The Great Escape

A Canadian Story

Ted Barris

• Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781771024754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

A unique retelling of WWII's most dramatic escape, told through first-hand recollections of the soldiers who experienced it. On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 336-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German POW compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as &8220;The Great Escape, &8220; an intricate breakout more than a year in the making, involving as many as 2, 000 POWs working with extraordinary coordination, intelligence, and daring. Yet within a few days, all but three of the escapees were recaptured. Subsequently, 50 were murdered, cremated, and buried in a remote corner of the prison camp. But most don't know the real story behind The Great Escape. Now, on the eve of its 70th anniversary, Ted Barris writes of the key players in the escape attempt, those who got away, those who didn't, and their families at home. Barris marshals groundbreaking research into a compelling firsthand account. For the first time, The Great Escape retells one of the most astonishing episodes in WWII directly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Joint Winner of the Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2014
Globe and Mail Bestseller
Toronto Star Bestseller

1

THE KING’S REGULATIONS

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THE ESCAPE SEQUENCE from a Whitley bomber about to crash seemed pretty straightforward in the procedure manual. Pilot Tony Pengelly had practised it often enough with the other four members of his crew, although they had only done it when the Whitley was stationary and sitting on the ground. When the bail-out order comes and the Whitley is flying straight and level, the Royal Air Force (RAF) manual said, Pengelly’s co-pilot, seated behind him in the cockpit, had to move quickly down a couple of steps to the cabin escape hatch below and to the right of the pilot. By the time he got there, the observer-bombardier, positioned below the pilot in the nose of the Whitley, would have opened the escape hatch door on the floor next to him, and the door would have dropped open with gravity. That would allow Pengelly’s co-pilot to be the first to crouch, fall backwards through the escape hatch and free of the aircraft, open his parachute, and descend safely to the ground. He would be followed by the observer-bombardier, next by the wireless radio operator-gunner, and finally by the pilot himself. The manual stipulated that the tail gunner had to extricate himself from the rear turret, fit on his parachute, and climb to the escape hatch in the roof of the rear of the fuselage. The rear-gunner was always pretty much on his own.

The problem remained, however, that a Whitley wouldn’t necessarily be flying straight and level in such an emergency. It could be side-slipping, diving, spinning out of control, or upside down in its unscheduled descent. It could be stricken by icing on its wings, hit by lightning, or buffeted by upward or downward turbulence. Nor did the procedure manual take into account such variables as a power failure, fire in the fuel tanks, explosions in a bomb bay, blocked passageways, or any other unexpected impediments to an orderly escape. Finally, the official RAF instructions for bailing out of a Whitley bomber in its death throes did little to account for the final variable in such an event—the nighttime skies over enemy-occupied territory.

When Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft introduced its state-of-the-art prototype Whitley bomber aircraft in 1934, the Royal Air Force adopted it as its first heavy night bomber. Among its unique characteristics, to offset the absence of flaps, the Whitley’s main wings were set permanently at a high angle to potentially improve its takeoff and landing capabilities. Aircrews recognized right away, however, that the Whitley seemed to fly with a pronounced nose-down attitude, and its pilots sensed this added to the aircraft’s considerable drag in flight. By the time he began piloting them in 1938, Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Pengelly was flying a version of the Whitley bomber that included higher performance Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, modified fins, de-icing on the wings’ leading edge, manually operated turrets armed with .303 Browning machine guns, and an extended tail section for a better field of fire for the tail gunner. But all that made his Whitley considerably heavier and less manoeuverable. Pengelly and his comrades considered the Whitley—with a crew of five, capacity for a seven-thousand-pound payload of bombs, and a maximum speed of 230 miles per hour at sixteen thousand feet—vulnerably slow, notoriously cold, and, if forced to shut down an engine, unable to maintain altitude. Whitley crews came to refer to their bomber as “the flying coffin.”

To offset the Whitley’s alleged shortcomings and intimidating nickname F/L Pengelly—being a stickler for detail—ensured that his aircrew was fully trained to cope with them. But as meticulously as he prepared his crew, Pengelly prepared himself even more so. Whenever new navigational aids appeared at his home aerodrome, the Canadian bomber pilot learned to use them as well as his navigator could. He paid close attention to the way meteorological officers read cloud formations and wind velocities so that he could read them equally well. And because the airworthiness and efficiency of his Whitley bomber depended so directly on the skills of his Erks, the ground crew, Pengelly developed tight working relationships with the mechanics, artificers, armourers, and riggers at RAF Topcliffe, where 102 Squadron was based in Yorkshire, England.

When his Whitley Mk V arrived at Topcliffe, Pengelly studied all its attributes and idiosyncrasies—engine revolutions, gun armament, bomb loads, petrol capacity, and the location of everything from the wireless radio to the evacuation dinghy. On days the squadron wasn’t briefed and dispatched to bomb targets in German-occupied Holland or France, he even took to blindfolding himself and his aircrew, simulating nighttime conditions inside the Whitley in an emergency. Pengelly insisted that if their aircraft were hit by flak or night fighters, all members of his crew had to be able to find any piece of equipment or reach an escape hatch by touch alone. As much as he could, he wanted to inspire an esprit de corps among the other four members of his crew—J. F. M. Moyle, C. P. Followes, H. Radley, and T. Michie. During downtime at the station, Pengelly even challenged his crewmates to motorcycle races on the aerodrome tarmac to sharpen the crew’s competitive edge. The skipper of the Whitley bomber, nicknamed “M for Mother,” wanted everyone on his crew at the top of his game. No doubt, some of the British prime minister’s oratory rang in Pengelly’s ears.

“Only one thing . . . will bring Hitler down,” Winston Churchill wrote, “and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland . . . without which I do not see a way through.”[1]

Forty-eight hours before he was shot down, Tony Pengelly felt fully prepared and sharply motivated to take on the enemy. At age twenty, he’d already served as an officer in the Royal Air Force for two years, since the fall of 1938. He’d seen action as a bomber pilot as soon as the war broke out. His RAF 102 Squadron had flown operational sorties (ops)—dropping propaganda leaflets on the Ruhr River in Germany—on September 4, 1939, the second day of the war. Then, for the first year of fighting, his bomber squadron had played mostly a supporting role. His station’s Whitley aircraft had flown operations to Norway in a losing cause. They had bombed German supply lines inland from Dunkirk as the British Expeditionary Force retreated from France in late May 1940. Through the rest of that year, including the crucial Battle of Britain period, which tested principally the Fighter Command aerodromes around London, 102 Squadron was on loan to Coastal Command, escorting naval convoys to sea from Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland. Like most of his air force comrades, F/L Pengelly—a Canadian in the RAF—felt as if Bomber Command was flying in circles. He was sick of Britain’s taking it on the chin. He was itching to go on the offensive.

“For the first six months of the war,” Pengelly lamented, “I flew at night mostly over Germany to gain operational and navigational experience dropping leaflets.”[2]

If the fate of aircrews seemed up in the air, so too was the leadership and bomber strength of RAF Bomber Command. While it didn’t concern Pengelly and his crew directly, in the fall of 1940, Sir Charles Portal moved up to commander-in-chief of the RAF, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse took over Bomber Command, and Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris became Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, second in command to Portal; Harris would presently assume total charge of Bomber Command’s strategic bombing campaign.[3] Ironically, as its role suddenly seemed suspended, so did Bomber Command’s aircraft strength suddenly diminish. Late in 1940, the British Air Ministry reported a total inventory of 532 bomber aircraft—217 Blenheims, 100 Wellingtons, 71 Hampdens, 59 Whitleys, and 85 Fairey Battles.[4] RAF leadership deemed the Blenheims and Battles obsolete and began moving them to Training Command or the scrap heap. Wellingtons still proved reliable so the RAF called for another hundred of them. Meanwhile, the Hampdens and Whitleys would soon be ready for replacement by more modern aircraft; but for the moment their numbers remained
the same. The bottom line was that Richard Peirse’s Bomber Command, in the fall of 1940, was reduced by more than half, to 230 aircraft. Operations would be fewer, but more specific and with less impact.

That autumn, nighttimes brought heavy frosts and penetrating cold. Like many crews waiting for news, Pengelly’s men dressed in their flying suits for warmth and huddled inside crew huts at the station. They had hung thick curtains as much to hold in heat as to black out the windows and doors. Spartan wall decor included propaganda posters, diagrams reminding aircrew about emergency procedures, and a few favourite pin-ups. And the men sat at linoleum-topped tables marked with indelible glass and cup stains and cigarette burns from hundreds of nights like these. Their talk—of pubs, of home, of women who couldn’t resist the attraction of an RAF uniform—reflected their bravado, their boredom, and their apprehension.[5] They all just wanted the CO to come in, announce offensive ops, and get on with it. Inevitably, he did arrive with those orders.

Mid-November brought what aircrew called the moonlight period, a time most Royal Air Force bomber crews welcomed during that phase of the war. If skies were clear, ops to a target would
be smoother without clouds buffeting them en route, targets would be more discernable, and the damage they inflicted on the ground would be more photographable. Aircrew also said a moonlit sky seemed to release them personally from the oppressiveness of flying in total darkness or dense, endless cloud. The British Air Ministry had earmarked German marshalling yards and iron smelters as high priority targets, but at the top of the list were synthetic oil plants in western Germany. A nighttime sortie against the refineries at Wesseling, near Cologne, revealed many of the shortcomings of 102 Squadron’s weapon of war—the Whitley bomber. But the emergency response aboard one of Pengelly’s sister aircraft illustrated the capability of 102 Squadron bomber crews to offset that deficiency.

On November 13, 1940, over Cologne, German anti-aircraft batteries on the ground hit the Whitley bomber piloted by Pilot Officer Leonard Cheshire. The enemy flak ignited a fire near the fuel tanks and among the target flares still inside the fuselage. With fire and smoke filling the cockpit and his bomber descending rapidly, Cheshire wrestled with the controls to keep the Whitley aloft while his crew ejected the remaining flares and battled the fires. Eventually, his crew extinguished the flames, and after nearly nine hours in the air, Cheshire brought the shredded Whitley back to base safely. For Cheshire, leaving the aircraft—even in a dire emergency—was not an option. The action earned Cheshire a Distinguished Service Order[*] and inspired the entire 102 Squadron, including F/L Pengelly. Explaining the successful return of his Whitley, Cheshire credited the variable that had overcome any of the Whitley’s inefficiencies.

“These eighteen-year-olds,” said Cheshire, himself just twenty-three, “are a remarkable breed of men.”[6]

If Cheshire’s courageous example and the exhilaration of taking the war deep into enemy territory hadn’t boosted the sense of purpose around 102 Squadron’s crew huts at Topcliffe, the news from northwest of London the next evening certainly would. On November 14 came intelligence reports that the Luftwaffe had delivered its most lethal bombing raid of the war. The same clear, moonlit skies RAF bombers relished had led four hundred German bombers to the heart of Coventry in Britain’s West Midlands. The enemy bombers had dropped five hundred tons of high explosives and thirty thousand incendiaries. The attack had destroyed three-quarters of the city’s munitions, aircraft, and armament plants, the centuries-old St. Michael’s Cathedral, and four thousand houses, more than half the city’s residential area. Britons were stunned and appalled. Pengelly had experienced the blitz himself. Earlier in the war, his private apartment had been bombed in a Luftwaffe raid that destroyed most of his photographic equipment. But cameras, lenses, and photo development gear could be replaced; nearly a thousand people had died in Coventry that night—the night immediately preceding Pengelly’s last combat flight of the war.

At the briefing for his operation, F/L Pengelly discovered that of the three ops targets slated—Berlin, Hamburg, and the airfields at Schipold and Soesterberg—the largest, Berlin, would be theirs. He’d been to Berlin first on the night of September 23–24 and three times since. This would be his fifth sortie to the German capital. In all, eighty-two Hampdens, Wellingtons, and Whitleys would set out across the North Sea that night and of them fifty bombers would attack sites in and around Berlin. The idea of security in numbers was not something Whitley crews experienced or even preferred. For most of his previous thirty trips—and commonly on Whitley sorties—Pengelly’s “M for Mother” Whitley had flown alone. As the Luftwaffe had over Coventry, the RAF operation to Berlin on November 14–15, 1940, enjoyed the assistance of moonlight, but for various reasons only half the attacking force of Whitleys actually reached the city.

At approximately ten o’clock, Pengelly and Moyle, his co-pilot, homed in on their Berlin-area objective and released their bomb load. They then decided to make a second pass over the target so that the Whitley’s newly mounted cameras could record the accuracy and damage of their attack. That’s when German anti-aircraft batteries around Berlin found their mark. Flak penetrated one of the bomber’s two engines and ignited a fire, just as it had two nights earlier aboard Cheshire’s Whitley. Pengelly reacted quickly, shutting down the engine in an attempt to prevent the fire from spreading to the fuel tanks inside the wing. Desperately, he turned the aircraft westward for home, but he knew the odds were prohibitive. The loss of one of his Merlin engines effectively cut his power in half. And the results were as predictable as a mathematical equation. Cheshire’s heroic dash for home on November 13 had succeeded because he still had two serviceable engines. Pengelly knew the technical specifications of his now one-engine Whitley—even empty of bombs—would prevent him and his crew from making it to friendly soil in England.

To his credit, the experienced bomber pilot did manage to keep the crippled bomber airborne long enough for his crew to prepare for the end. The extra minutes in the air gave each crewman enough time to tighten harnesses, secure parachutes and survival kit, and open escape hatches for evacuation. An hour west of Berlin, the radio operator tapped off an SOS on the wireless to alert RAF Coastal Command of their final descent. Five hundred miles from home, flying on one engine over German-occupied territory in a heavy bomber destined to crash or be shot down, and with just enough altitude to bail out successfully, Pengelly ordered his crew to abandon the aircraft. Then, just as the procedure manual stated, and as they had practised regularly on the ground at Topcliffe, first Moyle the co-pilot crouched and fell backward through the forward escape hatch, next Followes the observer-bombardier, then Radley the wireless radio operator (as well as Michie the tail gunner on his own out the rear hatch), and finally, Pengelly, the skipper, bailed out of the nose of their crashing Whitley. All got out safely.

When Tony Pengelly ran away from his Canadian home in Weston, Ontario, in 1938, two-and-a-half years earlier, to join the Royal Air Force, he’d resigned himself to the RAF life. It meant dedication to a life of service of indeterminate duration. Typically in the Commonwealth air forces, thirty combat operations or about two hundred hours were considered a complete tour of duty. But reaching that plateau merely entitled an airman to a six-month rest from operations (often instructing at a training station durin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Ted Barris
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• Notes
• Photograph Credits
• Copyright