Re: The Still Amazing Escape

Date: March 21, 2004

"The still-amazing escape

It was 60 years ago that 76 tunneled out of POW camp

BY MEG CLOTHIER REUTERS

LONDON -- Penguins and stooges, tunnelers and forgers -- they were all there in London this week to remember Tom, Dick and Harry.

These were the men who broke out of Nazi Germany's supposedly escape-proof camp Stalag Luft III on a moonless night in March 1944, creating one of World War II's most enduring legends and inspiring a classic war film.

The Great Escape itself was 60 years ago, but Squadron Leader Jimmy James, one of 76 prisoners who escaped through the tunnel code-named Harry, clearly remembers the moments as he waited underground to scramble to freedom.

"I felt a combination of surprise that we'd managed to accomplish this and also there was a tremendous tension, mixed with fear. But mainly I think I was very excited," he told reporters at London's Imperial War Museum.

That night in what is today Poland was the culmination of months of preparation, involving hundreds of men across the compound. Stooges warned of approaching guards, and "penguins" disposed of the buckets of sand dug up by tunnelers.

"We put sand in long, sausage- shaped sacks inside our trousers. The German guards had no orders to watch for people with sand coming out of their trousers," said penguin Maurice Driver.

Three tunnels -- Tom, Dick and Harry -- were started, but guards discovered Tom and blew it up. Dick became a store for sand and tools, leaving Harry as the escape tunnel.

But there was a major hitch. Harry cleared the barbed wire but came up short of the woods around the camp that would have covered the escape.

"We had to put a rope from the top of the exit to a man in the woods. One pull meant 'Go' and two pulls 'Stop,'" James said. Using the signals, 76 men made it out.

Ken Rees was meant to be No. 79.

"I was just about to leave. I was about 20 feet from the tunnel exit when I heard a shot fired," he said. A guard had spotted them.

"I crawled backwards up the tunnel. I tried to kick at the shorings to cause a fall. I thought a guard might try to fire up the tunnel behind me."

Rees was put in solitary confinement in the "cooler" -- where, in the film, Steve McQueen's character spends long hours throwing a baseball against the wall.

A breakout on this unprecedented scale seriously embarrassed the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler ordered the Gestapo to shoot 50 of the captured escapees.

"A great friend of mine was one of the 50. I almost felt guilty that he was shot and I wasn't," Rees said. "Normally I don't think about it, but when you meet up with people who were in the camp with you ..." Rees did not finish the sentence.

After he escaped, James was captured and taken to another camp. "People say, 'Was it worth it?' The Germans had never done anything like that previously, but it was war so we had to expect the unexpected," he said.

"Only three men got home. It was a big effort for that," he said.

The Silesian forest has grown back over the compound, but Dick, the store tunnel the Nazis never found, is still there. Today Britain's Channel Five will screen a documentary called "The Great Escape: Revealed."

"We found the concrete slab that blocked off the tunnel. Remember Charles Bronson washing in the shower in the film? That's Dick. We even found the metal hooks that were used to lift the slab out," said Peter Doyle, whose father was a prisoner of war in another camp.

"We found evidence of the bed boards they used to prop up the tunnel, tins they used for air pipes, and a forger's rubber stamp made out of the heel of a boot," he added.

"There is such a mythology around the escape. I think they find it hard to believe what they did.

©Reuters"