass meeting in the newly completed theatre, Massey and Bushell told kriegies that it was business as usual for X Organisation. The Big Four decided now to concentrate all efforts on Harry and break out to the north.
On 6 August, Brickhill wrote a postcard addressed to the International Red Cross in Cairo. In it, he requested that clothing he’d left behind in North Africa be sent to Matron Rimmer in Torquay, for her to send on to him at Stalag Luft 3. He listed the items he wanted: two uniforms, including the one made by Gieves Ltd, heavy brogue shoes, a forage cap, shirts, tie, socks and his RAAF greatcoat. He was insistent that he be sent at least one complete uniform, not the tunic from one and the trousers from another, which would not match. To those who knew how particular Brickhill was about his dress, this would not have seemed an unusual request.
Although it was still summer in Silesia, the camp’s German censors well knew that winter at Sagan would be bitter, and come November prisoners would need all the clothes they could lay their hands on. The censors put Brickhill’s card in the post, unaltered, and it duly reached the Red Cross in Cairo, who passed it on to the RAF. After Brickhill was confirmed as a POW, his belongings had been shipped to the Central Depository at RAF Colnbrook, at Slough, Buckinghamshire. His request was forwarded to Colnbrook and his clothing released to Matron Rimmer, who arranged for the items to be sent to Brickhill at Sagan via the Red Cross.
Brickhill had sought all these items primarily for use as escape clothes. With skilful cuts and tucks and the application of shoe polish as dye, Tommy Guest’s tailors were converting spare uniforms into civilian clothes to wear on the run, and even creating near copies of German military uniforms for some bolder German-speaking kriegies. Brickhill’s Gieves Ltd uniform, with its expensive cloth and satin lining, was ideal for transformation into a smart businessman’s suit. The brogues would complement it nicely.
When the clothing parcel reached Brickhill, he kept most items for himself, donating several pieces to colleagues for their escape rig. It seems his surplus blue RAAF greatcoat went to Dutchman Bram ‘Bob’ van der Stock, a pre-war medical student who helped out in the compound hospital, where Brickhill befriended him while hospitalised with severe bronchitis. The trousers from the parcel’s second uniform went to another escape candidate.93
In late August, to the chagrin of all prisoners, the three hundred USAAF personnel in North Compound were marched out to the new South Compound. Fresh RAF prisoners would soon fill their emptied blocks, 105 to 108. Americans who, like George Harsh, were members of the RAF remained in North Compound, but valuable X Organisation members such as Bub Clark and Jerry Sage were lost to South Compound. With Big S gone, George Harsh moved up in the X Organisation hierarchy, becoming security supremo. Clark and Sage departed vowing to dig their own tunnel and beat the Harry crew to freedom, with Clark becoming South Compound’s Big X and Sage his Big S.
Sage didn’t want to escape to get home. He had other plans. A member of the OSS (Office for Strategic Services), forerunner of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, Sage, like Brickhill, had been captured in Tunisia; in his case, during a behind-the-lines operation. The Germans never discovered that Sage was an OSS operative, codenamed Dagger. And he was itching to use his espionage skills in occupied Europe.
Later, Brickhill would learn that, on 1 September, the RAAF had promoted him to flight lieutenant, the equivalent of an army captain. By this time, he’d befriended another 103 inmate on BBC News-taking duty, Conrad Norton, a South African journalist. A civilian, Norton had been a war correspondent attached to the RAF when captured in Italy. In 1941, Norton had co-written a book, Vanguard to Victory, with fellow war correspondent Uys Krige, about South African victories against German colonial forces in East Africa during 1940–41.
Brickhill and Norton were instructed to keep their Canary transcripts absolutely exact. As the pair learned, the BBC news contained coded information sent to POW camps throughout occupied Europe by a secret British government outfit, MI9. This was, like the better known MI5 and MI6, part of the British War Office’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Based initially at London hotels and later at Wilston Park in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, MI9 had the task of facilitating and supporting escapes by British POWs and downed aircrew. It also gathered intelligence from POWs, those who’d found freedom and those still in camps. Several North Compound prisoners including Hugh Rowe and Henry Stockings had been briefed in England on the workings of MI9 prior to being shot down. Day appointed them the compound’s ‘code users’.
By day, Henry Stockings was one of Fanshawe’s penguins. At night, by the low light of a candle, Stockings and Rowe decoded messages coming in via the BBC News transcripts. They also coded texts for selected British prisoners to send messages to MI9 in their letters and postcards home. That code related to page numbers in a standard English-German dictionary.94 Outgoing messages would contain militarily important information from new prisoners, relating to what they’d seen on their way to the camp, and from X Organisation contacts on the Stalag Luft 3 staff.
Incoming messages included requests from London for specific information. In 1943 London particularly wanted to know about German rocket development, and X Organisation member Sydney Dowse, who’d been at Schubin with Day and Fanshawe, had befriended a German contact in the Stalag Luft 3 censor department who let it slip that rocket development was going on at Peenemunde on the Baltic. This information was passed on to London via coded mail from North Compound.95 Later in the year, the RAF mounted a 600-bomber raid on the Peenemunde complex which put Nazi rocket weapon development back by months. After the war, the work and very existence of MI9 remained a classified secret, in case it had to be activated again in another conflict. For that reason, Brickhill and other writers would for decades be prevented from mentioning MI9.
Among his inbound cards and letters, Brickhill had heard from Del Fox. Writing a card in reply on 27 November, he lamented that he was ‘extensively browned off’ and voiced the hope that he would see Del sometime in the future. He told her that the first snow had fallen at Stalag Luft 3, and it was getting mighty cold there. By that time there had been several shows put on by the kriegies in the compound theatre, and Brickhill reported that he’d enjoyed one or two of these. He also mentioned that he was involved in the fermentation of raisin wine for Christmas.96
Even Roger Bushell was contributing to the wine-making process, pilfering sugar from colleagues to go into the pot. The last big brew had been for riotous Fourth of July celebrations led by the Americans. This latest concoction would end up being consumed on New Year’s Eve, with near-tragic results. Most wine drinkers would come off with crushing hangovers, but one drunken young Englishman would stagger out into the snow after lights-out, and be shot by a guard, although not fatally. The SBO would ban the making of raisin wine after that.
Brickhill also told Del that he was studying French and Spanish intensively. He didn’t tell her that he had chosen to learn these two languages because his intended escape route would take him through the south of France to neutral Spain. Likewise, he failed to mention that in October the men of North Compound had been heartened to learn that the Williams trio had escaped from East Compound using their wooden-horse tunnel. All three would succeed in reaching England.
This break was encouraging news for North Compound’s X Organisation. The men of North Compound needed geeing up. While Harry’s progress had been steady, the tunnel was still well short of the woods, and digging had been suspended until the new year, when the worst of winter had passed. The Gestapo, Germany’s secret police, were seething that three POWs had escaped to England, and security in the Reich had tightened. As the X Organisation learned through its contacts, the Gestapo was now talking about shooting POWs caught on the run.
When Roger Bushell was told this, he dismissed it as a bluff, reminding colleagues that the Geneva Convention prevented the execution of POWs. And hadn’t Germany been the first nation to sign the Convention, in 1929? Bushell remained gung-ho about his big break. As tunnelling had forged ahead the previous spring, he’d trumpeted the motto ‘Home by Christmas’. Now, as the Christmas of 1943 came and went and he was still a prisoner, he was forced to revise that goal.