Toronto, OntarioExcerpt from an article in Flightlines (below):
Flying Officer Weir shipped out in August, 1940, arriving on the south coast of England, in the middle of the Blitz, and at the apogee of German invasion fears. He was posted to RCAF 401 Squadron, which had sustained heavy losses in the Battle of Britain, and had been re-assigned to Thurso, Scotland, to regroup while protecting the skies over Scapa Flow, the main British naval base.
By October, 1941, 401 Squadron had been posted to Lancashire and re-equipped with Spitfires. Flying Officer Weir, who had accumulated 1,000 hours of operational flight time, had far exceeded the life expectancy for new fighter pilots. His luck was about to expire.
Flying sweeps with a rookie tail man over Abbeville, one of the main Luftwaffe bases in Normandy, he was shot down by a coven of Messerschmitts. In the melee, the cockpit and fuel tank burst into flame. Flying Officer Weir bailed out at 26,000 feet, a dangerously high altitude without an oxygen mask, and landed - burned, battered and bootless - about 30 km southwest of Caen.
His eyes were almost fused shut and the skin on his hands, face and neck was seared. A French farmer led him, nearly blind and in shock, to a tree stump and told him to wait for the Germans. That's how he began his nearly four years as a POW, first in a German hospital, then in Stalag Luft I on the Baltic.
"It was a nightmare," said Mrs. Weir about the three dreadful weeks that her fiancé was missing in action. She was working at Simpsons (now the Bay) as a personal shopper when she received an urgent message to go to the office. Thinking she was about to be fired, she was overjoyed to learn the real news - Flying Officer Weir was alive, albeit in a POW camp. Her relief was so palpable that she quit her job and began working for a research facility in the war effort.
Overseas, hatching escape plots was the primary conversational currency - tunnelling, sneaking under the wire, or jumping from trains when being transported from one camp to another. And escape is what Flying Officer Weir did a couple of days later when hundreds of Allied airmen were marched to the local train sta- tion, bound for Stalag Luft III, the "escape-proof" POW camp deep in Poland. But freedom lasted only a couple of days before he was rounded up in the local whorehouse, marched to Gestapo headquarters, brutally beaten, and loaded aboard another train.
With 300 other prisoners, he arrived at Stalag Luft III, near Sagan (about 160 km southeast of Berlin) in mid-April, 1942, and immediately joined the "˜X' or escape committee, even though the camp had been deliberately designed to thwart tunnelling. The barracks in the four compounds were raised several inches off the ground so guards could observe covert digging; the sandy subsoil, which was structurally fragile, was bright yellow and easily detected against the grey surface soil; finally, the Germans had embedded seismograph microphones around the perimeter of the camp to amplify digging sounds.
But they weren't counting on the determination and organizing skills of RAF squadron leader Roger Bushell. He was shot down in March, 1940, and had survived at least four POW camps and several escape attempts before arriving in Stalag Luft III in October, 1943. He immediately developed an ambitious master plan for three tunnels - Tom, Dick and Harry - and an escape strategy to spring more than 200 men, equipped with civilian clothes or uniforms, identity papers and travel documents.
Flightlines January 2018
