Great Lakes Freezing At 94%

It has been a long time since we witnessed the Great Lakes being frozen over to the degree that they're this year.There have been times in the past that we had a similar situation. I worked with a man in the forestry at Pays Plat, Northern Ontario who was a guard at a prisoner of war detention center during the war.

He told me that the prisoner camps in  the north were not heavily guarded as there was nowhere to go. On one winter and I believe he said 1943 Lake Superior froze solid at least on the Ontario side.A small group of German POW's planned to get away from their camp by crossing the lake to escape through the USA.They gathered supplies over a time and had a sleigh made to use around the camp.

One evening as it got dark they left their barracks and loaded their sleigh and left the safety of their camp and started out across the lake. Superior was a huge lake but these prisoners were not discovered missing until late the next day and a  search was undertaken.They were not found on land and it was a few days before it was known that they left by the frozen lake.

It was thought that they made the trip and were picked up on the American side. This would have been a tremendous saga of strength, ingenuity and great direction. There was a story written about this feat in a German paper some time later. The story teller of this feat has since passed on but he told the story so many times with conviction I feel it had a ringing of the truth.