Re: Great Escape Veteran Passes

Date: February 29, 2004

"Montrealer survived storied Great Escape
 
ALAN HUSTAK THE GAZETTE

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Tony Bethell, a former Montreal stockbroker, was a Second World War fighter pilot and one of only 26 prisoners to survive the Great Escape.
 
Flight Lt. Tony Bethell, a former Montreal stockbroker and one of only 26 prisoners to survive the storied Great Escape from a German prisoner of war camp in 1944, died of cancer at his home in Caledon, Ont., on Feb. 17.

He was 81.

Bethell's exploits in the camp were featured in the 1963 movie The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Garner.

"He kept a log book while he was in camp, but he never talked about his experience at all, other than the odd thing," his wife, Lorna MacDougall, said. "None of them did. They did not talk about it.

"Fifty years went by before there was any official recognition, which infuriated him, until a public memorial service was finally held in 1994."

Former British naval officer Sir Hugh Cubitt, a friend for more than 50 years who delivered the eulogy at Bethell's funeral on Monday, recalled his charm, strong character, zest for life and his dazzling smile.

Cubitt said Bethell never understood why he survived the ordeal when 50 of his comrades were shot.

"Perhaps, he surmised, it was because he was only 19, the youngest of them," Cubitt said. "Perhaps, because with his clear blue eyes, the Gestapo saw him as a near-perfect Aryan specimen. Perhaps, it was pure luck.

"It was a searing experience which never left him."

Richard Anthony Bethell was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), on April 9, 1922. His father was in the colonial service, first in Tanganyika, then in Gibraltar.

As a child, Bethell was sent to Junior Kings School in Canterbury, a private kindergarten, then to Sherborne School, where he obtained certificates from Oxford and Cambridge.

He was 18 when the Second World War began and he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He was trained to fly as a civilian in Americus, Ga., and, in 1941, was sent back to England with his wings to join the RAF 268 Squadron. During a mission over Holland on Dec. 7, 1942, Bethell was shot down and taken prisoner. He spent the next three years in Stalag Luft III, a German PoW camp near Z'agan in southwest Poland.

During the spring of 1944, Bethell was involved in the daring scheme to dig three tunnels out of the camp. He was part of what was called Operation 200, so named because the target was to get 200 prisoners out.

In the end, 76 allied prisoners eventually escaped - all but three, including Bethell, were captured - and 50 of those were executed.

A meticulous man with piercing blue eyes, Bethell never much cared for James Clavell's Hollywood screenplay of the story in which McQueen and the others were taken by the Gestapo and shot en masse in an open field.

"That was entirely untrue," Bethell's widow said. "There was no mass execution. The 50 doomed men were led out of the prison and executed in small groups over a period of several weeks."

Today, only six of the 26 men who survived the Great Escape are still alive - in Australia, New Zealand and England.

When the war ended and Bethell was set free, he joined an import-export company and worked in Sudan and Ethiopia. He re-enlisted in the RAF to become a navigational instructor in 1949 and was posted to the British Joint Services Mission in Washington, D.C.

In 1954, he married Ellen Knode, who was from Philadelphia, and they had three sons and two daughters.

The following year, he resigned his commission and moved to Montreal to work for W.C. Pitfield and Co., a brokerage exchange. Except for a brief stint in the early 1970s with F. H. Deacon and Co., Bethell remained active in Montreal's investment community and returned to work for Gerbro Inc. until he retired to Ontario in 1993.

Bethell sailed, played golf and cross-country skied, and was a great outdoorsman.

His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1970 Bethell married Lorna MacDougall McMaster, a widow with three daughters. She survives him.

"He loved flowers, but not looking after them and working in the garden; that was my job," she said. "His department was the woods and the fields. He loved his tractor, and was never happier than on his SkiDoo making trails through the woods."

ahustak@thegazette.canwest.com
©2004 Montreal Gazette"