"A tense, thrilling, fabulous tale." ―Philadelphia Inquirer
They were American and British air force officers in a German prison camp. With only their bare hands and the crudest of homemade tools, they sank shafts, forged passports, faked weapons, and tailored German uniforms and civilian clothes. They developed a fantastic security system to protect themselves from German surveillance.
It was a split-second operation as delicate and as deadly as a time bomb. It demanded the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred men―every one of them, every minute, every hour, every day and night for more than a year.
Made into the classic 1963 war film of the same name starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough.
Prelude
Roger Bushell had just turned thirty when he reached Dulag Luft, the reception camp for Air Force prisoners. He was a big, tempestuous man with broad shoulders and the most chilling, pale-blue eyes I ever saw. In his early twenties he had been British ski champion, and once in an international race in Canada he had come swooping downhill like a bat out of hell and taken a bad spill over a boulder. The tip of one ski caught him in the inner corner of his right eye and gashed it wickedly. After it had been sewed up, the corner of his eye drooped permanently, and the effect on his look was strangely sinister and brooding.
It was on May 23, 1940, that he had led the twelve Spitfires of his squadron in over the coast between Dunkirk and Boulogne. Down below, men in sweaty battle dress were digging in on the beaches and spilling blood on the sand from the bombs. There weren’t many R.A.F. fighters about because there weren’t many R.A.F. fighters, and most of them were over on the rim of the battle trying to stop the dive-bombers from getting through.
Forty Messerschmitt 110’s had slid down toward the Spitfires and five of them picked on Bushell. He steep-turned and they overshot and pulled up. As he saw the last one sliding above, Bushell straightened out, pulled up, and was almost hanging on his propeller when his stream of bullets hit the German. Smoke poured out of the Messerschmitt’s port engine, and it turned on its back and went straight down.
Another Messerschmitt was coming at Bushell head-on. They were both firing; everything was red flashes, and then Bushell shot inches above the German and saw the German behind shoot steeply up, flick into a stall, and spin down, smoking. Bushell was on fire too, smoke pouring into his cockpit. His engine seized and the smoke cleared away.
Gliding down, he picked a field, and as he slid the Spitfire into it on its belly flame spurted under the engine cowlings. He had cracked his nose on the gunsight and scrambled out with blood pouring down his face. Watching the plane burn while he fished for a cigarette, he judged he was in British-held territory and with any luck would be back in his squadron in a couple of days.
A motorbike came pelting down a lane and turned in at the far end of the field. Bushell waited placidly for it, and then he saw that it wasn’t a crash helmet that the rider was wearing but a coal-scuttle helmet, and a moment later he saw the gun pointing at him.
If the Germans had realized what a troublesome man they had caught they would possibly have shot him then. It would have paid them.
Though he was a squadron leader in the R.A.F., Roger Bushell had been born near Johannesburg, and at the age of six he could swear fluently in English, Afrikaans, and Kaffir and spit an incredible distance. Later he acquired public-school polish by being educated in England at Wellington. His housemaster when he first went there summed him up very neatly in a letter to his mother: “Don’t worry about him. He has already organized the other new boys. I know the type well. He will be beaten fairly often but he will be well liked.”
At Dulag Luft the Germans put him hopefully in solitary confinement to soften him up for interrogation, but that was not an enormous help because Bushell had been a barrister with a talent for suave belligerence, and they got nothing out of him except a rather acid charm. They turned him loose then in the compound, a bare patch of earth a hundred yards square with three long, low huts surrounded by mountains of barbed wire, searchlights, and machine guns, and inhabited by an unhappy band of men trained to fight but shut up behind barbed wire while their country awaited invasion.
The senior man, Wing Commander Harry Day, had been shot down five weeks after the war started, flying a Blenheim on a suicidal, lonely daylight reconnaisance over Kaiserslautern. He’d flown as a youngster in the first war, and now he was graying, a tall, stringy, vital man with a lean face (the type they call “ravaged”) and a hooked nose. There was a wild streak in him, and prison camp didn’t help it. He was capable of a sort of austere introspection, and then it would vanish in a mood of turbulent gaiety. He could be steely and frightening, and then sometimes that wry mouth of his would relax in a gentle smile.
“The Artful Dodger,” Major Johnny Dodge, had been born an American (his mother, Mrs. Charles Stuart Dodge, was a daughter of John Bigelow, U. S. Minister to France under Abraham Lincoln). In the first week of the 1914 war, the Dodger, a smooth-cheeked youngster of twenty, sailed to England to get into the fight as soon as possible. Five years later he was a colonel with the D.S.O. and M.C. When things started again in 1939 the Dodger’s friend and family kinsman, Winston Churchill, soon had him back in the army and the Dodger was trapped a few months later with the B.E.F. in France, down the coast from Dunkirk.
Now, in his forties, he swam miles out into the channel to intercept a ship, missed it, swam back, was caught, escaped, then was caught again by the Luftwaffe and always thereafter stayed in Air Force prison camps (when he wasn’t escaping). Tall and courtly, the Dodger had an incredibly charitable nature and a strange insulation from fear. I don’t say that extravagantly. I think fear didn’t bother him. Bushell was like that and so was Wings Day.
So was Peter Fanshawe, a Fleet Air Arm lieutenant-commander, regular R.N. in character as well as fact — fair-haired Fanshawe, whom you couldn’t call Peter because he was so Royal Navy, but very sound and hard to get to know. Jimmy Buckley was also a Fleet Air Arm lieutenant-commander, more hard-boiled than Fanshawe. There were the dependable Mike Casey, Paddy Byrne, and a lot of others. In the subtle hierarchy of character, independent of rank, Bushell was soon one of the leaders in the common ambition to escape. He, Wings Day, and a dozen others started digging tunnels. They had a lot to learn about it. The first one they started under Paddy Byrne’s bed, cutting a trap door in the floor. The Germans had a lot to learn about finding tunnels too, so they got away with a lot they shouldn’t have, burrowing into the wet earth with their hands, hauling the dirt back in basins, and dumping it under the hut. It was pitch-black down in the rat hole, and they did it all by touch, working in long woolen underclothes so that dirt stains on their uniforms wouldn’t give them away.
The first tunnel was just under the wire with about eight feet to go to freedom when they ran into a spring and water gushed up and flooded them out. They started another tunnel in another direction. The Germans found it. Winter closed in and the escape season was temporarily over. You can’t hike two hundred miles over snow without much food and no shelter to a friendly border.
As spring softened the country they started a fresh tunnel under a bed in Wings Day’s room, and this time there were no serious hitches. By July it was eighty feet long, under and past the wire with only a couple of feet to dig up. And after all that, Roger got away the night before they made the break.
The prisoners were taken into an adjoining field for exercise, and in a corner of this field a goat lived in a tumble-down shed. A mock bullfight between the goat and the prisoners drew the guards’ eyes (as is was meant to), and Roger crawled into the shed. There had been a lot of debate as to how he would get on in the shed. Buckley started the old gag by saying, “What about the smell?” and Paddy gave the stock reply, “Oh, the goat won’t mind that.” And, as it happened, the goat didn’t mind at all. There was no fuss and after nightfall Roger crawled out and was away across the fields.
The next night there was a great din from a midnight party in one of the huts in the compound, and while the guards pondered on the merriment from behind their machine guns, Byrne dug out the last couple of feet of the tunnel and seventeen shadows emerged at the far end and snaked off into the woods under cover of the party noise.
Getting out of a camp is only half the battle; they learned this bitterly. They were all caught — most of them on the following day. The Dodger was snared trying to cross a bridge where there happened to be a guard. Wings Day stayed out three days till a couple of woodmen bailed him up with a shotgun. He had roughly tried to convert his uniform to look like civilian clothes, but you want a dark night to get away with that sort of thing.
Roger had crushing luck. He got away to the Swiss border and was within thirty yards of the frontier in a little village at night when a border guard stopped him. Roger pretended he was a slightly drunken ski instructor going home after arranging a skiing match in the village. The guard was friendly and believed him but said he’d better come along to the station for formal check. Knowing what that would mean, Roger charmingly agreed and suddenly bolted around a corner and was away with a couple of bullets chasing him. He thought he was completely clear when he found he’d run into a cul-de-sac with high walls all around it, and back he was brought to punitive solitary confinement in a Frankfurt jail and then to Dulag.
Still, it had been valuable experience and the prisoners had tasted blood.
It was a good lesson for the Germans, too. They “purged” Roger and the Dodger and all the others who had escaped to a new camp at Barth, up by the shores of the Baltic. Within the next year, forty-eight tunnels were started there; but water lay only about four feet under the surface so the tunnels had to be very shallow, and the Germans used to collapse them all by driving heavy wagons around the compound.
Apart from the normal fervent wish to get out of prison and back home to the war, there was plenty of other motive for escaping. The Geneva Convention lays it down that captured troops are to be properly fed. The German idea of proper feeding wasn’t much more than a formality; they fed us on about ½d. a week. If you’ve ever known hunger — not gnawing appetite, but real hunger — you’ll understand part of the reason for P.O.W. reluctance to endure German hospitality. In his first year in the bag, Roger lost nearly forty pounds.
After a few months there, he and some others were herded into cattle trucks for transfer to another camp. Roger and some others levered up the floor boards in their truck, and bodies began to slip through into the night. One man went under the wheels, had both legs cut off, and died immediately.
At night, in a siding near Hanover, Roger and a Czech officer in the R.A.F., Jack Zafouk, slipped out, reached cover, and set off for the Czech border, where Zafouk’s brother lived. Jumping a couple of goods trains, they reached the brother, who gave them money and the address of a friend in Prague, who took them in and sheltered them.
For a week they both had to keep inside the friend’s flat. Zafouk didn’t dare to go out because old friends might see him, and Roger had to stay in because he couldn’t speak Czech. The host contacted the underground and arranged for their escape through Yugoslavia, but just as they were setting out the Gestapo broke the escape chain and executed the members.
Still shut in, Roger and Zafouk waited weeks till another underground chain arranged to pass them along to Turkey. They got to the Czech border when the Gestapo broke this chain too, and they narrowly escaped back to Prague. Czech patriots shot the Gestapo chief Heydrich about that time, and hell broke loose in Czechoslovakia. There were many executions and tortures besides Lidice.
And many spiteful betrayals. One morning the bell of the flat rang sharply. The Czech host, his son, and daughter were all out. Roger and Zafouk kept quiet and didn’t answer the bell, but the door was burst open, five Germans pushed in, and in a few moments they were off to the Gestapo cells.
Zafouk was interrogated for a week and then sent to another camp. Roger was taken to Berlin, to a Gestapo cell. The Czech family was shot.
Meanwhile, other escapes were going on; that is, escapes from prison camps. No one yet had succeeded in getting back to England. At Barth, a primitive escape committee was organized to co-ordinate escape work. Wings Day nominated Jimmy Buckley as first chief. A genuine cloak-and-dagger atmosphere was creeping in. They called it the “X organization” for security reasons, and Jimmy Buckley was officially labeled “Big X.”
The Germans became escape-conscious too, and “ferrets” appeared in the compound — German security guards dressed in overalls and armed with torches and steel spikes to probe for tunnels. Then they dug sound detectors into the ground around the barbed wire to pick up sounds of tunneling, and like clockwork they found tunnel after tunnel.
But there were still other ways of escape. One man dressed himself as a ferret and walked openly out of the gate at night. Others hid in trucks that brought food into the compounds. A Swiss commission (the Protecting Power) came to inspect the camp, and while they were in the compound a team dressed in makeshift civilian clothes walked out in their place. Pat Leeson dressed himself as a sweep with a dirty face and a cardboard topper like the German sweeps wear and walked out of the gate while the real sweep was in the compound. Another reluctant captive was Douglas Bader, that phenomenal man who’d lost both his legs in an aircraft crash in the early thirties and went flying with tin legs to get a string of victories, wing commander’s rank, a D.S.O. and Bar and D.F.C. and Bar. He’d collided with a German fighter in a scrap over France and had a leg trapped immovably in his damaged cockpit. So he took his leg off (the only time he ever appreciated losing his real ones) and baled out. The R.A.F. dropped a new tin leg for him and, mobile again, Bader was so intractable that the Germans took him out of the camp and put him into a prison hospital.
A few days later, Bader sneaked into a working party of British soldier prisoners being taken to a near-by airfield for labor. He stayed four days with them there looking for a chance to jump into a plane and take off for home, but before he could make it the working party was paraded one morning and a German security N.C.O. who knew Bader appeared and put the finger on him. They packed him off to Kolditz Strafelager, the punishment camp for the naughty boys.
In England, the R.A.F. air offensive was getting into full swing and a lot of good men were being shot down. Mostly they died, but some landed alive and were captured, and the number of prisoners was growing. To cope with them, the Germans built a new camp at Sagan, a town of about 25,000 in Germany’s dust-bowl, Silesia, about halfway between Berlin and Breslau. It was up toward the Polish border and a long, long way from any friendly or neutral territory. The Germans called it Stalag Luft III, and by that name now it is notorious. We called it Goering’s luxury camp, but that was sardonic. In the spring of 1942, a couple of hundred prisoners were purged to Stalag Luft III from Barth and other camps.
Among them was a fellow with the D.F.C., a persistent escape fiend. While crates containing equipment were being loaded on the train at Barth, a German interpreter said archly to the prisoners doing the loading, “Be careful of those crates. Maybe an escaper is nailed up in one.”
The boys all dutifully said, “Ha ha, how funny that would be,” knowing very well it was funny because the D.F.C. man was nailed up in one of them. He broke out on the journey and got away for a day or so but was caught and sent to Kolditz Strafelager.
When the others reached Sagan they found it about as grim as they’d expected — six low drab wooden barrack huts in a patch of sand surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence nine feet high. Spaced about a hundred yards apart just outside the barbed wire, the “goon-boxes” stood up on their stilts about fifteen feet high so that from the little huts on top the sentries behind their searchlights and machine guns could look down into the compound with clear vision and an unrestricted field of fire. (They were called goon-boxes because every prisoner of the Third Reich referred to the Germans as Goons.)
About thirty feet inside the barbed wire ran the warning wire on its little posts about eighteen inches high. It was there to keep prisoners away from the fence, and it certainly did. If you put a foot over it, you could be reasonably sure of several bullets from the nearest trigger-happy sentry.
The night the first party arrived at Sagan, Wings Day and two others dressed up in R.A.F. uniforms they had converted to look like German Luftwaffe uniforms (all the guards were Luftwaffe) and tried to bluff their way through the gate. The guard wasn’t fooled, and they were marched off by a reproachful Kommandant for fourteen days’ solitary in the cooler. The cooler, like Grannie’s castor oil, was the German universal remedy for intransigent P.O.W. behavior and, like Grannie’s castor oil again, solitary is not funny. Even the Germans, incidentally, called it the “cooler,” an expression they picked up from us.
There were many more reluctant guests in the new camp. Jimmy Buckley had been purged there too, and he started up the “X organization” again. Before long there were several tunnel syndicates worming out under various huts and a variety of other schemes too.
Bravest of them was a brilliant idea of Ken Toft and “Nick” Nichols. Nichols was a good-looking Californian with a crew cut; a cool, composed and deliberate individualist if ever I saw one. He’d been in the American Eagle Squadron, with the R.A.F., and been shot down early in 1942. Nick didn’t seem to have any nerves, which was just as well for the kind of job that he and Toft pulled. They had a theory that halfway between the goon-boxes there should be a blind spot hidden from the sentries by the long line of thick, coiled wire. If they could get to that spot across the lethal area from the warning wire, they could cut their way through in safety (?). If the theory was right they had a slim chance of getting through the wire (probably to be caught soon after). If they were wrong, a probable bullet each.
Four goon-boxes had a view of the warning wire at the chosen spot, so Jimmy Buckley laid on four elaborate diversions. At a given signal, a prisoner yelled to the sentry in one box to ring up for an interview with the Kommandant. In front of the next, two men staged a spectacular (sham) fight and one of them was knocked out while the sentry gaped at them. Another prisoner hailed the sentry in the third box and asked permission to get a ball that had been tossed over the warning wire. By the fourth, a man was doused with a bucket of water while the sentry looked on and laughed.
And in the vital five seconds Toft and Nichols crossed to the fence and crouched down by it. A hundred men held their breath (including Toft and Nichols), but the theory worked. They weren’t seen. Nichols had a pair of crude wire-clippers made from a couple of hunks of metal. Strand by strand they worked their way through the wire till they were through. At another signal, four more diversions were repeated in front of the sentries, and Toft and Nichols ran the few yards into the cover of the woods. It would be nice to report that they got back to England, but they were caught soon after and slung into the cooler for the punitive solitary.
The tunnelers in the new compound were soon running into complications. The Germans had built the huts in the middle of the compound and cleared the ground on the far side of the wire so there was well over a hundred yards to tunnel to get to cover outside the wire. The soil was sandy and collapsed easily, and one by one the tunnels were found. One was very shallow and a horse pulling a ration wagon stuck his hoof through it, to the grief of the diggers, the joy of the Germans, and the surprise of the horse.
“Piglet” Lamond, a slight, toothy little New Zealander, won fame with his brilliant “mole” idea which greatly shortened the distance necessary to tunnel. We had been digging a sump by the ablutions hut, only about five yards from the wire, and it was Lamond’s idea to tunnel from the sump. When it was about seven feet deep he tunneled a hole in the side toward the wire, covering the entrance by hanging a coat over it. After a few days he had a little tunnel about twenty feet long, and one evening he and two others crawled into it. We buried them there alive, filling up the pit with rocks and gravel. Lamond’s idea was to tunnel the remaining few yards in the one night and surface just outside the wire before dawn.
They were all stark naked, carrying their clothes in bundles, and there was just room for them to lie one behind the other, with a few feet to spare behind.
Lamond in front did the tunneling; the other two shoved the sand back, filling up the tunnel behind them. They were only about four feet down and stuck pointed sticks up through the surface for breathing holes. It was pitch-dark down there and stiflingly foul. No one had done this sort of thing before, and it was just a theory that they could get enough air to keep them alive. For all they knew they might gradually lose consciousness and suffocate.
Prisoners watching from the nearest hut saw steam rising out of the air holes and prayed that the hundfuehrer and his Alsatian dog who patrolled the compound at night wouldn’t notice. The “moles” lost track of time after a while. Their watches stopped because of the sand, and in any case the air was too foul for a match to light. They were thinking they might be far enough to dig up and away when Lamond saw light filtering down through an air hole. It was day.
They lay sweating in the foulness all day. The tunnel was just as wide as their shoulders, and they could hardly twitch a muscle. When no more light came down the air hole they still waited a few more hours for wandering Germans to go to bed, and then they tunneled up the few feet and found themselves just outside the wire.
After tramping through the woods to the Oder River eight miles away, Piglet found a rowboat and they set off downstream toward the Baltic, hundreds of miles away. Within a few hours the boat was reported missing, and a policeman downstream on the watch for it picked them up at gunpoint.
To stop this sort of tunneling nonsense the Germans dug an eight-foot-deep ditch between the warning wire and the fence. Three men crawled nervously out of their hut one night, dodged the searchlight beams, snaked under the warning wire, dropped into the trench and started to dig a blitz “mole” tunnel like Lamond’s. They only had about twenty feet to go to get outside the wire, but they didn’t push enough sand out of their entrance hole into the trench. No matter how tightly you pack it, sand that is dug out fills up a third as much space again in its loose form. Before they reached outside the wire the sand they had passed back had filled in all the tunnel behind them and they could pass no more back. So they were trapped — couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. All they could do was to dig up, and when they surfaced it was dawn and they were caught, feeling rather foolish out there by the wire.
The Germans very quickly filled in their anti-escape trenches and took new, and much more efficient, precautions, burying microphones all around the wire, as at Barth. Over in the Kommandantur (the German administrative compound) men sat with headphones plugging in to each detector in day-and night-long watches.
Buckley heard about it and he and the tunneling experts, Wally Floody, “Crump” Ker-Ramsay, Johnny Marshall, Peter Fanshawe, and others had a conference at which they decided to dig two tunnels thirty feet deep to get out of the range of the microphones. If one tunnel was found, they might break out from the other. They made camouflaged trap doors in the floors of two huts, and then came the master stroke! They dug two shallow camouflage tunnels about thirty feet long and stopped them there. Halfway along each of these they made a second camouflaged trap in the floor and under this sank a shaft twenty feet vertically and started the real tunnel from there. If the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnels they probably wouldn’t find the secret deep shafts, and the diggers could burrow down to the real tunnel from another direction. They were learning, growing in cunning.
The ferrets did find one of the dummy tunnels, and then, by accident probably, hit upon the hidden trap door in it and that was the end of that one, the other tunnel forged ahead, the tunnelers hacking at the crumbling face in stinking darkness, passing the sand back in a metal washbasin drawn by plaited string. Special dispersers hid the sand under the hut and carefully raked it over so it did not seem obvious.
They devised a crude form of ventilation for the deep tunnel. Short sticks were fitted into sockets in each other like a fishing rod and pushed up through the soil till they broke through the top, twenty feet up. A P.O.W. sentry (always know as a stooge) lay upon the sand above to hide the stick as it pushed through, and then he camouflaged and protected the hole with a stone. Stinking air filtered up through these little holes. They made conditions just possible for working below, but only just. After a couple of hours of blind digging at the face, men crawled painfully back up with splitting heads and retched up green vomit. Pretty often it was dry retching because on German rations you didn’t have much to bring up.
Johnny Travis, a dapper little Rhodesian, had been a mining engineer until he was trapped for three days 4,000 feet down a gold mine once by a fall of rock. He had bad claustrophobia from that, but he still used to go down the tunnel and work close to screaming point for a couple of hours, then come up to vomit. The sand was so crumbly there were frequent falls and there was always a number two digger close behind to haul you out by the legs if you were buried. It was grim.
Buckley noticed that Travis was a minor genius with his hands, making baking dishes from old tins, and shaving brushes from hunks of wood and bits of string. He pulled Travis out of the tunnel and started him making escape equipment — fat lamps from old tins with fuel made from margarine boiled to extract the water, and wicks made of pajama cord. He made shovels for the diggers from bits of metal from old stoves and filed down broken table knives for chisels. (Buckley got the bits of file from bribing German guards.)
As the tunnel lengthened, the air got so bad they couldn’t go on. Buckley commandeered an old accordion from one of the prisoners, and they used this to try to pump some air in. Then Marshall, Travis and some helpers designed a rough pump from a kit bag, with old boot leather for valves. It was just finished when someone fell on it and smashed it. He made another, and the Germans found it before it could be smuggled below. He made another, and it pushed just enough air into the tunnel to enable them to carry on.
The level of the dispersed sand was rising too noticeably under the hut so they dug a short tunnel back to the adjoining hut and started putting sand under there. The main tunnel was steered under the kitchen hut to disperse more sand there, but they were disappointed to find that there was no room underneath. There was a huge fall under that hut, and Wally Floody was nearly suffocated under half a ton of sand. It shook him up.
Then the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnel. All of us held our breath, but the Germans missed the secret trap door in it. They destroyed the dummy tunnel, so Floody and Crump dug a new dummy tunnel from another room and sank another secret shaft to line up with the main tunnel again. They didn’t know the burrowing had undermined the hut foundations, and the weight above collapsed the new dummy tunnel as Floody was crawling naked along it. Ten feet of it came down along his body but by a miracle he had his face just over the trap door to the secret shaft and could breathe. The tunnel team dug madly for an hour and got him out. He was lucky.
They dug another shallow dummy tunnel, sank another deep shaft and at last made contact again with the main tunnel.
They’d been working for months now, and the X organization was slowly growing all the time. Tim Walenn and a couple of men who’d been artists before they became airmen started a little factory for forging papers and passports. Tommy Guest organized a tailor shop to convert uniforms into rough civvy clothes. More metal workers and carpenters joined Johnny Travis. The tunnel pushed on till it was over three hundred feet long; less than a hundred feet to go now, but the sand was rising blatantly under the new dispersal hut.
A gang of ferrets raided the hut one morning, cleared everyone out, and almost took it apart. Underneath they found fresh sand over the exit of the dispersal tunnel, dug down to the trap door, and traced it right back to the deep shaft. They blew up the lot.
Buckley, Wings Day, the Dodger and others were purged to Schubin, a camp up near Bromberg, in Poland. In the train going there the dogged Dodger prised up a floorboard in his cattle truck and jumped out. A guard saw him and a posse jumped off the train and persuaded him to come back at pistol point. Paddy Byrne got out too. Also caught.
Within a week of arriving at Schubin, Buckley, Wings and company were tunneling from one of the lavatories, and this time there was no hitch. The tunnel was 150 feet long when they surfaced outside the wire, and nearly forty men got out through it.
It wasn’t discovered till Appell (counting parade) next day, and even then the Germans nearly missed it. Normally we paraded in five ranks for appell, but that morning some sections paraded in fours. The German officer had nearly finished counting when he noticed some of the fives he was counting were not fives but fours, and his blood pressure nearly sprayed out of his ears.
Five thousand troops turned out for the search, and before long the escapees had nearly all been caught. Wings Day was out for a week till a Hitler Youth boy spotted him hiding in a barn, and the local Home Guard winkled him out with shotguns.
Two they never caught and this was tragedy. Jimmy Buckley and a Danish lad in the R.A.F. got to Denmark and started out in a little boat from the Zealand coast. Five miles across the water lay Sweden and freedom. No one ever found out exactly what happened. Maybe they were rammed, or shot, or just capsized. The Dane’s body was found in the sea weeks later. They never found Buckley.
Late in 1942 Roger Bushell arrived in Sagan. The Gestapo had grilled him for several months, trying to pin charges of sabotage and spying on him, but Bushell’s tough and nimble brain had kept him clear of the firing squad. They would probably have shot him in any case if Von Masse, chief censor officer at Stalag Luft III, who knew and liked Bushell, hadn’t heard that the Gestapo was holding him. Von Masse’s brother was a Generaloberst (colonel-general), and he used this influence to have Bushell handed back to the less lethal custody of the prison camp.
In Prague Bushell’s Czech host had given him a smart, gray civilian suit, and it never occurred to the Gestapo, who dealt mainly with civilians, to take it from him. Roger wore a tattered old battle dress back to Sagan and carried his suit with him, wrapped in paper. Von Masse met him when he got to the camp, and Roger went for him with bald-headed fury over the way the Gestapo had treated him. Von Masse apologized.
“Don’t blame us, please, for what the Gestapo do,” he said. “They’re not the real Germany.” He added warningly: “What I particularly want to say is that you’re lucky to get back this time. You won’t get away with it again. I’m telling you that if you get out once more and they catch you I think they’ll shoot you.”
“If I get out again they won’t catch me,” Roger said, and went off into another tirade about the Gestapo, upsetting Von Masse so much that he forgot to search him — which was what Roger had banked on. He brought his suit into the compound, planning to use it on his next break.
This was a changed Roger — not the old boisterous soul who thought escape was good, risky sport like skiing. When he skied he used to take one course straight down at uniform, maximum speed, swearing like a trooper. Now he was moodier, and the gaze from that twisted eye was more foreboding. In Berlin he’d seen the Gestapo torturing people, and he did not tolerate Germans any more. By now he’d been behind the wire nearly three years, and his frustrated energy was focusing on the people responsible. He cursed all Germans indiscriminately (except Von Masse), but inside it was a clear, cool-headed hatred and it found sublimation in outwitting them.
With Buckley and Wings Day gone, he took over as Big X.
Release Date: July 4, 1963
Release Time: 172 minutes
Director: John Sturges
Cast:
Steve McQueen as Captain Virgil Hilts(The Cooler King)
James Garner as American RAF officer Flight Lieutenant Bob Hendley(The Scrounger)
Richard Attenborough as RAF officer Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett(Big )
James Donald as Group Captain Ramsey(The SBO)
Charles Bronson as Polish RAF officer Flight Lieutenant Danny Welinski(Tunnel King)
Donald Pleasence as Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe(The Forger)
James Coburn as Flying Officer Sedgwick(The Manufacturer)
Hannes Messemer as Commandant Oberst von Luger
David McCallum as Lieutenant-Commander Eric Ashley-Pitt (Dispersal)
Gordon Jackson as Flight Lieutenant Andy MacDonald (Intelligence)
John Leyton as Flight Lieutenant Willie Dickes(Tunnel King)
Angus Lennie as Flying Officer Archie Ives(The Mole)
Nigel Stock as Flight Lieutenant Dennis Cavendish(The Surveyor)
Robert Graf as Werner(The Ferret)
Jud Taylor as Second Lieutenant Goff
Hans Reiser as Gestapo officer Kuhn
Harry Riebauer as Stabsfeldwebel Strachwitz
William Russell as Sorren(Security)
Robert Freitag as Hauptmann Posen
Ulrich Beiger as Gestapo officer Preissen
George Mikell as SS Officer Dietrich
Lawrence Montaigne as Haynes(Diversions)
Robert Desmond as Griffith(Tailor)
Til Kiwe as Frick
Heinz Weiss as Kramer
Tom Adams as Dai Nimmo(Diversions)
Karl-Otto Alberty as SS Officer Steinach
Awards:
36th Academy Awards - April 13, 1964
Best Film Editing - Ferris Webster - Nominated
21st Golden Globes - March 11, 1964
Best Picture-Drama - Nominated
AFI's 100 Years - June 12, 2001
100 Thrills - #19
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Though The Great Escape is a novel, its basic story is true, and the novel's author Paul Brickhill (1916-91) was a participant in it. Brickhill, an Australian, had flown missions against the Germans in Tunisia for the Royal Australian Air Force when he was shot down in 1943. Locked away and bored in Silesia in Luft Stalag III, he and his fellow prisoners concocted an escape plan -- a daring idea that would result in a mass escape from the Germans. Of the 76 officers who escaped, only three were successful; Hitler himself ordered the execution of 47 of the men who were recaptured. Still, the escape remains one of the great heroic stories of World War II.
A native of Melbourne, Brickhill had begun a career as a newspaper reporter at the Sydney Sun when war was declared in 1939. His instincts as a reporter stuck with him during his incarceration by the Germans, as he collected stories from his fellow prisoners that became the foundation for his later work. After the war, Brickhill sought to go back to newspapering, but quickly abandoned it to begin work on his first book, entitled Escape to Danger (1946), about his experiences in the POW camp. From this, he drew the story of The Great Escape, published four years later.
The following year, Brickhill published The Dam Busters, an acclaimed account of pinpoint bombing raids by the 617 Squadron, followed by an anthology of POW stories entitled Escape or Die (1952) and Reach for the Sky (1954) a biography of aviator Douglas Bader.
B&N / WIKI / INDIE BOUND
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