FLOODY, Clarke Wallace Chant

Clarke Wallace “Wally” Floody was the chief tunnel engineer of the Great Escape — the mass break-out by seventy-six Allied prisoners of war from the North Compound of Stalag Luft III, Sagan, on the night of 24 March 1944. Transferred out of the camp ten days before the breakout, Floody survived the war. Fifty of the escapers did not. After the liberation he gave evidence at the Nuremberg trials on the conditions in German POW camps, was appointed MBE in 1946 for his conduct at Sagan, and in 1963 served as technical adviser to the motion picture The Great Escape, whose fictional “tunnel king” character played by Charles Bronson was drawn from him.

Early life

Floody was born in Chatham, Ontario, on 28 April 1918. He attended Northern Vocational School in Toronto. In 1936, at eighteen, he headed north to work at the Preston East Dome Mines at Timmins as a mucker — the underground worker who shovels broken rock into carts at the tunnel face for haulage to the surface. The job taught him tunnelling on an industrial scale, which was directly relevant to what he would do eight years later at Sagan.

He married Betty on 24 May 1940. The couple moved to Kirkland Lake so Floody could return to the Ontario gold mines.

RCAF and capture

Floody enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 and took his pilot training through 1940 and into May 1941. By the end of May 1941 he was posted to England and flying Spitfires with No. 401 Squadron of the RCAF from RAF Biggin Hill.

On 27 October 1941 his Spitfire was shot down over Saint-Omer in occupied France. German ground troops captured him on landing. After the usual transit camps he was sent to Stalag Luft III — the Luftwaffe-run camp for Allied aircrew prisoners at Sagan (now Żagań, in south-western Poland).

The X-Organization and the tunnels

Inside Stalag Luft III, an escape committee operated under the code-name X-Organization and the command of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell (code-name Big-X). Bushell put Floody in charge of the engineering side: tunnel design, tunnel digging, and sand dispersal — the camouflage problem of getting tons of bright excavated sand out of the tunnels and into the camp’s flowerbeds and vegetable plots without German guards noticing.

Three tunnels were dug simultaneously — Tom, Dick, and Harry. The scale was extraordinary: Harry was approximately three hundred and thirty feet long and dug at a depth of thirty feet below the surface, shored with slats from the prisoners’ bed frames, lit with an improvised electric system drawn from the camp mains, and ventilated by a piston-and-valve pump built from tin cans and leather kit-bag seals. Floody supervised the design of the tunnel profile — cross-section, shoring, and station chambers — and the techniques for dispersing the sand.

He was repeatedly buried in tunnel collapses during the construction phase. His MBE citation, gazetted in 1946, specifically credits his “marked degree of courage and devotion to duty” through these buryings.

Transfer to Belaria

In March 1944, German guards caught a “penguin” — a prisoner dispersing tunnel sand — and identified tell-tale sand on the clothing of several of the X-Organization’s senior figures. Floody and nineteen others were transferred out of the North Compound to Belaria, a satellite camp. The breakout from tunnel Harry went ahead on the moonless night of 24 March 1944, ten days after Floody had been removed from Sagan. Seventy-six prisoners escaped through the tunnel. Seventy-three were recaptured. Fifty of the recaptured men were executed by the Gestapo on Hitler’s direct order, in breach of the Geneva Convention.

Floody’s transfer to Belaria almost certainly saved his life.

After the war

Floody gave evidence at the Nuremberg trials on POW conditions and on the Gestapo killings of the Sagan escapers. King George VI appointed him a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 1946 honours, citing his tunnel-engineering work.

He returned to civilian life in Canada, moved into business, and was a co-founder of the Royal Canadian Air Force Prisoners of War Association — the veterans’ association that maintained a postwar record of Canadian aircrew POW experience.

The 1963 Mirisch Corporation film The Great Escape, directed by John Sturges, was based on Paul Brickhill’s 1950 book of the same title. Floody served as the film’s technical adviser. The “Danny Velinski” character — Bronson’s tunnel king — was drawn directly from Floody’s role at Stalag Luft III.

Floody died in Toronto on 25 September 1989, at the age of seventy-one.