Carl Boggild abetted the Great Escape in World War II
The flight lieutenant was shot down over Nuremberg in 1943. As a prisoner of war he procured supplies for a tunnel out of his camp, Stalag Luft III, in what we now call the Great Escape.
Carl Boggild, 91, was a flight lieutenant on Lancaster bombers in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Shot down in 1943, he became a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft III, where he helped procure supplies for what would become known as “the Great Escape.” Boggild didn’t tunnel out but he would later stage a daring escape of his own. Here is his account:
I was shot down on the 28th of August, 1943 during a raid on Nuremberg. It was pretty hectic. We were over the target a little early, waiting for the pathfinder to drop the marker on which we bombed. We were stooging around and a fighter picked us off.
I had a parachute, but we were at quite a height. Still, it didn’t take long. All of a sudden — boom — I was in the middle of the woods. I broke my ankle. We lost three of our seven-man crew.
It was midnight. I sat where I was until it got light and then I made myself a crutch out of a branch. I went out to the edge of the woods, and there were kids with a McCormick Mowing Machine.
They took me into the farmhouse and some lady gave me pumpernickel bread and a knife to cut myself some slices. Then the Home Guard came up and we had to hide the knife very fast. They took me to a local jail.
I didn’t get any medical attention for a couple of weeks. Finally they took me to a German clinic. All they did was roll some plaster of Paris around it. But they didn’t set it.
Then, in another week or so, I got to a little hospital that was run by British doctors who were captured at Dunkirk. One of the doctors was a Harley Street bone surgeon and he reset my leg.
They took me to Stalag Luft III. It was an officers’ prison camp. There were probably 10,000 air force officers in that camp, divided into five compounds, roughly 2,000 in each.
The tunnel had been started before I got there, quite a bit before.
Practically everybody in the compound was involved. Someone had to vouch for you, because the Germans would, at different times, parachute somebody in as a spy.
The main tunnel was underneath a stove, and there was sort of a cement block on which the stove stood. The tunnel was directly underneath that. So we had to lift the stove and then the cement block.
I never went in the tunnel. It was very sandy soil and we had to have the tunnel fortified with all the bed boards. It went down 30 feet before it went out. One of my jobs was collecting bed boards.
The escape happened in March ’44. I didn’t draw a lucky ticket. I wasn’t one of the originals. We drew about 200 lucky tickets.
We only got 76 guys out. The tunnel came up a little bit too close to the road. A guard walking off-duty saw them. The s--- had really hit the fan.
Seventy-three of the guys were recaptured, 50 of them were murdered. They were caught in different spots. They were just shot by the assassins.
The Germans weren’t harder on us after the escape. Nothing really changed.
One night in January 1945, the Germans told us at about 11 o’clock at night, “Pack your gear, we have to leave here in about two hours.” You could hear the Russian guns. They were getting close.
We walked maybe 100 kilometres a day or so — across the country.
I remember once along the road, an old lady came up with a glass of milk and I grabbed it right away and drank it. The guard knocked it out of my hand. This woman gave the guard all kinds of hell.
We got to this camp up in Bremen and it was pretty poor.
In April we were moved again because our own troops were getting too close. The Germans wanted to save us, I guess to use as bargaining chips or something.
About an hour after we started marching, this little French guy, Alex, a captain in the French Air Force, and I waited until the guards weren’t looking. We rolled into a ditch and hid behind a bush until the rest of the column went on.
The first time we marched across the country in January ’45, our own people in London said nobody is to try and escape because we’re negotiating the end of the war. But the next time they moved us, Alex and I figured, “Look, we don’t care if King George himself says don’t try to escape. We’re buggering off real fast.”
I got back to England about a month before the rest of my crew.
Then I met my brother, a captain in the Navy,at Bournemouth. He told me my other brother Bill had just been killed in the army about a month before. That took the shine off quite a bit.
As told to Paul Hunter
Excerpted from the ebook Never Forget: More Stories from the Conflict Zones, by Paul Hunter and Jim Rankin. To read more, subscribe to Star Dispatches, the Toronto Star’s weekly ebook program, at
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