Wally Floody

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Steve McQueen (left) on the set of The Great Escape with the film's technical advisor, ex-POW Wally Floody (right) , who was one of the tunnelers involved in the real event.

Flight Lieutenant Wally Floody OBE (born Clarke Wallace Chant Floody) (April 28, 1918 - September 25, 1989), was an imprisoned Second World War pilot who was instrumental in organizing and implementing the "Great Escape" from the German Stalag Luft III prisoner of war (POW) camp.

Floody was born in Chatham, Ontario. He attended Northern Vocational School. In 1936 he headed north to work at the Preston East Dome Mines in Timmins, Ontario as a mucker shovelling the rock and mud into carts to be hauled up to the surface. The job would have a prophetic impact on Wally in a few years.

At the onset of the war, Wally worked on a ranch in Alberta when he decided to return home to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). He financed his trip back east by shovelling coal into the boiler of the locomotive for the entire trip back to Toronto. After learning that the RCAF was not quite ready for the huge influx of personnel, Wally and Betty married on May 24, 1940 and moved to Kirkland Lake, Ontario where Wally could go back to working in the mines.

In 1940, Wally and Betty were back in Toronto visiting family. Anxious to find out what was happening to his enlistment application Wally checked with the recruiting office only to find his application was at the bottom of the pile. The reason: he was now married. After convincing the recruiting officer that, "My wife backs me in this 100%", he was advised that the train was leaving for the BCATP air station in Brandon, Manitoba that evening. After a quick goodbye to his family Wally was on his way to becoming an operational pilot and flying with No. 401 Squadron). ^[1]

Operating from RAF Biggin Hill in England, his Spitfire was shot down in October 1941 over St. Omer, France, where he was met by two German soldiers. He was imprisoned at the POW camp Stalag Luft III at Żagań in what is now Poland. There he was responsible for the digging of tunnels and their camouflage, for the upcoming escape attempts by Commonwealth and European prisoners.

However, in March 1944, the German guards, always suspicious of escapes, caught the tell-tale sign of sand being dropped by one of the 'penguins' out the bottom of his pant legs and immediately rounded up Wally and 19 others and transferred them to another camp in Belaria.

The escape of 76 men went ahead on the moonless night of Mar 24, 1944. Eventually the Germans caught all but three prisoners, and to make an example of them to all the other prisoners, Hitler ordered the execution of 50 of the recaptured Allied officers under the excuse that they were shot while attempting escape. At the end of the war Wally gave evidence about conditions in POW camps at the Nuremberg Trials.

On September 22, 1946 two days after Betty and Wally's first son Brian was born, they received news that Wally had been awarded the Order of the British Empire by King George VI, the text of which said, in part,

"Flight Lieutenant (F/L) Floody made a thorough study of tunnelling work and devised many different methods & techniques. He became one of the leading organizers and indefatigable workers in the tunnels themselves. Besides being arduous, his work was frequently dangerous....F/L Floody was buried under heavy falls of sand.....but, despite all dangers and difficulties, F/L Floody persisted, showing a marked degree of courage and devotion to duty. ^[1]

Returning to civilian life he became a businessman and co-founder of the Royal Canadian Air Force Prisoners of War Association. He died on September 25, 1989.

[edit] Feature film involvement

In early 1963, Wally received a phone call from director John Sturges.^[1] He told Wally he was planning to make a movie based on the book by Paul Brickhill, an Australian flyer and writer who, like Wally, had spent time at Stalag Luft III. After Sturges' reassurance that the film was to be as accurate as theatrically possible but true to the efforts of those prisoners and the atmosphere of the camps, Wally agreed to be technical advisor on the 1963 feature film The Great Escape. He is popularly considered the real-life counterpart to that film's fictional "Tunnel King", Danny Velinski, played by Charles Bronson. ^{[2] [3]}

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Daily Telegraph obit. 1989
• RCAF No. 401 Squadron
• The Tunnel King: The True Story of Wally Floody and the Great Escape