The Magician of Stalag Luft III (Part 3)

Part 3 of a three-part blog telling the compelling story of John Casson, magician, navy pilot, and Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war. His part in The Great Escape and how magic and performing helped him and others survive captivity.

In this part, Casson's arrives at Stalag Luft III, where he becomes a leading producer of camp entertainment, continues sending coded messages to M.I.9 and supports The Great Escape.

The Stalag Luft III commandant provides an additional introduction to this blog, with this quote:

“The [POWs] were always pitting their brains against our camp systems, more or less on the lines of each man being an individual magician working out a trick to escape. This meant that in the camps we were faced with a lot of brainy young conjurors who had plenty of time in which to work out their various tricks against us…” 

Showtime

 

In early April 1942, Lieutenant Commander John Casson was transferred to Stalag Luft III, a newly built Luftwaffe-sponsored prisoner-of-war (POW) camp near Sagan in Lower Silesia, Germany (now Zagan, Poland).

 

Along with other British and Commonwealth air force officers, his new home was in the East Compound, the first to be completed. Other compounds followed, to hold British and Commonwealth non-commissioned aircrew and U.S. Army Air Force (U.S.A.A.F.) personnel. 

 

Eventually the camp grew to 60 acres and housed about 2,500 Royal Air Force, 7,500 U.S.A.A.F. and about 900 officers from other Allied air forces, for a total of 11,000 inmates.

 

After the POWs, or kriegies, as they called themselves (from Kriegsgefangene, German for "Prisoner of War"), settled in to their new surroundings, boredom quickly set in.

Stalag Luft III guard tower

(Source: Public domain)

Lieutenant Commander John Casson R.N., Stalag Luft III POW Personnel Card 

(Source: National Archives)

To alleviate this, John Casson and others came up with a plan to convert three rooms in Hut 64 into a theatre that held 150 people:

 

"By the end of 1942 in Stalag Luft III we had designed and built for ourselves a compact and efficient little theatre.” 

 

Straight plays were produced once a fortnight, from Shakespeare and Shaw to farce. There were also revues, symphony concerts, bands concerts, gramophone recitals and a few films. Costumes were hired from Berlin. Scenery was obtained locally and paid for from a communal fund. Make-up and other theatrical supplies were supplied via the Red Cross. 

Many POWs joined in or assisted with the productions, both front and backstage. Two POWs who became involved in painting and shifting scenery, and generally lending a hand, were Flight Lieutenants Eric Williams and Oliver Philpot, who famously escaped from the East Compound in the ‘Wooden Horse’ escape.

A year or so after his arrival at Stalag Luft III, in early summer 1943, Casson was transferred to the camp's North Compound, which had just been built.

 

Once there, the POWs set about building a theatre for the North Compound. This time the Germans allowed them to construct a separate building, which seated 350 prisoners at a time. Tiered seating was made from Red Cross parcel crates, as were many of the props and sets.

 

Stalag Luft III's North Compound theatre

(Source: Public domain)

John Casson emerged as the leading organiser of camp entertainment, working alongside Wing Commander H.R. Larkin, Flight Lieutenants A.J. Madge and I.A. McIntosh and several others.

 

“From the time we opened it [in September 1943] until we were moved out of the camp in January, 1945, we put on a new show roughly every three weeks."

Of the 29 major productions put on in the North Compound theatre, Casson produced four (more than any other producer). These were Macbeth (October 1943), I Have Been Here Before (July 1944), St. Joan (September 1944) and Thark (October 1944). Each was a major undertaking, for which he obtained detailed production and direction notes from his actor parents, by post. (George Bernard Shaw actually wrote the role of St. Joan specifically for Casson’s mother).

When not producing, Casson helped or appeared in other productions, for example as a magician in revue shows or as narrator in the camp’s Christmas 1944/45 production of Messiah. Coming from a theatrical family, it was no surprise that Casson had "an expansive, theatrical style", well suited to acting, or recitals of prose or poetry. He was described as "a remarkably handsome man with a fine voice and commanding presence". 

 

John Casson narrated Stalag Luft III's 1944 recital of Handel's The Messiah

(Source: Mike Netherway)

Stalag Luft III actually cultivated a number of post-war theatricals. These included actor Peter Butterworth (a star of the Carry On film franchise), Rupert Davies (famous for playing the title role in the B.B.C.’s Maigret), Kevin McIntosh (who became National Theatre director), Talbot 'Tully' Rothwell (screenwriter for the Carry On franchise) and George Cole (who played Arthur Daley in I.T.V.’s Minder).

 

The quality of the productions was superb. Yes, the producers, directors and performers had a captive audience, but the theatre played a central role in helping the POWs survive captivity. As one of the camp newspapers recorded, “the kriegie is assured of 'escape' in the theatre”.

 

After the war, many Stalag Luft III POWs recalled the value of the theatre in improving their well-being and boosting morale. One wrote:

 

“The theatre was a magic word for us prisoners of war - as with the weekly visit to the camp’s 400-seater came escape into the atmosphere of the world we left behind, the homely humour of the Music Hall.”

 

Another added:

“The theatre was a great morale raiser: you put on your best blue and went to the theatre about every fortnight."

 

The POWs were on parole not to appropriate any stage properties for escape purposes. But that didn’t stop the theatricals supporting escapes. Which explains why, at the start of 1944, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, head of the escape committee, was accepted for the lead role of Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion …

The Escaping Club

There were many many escape attempts from Stalag Luft III. Tunnels (almost a hundred of them), gate walk-out schemes, wire attempts, wall schemes, transport schemes and a miscellany of other ideas were tried. Few escapers succeeded and even fewer were successful in leaving German occupied territory. 

 

But, Stalag Luft III gained notoriety for two escapes where some of the participants did manage to make a ‘home run’.

 

The first, massively ingenious escape, was the ‘Wooden Horse’. Three British officers, Flight Lieutenants Eric Williams and Oliver Philpot, along with army Lieutenant Michael Codner, managed to get home to England. They escaped via a tunnel dug from the centre of an exercise space, while their colleagues jumped over a wooden gymnastic vaulting horse hiding the tunnel's entrance shaft. The tunnel took three months to dig, with the entrance shaft closed and covered over with sand before the vaulting horse was packed away each day. The men escaped on 19 October 1943.

 

Film still from The Wooden Horse (1950)

(Source: London Films)

The ‘Wooden Horse’ escape took place from the East Compound. Many of the POWs in the compound joined in with the vaulting exercise, but fewer knew of the tunnelling going on below them. Casson didn’t take part (as he had been moved to the North Compound), but his friend Peter Butterworth is on record as being one of the vaulters.

 

In the East Compound, Casson’s fellow permanents from Dulag Luft took on key roles. ‘Wings’ Day was the first S.B.O. and Jimmy Buckley remained his right-hand man as head of the escape committee (or ‘Big X’).

 

By the time the North Compound was opened, Jimmy Buckley had been moved to another camp, and Roger Bushell took over as ‘Big X’. He was the mastermind behind Operation 200, the ambitious plan for a mass escape of 200 prisoners.   

 

In both camps, Casson carried on his duties as a code letter writer. Some historians have claimed Casson to be the ‘code-master’ of Stalag Luft III, but this is not supported by the official history prepared by military authorities shortly after the war. However, M.I.9 records do confirm that they received messages from Casson, as the organisation did when he was at Dulag Luft (Oberursel). Certainly, given Casson’s long time in captivity, his rank, and relationship with Bushell and ‘Wings’ Day from his time with them as a permanent at Oberursel, he would have been trusted with highly sensitive messages. 

Casson wrote after the war that:

 

"My 'cover' [for writing coded letters] was being known as from a theatrical family, running shows in the camp, so I hoped not interested in the war or escaping! I did this with the knowledge and convenience of the SBO in Dulag and Luft III and it worked!"

Aside from the theatre and coding, Casson studied German and Russian, two useful languages for a POW in eastern Germany. 

Operation 200 - The Great Escape

Operation 200, later known as ‘The Great Escape’, began when the British officers were moved into the North Compound. Right from the start, the camp was organised into five main sections. These were intelligence, security, escape, entertainment, and food and clothing. Casson was in the entertainment section, but supported the intelligence section as a code writer.

 

Rather than have many prisoners attempting a myriad of escapes, the camp was organised around Bushell’s plan for a single mass escape. Of the 1,500 officers billeted in the North Compound, some 600 were directly involved in escape preparations. It took a year to get ready.   

 

Three tunnels were dug for the escape, codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom was discovered by the Germans. Dick was abandoned, as the forest area where it would have come out was cleared by the camp authorities to expand the camp. This left Tom as the only option. 

 

All efforts were devoted to getting Tom completed and escape clothes, food and equipment, documents and money prepared; along with language lessons, intelligence briefings and much more. 

 

One key problem was finding places to dispose of the sand dug out from Tom, without the Germans noticing. Overseeing this task was Peter Fanshawe, Casson’s observer / co-pilot on the day he was shot down. He invented the concept of ‘trouser bags’ filled with sand, which could trickle out as the wearer wandered around the camp. Later, when it would have been too obvious to spread any more sand above ground, he proposed dispersing it in Dick, the undiscovered, abandoned tunnel.

 

When Fanshawe ran out of places to hide sand from the tunnel, and snow cover made it impractical to scatter it undetected, he used a large empty space under the North Compound’s theatre seating as the main dumping area.

 

The theatre played another important role in the Great Escape. On the opposite side of the compound from the entrances for Tom, Dick and Harry, it served to distract the guards’ attention from tunnelling activity. A confident of key escape committee members, Casson would have coordinated this misdirection at a high-level. Plus, the theatre disguised Roger Bushell’s role as ‘Big X’.

 

Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, mastermind of the Great Escape

(Source: Public domain)

The Germans were aware that something major was going on but all attempts to discover tunnels failed. In early March 1944, in a desperate move, 19 top suspects (including Peter Fanshawe) were transferred to other camps with no warning. This was only weeks before the escape was scheduled to take place.

 

Fortunately, Bushell’s deliberate ploy to have himself cast as the lead actor in Pygmalion, convinced the Germans that he was not ‘Big X’ or a key member of the escape plans.  

Finally, on the night of 23 March 1944 - coincidentally on the 60th anniversary of famed escapologist Harry Houdini's birth - the Great Escape began...

 

Two hundred selected men tried to escape through tunnel Tom, but only 76 managed to get out before guards detected the tunnel's exit. 

 

Miraculously, Sergeant Pers Bergsland and Second Lieutenant Jens Muller from Norway, and Flight Lieutenant Bram Van der Stok from the Netherlands, made ‘home runs’. Sadly, the other 73 escapees were captured. 

 

In normal circumstances, the 73 escapees would have been returned to Stalag Luft III and punished by a period in solitary confinement. John Casson was one of the first to hear that something different would happen to these escapees. A German officer said to him, “that he was glad that Casson hadn’t been picked for the escape, because a dire fate awaited those who had. But he could not, or would not, elaborate”.

 

In fact, infuriated by what was the largest attempted escape of the war, Hitler ordered all the escapees to be shot. In the end, 50 were murdered. The remaining 23 were returned to Stalag Luft III or other camps.

 

Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was among the 50 killed. ‘Wings’ Day was one of the survivors. 

The final year...and one last tunnel

Two months or so after the Great Escape, the Allies landed at Normandy and started their advance across Europe. From June 1944 onwards, neither the Allies, nor the Germans, had time to worry much about prisoners' mail. Letters between home nations and the prisoners slowed to a trickle and, at times, communication with the camps in Germany seemed to be broken off. 

Consequently, for the latter half of 1944, John Casson's coding activity was much reduced. Likewise, with Stalag Luft III in shock at the murder of the fifty escapees and with the war reaching its final stages, escape activity also tailed off. 

But, Casson was involved with one final Stalag Luft III escape plan - the construction of George, a fourth tunnel from the North Compound. While tunnels Tom, Dick and Harry were made famous by their role in the Great Escape, George is much less well known. 

It was probably started in the late summer of 1944. An uber-secret tunnel, only a small number of POWs worked on it. As the producer of three major productions over summer and autumn 1944, Casson would have helped the diggers use the theatre as their entry point to the tunnel. Plus, the comings and goings of the actors and stage crew, and the performances themselves, were coordinated to provide maximum cover for the tunnel operation.

Sketch of Stalag Luft III's North Compound, showing (top centre) tunnel George running from the theatre

(Source: Public domain)

George was built as a 'contingency tunnel', for use in case the advancing Soviet army prompted the German guards to turn on their prisoners. It was also used to store escape items, such as forged documents, clothing, tools, food and even a makeshift radio set.

The Long March

By the end of 1944, the Soviet's controlled the eastern half of Poland. On 12th January 1945, they launched an offensive which threatened to (and did) lead to the capture of Lower Silesia, where Stalag Luft III and several other German POW camps were located. 

Hurriedly, the camps were evacuated. On 27th January, 1945, all eleven-thousand of the POWs from the five compounds of Stalag Luft III were ordered to trek westward on a 'long march' to northern Germany. Accompanied by their guards, the emaciated POWs moved from camp-to-camp, as the Allies closed in on their enemy's borders.

The conditions were freezing (the worst winter on record at the time), there was little food and the POWs held a constant fear of getting shot by their guards as the Allies advanced. Finally, in April, the Stalag Luft III prisoners reached the outskirts of Lubeck. Sadly, about 200 men died on the way. 

At Lubeck, the POWs were liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division. As the British troops arrived, the prisoners' guards abandoned their posts and slunk off. A soldier in the formation described encountering the POWs in the vicinity of Lubeck, "... a wild delirious crowd of allied POWs surged forward, many of them British. They swarmed round the tanks, white, emancipated, hungry, footsore, but riotously happy". 

Among the freed prisoners was John Casson. 

Within a week or so, as part of Operation EXODUS (the British operation to bring POWs home), he made it back to the U.K.

After four years and ten months of captivity, Casson arrived home, quite aptly, on the 8th May 1945; otherwise known as Victory in Europe (V.E.) Day.

After the war

In March 1946, Lieutenant Commander John Casson was conferred the honour of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) by King George VI for his outstanding services while a prisoner-of-war. Lieutenant Peter Fanshawe received the same honour. The details of their "outstanding services" were not released for security reasons, but the honours hint at the contribution they made to running the camps they were captive in, and their various furtive activities.  

London Gazette entry listing O.B.E. awards to John Casson and Peter Fanshawe

(Source: London Gazette)

Earlier that year, John Casson had retired from the navy. Despite his rehabilitation and appointment as executive officer of H.M.S. Wagtail, a naval air station at Ayr on the west coast of Scotland, he realised that five years in captivity had significantly hampered his chances of further promotion.

Buoyed by the confidence and experience he gained as a magician and his foray into acting, directing and producing in Stalag Luft III, he decided to follow his parents' path into a life on the stage. 

Famed Nineteenth Century magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin once wrote, "a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician". Casson put this maxim to the test. Indeed, when he first muted the idea with his actor-director parents, Casson's mother said she had always known he would make a good actor - "Look at your conjuring, darling, that's acting". 

John Casson (c1950s)

(Source: Casson, J. Lewis & Sybil (1972))

His first job in the industry was as a low-paid assistant stage manager at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre.

"Two months [after] ... I left the naval air station, where I had been more or less in charge of the airfield and five or six hundred officers and men, [I] ... was driven to the stage-door of the Citizens' Theatre in the Gorbals, where I was under the orders of a girl of 25."

However, he rose through the theatre's ranks quickly and became the theatre's Director of Productions, under the chairmanship of James Bridie, its founder. After five years in Glasgow, in 1951, Casson took his family to Australia, becoming the resident producer for J.C. Williamson Theatres for the next two years. 

John Casson photographed directing Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson in a 1954 play

(Source: Weekly Magazine (1954))

Shortly before Casson left the U.K., Eric William's book The Wooden Horse (1949) was published. The following year, Paul Brickhill's book, The Great Escape, came out and a film-adaptation of The Wooden Horse was released. Incidentally, Casson's friend and fellow POW actor, Peter Butterworth, auditioned for a part in the film. But, the producers said he didn't look convincing enough, despite him having been one of the vaulters covering for the escapers in real life.

In his third career, Casson worked as a management consultant with PA Management Consultants, based in Melbourne, from 1954 from 1969. During this time, The Great Escape film was released in 1963, bringing renewed attention to his time at Stalag Luft III.

The Great Escape film poster (1963)

(Source: The Mirisch Company)

Despite stepping away from a theatrical career, Casson became widely known in the Melbourne area for a side-job as a presenter on GTV, a Melbourne-based TV station launched in 1957. He hosted a daily programme, called Epilogue in the last slot of the day. With his commanding voice, and in a nod to his study of theology in Dulag Luft (Oberursel), Casson delivered nightly Bible readings. His run finally ended when church authorities complained that he was not ordained. 

John Casson's later career made good use of his background in the navy and the theatre, combined with his oratory and performing skills. He described his views on the value of communication in management in his book, Using Words (1968) (still proudly recording his magic hobby in the book's author bio).

John Casson (c1960s)

(Source: Casson, J. Using Words (1968))

Returning to the U.K. in 1969, he became a successful freelance consultant, lecturing on communications and management training courses, frequently travelling back to Australia for assignments.

John's father, actor and theatre director Sir Lewis Casson, died in the same year. This prompted the younger Casson to write a biography of his famous father and mother, Dame Sybil Thorndike. Lewis & Sybil - A memoir by John Casson was published in 1972.

In 1975, John Casson appeared on an episode of This Is Your Life, celebrating the wartime and acting career of Peter Butterworth.

Occasionally in retirement, he would show family and friends a card trick or two, overlaid with an engaging, descriptive patter in his distinctive voice. He remained a member of The Magic Circle into the 1990s.

In March 1994, Casson returned to the site of the former Stalag Luft III. He attended a ceremony to mark the fiftieth anniversary of The Great Escape, and was responsible for reading out the names of the 50 murdered escapees.

John Casson's (short) appearance on This Is Your Life (1975)

(Source: Thames Television)

In Using Words, Casson refers to the skill of conjurors, as "using [the] human propensity to jump to conclusions on the basis of unchecked assumptions". He gives as an example:

"When we see a grand piano on the stage we only see one side of it. But we unconsciously assume that it's an ordinary piano and therefore that the other side of it is also a normal piano. But it doesn't have to be. The conjuror can have it built so that the back of it is an open cabinet in which he can hide a wedding cake, a couple of geese and the flags of all nations if he so desires. We shall be fooled, however, because we know it's a 'piano', and the conjuror, of course, will see to it that we are kept so entertained that we never have time or the desire to check our assumptions". 

With this short paragraph, Casson sums up his unheralded role in the Great Escape and the myriad of other escapes in Stalag Luft III; for the hive of theatrical activity he coordinated, must have 'fooled' the Germans. In the very best tradition of the magician, Casson's leading role in camp entertainment misdirected the captors, drawing their attention towards the theatre and not on Tom, Dick, Harry, or George.

John Casson (1990)

(Source: John Casson)

John Casson - sailor, pilot, magician, prisoner-of-war, theatrical director, management consultant, TV presenter and communications trainer - died in 1999, aged 90.

Quoted text is mostly taken from 'Lewis & Sybil - A memoir by John Casson' (John Casson, 1972) and 'Using Words' (John Casson, 1968).  

Look out for a future blog on another magician / prisoner-of-war from Stalag Luft III, a Battle of Britain pilot who ends up in Colditz ...

If anyone has any more information on John Casson, or magic in POW camps, please add comments below!

Related article: Part 1 of this blog tells the story of John Casson's early life, how he became a naval aviator, magician and prisoner-of-war. Blog link.

Related article: Part 2 of this blog tells the story of John Casson's capture and his time at Dulag Luft (Oberursel), where he learns how to send coded letters to M.I.9, before he moves to Stalag Luft III. Blog link.

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