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Re: The Great Escape

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 26, 2003

"The Great Escape

by STEPHEN COAN 

On the night of March 24, 1944, 76 Allied RAF officers escaped from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag-Luft III on the snowbound German-Polish border. Seventy-three were recaptured, 50 of whom were executed on the direct orders of German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Among them were four South Africans: Squadron Leader Roger Bushell of the RAF and Flight-Lieutenants Johannes Gouws, Clement McGarr and Rupert Stevens of the SAAF.

Of the four, Bushell is the best documented, thanks to him being the driving force behind the mass escape. He was the head of the Escape Committee - codenamed X-Organisation - and known as Big X.

Bushell was born in Springs in August 1910, the son of an English mining engineer who had emigrated to this country. First schooled in Johannesburg, he then went to the English public school Wellington, and from 1929 studied law at Cambridge university. According to Anton Gill, author of the recently published The Great Escape, Bushell was a "vigorous all rounder. He shone in his academic work but was also a tireless partygoer and a good enough skier to represent the university. His attitude to skiing mirrored his attitude to life. He approached it with a fearlessness that bordered on recklessness; his success lay in his ability to calculate the degree of risk and take that to the limit."

Bushell gained a reputation as a defence lawyer, while his love of speed inevitably drew him to flying and in 1932 he joined 601 Squadron of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, a squadron of young elite known as The Millionaires Club.
Gill notes that "his character contained precisely the correct mixture of arrogance, intelligence, patriotism and daring to form him for action".

There was not to be much action for Bushell in World War 2. He was shot down on his second mission, flying a Hurricane while covering the evacuation at Dunkirk, and taken prisoner after crash-landing near Boulogne. At Dulag-Luft, a transit camp for RAF personnel, Bushell quickly became deputy of the escape committee. In the spring of 1941, after hiding in a shed on the edge of the exercise field, he escaped as far as the Swiss border, posing as a ski-instructor, before being caught. In another escape attempt, Bushell and three others, while in transit between camps, escaped through the floor of a train wagon via a hole they had cut with a stolen table knife. Bushell was eventually recaptured in Prague.

Aircrew such as Bushell were regarded as crack troops, expensive to train and capable of causing great damage thereafter; consequently, the Germans wanted them held in tight security. A new camp was built far from friendly borders, named Stalag-Luft III, a couple of kilometres south of the town of Sagan (now Zagan), then in Germany and now in Poland.

The Germans cleared an area in the surrounding pine forest and initially laid out two compounds, one for officers and the other for enlisted men. In the officers' compound six barrack blocks were built, all raised on stilts, with only concrete foundations below the washrooms and stoves. The blocks were set well apart and well back from the perimeter fence in a bid to discourage tunnelling. The double perimeter wire fences were three-metres high and topped with coils of barbed wire. Warning wire 10 metres from the inner fence marked no-man's land. Step over the wire and you were liable to be shot by guards at the top of the watchtowers.

When Bushell arrived at Stalag-Luft III, his reputation had preceded him and he was appointed Big X, in charge of the Escape Committee known as X-Organisation that had determined on a mass breakout.

Under Bushell's leadership, three tunnels were launched: Tom, Dick and Harry. Tunnel entrances could only be dug down from the stove or washroom areas and trapdoors were created to disguise the entrances. Tom was dug down from the kitchen floor in Block 123. The trap was a square of concrete, cut out and replaced with another square that could be lifted easily.

The trap for Dick from Block 122 was the most ingenious of the three, hidden in the drainage well in the washroom. Water was removed from the drain and a concrete square was cut out of the sidewall and replaced with a specially cast replacement sealed in place with a waterproof mixture of clay, soap and cement.

Water was let in again to the level of the drainage pipe and the grille replaced.

Harry, the longest tunnel, ran from Block 104 and was concealed under a moveable stove.

The plan was to break out 200 prisoners and over 600 prisoners were involved in the various support services that included a map department, a forgery department to produce hundreds of sets of false documents, and a tailoring department that made everything from German uniforms to civvies.

Tunnelling was the responsibility of Wally Floody, a Canadian fighter pilot and a mining engineer in civilian life. He was dubbed the Tunnel King. Thirty-foot vertical shafts were dropped from the traps to where tunnelling commenced. The sandy soil required that the shafts and tunnels be shored up. Over 3 000 bedboards and floorboards were removed and used for the shoring, undetected by the German guards. The tunnels were ventilated by air pumps, with airlines made by linking together dried milk tins. Trolleys to carry sand and workers were built to run on rails made out of beading and battens. The tunnels were even illuminated by electricity. The wiring was stolen and the power tapped from the camp supply. Grease or fat lamps were also used.

When the Germans began clearing trees for a new compound sited where Tom and Dick were intended to surface, it was decided to complete Tom, while Harry was closed down and Dick used for sand dispersal.

To prevent discovery of the tunnels "stooges" or "duty pilots" monitored German movements and kept an eye out for "ferrets" - German soldiers on the lookout for any escape activity. When Tom was discovered by the Germans, Harry, the longest of the tunnels, was reopened and by March 1944 was ready for use.
There were 500 applications from would-be escapers. Ballots were held to whittle the number down to the required 200. The first 30 places went to those who had the best chance of escape, thanks to having been out before or being German speakers. They were issued with forged train tickets and travel documents.

The breakout took place on the night of March 24 but a series of setbacks resulted in only 73 men getting away into the frozen, snowy landscape surrounding the camp.

When he learnt of the escape, Hitler was furious and demanded that all those recaptured be handed over to the Gestapo and shot. This was contrary to the rules of war and Hitler was finally persuaded to reduce the number of those to be shot to 50. The men were shot singly or in pairs, typically during a car journey when a halt was made on the pretence of giving the men an opportunity to relieve themselves. Then they were shot in the back of the head. According to the official record, they were "shot while trying to escape".

After the war, 72 men were indicted for their part in the killings. Twenty-one of them were later executed.

* The Great Escape, by Anton Gill, is published by Review.

Readers write of their links with the great escape

The Great Escape was one of the most famous episodes of World War 2. Last month, a letter published in The Natal Witness publicising The Great Escape Memorial Project drew several responses from readers.

Pietermaritzburg resident Frank Brink arrived at Stalag-Luft III a month after the escape. "I was shot down on April 25, 1944, while on a bombing raid over Pesaro," he recalls. Brink, a flight-lieutenant, was the wireless operator in a B26 Marauder. During combat, he manned both side guns in the fuselage. "We were hit by ack-ack. I crawled out of the turret and parachuted down into the sea. I was the only survivor of the crew of six."

Brink was taken to taken to Verona where he was interrogated by a Private Scharf. "He'd worked for Lindsay Motors in South Africa before the war and spoke fluent Afrikaans and Zulu, as well as German and English."

After a week of solitary confinement, Brink was taken by by train to Frankfurt, then to Dulag-Luft, a transit camp, where he spent three weeks before being sent to Stalag-Luft III towards the end of May.

"Everyone was talking about the escape. I was put in a room in Block 101 with an RAF Squadron Leader, Bush Kennedy, and a Canadian Fleet Air Arm pilot, Dickie Bartlett. The Germans allowed them to go out each day, with a work party, to help build a memorial to the 50 officers shot by the Gestapo."
Towards the end of April, 50 cremation urns had been brought to the camp. They were interred in a memorial designed by a prisoner who had been an architect in civilian life. In 1948 the ashes were removed and buried in the Poznan Old Garrison Cemetery in Poland. The original memorial still stands.

Brink later moved to Block 119. "I got the bunk that had belonged to Johannes Gouws and also some of his clothes, including his tie and his pajamas." Brink still has the tie (see left).

Born on August 13, 1919, Gouws grew up on the family farm near Bultfontein, in the then Orange Free State. After matriculating in 1937, he joined the Special Service Battalion for military training. He later joined the South African Air Force. In 1941 he was shot down behind enemy lines in Abyssinia, rejoining his unit after an epic walk of 500 km. He was shot down again on April, 9, 1942, near Derna in Libya and imprisoned at Stalag-Luft III. After the Great Escape, he was recaptured and shot by the Germans on March 29, 1944.

Pietermaritzburg resident Alex Duigan has a postcard written by escaper Flight Lieutenant Clement A. N. McGarr. Born in November 24, 1917, McGarr belonged to 2 Squadron SAAF and was shot down and captured on October 6, 1941. He was shot by the Gestapo on April 6, 1944. The postcard was written from Stalag-Luft III on February 3, 1943, to his friend Brian Arntzen: "Dear Brian, I was very pleased to get your letter. Glad to know you are well again and having a bit of a rest. Hell, that is all I get here. Violet is very good, writes long letters very often, full of interest. Greg will be a real family man by now. Give him my regards, also Ronnie Bridson and George Williams, when you meet him next. I believe there are heaps of Durban chaps the same as myself. Best wishes, Neville." "