Wally Floody, better known as the Tunnel King, was born Clark Wallace Chant Floody in Chatham on April 28, 1918. His mother, Mary Chant, was a Clinton native. She married William Floody at Clinton’s Wesley Methodist Church in 1916. Wally attended vocational school in Chatham and spent his summers working on a cousin's farm tending livestock just south of Clinton. He graduated from high school in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression and worked the gold mines of northern Ontario where he learned skills that proved invaluable in planning the Great Escape.
Barbara Hehner, in The Tunnel King, wrote that when war broke out in 1939, Floody was working as a cowboy on a ranch in Alberta. He wanted to join the Royal Canadian Air Force but his marriage to Betty Baxter in 1940 almost grounded his flying aspirations as the air force only wanted single men. Eventually, with his wife’s and the RCAF’s permission, Floody was allowed to enlist. He was commissioned a pilot officer and flew a Spitfire with #401 Squadron.
P/O Floody was shot down over France and immediately captured by Germans in October 1941. As a POW, his skills as a hard rock miner in northern Ontario made him a highly prized asset in escape operations. At his first camp, Floody was involved in two unsuccessful escape attempts. For his troubles, he was sent to the famous Stalag Luft III, a large POW camp consisting of over 2,000, mostly Commonwealth, fliers (in fact, unlike in the movie, the only Americans involved in the Great Escape were wearing Canadian uniforms).
P/O Floody was shot down over France and immediately captured by Germans in October 1941. As a POW, his skills as a hard rock miner in northern Ontario made him a highly prized asset in escape operations. At his first camp, Floody was involved in two unsuccessful escape attempts. For his troubles, he was sent to the famous Stalag Luft III, a large POW camp consisting of over 2,000, mostly Commonwealth, fliers (in fact, unlike in the movie, the only Americans involved in the Great Escape were wearing Canadian uniforms).
In 1943, work began on the most ambitious escape attempt of the Second World War. RAF Squadron Leader Roger Bushell put Floody in charge of constructing three escape tunnels code-named Tom, Dick and Harry.
Engineering the tunnels was an enormous task conducted under almost impossible conditions. Each tunnel was dug to a depth of 30 feet and had to extend over 350 feet to reach the nearest wooded area. Every three feet of tunnel produced 1.5 tons of dirt. Floody overcame the difficulties of disposing of the enormous amounts of bright yellow dirt without being detected by ever-vigilant German guards.
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| Enlarged view of one of the tunnels. |
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| Actor Charles Bronson in the role of "Tunnel King" Wally Floody in movie The Great Escape. |
Eventually, the guards discovered Tom, while Dick was shut down, but Harry was still an active tunnel in March 1943. But just three weeks before the escape was to be made, he and several other airmen, all suspected escape artists, were transferred to another camp. Floody, who had done so much to make the escape happen, was denied the opportunity to be part of the escape.
Although the original plan called for 200 airmen to escape, only 76 made it out of the tunnel before the escape was discovered. Of those 76, only three escaped successfully. All the others were rounded up within a few weeks. Fifty of the recaptured airmen were shot by the Gestapo, including six Canadians.
It was a brutal act that shocked even Floody’s German guards. They allowed the inmates to erect a memorial to the executed airmen at Stalag Luft III. Floody was even allowed to attend a memorial service in December 1944. He told an interviewer in 1986 that “every time I tell my wife I might have been one of the prisoners who got away, she reminds me ‘Yes, but you might have been one of the ones they shot.”
Floody was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945.
Citing Floody’s “marked degree of courage and devotion to duty” in organizing the mass escape, King George VI awarded him with the Order of the British Empire.
He was nearly consigned to post-war anonymity until Australian Paul Brickhill’s book The Great Escape was published in 1950.
In 1962, film director John Sturges asked Floody to be the technical advisor in the big budget movie The Great Escape consisting of a cast of Hollywood A-list actors including Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson who played The Tunnel King.
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| Actor Steve McQueen, Wally Floody and Charles Bronson on site of filming for movie The Great Escape. |
Despite the film’s heavy emphasis on fictional American characters (indeed, only one of the 76 escapees was an American and he was serving in the RCAF), Floody said the film was realistic in many respects.
His accounts of how the tunnels were dug, the means used to extort or bribe guards to obtain illicit materials, right down to the electric lighting, the air pump and the trolley used to move dirt out and men into the tunnels, Floody reported, was very accurate. At one point, according to Hehner, Floody told the cast at dinner that “I know you’re getting everything right, because I had terrible nightmares last night.”
While the film gained critical and box office success, Floody enjoyed success in several post-war business ventures. He was a key organizer of the RCAF POW Association. Wally and his wife, Betty, had two sons, Brian and Michael.
Although Floody was a non-smoker, he died of emphysema on Sept. 25, 1989 at the age of 71. Many, including his son Brian, attribute the cause of his death to work in the small confined space of the tunnels at Stalag Luft III.
His 94-year-old sister, Catherine Heron, in a 2014 interview said “We’re so proud of Wally, and what he did.”
And so should we all.
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