World War II POWs tunneled under a German prison camp 75 years ago, and a legend of wartime valor was born
Steve McQueen aboard his motorcycle just before his character is chased to the German-Swiss border in the 1963 film. PHOTO: MARY EVANS/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT COLLECTION
On March 24, 1944, dozens of malnourished, ragged Allied prisoners of war began crawling out of a 340-foot tunnel they had spent nine months digging under Stalag Luft III, a Nazi prison camp in Lower Silesia. Just three of the 76 escapees reached safety. All of the others were recaptured, and 50 of them were executed.
The operation, whose 75th anniversary we mark this week, came to be known as “The Great Escape.” It received widespread public attention in a 1950 book of that name by one of the plotters, Australian pilot Paul Brickhill, and then in a 1963 blockbuster movie starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough. The last of the surviving escapees, British bomber pilot Dick Churchill, died last monthat the age of 99.
The overwhelming majority of the 600 participants in the breakout effort worked just to get the others out.
The story of the deadly wartime game of hide-and-seek still grips the public imagination three-quarters of a century after the fact. Why the continuing fascination with this particular episode of the long, awful conflict?
It should be acknowledged from the start that the best-known version of the story—the film directed by John Sturges—was in large part Hollywood hokum. Former inmates of Stalag Luft III generally agreed that the producers accurately depicted aspects of the plotting and execution of the escape: the digging of the tunnel 30 feet underground to evade listening devices; the challenge of dispersing the sandy, porous soil around the compound without detection; the theft, extortion or fabrication of vital materials; the claustrophobia inside the tunnel; and so on.
The movie’s motorcycle chase scene
But the survivors disliked the movie’s romanticized characters—some looking suspiciously well fed—and heightened drama. At a 65th anniversary reunion, they hooted at the legendary (and entirely fictional) scene in which the American Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) leaps over a barbed wire barrier on a stolen motorcycle in a failed attempt to reach Switzerland. (McQueen’s stunt double, Bud Ekins, made the actual jump; the scene was McQueen’s idea.) The characters were necessarily composites, and some were absurd. James Coburn’s Australian accent was especially laughable.
“‘The Great Escape’ was full of lies,” said the British flier Desmond Plunkett, who volunteered to be unlucky number 13 in the real-life line of escapees, speaking about the film to a newspaper years later. “Perhaps 10% was true. The rest was rubbish.”
The memorialized path of “Harry,” the third of three escape tunnels dug by prisoners, and the only one used to escape Germany’s Stalag Luft III. PHOTO: PEN&SWORD/BNPS
Nonetheless, the film and its real-life inspiration confirm some enduring truths about fighting wars and striving for peace. Both versions of the remarkable tale highlight, above all, the indispensability of personal honor and ethical commitment.
At the beginning of the film, the Stalag commandant, Col. Von Luger (Hannes Messemer), offers a cigarette to Group Captain Ramsey, the senior British officer (James Donald), and soothingly tells him, “With intelligent cooperation, we may all sit out the war as comfortably as possible.” But the Ramsey character will have none of it. “It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape,” he says. “If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.”
This is exactly what the real-life prisoners of Stalag Luft III did with the limited resources at their disposal, and most did so without any expectation of personal benefit. At its peak, the camp held over 10,000 Allied personnel. Almost none had a hope of getting outside the fence, let alone back to their loved ones or to the battle. The mastermind of the escape operation, Royal Air Force squadron leader Roger Bushell, thought that he could evacuate around 200. Audacious though the notion was, that figure represented less than 2% of the camp’s population. The overwhelming majority of the 600 participants in the breakout effort worked just to get the others out.
The “X Organization”—as the leaders of the escape network called it—also embodied the teamwork that must accompany any common goal. There was a division of labor: lookouts, tunnel diggers, materials makers, guard diverters, dirt disposers, tailors, thieves, forgers of papers and others. Perhaps 30 men devoted themselves to the awful business of the actual tunneling. (Three escape routes were dug through the sandy ground, nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry, but only Harry survived to be used). The Australian Brickhill, author of the 1950 book, acknowledged that he was merely “a cog in the machine,” in charge of “a gang of ‘stooges’ guarding the forgers.”
One of the most overlooked aspects of The Great Escape is the national diversity of those involved. Brits and members of the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) dominated, but the plan also included men from Poland, France, Norway, Lithuania, Argentina, Greece, Holland and Czechoslovakia. These men came from around the world. Yet they spoke a common language of duty and sacrifice. (Unlike in the film, no Americans took part in the final stages of the breakout; they had been moved by then to another compound.)
A soldier on the exit ladder of the infamous tunnel, dug 30 feet below the ground to evade detection by listening devices. PHOTO: MEDIADRUMIMAGES/USAFA
Another takeaway of The Great Escape is that there are degrees of evil. Stalag Luft III was hardly paradise. It was run by loyal air force officers of the Third Reich. You could be shot for trying to cross the wire. But its hardships were nothing as compared with the Nazi horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Following the war, former inmates testified that the real-life commandant, Friedrich Wilhelm von Leindeiner-Waldau, had followed the rules of the Geneva Conventions. When one Stalag captain, Hans Pieber, learned that the Gestapo had murdered 50 escapees, including the leader Bushell, he told the prisoners, “We do not want to be associated with it. It is terrible…terrible,” according to Brickhill’s account. Brickhill added, “Pieber at times may have been a hypocrite, but he wasn’t this time. He was a shaken man.”
Above all, the story of The Great Escape has endured through the better part of a century because it is a tribute to individuality and human dignity. For a brief moment, the men of Stalag Luft III—even those who never made it into the tunnel—were able to win their freedom from one of the worst tyrannies in history. Even as prisoners, they found a way to be living, breathing human beings again.
“They triumphed,” wrote George Harsh, one of the American prisoners, in his introduction to the book, “through the only means left to them, over an idea that was rotten from the core out. And they proved for all posterity that men, working together, can dig a damned deep hole in the ground—or build a shining tower of Babel.”
—Mr. Vinciguerra is the author of “Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber and the Golden Age of The New Yorker.”
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