The Great Escape
At the tunnel face, a young RAF officer drenched in perspiration lay on his side, chipping at the sandy earth inches from his nose, while a second officer heaped the excavated earth into small trolleys that were hauled back to the entrance. To leave the tunnel, a man had to crawl along the excavated route and climb a wooden ladder up a shaft to a trap door that opened into the prisoners' barrack huts.
No detail too small
Roger Bushell
During the war, prisoners on both sides were duty-bound to try to escape and return to active service. For an escape bid to go smoothly, however, a great deal preparation was necessary. Once outside the wire, the prisoners needed disguises, official papers and money which would aid their passage to a neutral country. A team of self-taught tailors set about transforming items of uniform into passable civilian clothing. Some prisoners proved adept at forging official German passes, while others made miniature compasses- all carefully hidden.
Every prisoner had to memorize a detailed cover story to satisfy the strict security checks he would face at railway stations and checkpoints. While some officers chose the disguise of German soldier on leave, most opted to pose as a foreign worker from a country in Occupied Europe, since many such workers were employed in Germany at that time.
The plan for a mass escape from Stalag Luft III, a German Air Force camp for captured Allied airmen at Sagan, 130km southeast of Berlin, was conceived in the spring of 1943. Three tunnels codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry- the word 'tunnel' was never to be so much as whispered under the breath, were planned, so that if the guards discovered one of the tunnels, the other two might still escape notice. The depth for the tunnels was 9m, to avoid detection by the anti-tunnelling microphones that the Germans had sunk into the ground. The plan was put forward to the escape committee by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, a fighter pilot who had been shot down over Dunkirk in 1940. The senior British officer in the camp, Group Captain Harry 'Wings' Day, and the engineering expert, Canadian Fight Lieutenant Wally Moody, were also involved.
Before digging could even start, however, the POWs had to solve a major problem- how to get rid of the 100 tons of bright yellow earth that would be excavated. They came up with a number of imaginative ideas. While strolling about with bags of earth concealed under their baggy penguin trousers, the POWs discretely let it run out of the bottoms, then scuffed it into the grey dust of the camp. They mixed sand with soil in the compound's gardens and, at every opportunity, staged boisterous open-air combat drills that raised clouds of dust, enabling them to trample yellow sand into the ground without attracting attention.
Ferrets on the scent
Attached to every POW camp were special guards, nicknamed 'ferrets' by the prisoners, whose sole duty it was to ferret out escape attempts. The POWs kept a constant lookout for them and devised an elaborate warning system to alert tunnelers if the ferrets came to near a tunneling hut. Work was halted on Harry and Dick when word got out that a new compound was to be built over the very place where the tunnels were to have their exits, and all resources were immediately switched to Tom. The ferrets were becoming increasingly suspicious, however, and eventually they discovered Tom's entrance during a routine search and blew up the tunnel.
The final push
By early January 1944 the escape committee was confident that the Germans believed they had put an end to their escape attempts and work continued on Harry. By mid March the tunnel was complete, apart from the last few feet leading out into the fir trees that encircled the camp. The plan was to smuggle 200 officers into the tunnel in relays- if successful, this would be the biggest mass escape in history.
The operation began on March 24- a moonless night at 10:30. One by one the men scrambled down the shaft and wheeled themselves along the tunnel, switching trolleys in a shuttle system that enabled them to pass rapidly along the 102m of a single track. For a few hours all went smoothly and the officers began to pour out of the exit beyond the camp fence. But time was running out and more that 100 men had to turn back. Just before 5 o'clock in the morning disaster struck as a sentry.
In all 76 prisoners had escaped. When news of the break-out reached Hitler he reacted furiously. His first order was to shoot all the escapees on recapture, but was eventually persuaded to reduce this total to 'more than half'. As a result, a nationwide hue and cry ensued: only three escapees reached Britain via Sweden. The rest were rounded up within two weeks of Hitler's orders, and 50 of them were shot while resisting arrest or attempting further escape, among them Roger Bushell.
This vengeful act influenced the British military's decision in October 1944 that escape should no longer be a duty. But the fate of the Stalag Luft III POWs did not deter further attempts. Within just two months of the Great Escape, the daring officers of Stalag Luft III's north compound had already begun work on 'George', tunnel number four.
