MH: Were you guarded by regular troops?

McKiel: Many of them were men who had been on the Eastern Front and had lost an arm or a leg, or were incapacitated in some fashion but were still able to do guard duty. In some cases, they were fairly friendly. Some of them had immigrated to Canada or the States before the war and then gone back to Germany earlier, when Germany seemed to be getting more prosperous. So they were perfectly fluent in English. We monitored them closely. The men who did the monitoring were called stooges. They watched for ferrets and for Germans who were getting too close. If we were working on the tunnel and they got too close, we could shut down the entire operation in less than 20 seconds. And that held true for all the other activities. We could close up the mapmaking, or passport printing or anything else.

MH: Were you a penguin all the time?

McKiel: No, I did duty as a stooge as well.

MH: What else did you do?

McKiel: I was very active in the theater. We had a very classy theater in the camp. One of the plays we did was The Philadelphia Story. I played Katharine Hepburn’s role. It took me three months to learn to walk and talk like a woman! Actually, the theater played a vital role in the escape. We had a number of London West End producers, actors and technical people in the camp. So our productions were all very good, and the German officers always wanted to see our plays. We’d reserve the front two rows for them. So then we’d tell them that the play should be recorded for history. They’d always agree and give us film and let us take pictures. Of course, most of the film was used for making passport photos and documents.

MH: That is amazing. Did you know Roger Bushell?

McKiel: Oh yes. Roger was the ‘Big X.’ He had quite a reputation for escaping from various camps, and they finally sent him to Stalag Luft III because it was a new camp, and they had built it with great care and planning and thought that it was escape-proof. He was actually a student in Germany before the war. He was from South Africa, so he spoke Boer. He was quite fluent in German. He was a very bright fellow, and he ran a very tight ship. For example, when anyone came up with a plausible escape plan he would listen to it and criticize the plan and then approve or disapprove it. His word was pretty much law. He got a great deal of respect from the inmates and at the same time had a great deal of respect from the Germans. They really acknowledged that he was a dangerous individual, so he was watched in particular. He was very careful about his activities so they would not realize that something was cooking.

MH: He sounds like a hell of a guy.

McKiel: He was. And unfortunately he didn’t make it. He had an excellent escape plan himself. He was going to head to Czechoslovakia and then get out through the Balkans. He would have made it, except at the border there was a minor discrepancy on one of the papers and he was caught.

MH: Did you also know Wally Floody?

McKiel: Oh, yes. He was a Canadian hard-rock miner from Sudbury, one of the main organizers of the tunneling. He was quite a large fellow, very tough physically and very smart. He really knew his stuff. I do not know how he overcame the claustrophobia in the tunnel, but he did. He was a very fine fellow — just passed away two years ago.

MH: When the tunnel was finished in March 1944, how were people selected to go?

McKiel: Well, there were about six people who had vital information and had very good escape plans and a very good chance of getting back to England. They were given the first six spots. The rest of us — anyone who had worked on the tunnel in any capacity — were put into a lottery. My number was 327, so I knew I was not going. They shunted all of us who were not going to another hut and had all of those who were going out crowd into hut No. 104, as carefully as could be done, so the Germans would not notice. We were on edge but quite optimistic. There were still some comical things that happened. There were several men who were traveling as German officers. One of them walked into a room and the men thought he was a real German and that they were caught. The disguise was that perfect. Well, when the Great Escape finally came, we had hoped to get 220 out. But various things went wrong. There was a snowstorm that night. There was a raid on Berlin, which meant that power was cut off.

MH: Why did that affect your progress?

McKiel: We’d been able to steal wire and string the whole tunnel with lights. When the power went off, we had to resort to fat-lamps instead. Things went much slower than we expected, and we only got 76 officers out. When they broke through they discovered that the tunnel was not as long as they had anticipated. It was about 60 feet short of the woods. As a result, about 3 in the morning a sentry who was supposed to be patrolling the wire decided that he had to have a pee. He went over to the edge of the woods, and no sooner had his pants open than out popped a head between his legs! He fired his rifle and we knew then that we’d been discovered.

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