Page 15 - RCAF Centenary

For the next two years he managed to keep out of trouble, or so it seemed. But under RAF Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, an elaborate mass escape plan through one of 3 tunnels was hatched and put into action. In the dead of night in late March 76 prisoners including McGill made it beyond the barbed wire before the guards descended on the exit.
Within 2 weeks all but 3 were apprehended but not after thousands of Nazi personnel had to be mobilized in the dragnet to round up the escapees. Hearing of this escape, Hitler became furious and personally ordered all to be shot. However, fearing reprisals on their own POWs, Hermann Goering was able to reduce this to only 50. George unfortunately was one of a group taken into the forest and shot in cold blood by the Gestapo on or about 31 March. A total of
6 Canadian airmen were executed under Hitler’s decree. His body and others were cremated, their final resting place unknown. The newspapers in Canada reported first McGill being ‘shot down’ and later his execution. At age 26, George left behind his wife Elizebeth and son Peter. This tragic event was the basis for the highly acclaimed 1963 movie The Great Escape.
F/O Clarke Wallace ‘Wally’ Chant Floody, MBE ‘The Tunnel King’ (1918 –1989)
Although born in more rural Ontario where his forebears from Northern Ireland had settled in the early 1800s, Wallace grew up in the big city, Toronto. In his teens at Northern Vocational School his main extracurricular interests centered on sports and at 6’ tall, basketball and football were natural activities for him. That was in 1932, in the midst of the Dirty 30’s, the Depression.
Although his first job appears to have been selling advertising for the Toronto Daily Star, he followed his dreams of more rural life
and higher pay which drew him to Timmons where he worked underground at the Preston East Dome silver/gold mine as a common laborer, a ‘mucker’. In 1938, a free ticket to watch an autumn football classic, the Grey Cup, drew him back to Toronto and there
as fate would have it, he met the future
Mrs. Floody, Betty Baxter. Love progressed
quickly but before tying the knot, he and his close friend, seeking more adventure, left Canada, working their way to Mexico and back before taking a job on a ranch in Alberta when war broke out.
Eight months later and back in Toronto, he and Betty married and moved north to Kirkland Lake where he resumed working underground. While there he felt the urge to enlist and with Betty’s support, put in his application to the RCAF.
It took a bit of wrangling since at that time the RCAF was not accepting married men but together they managed to finally sidestep that obstacle and on the Thanksgiving weekend he was ordered to report first to the No. 2 Manning Depot in Brandon Manitoba then it was off to Saskatchewan and the BCATP No. 2 Initial Training School. Completing that program, his next posting was to Dunnville for Service Flying