Re: Great Escapologists

Date: March 18, 2004

"Great Escapologists

By Lindesay Irvine, PA Features

This month sees the anniversary of one of the most dramatic incidents of heroism in the Second World War. On the night of March 24, 1944, 76 Allied air crew escaped from Stalag Luft III, the German Prisoner of War camp near Sagan, now in Poland.

Daringly, the men escaped through a 300ft tunnel under the camp’s closely guarded perimeter – which had been painstakingly dug over the course of a year’s stealthy work beneath the noses, literally, of the guards.

The story of what’s become known as The Great Escape is one of the best known stories of wartime bravery, considerably helped by the rather larger-than-life film version of the story, featuring Steve McQueen.

But, as Lois MacDonell knows, this celebrated tale was far being from the only occasion when the airmen of Stalag Luft hatched a daring scheme to break free.

Lois, 62, is the widow of Donald MacDonell, a Spitfire pilot who was shot down over the Channel in 1941 and interned in a different wing of the same prison camp.

Her husband died in 1999, aged 85, and she is currently editing his memoirs, which paint a vivid picture of life in Stalag Luft and reveal the internees’ many and various bids for liberation.

“There were lots and lots of small escape plans which usually didn’t succeed at all,” Lois explains. “The British were very aware that it was their duty to make a nuisance of themselves – to take up the time and manpower of the German authorities. I think it was taken as read that you tried to escape.”

Certainly, this was an ethic taken very much to heart by Donald, who took part in planning numerous escape bids, including an unsuccessful one of his own, as Lois relates:

“He was trying to pose as a medical orderly. The orderly used to come into the camp and go out each day at a certain time. He was dressed up as the orderly, complete with a kidney bowl.

“I don’t know what they’d done with the medical orderly. They thought they’d dealt with him but obviously they hadn’t because all of a sudden, there he was, just about to leave – and behind him there was another individual with a kidney bowl.” Back to the drawing board.

Donald’s memoirs recall many other such imaginative, if not often successful, bids. One internee put his energies into gathering all the elastic he could from around the camp, his plan being to construct a giant catapult capable of hoisting a man over the fence.
parently he was full of such madcap schemes. “‘Death’ Shaw, they called him,” laughs Lois.

On another occasion, Donald recalls watching tensely through cracks in the barracks shutters as one man attempted to take advantage of a bitter winter night, which had left the camp deep in drifted snow.

Covered from head to foot in white sheets, shirts and towels, he crawled from underneath one of the barrack blocks and began to clip through the barbed wire at the fence with home-made wire cutters. Unfortunately, one of the wires snapped free with an almighty clang, alerting the nearby guard, who swung his searchlight down and caught the man in his beam.

“He raised his hand and shouted what he thought was the German for, ‘Don’t shoot’,” Lois explains. “In fact he yelled out, ‘Don’t sh*t’.” Luckily for him, this reduced the guard to helpless laughter, and he was led away unhurt for the statutory seven days in the cooler.

Such eccentric antics should not, of course, give the impression that the prison camp was not a tough ordeal. Rations were scarce, and conditions basic – but for the most part they were treated reasonably well.

Red Cross parcels were allowed through, for which Donald was very grateful, given that they contained items like real chocolate unavailable to Germans. Making use of the abilities of some of the very talented internees, prisoners were allowed to entertain themselves with things like history and maths study groups, and even a drama club, with whom Donald appeared in various Shakespeare productions.

And relations with at least some of the guards – lubricated by some of the contents of their Red Cross parcels – were cordial enough that the most extraordinary items could be smuggled in.

One “compulsive tunneller”, Harry Burton, who was thrown into the cooler after the latest of a long string of escape bids failed, managed to obtain a hacksaw blade. He used this to saw through his cell bars, and timed an above-ground break for freedom well enough that he not only got away from the camp, but was one of the few prisoners to make it back to Britain.

“The PoWs even had their own radio,” says Lois, “which was described by Donald as ’a masterpiece of ingenuity, scrounging, bribery and sheer technical genius’.”

But as Donald’s memories testify, the best part of the men’s remarkable ingenuity went into their endeavours to get out.

If the Great Escape, made from the camp’s north wing, is the most celebrated of the escapes, another, in the east wing where Donald was held, was his greatest success and is almost as well known.

This was the Wooden Horse escape, in October 1943 – also made into a film in which one Donald MacDonell features briefly. By this stage, he had become camp adjutant, liaising between the Germans and the prisoners, and so was ineligible to escape himself. (“Actually, he was claustrophobic anyway,” remembers Lois, “so he wouldn’t have been any good in a tunnel!”)

But he took a major part, on the escape committee, in putting the elaborate plan together. For this scheme, the prisoners concocted a passion for gymnastics, and convinced the Germans to permit them to construct a vaulting horse out of old Red Cross crates.

Taken into the exercise yard each day, and dutifully vaulted over by the PoWs, the horse concealed one of a team of three diggers, who day by day over the course of a year eked out a passage under the fence.

The sand from the digging was transferred to the trousers of helpers, who dribbled it out over the prison yard. The Germans knew from the soil being deposited that something was up, but were unable to find out what.

When the bid for freedom came, all three of the diggers escaped and, remarkably, made it back to Britain.

When The Great Escape itself came, in March 1944, the men in Donald’s wing had known it was coming for some time, and cheered on the 76 escapees.

What they didn’t know, and were devastated to learn, was that of the 73 men recaptured after a gigantic manhunt across Europe, 50 were summarily shot by an SS firing squad. Escape plans were put on hold as the whole camp mourned much loved colleagues.

This was a brutal loss, but does make clear what a moral blow their daring had dealt to Nazis.

Like many others who survived the camps, Donald went on to a glittering career – in his case, in the military – and Lois remains fiercely proud of his achievements. “When we are thinking our own freedom, we should think about what other people have done in order to protect that,” she says.

©The Scotsman"