The Great Escapers

The Wooden Horse

By early 1943 there had been as many as 30 tunnel attempts from the camp. None had succeeded. More depressing still, most had been detected long before they had reached anywhere near the wire. The stamina, both physical and mental, required to sustain building a tunnel 300 feet long was beyond most of the prisoners and many were beginning to be depressed by seeing their efforts go to waste. It was after the failure of yet another tunnel attempt that Lieutenant Michael Codner and Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams were walking around the East Compound reflecting morosely on their plight. Codner was in the Royal Artillery, but had been working with the Air Force when he was captured. He had met Williams at Szubin. Williams, 31, had been the captain of a Stirling of 75 Squadron, based at Newmarket. He had been shot down on a mission to bomb a car-works south-east of Berlin on the night of 17 December 1942. Before the war he had been an amateur artist and his life had been a halcyon existence devoted to music and painting that now, amid the austere isolation of the pine trees of Silesia, seemed like a world away. Williams was one of the prisoners who had chosen to dull the boredom of captivity by becoming one of the most enthusiastic theatre players and was becoming a mainstay of many of the productions. But Codner felt the torment of imprisonment more, and the desire to escape overwhelmed him. He often told Williams that he felt a greater shame at being a prisoner since his capture had involved the conscious surrender of arms, whereas Williams had been involuntarily shot out of the sky.

As Williams and Codner walked around the perimeter track, it seemed to them that the chances of escape from Stalag Luft III really were too remote to be worth thinking about. It was then that Codner posed the question that had been asked many times before: was it really necessary to start the tunnel inside one of the barrack blocks? Why couldn’t the shaft be sunk as near to the trip wire as possible, Codner wondered? Williams stated the obvious: every square foot of ground was visible from at least three goon boxes and by now the ferrets were wise to every conceivable type of ‘moling’ operation. But then Codner recalled a botched escape attempt that he had heard about from another POW camp some time ago. Every day a crowd of prisoners settled down near the wire ostensibly to listen to one of them playing an accordion. While he played, they sat around in a circle and sang. But a group of them in the middle quietly dug a hole in the ground. After they had excavated as much sand as they could conceal in their pockets, they placed some bed boards across the hole, and replaced the surface sand. Unfortunately, the ruse was discovered almost as soon as it had been started. A sentry walked over the trap and stumbled down the hole the very first night.

The experience seemed to confirm the impossibility of beginning a tunnel from anywhere except from the comfort and security of inside one of the barrack blocks. But to Williams and Codner the idea offered at least a ray of hope. The accordion attempt had been a slapdash and amateur affair, and presumably every camp Kommandant in Germany would now keep a wary eye on anyone playing an accordion. But supposing a different, cleverer ruse could be thought up? It was while mulling over the idea that Codner suddenly remembered the story of the wooden horse of Troy. Why didn’t they build their own wooden horse? An hour later Williams and Codner were presenting the idea to the Escape Committee.

The men would construct a vaulting horse like the ones that were used in schools – strong oblong structures with a padded top and solid wooden sides. There was plenty of good quality timber in the theatre in the North Compound that the prisoners had squirrelled away under the floorboards when they built the place. The Germans loved athletics and von Lindeiner, who was always looking for ways to keep the prisoners distracted and out of trouble, would surely approve of this harmless activity. The wooden horse would be kept in the cookhouse, which was the barrack block closest to the wire. It would be taken to exactly the same spot as near to the wire as possible every day. The exact location would be worked out by elementary trigonometry. Also, the footfalls of the vaulters would leave two convenient markers. The tunnel would only need to be 100 feet long. A group of prisoners would exercise and while they vaulted one of the escapers would be inside the horse, digging the tunnel.

This time the tunnel would be a professional affair. The trap-door would be at least a foot beneath the surface, while the ground above was constantly being churned up by the prisoners exercising, so there would be no problem disguising the area above the trap-door. The excavated sand would be returned in sacks inside the horse at the end of the exercise period.

The Escape Committee was sceptical. The plan was not entirely watertight. What sort of wood would the horse be constructed from? If it was anything like a real school vaulting horse it would be very heavy indeed. How much soil could be contained within the horse in any one exercise session? And given this limitation, how far would the diggers be able to tunnel each day? On their feeble rations, would the other prisoners be capable of exercising long enough? Would they be strong enough to carry the horse laden with sand back to the cookhouse? And last, but not least, would the goons really be so dimwitted not to notice anything over the many months it was likely to take? Nevertheless, Williams and Codner had ‘patented’ the idea as their own and the committee told them that if they could build a vaulting horse they would receive its full backing. That June, Williams wrote to his mother telling her about a play the prisoners had just staged with costumes hired from a shop in Berlin. He added, a little mischievously perhaps, ‘Now doing a melodrama which is going to be very funny indeed.’

That July there was a happy interlude over in the North Compound. There were now some 500 Americans in the camp and they had decided to celebrate Independence Day as they would at home. On 4 July the other sleepy inmates of the North Compound awoke to the sound of banging drums and blowing bugles as a party of ‘Red Indians’ and ‘Colonialists’ marched around the camp. They were quickly joined by the British and other RAF officers and soon the whole camp was heaving with thousands of noisy prisoners sharing tin cups of an illicit and fiery alcoholic concoction, especially brewed by the Americans to celebrate the occasion. The prisoners became increasingly inebriated as the day progressed, and at one stage Johnny Dodge and Wings Day found themselves being unceremoniously thrown into the fire-pool by the American ‘rebels’. The Germans looked on, at first bewildered but soon amused. Pieber could not resist a good-natured chuckle at evening Appell as the prisoners tried to stand up straight for the count. The day ended in good spirits all around.

By then in the East Compound, Williams and Codner’s escape plans were taking shape. The vaulting horse had been built by a team of carpenters under a Wing Commander Waw and more than lived up to expectations. Using the theatre wood smuggled over from North Compound, and three-ply Canadian Red Cross packing cases, they constructed a light but strong horse, with a pad on top made of sacking stuffed with wood shavings. Inside the structure up to three men could be accommodated. Cross-sections were installed to help them wedge themselves in while the horse was being carried. Hooks ran along the roof of the inside for the bags of excavated sand to be hung from. Wooden boards for shoring up the tunnel had also to be carried out. There were two holes on either side of the box through which two long poles could be pushed for four men to carry it.

The Escape Committee was finally satisfied that the wooden horse project represented a viable escape plan and approval was given to begin the tunnel attempt. Before they went ahead, however, the prisoners had to submit the horse to von Lindeiner’s security officers for inspection. It was a tense few moments while the Germans peered into every crevice of the wooden horse, but they could find nothing suspicious about it and agreed that it would be an excellent way for the prisoners to exercise. It was with a great deal of relief that the horse was finally taken over to the cookhouse block, which would be its home for the duration of the escape attempt. On 8 July 1943, the wooden horse emerged from the block for the first time, its four carriers taking it to a prearranged spot five yards from the trip wire, just inside the perimeter track. One of the most audacious escape attempts was about to begin.

To construct a tunnel in such circumstances was a startling achievement, but the role of the four daily carriers should not be forgotten either. Because the Germans had inspected the horse they knew it was a comparatively light structure, so it was essential that the men make light work of their task. But that was no easy achievement. The horse always contained two grown men and occasionally three. On the return trip the additional burden of up to 12 heavy sacks of sand was added. (The sacks were made from trouser-legs cut off beneath the knees and stitched up.) The carriers had to first negotiate the three steps leading down from the cookhouse block in full view of the watchtowers and the ferrets they knew were spying on them from the forest beyond. It was necessary to keep the horse as close to the ground as possible so that nobody caught a glimpse of what was inside. Annoyingly, the ferrets were occasionally actually sitting on the steps of the cookhouse as the horse was taken past them. Remarkably, while weighed down by their burden, the carriers would often use only one hand to hold the pole to keep up the pretence of lightness. It was a feat of extraordinary physical and mental stamina that would be repeated almost every day of the following four months.

Once in position the prisoners would perform their exercises for two or more hours under the supervision of a 24-year-old South African airman. John Stevens grew up in Cape Town and joined the South African Air Force at the onset of the war. He was flying a light bomber in the Western Desert when he was shot down and seriously wounded. After making a remarkably quick recovery, the Germans sent him first to Barth and then Sagan, where he would become one of the most persistent escapers. He was also one of the most athletic of the prisoners, leading an exercise group every morning before Appell.

Early on, in a ruse to put the Germans off the scent, Stevens had decided the vaulters should deliberately knock over the horse, toppling it over in full view of the goon towers to show the Germans that nothing was going on inside. The ruse proved to be successful. From then onwards, when something very definitely was going on inside the horse, an instructor always stood by the side of it and a system of tapping signals was devised so that the diggers inside could communicate with him, and vice versa. They could tell him when their shift was complete and he could warn them if a guard was approaching. Often the Germans did come to watch the men jumping over the horse and would shout words of encouragement. One day Charlie Pfelz caused a momentary pang of panic when he walked up to within six feet of the horse while digging was going on inside. Observing the vaulters for a few minutes, he came up with the helpful suggestion to Stevens that they would find it a whole lot easier if they used a springboard. Stevens agreed that the idea had merit and said he would look into it. The ferrets, it seemed, really did think the wooden horse was nothing more than a little harmless exercise to while away the days of boredom.

Underneath the horse, Codner and Williams began their formidable task. The vaulting movements above were helpful in camouflaging their activity from the seismographs. They began by digging a shaft just three feet deep, before turning at a right angle and starting the tunnel towards the wire. In order to minimise the amount of soil they would have to excavate and thus carry back to the canteen, they made the tunnel as small as possible. It was just 18 inches square and the task of crawling along it was a horribly claustrophobic one. Williams and Codner took turns to mole their way along its length. At first only one man at a time worked on the tunnel. He would carefully excavate the soil, place it in a sack, and attach the sack to a hook. As they progressed towards the wire, the atmosphere became oppressively stifling and humid. A decision was made early on not to poke any air holes through to the surface inside the perimeter track. The risk of them prompting a collapse, either from below or if a guard stood on them, was just too great. The tunnel had to be shored up with wooden boards all the way to the perimeter track. After that the men only shored it up where the soil showed signs of collapsing.

It was a long and laborious job. They had to fill 12 bags each day. There was no light at all in the tunnel and the air became fouler and fouler the further along the tunnel they progressed. They worked naked, and ‘side stroked’ the sand behind their backs towards the tunnel entrance. At the end of every shift, they placed a trap-door made of three boards about two feet beneath the surface. The original soil that had covered it was replaced, and Williams and Codner tapped on the side of the box to indicate that they had done their day’s work. The four carriers would make a great display of cheerfulness as they lifted their staggering burden, while Stevens’s men would shuffle their feet in the sand to disguise the disturbance.

But not all the men were happy. It was hard work vaulting every day, on rations that weren’t even adequate to keep an inactive adult healthy. Some of the men complained that it was they who were doing the hard work while Codner’s and Williams’ task beneath the ground might be uncomfortable but hardly physically draining. There was a minor revolt in their barrack block and the result was a slight altering of the mess arrangements. In the meantime, the two tunnellers decided they would need a third member of the team for the escape and they recruited Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot. At first, though, Philpot did not take part in the tunnelling. Instead he organised the sand dispersal operation, getting rid of most of the stuff beneath the barber shop and in the cookhouse roof.

In the North Compound digging continued apace into the summer of 1943 with Tom and Dick (heading westerly out of blocks 123 and 122 respectively) getting priority over Harry because they were nearer to the wire. The by-now familiar camp distractions continued as well. The prisoners cultivated vegetable plots outside their barrack blocks (an activity that also helped disperse the soil). Theatre groups had developed a slightly more sophisticated repertoire of plays and musicals than Alice and Her Candle that had so exasperated Wings Day in Barth. Many of the men exercised on a regular basis to keep their spirits up and took part in competitive games. Others signed up to language, art and drawing classes.

Johnny Dodge had established an international debating society that was becoming one of the camp’s greatest attractions. Dodge had briefly flirted with socialism but subsequently never wavered from his view that capitalism within a democratic framework was the only viable form of society. Others had more radical views. The inmates established a mock parliament, which complimented Dodge’s debating group. Once Roger Bushell, casting himself in the role of deputy leader of the Labour Party, proposed a motion that after the war all industry should be nationalised. Tom Kirby-Green argued that it was time the British recognised the prevalence of the black majority in much of their Empire. In raising these questions the men were really doing nothing more than thousands of other intelligent and thoughtful men at that stage of the war. They were young, highly educated men thrown into a barbarous struggle between the Nazis’ hateful ideology and the Allies’ far-from-perfect societies. In Britain they would eventually return from the war and some of them would form part of one of the most remarkable Houses of Parliament ever. It is curious to wonder what the 1945 Parliament would have been like had the likes of Roger Bushell and Tom Kirby-Green managed to get elected and been given the opportunity to restate the arguments they first rehearsed in the barren wastes of Silesia.

No sooner had the men arrived in the North Compound than rumours began to spread that the Germans were going to be adding yet another compound to Stalag Luft III – directly to the south of the North Compound. When von Lindeiner’s men started clearing the forest to the south it was apparent the rumours were true. The men soon discovered that the new South Compound was going to be reserved entirely for American prisoners. There was a flurry of disquiet. The Americans had worked as hard on Tom, Dick and Harry as anyone else had, but it now looked as if they would be removed from the North Compound before any of the tunnels were due to break through. Bushell held an emergency meeting of the Escape Committee.

Dick was 70 feet long by now and there was clearly no chance it would be completed before the new compound was built. Harry was far from complete. Tom was nearer to the wire. But worryingly, Block 123, the barrack from which Tom was being built with the trap-door that was the most vulnerable, had already attracted the suspicions of the ferrets. Bushell proposed that if the Americans were to be given a fair chance of escaping, the Escape Committee should focus all its resources into one tunnel. He thought that the best chances of success lay in closing down Dick for good, postponing Harry for the time being and pouring every last resource into Tom. Dick, he suggested, could be used, ironically, for dispersing the sand from Tom. The Americans protested. As one of the most important members of the X-Organisation and one of the regular diggers, Bub Clark already had a place guaranteed in one of the tunnels. But, he argued, to hurry up the digging now would jeopardise the security of the whole operation. Clark pointed out that Block 123 was the most vulnerable of the three barrack buildings and concentrating all their efforts on it might attract more attention from the ferrets. In any case, the Americans would have plenty of opportunity to escape from their new compound. The RAF officers, however, were fond of their new American friends and they wanted them to go out with them. Bushell’s view prevailed and it was agreed to work flat-out on Tom.

It was a race against time. Glemnitz and his security staff had already arrived at the conclusion that there was definitely a tunnel being built on the west side of the compound – they just didn’t know which block it was emanating from. However, the ferrets were keeping a very close eye on all the blocks near the wire, and 123 in particular, around about which their seismographs indicated an unusual degree of activity. Hardly surprising, since beneath the ground the diggers were working at a furious rate, this time in relays of three teams of diggers. On some days the men progressed as much as three yards.

But Bub Clark had been proved right. In their hurry to get Tom finished, the men had become less scrupulous about security. On more than one occasion the ferrets witnessed penguins kicking yellow sand out of their trouser-legs. The Germans dug trenches and probed the ground with their poles. They could sense they were getting close. The barrack blocks along the western side of the compound were repeatedly searched, 123 being subject to a nerve-wracking five-hour inspection on one particular day. Glemnitz persuaded von Lindeiner that the trees in the compound should be cut down to improve the sight-lines of the goons, and reluctantly the Kommandant agreed.

There was further bad news for the prisoners when they were informed that a West Compound was to be built directly in the path of Tom. It meant they would have to extend the tunnel by at least 40 yards and yet again raised doubt about whether the Americans would still be with them by the time they broke through. Nevertheless, by September the tunnellers had pushed Tom to 285 feet beyond the wire, arriving a tantalising ten feet short of the shelter of the woods beyond. September, though, was to prove the cruellest month. It began with the Germans conducting a series of very thorough searches throughout the compound, at one stage very nearly stumbling on the trap-door of the now discontinued Harry. Once more the ferrets returned to 123 and took the block apart with unusual thoroughness.

Typically, though, it was purely by a stroke of luck that the ferrets actually discovered the trap-door in the passageway by the kitchen. A ferret was quietly tapping away at the concrete with a pickaxe. He didn’t find the hollow sign he was looking for, but he did chip a corner of the shaft, exposing the narrow clink of a line. The first the prisoners knew was when the excited man emerged from the barracks grinning from ear to ear and shouting triumphantly for Glemnitz. The POWs held their breath, hoping against hope that the inevitable had not happened. Shortly afterwards, Glemnitz arrived from the Kommandantur and pushed his way through the gathered crowd of prisoners, who were trying to look as if they hadn’t a care in the world but not always succeeding. The men watched in a mournful silence as Glemnitz stomped up the barrack block steps. A dark cloud seemed to settle over the crowd of Kriegies standing motionless and silent outside. It seemed an age before Glemnitz emerged, this time smiling broadly. He did not have to say a thing as he stalked confidently across to the Kommandantur. Tom had been discovered after four and a half months of back-breaking work. It is not difficult to imagine the frustration felt by the diggers and all the other men who had contributed to the escape plans, but the discovery of Tom at least proved that Bushell had been right about one thing. The Germans were astonished by what they found.

So astonished that dignitaries from Berlin visited Stalag Luft III to see what an incredible piece of engineering the tunnel was and Colonel von Lindeiner even seemed to take perverse pleasure in showing off the engineering masterpiece that his prisoners had so painstakingly constructed. Newspaper photographers came to take pictures of their creation. Indeed, it was such a beautiful work of engineering that the Germans had difficulty in working out how to destroy it. Eventually, a sapper was brought in from a nearby army unit and Tom disappeared under 100 pounds of explosives. A good part of Block 123 was damaged too, provoking catcalls and whistles from the watching prisoners. Odd as it may seem, von Lindeiner had established a small escape museum in one of the Kommandantur barracks. It was mainly, of course, to help his men understand the lengths to which the prisoners would go and the ingenuity they could display, but it was almost with a sense of pride that he showed guests around the small room and showed them the newspaper pictures of Tom.

There were several elements of consolation for Roger Bushell and the Escape Committee. One was that the tunnel had been discovered by a fluke. Had it not been for that infuriating piece of good fortune, the Germans would probably have dismissed the clear evidence of their seismograph system as some sort of anomaly or aberration. Moreover, in four and a half months more than 166 tons of sand had been dispersed around the compound little more than one mile in circumference. Yet, except for spotting a few prisoners kicking off yellow sand in the vegetable gardens, the Germans had not discovered the key dispersal points. Finally, it was apparent from their reaction to Tom that the Germans clearly did not think it was possible that more than one such tunnel existed. (Indeed, one German-speaking prisoner overheard Glemnitz say as much to one of the ferrets.)

Two days after the discovery of Tom, work resumed on Dick and Harry. However, the Germans increased their security activity to such an extent that it made it virtually impossible to carry out soil dispersal operations without a high risk of detection. With the winter fast approaching, it was decided to postpone all digging activities on Dick and Harry indefinitely. It was a psychological blow to everyone. Nevertheless, they could take some comfort in the knowledge that Harry was by now some 115 feet long. The whole structure had been meticulously shored up.

Late that fall the Americans were marched out of the North Compound and into their new South Compound. (By virtue of the fact that he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force, George Harsh was one of the Americans to remain in the North Compound, along with others who served in British Commonwealth uniforms. He took over Bub Clark’s role as Big S.) The move was a source of great disappointment to both the RAF officers and the Americans, not just because some of the hardest workers on the tunnels were now going to be denied a chance to break out, but because the men had become used to one another and great friendships had developed. Both groups held one another in enormous respect. The Americans would play no further role in the Great Escape but they remained in daily contact with the RAF men through a regular communication system that was set up. At its most basic this was reduced to little more than a prisoner lobbing a message contained in a tin or ball over the wire. On a more sophisticated level the prisoners could communicate with semaphore signals.

Roger Bushell, however, was quick to grasp one opportunity that the removal of the Americans presented. He put the word about that it was the American, and not the RAF officers, who had been behind much of the escape activity. Bushell hinted that Bub Clark in particular was one of the biggest troublemakers. Later, it was reported that von Lindeiner had asked Glemnitz who was the most dangerous prisoner in the camp. ‘Without any doubt, sir, Colonel Clark,’ replied the Feldwebel without any hesitation.

The Kommandant was taken aback. ‘Not Squadron Leader Bushell?’ he demanded.

Glemnitz replied: ‘Once I believed it was Squadron Leader Bushell, but he has quieted down, Kommandant. More interested in the theatre these days.’

For many months after the move, the Americans were puzzled why von Lindeiner’s men were subjecting the South Compound to such close scrutiny. ‘They came down on us 24 hours a day for weeks on end,’ recalls Clark with a smile.

One point of regret to the British was that Glemnitz was dispatched to work in the South Camp, leaving the RAF at the mercy of Rubberneck, now in charge of security. Griese adapted to his new role with ill-disguised enthusiasm and his first move was to stamp down on fraternisation between ferrets and the prisoners, throwing any German guard into the cooler on the slightest suspicion of collaboration, and actually sending one reprobate to the Eastern Front for his sins. His new regime did not deter all the Germans. Pieber continued to develop passport photographs that Valenta had taken with the Leica camera that the Luftwaffe captain had provided. And the pleasant little Hundführer was not deterred from offering the Allied officers little gifts.

While gloom prevailed in the North Compound, a mood of cautious optimism was developing in the East Compound, where the wooden horse escape was approaching fruition. Codner and Williams had also had their close calls. On one occasion the tunnel collapsed, leaving a slight but clearly visible indent in the topsoil above and Codner stuck underneath. A vaulter threw himself over the hole, feigning injury, desperate to hide it from the view of the goon boxes. The instructor crouched by his side while a stretcher was summoned, all the time the guards in the goon boxes watching intently. Below ground Codner furiously worked to shore up the tunnel while the other vaulters hung around the ‘injured’ man, pretending to be concerned while casually kicking the sand back into the hole. By the time the stretcher bore the patient away, miraculously the damage had been repaired.

The going was hard though. After Codner and Williams had reached 42 feet towards the wire, both they and the vaulters were exhausted. The Escape Committee had granted Codner and Williams extra rations in view of their exertions but, for some odd reason, not the vaulters. One of the vaulters had injured his leg but heroically carried on regardless. Petty resentments began to surface, some of the vaulters wondering why they should work so hard when they were not going to get a chance to escape. Codner and Williams decided that if they were not to jeopardise the whole project they needed to work fast.

They decided the only way they could get the tunnel done was by working in unison. From then onwards they went down the tunnel two at a time. One man would dig, the other would remain at the shaft entrance, hauling the excavated soil back in a metal washbasin 18 inches deep and 18 inches in diameter attached to a rope. The rope was made from plaited string from Red Cross parcels. In this new system they dug 36 bags at a time, storing the bags near the tunnel entrance and removing them in the following three shifts.

The tunnel was progressing at a laborious six inches a day. It was such arduous work that Williams became ill through the effort and for some weeks he was temporarily laid up, receiving treatment in the camp’s sick quarters. The Luftwaffe doctor would have been furious, or perhaps mildly amused, if he had known the cause of his patient’s illness. At least Williams’ stay in the sick bay gave him time to reflect on the approaching problem of how, exactly, the men would escape once outside the wire. One of his fellow patients was to give him some valuable ideas. The man was an Australian who had been shot in the shoulder trying to escape, and had a sardonic sense of humour typical of his countrymen. The sick bay had a gramophone player, which had been very kindly provided by the camp padre. One day it was playing Beethoven’s Second Symphony when there was a sudden Blitz Appell (an emergency roll-call, favoured by Glemnitz when he thought he could catch the prisoners out at something) and the ferrets marched in. ‘Ach, Beethoven,’ said one of the ferrets upon hearing the strains of the great German composer drifting across the room, ‘A good German!’

‘Yes,’ agreed the Australian, ‘he’s dead.’

The Australian officer had roughed it all the way to Danzig in a cattle train. Williams learned from him that fast trains ran the risk of identity checks so it was better to go for slow trains, with small compartments only, that didn’t have corridors and thus attracted less identity checks. The Australian had a goon called ‘Dopey’ that he had tamed. Each day Dopey would come into the sick bay with news of the latest catastrophe the once mighty Third Reich had suffered. ‘Frankfurt: kaputt!’ he would bemoan. ‘Duisburg: kaputt!’ And so on.

Williams cultivated Dopey too and always turned the conversation around to trains. ‘Hamburg, Bahnhof: kaputt?’ he would enquire.

‘Hamburg: kaputt!’ came the reply.

Williams discovered that trains were almost always overcrowded and invariably late. Foreign workers were allowed to travel on them but they needed special passes from the police in the town that they had travelled from. Williams blackmailed Dopey to obtain two copies of these passes.

The German doctor believed that Williams was so ill he needed to be operated on, but the RAF man refused to countenance the idea. It would certainly have made his life more comfortable. But it would have ruled out any further work on the tunnel. He signed himself out of the sick quarters and soon the vaulters were back in business, some of them a little more reluctant than others. The discovery of Tom in the North Compound had left a deep cloud of depression over many prisoners, but it only served to give added impetus to Codner’s and Williams’ efforts. By the second week of October the tunnel was 100 feet long, and comfortably on the other side of the wire. The long Silesian summer was drawing to a close. With the winter would come rain and its attendant problems for a shallow tunnel dug in sandy ground. The men realised they had to break out now, or face the prospect of spending Christmas in captivity – and possibly finding in the New Year that their tunnel had been destroyed by nature.

Codner and Wiliams had successfully overcome great odds on the inside of the wire. Now they had to confront similar ones on the outside. The tunnel extended several feet beyond the track along which the outside guards patrolled. It was perilously close to them and well within the lights of the arc lamps that extended 30 feet either side of the wire. To avoid detection, the men would have to excavate the escape shaft as quietly as possible. When they emerged they faced a sprint across a road and open countryside into the woods beyond in full view of the watchtowers. The attempt could only be made on a moonless night – when the Germans were always extra vigilant.

The night that was finally chosen was Friday, 29 October. The plan was for Codner to be sealed in the tunnel during the day, to complete the few final feet of tunnel. It would be a lonely, dangerous and gruelling several hours for the Royal Artillery officer. Williams would join Codner after the evening roll-call along with Oliver Philpot, the third member of their team. All three men would be wearing their escape outfits of overalls and hoods – all dyed black using tea and coffee grains – to make them less conspicuous when they emerged into the dark night beyond the wire. They would take their escape disguises in duffel bags down the tunnel with them to keep them clean.

Williams and Codner were going as French draughtsmen at first. They would have documentation to show that they were travelling from Breslau to the Arado aircraft works at Anklam, north of Stettin. Once there they would have the disguises of Swedish sailors in the hope that they could get on a boat for neutral Sweden. Williams’ disguise consisted of a converted marine’s uniform and a trenchcoat, courtesy of Tommy Guest and Ivo Tonder’s toiling tailors. He had a beret made out of an old blanket, a black roll-neck sweater and a small leather case to hold his clean gear, survival rations and false papers. Tim Walenn’s forgery department had supplied him with the appropriate identity and travel papers, and a couple of bogus letters addressed to his assumed identity and purportedly from a French girlfriend. It was an impressive effort. As a final touch Williams had shaved off his distinctive ‘RAF’ moustache. Codner was going to accompany him and had been provided with a similar outfit made out of old Australian Navy trousers and an RAF mackintosh. He carried a canvas valise for his false papers and survival rations.

Philpot was going to travel separately from the other men, posing as a Norwegian working for the Margarine Marketing Union in Berlin. His outfit was that of a petit bourgeois businessman complete with Homburg hat. The tailors’ department had made it out of a similar ensemble of old RAF and Navy uniforms and other scavenged materials. He had a suitcase, too, just big enough to squeeze in the tiny tunnel. It contained high-energy rations ingeniously disguised as the sort of ‘margarine’ products a businessman with the Margarine Marketing Union would be travelling with. Philpot could speak passable German but not a word of Norwegian and so was equipped with a pipe to disguise any difficulties he might experience in that respect. (He had also shaved himself a stubby Adolf Hitler-style moustache, perhaps in a ploy to win some empathy from the German travelling companions he expected to meet along the way.)

Philpot was briefed for his escape by the Norwegian flier Halldor Espelid, who, with Arnold Christensen, ran the Scandinavian section of the X-Organisation’s intelligence network. Espelid was one of the many Norwegians who had escaped to Britain by boat after the Nazis invaded in April 1940. He was flying a Spitfire with 331 Squadron when it was brought down over the Pas de Calais in August 1942. Espelid had spent a short time in Szubin before being sent to Stalag Luft III, where his reputation as one of the best intelligence officers was founded.

Williams and Codner hoped to get to Sweden via Frankfurt an der Oder and the Baltic seaport of Stettin. Philpot aimed to get to the neutral Scandinavian haven by the longer route, via Frankfurt and Danzig. All three were due to travel on the same fast train to Frankfurt, which left Sagan railway station at 7 p.m. that evening. The plan was to avoid fast trains wherever possible in favour of slow trains travelling with local workers. The Germans, Williams had discovered, were used to incompetent foreign workers – there were six million of them in Germany at that time – and it was not unusual for one of them to be unable to speak German. All the escapers had to do in any sticky situation was look helpless and declare: ‘Ich bin Ausländer.’

Shortly after noon on 29 October Codner had a substantial meal of bully-beef, potatoes, Canadian biscuits and cheese. At 1 p.m. the wooden horse was taken out as usual, with Williams and Codner inside. This time, though, Codner had all of their luggage and descended with it into the tunnel. Williams stayed in the wooden horse and by 2 p.m. he had replaced the trap-door and topsoil. While he was doing that, Codner below ground had pushed two air holes upwards to breathe. In the meantime, the horse was taken back to the cookhouse. Codner’s absence from the afternoon roll-call at 3.45 p.m. was successfully disguised.

It was now Williams’ and Philpot’s turn to bid their comrades farewell, and they too were treated to a hearty meal. By now all friction between the vaulters and the escapers had disappeared and everybody wished the two men ‘good luck’. At 4.15 p.m. the horse was taken outside once more, this time with the two men and another officer inside. Williams descended into the tunnel first and as he made his way along, it came as a relief to him to hear the familiar voice of Codner greet him in the dark distance. The tunnel was very hot and stank with the foul stench of sweat. Williams found Codner was filthy but surprisingly cheerful, given that he had been incarcerated underground for half the afternoon. Behind them Philpot was putting the last few bags of sand into the horse and after he finished said goodbye to the officer who remained in the horse to close the trap-door.

The officer sealed the tunnel at 4.50 p.m. and the horse was returned to the cookhouse with the news that all was well with the three men in the tunnel. It must have been an enormous relief to the four carriers when they placed the horse on the ground for the last time. Perhaps, on this one occasion, their smiles were not affected. It is hard to overestimate the excitement of the three men in the tunnel. They were going to break through the surface of the soil outside in just over an hour’s time, at 6 p.m., when it would be dark but by no means pitch black. However, it was essential for them to go then if they were to have enough time to get to the railway station and catch the 7 p.m. train.

At 6.05 p.m. Codner pushed through the final few inches of the tunnel, which, he was to discover, had exited some 15 to 18 feet on the other side of the wire. But to Codner’s alarm he also found that it had broken through part of the pathway that the German guards patrolled on the outside of the wire, not, as had been planned, a foot further into the darkness. This potentially grievous error was only ameliorated by the fact that the outside patrol had not appeared due to some oversight or possibly sheer laziness on the part of the goons. Codner leapt out of the tunnel followed by Williams and they ran across the road to the dank bank of trees looming in the darkness. Each experienced that peculiar sense of exhilaration mixed with fear as they sped across the open expanse of ground. Their hearts pounded as they half expected a shout of alarm from the goon box followed by the crack of a rifle shot. To their relief the shot did not come. They raced into the enveloping embrace of the dark forest, hardly able to contain their excitement as they threw their black overalls and hoods off and put on their civilian disguises. The men cleaned the muck off one another’s faces. Still there was not a hint of sound from the camp to indicate anything was amiss. Just minutes later Philpot shot across the road to the woods. As he left the tunnel behind he wondered just how soon it would be discovered. Codner and Williams now helped Philpot clean himself up, leaving the forest as quickly as possible. Philpot let the other two have a head start of a few minutes.

Williams and Codner arrived at Sagan station within 20 minutes and made their way to the booking hall. Williams got the fright of his life when he walked straight into the German doctor who had been treating him only two days earlier. His alarm turned to relief when he realised the doctor did not register a flicker of recognition at the sight of his English patient now bereft of his moustache and wearing the disguise of a French foreign worker. The English officers stood in the queue for the Frankfurt an der Oder train. Philpot arrived a few minutes later and could see the other two just ahead of him. Both parties studiously ignored one another.

Fortunately, the train to Frankfurt an der Oder arrived shortly afterwards and the journey contained no more unwelcome surprises. The compartment was crowded and dark, as they had hoped it would be. In the gloom most of the passengers sought to ignore one another’s glances and get the uncomfortable ordeal over and done with. Once the train left Sagan, Philpot’s path did not cross with Williams and Codner’s on their flight from Germany. The train steamed into Frankfurt shortly before 9 p.m. The three men disembarked, intent on their separate routes and still unsure as to whether their absence had been discovered at Sagan. There were no further connections that night, and so the men had to find somewhere they could stay overnight in the city without arousing suspicion or being detected. Philpot walked as casually as he could through the dark streets before finding a quiet patch to settle down in by the Oder. It would be a terribly uncomfortable night in the cold, but it was one that Philpot would not exchange for the comparative warmth of his camp bed. He was a free man once more, and intended to continue to be so.

Williams and Codner had a similarly depressing night. They tried to find rooms in several hotels only to discover every one of them seemed to be booked up for some inexplicable reason. In despair, they edged their way to the outskirts of the city and, like Philpot, found a quiet place in a dry drain ditch where they could spend the night undisturbed. They were both wearing warm woollen underclothes but they were by no means warm enough. It was to be a long night.

The following dawn and Philpot was back at Frankfurt railway station at around 6 a.m. He had time to wash and shave in the station’s facilities before catching the 6.56 a.m. slow train to Kustrin (now the Polish town of Kostrzyn), 18 miles from Frankfurt an der Oder and 51 miles north-east of Berlin. Philpot had deliberately chosen this opaque route out of Germany because it was the least likely and he hoped not to encounter any police specifically looking for an escaped RAF officer. (Although at that stage he had no way of knowing whether the tunnel and the men’s absence had been discovered.) On the train Philpot fell into amiable conversation with an old man. He was greatly comforted by the fact that his disguise appeared not to arouse any suspicion (even though, he reflected, his German companion was practically senile). The train had arrived at Frankfurt late and arrived in Kustrin late. Philpot bade a friendly farewell to the German and boarded the express to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), a train so crowded that he had to spend the first leg of the journey to Dirschau (now Tczew, in Poland) in the passageway of the third-class coach with many other passengers including many soldiers. Tiredness overcame him and Philpot fell asleep on his suitcase. Suddenly, he slipped off the case and awoke with a jerk, blurting out: ‘Damn.’ Realising his mistake he was momentarily alarmed, only to find his fellow passengers smiling benignly at him, even the soldiers. He could be excused for thinking that this escaping lark wasn’t so difficult after all.

If he did, then he thought too soon. Shortly afterwards, a member of the criminal police began edging his way down the passageway, asking everyone for their identity papers. When it came to Philpot’s turn he tried to appear calm as he handed over his identity card, hoping that the policeman would not notice that the photograph was of someone else altogether. (The forgery department had no photograph of Philpot and so had inserted a picture of the closest match they had.) There was a slight moment of apprehension when the German demanded to know where his Norwegian passport was. Philpot explained that the Dresden police had confiscated it and had told him his identity card would suffice. It would, replied the policeman, if they had stamped the photograph – but they hadn’t. Philpot began to think his time was up. His heart started racing wildly as now the policeman began to scrutinise the photograph. Philpot held his breath for what seemed a lifetime, before the policeman airily handed the imperfect document back to him. The papers were sufficiently in order, he concluded brusquely, before moving on. Philpot inwardly sighed with relief.

Williams and Codner had also left their hiding places as soon as they could before dawn. They discovered that the Germans were early risers and Frankfurt was full of people on the way to their offices, factories and shops. The two men had a coffee at the station, casually looking around to see if they could spot Philpot. In fact he had already gone and they took a later slow train (or Personenzug) to Kustrin. Williams and Codner were relieved to find that there appeared to be no identity checks on this train and there was no sense that anyone was on the look-out for them. The first carriage was full of Russian prisoners of war and when they tried to enter it the German guard angrily ordered them to get out. They arrived at their destination just before 10 a.m. and spent the day in Kustrin idling their time away, first in a park, where they cleaned themselves up and ate some of their rations.

Later they risked venturing into a café and subsequently hit on the bright idea of whiling away the rest of the day inside the black anonymity of a cinema. Williams and Codner were also gambling on the fact that they were dawdling their way to freedom. If the alert had been raised at Sagan and anybody was looking for them, they would surely have checked the fast trains. In the late afternoon they took the slow train to Stettin, arriving at 8 p.m. Once more they were to discover all the hotels were full, but this time their evening was not going to be quite as uncomfortable as the one the day before. Wandering out into the suburbs they discovered a row of houses each with its own air-raid shelter. Inspecting them one at a time, they chose the one that appeared to be most comfortable. Settling down for another night’s sleep, they prayed that for once, hopefully, the RAF would not be paying Stettin a visit on that particular night.

That afternoon Philpot had arrived at Dirschau and boarded the express to Danzig, arriving at 5 p.m., just under 24 hours after he had emerged from the tunnel at Sagan. After his hair-raising encounter with the German policeman, he could be forgiven for relaxing over a glass of beer at the railway station café before setting off for the docks on a tramcar. He had hoped to have a look around but by the time the tram arrived darkness had descended and he couldn’t see the lay of the land. Philpot returned to the station and sought a room in a hotel nearby. The clerk was churlish about his identity card, but eventually gave him a spare bed in a room, sharing with another man. Acutely conscious that given a whole night of sleeping he could very well repeat his dreadful faux pas on the train, Philpot rushed to have a bath and be asleep before his room companion arrived. When the man arrived late that night Philpot feigned deep slumber. He repeated the ploy in the morning, hoping his roommate didn’t think there was anything odd about someone who appeared to sleep for so long. It was an agonising wait while the man washed and shaved, but after the man had left, Philpot paid his bill and headed for the docks once more. Taking a ferry that made a round trip of the harbour, he was pleased to see a Swedish ship being loaded with coal. It would be the ship, he decided, that would take him on the final leg of his flight to freedom.

His fellow escapees spent the Sunday evening in the Hotel Schobel, finally and joyfully getting their first taste of real comfort since they left Sagan. They had left the air-raid shelter before dawn and checked into the hotel at 9.30 a.m. They too had to go through the ordeal of explaining their less-than-perfect documentation to the hotel clerk. They, like Philpot, had discovered it was not such an ordeal after all. The Germans did not have the meticulous approach to documentation they were commonly supposed to have. They produced their Ausweise and filled in a form stating that they were French draughtsmen on their way to Anklam to work in the Arado Flugzeugwerke, the aircraft works. The clerk accepted their cover story and checked them in. The two men were to spend the following days of their escape checking into a variety of hotels because they were under the impression that a stay of longer than two days had to be reported to the police. Once, in the Hotel Gust, they found themselves sharing a breakfast table with three senior officers of the German Army. When it came to coffee, the British officers felt bold enough to dig into their pockets to get their American Air Force ration biscuits which they cheekily munched in front of the Germans. Their breakfast companions seemed not to notice.

The two men spent their mornings reconnoitring the docks at Freihaven and checked out the coaling station some three miles further on at Reiherwerder. But their search for a suitable Swedish vessel was to prove fruitless and depression began to set in. They spent every afternoon in the cinema, eventually seeing the same film four times and never understanding a word of it. In the evenings they made the rounds of cafés, where they hoped to meet someone who would be prepared to help them escape, and ended up consuming vast quantities of German beer, which, they concluded, appeared to contain no alcohol whatever. Neither of them could speak a word of Swedish so it wasn’t possible to approach any Swedish sailors they might find. Instead they inveigled themselves among French itinerant workers in the hope that they might find one sympathetic to a couple of escaped POWs.

In the meantime, Philpot had had a remarkably smooth escape. He had been challenged only twice during his odyssey across Germany and on both occasions any inadequacies in his forged documentation had been disregarded without a great deal of concern. But now, as Philpot returned to the Swedish ship in Danzig harbour that evening, he realised that the next stage of his journey was not going to be quite without hazard. He found the whole dock was bathed in light. There were lights in every conceivable part of the dock and a huge searchlight followed the progress of the crane as it loaded coal onto the vessel. Sentries guarded every gate. Philpot was beginning to think his task was all but impossible.

However, by climbing down to water level, he found it was surprisingly easy to get around the barbed-wire fences that jutted out either side of the dock. Doing so, he walked along the dock before encountering a vertical ladder leading to the higher dock. Above him Philpot could see the gangway to the ship, guarded by a single sentry who could not possibly miss an intruder.

Philpot, though, didn’t have his eye on the gangway. What attracted his attention were the mooring cables that secured the ship to the dock. There were several of them and all led directly through portholes and onto the deck of the vessel. He wondered, could he shin up them without being spotted from the shore? Philpot headed for the vertical steel ladder leading to the upper dock. It was when he started climbing it that Philpot heard a boat approaching. He scrambled to the top quickly and the movement attracted the interest of a sentry, who approached with his torch flashing. Alarmed, Philpot dived for cover behind a large obstacle. Fortunately, the sentry walked on the opposite side. Philpot overheard him exchanging words with the people in the boat, possibly harbour officials or police. Soon afterwards, calm returned. There was no further sign of the boat or the sentry. It had been a salutary lesson.

Philpot lay in wait. After a while he began climbing up one of the mooring cables. It proved a mistake. The cable was wrapped tightly around the stern of the ship and afforded no handhold for him to make his way around. Remarkably, nobody had spotted him. He returned to the dock and chose another cable. This time it led directly through a large hole in the side of the hull and on to the deck. As he made his way up he half expected a shout from the dock, but none came and he was soon safely ensconced in the Swedish ship. He looked around to see the deck was deserted, but at the same time it offered no opportunity of a hiding place, so he made his way around before finding a flight of steep stairs down to a galley. It too was deserted and to his gratification there was a warm chocolate drink on the stove. Unsurprisingly, he drank it without the slightest hesitation.

Eventually Philpot found his way to a hold that contained coal, and from there discovered the engine room and a hiding place where he settled down and soon fell into a deep slumber. He was gratified a few hours later to wake to the sound of growling engines and the gentle movement of the ship rolling through the sea. Smiling to himself, he stayed in his hiding place until he was confident the ship was well out of German waters. When that moment arose he pulled himself up, straightened out his crumpled outfit and introduced himself to a startled Swedish seaman in the engine-room. It was 2 November. The crewman took him up to the captain’s quarters. There he was royally entertained before the ship docked at Södertälje at midnight on 3 November. He spent the night in a police cell, but Philpot was a free man, and the following day he was escorted to the British Legation in Stockholm. Shortly afterwards Philpot was sent back to Britain.

Although Williams and Codner had set out earlier and had the shorter journey, they were to spend much more time on occupied soil. Their nightly encounters with the café society of Stettin’s itinerant French community were to provide mixed blessings. On one occasion they thought they had found a helper – the man seemed to enjoy his role as their co-conspirator, so much so that his efforts to help them were so theatrically histrionic that he proved more of a hazard than a help. They quickly dropped him and found themselves immersed in the capricious and potentially murderous world of the underground movement. They met two Frenchmen who were also trying to escape, but the Frenchmen were convinced that the two Englishmen were Gestapo agents and wanted to keep their distance from them. Through them, however, Codner and Williams met another French escaper by the name of André Daix, who had hatched a plan to get to Denmark by a ship but didn’t think he could take the British pair with him. It was all very unnerving for Codner and Williams, who were unused to living such a cloak-and-dagger existence where nobody’s word could be taken for granted – despite their experience of being incarcerated in Stalag Luft III.

Nevertheless, through Daix, Williams and Codner were introduced to two Danish sailors, Captain E. Ostrup Olsen and his bo’sun Pedersen, who appeared to be willing to help. (They did not know it at the time, but the Danes were working for British and American intelligence respectively. They had been equipped with a high-quality camera, which they used to record the comings and goings of German ships in the coastal waters that stretched from Scandinavia to France. On board their small ship, the SS J.C. Jacobsen, they had a quantity of incriminating photographs waiting to be delivered to London. Neither man ever let on about their secret role to the British escapers and it was only long after the war that they would find out.)

Pedersen was eventually convinced of their story and agreed to take both the British and Frenchman to Sweden. It would be a risky endeavour. The Jacobsen was a very small vessel and the hideaways would be sharing it with a complement of German passengers. The men would have to evade a thorough search of the ship before it left harbour and when it arrived in Swedish waters they would have to escape on the pilot’s boat without giving the game away to the Germans on board, otherwise the crew would suffer. All three men agreed to do exactly what the Danes told them to.

They were taken on board the Jacobsen and hidden in a tiny compartment under the fo’c’sle. While the ship was being searched before it embarked, Williams was cowering in a cramped corner, his eyes within inches of a Nazi soldier’s jackboots. At one hair-raising moment the German plunged his hand into the enclosure and began groping around. Williams held his breath and pushed himself backwards as far as he could. Finally, though, the ship set sail. It was an uncomfortable voyage for the British and French as they continued to hide while the Germans strolled around the deck, but after some hours the ship approached Swedish territorial waters. Now, everything depended upon who the Swedish pilot was. If it was somebody sympathetic to the Allied cause, then all would be – almost – plain sailing. If it was a quisling then everybody would be in trouble.

As the pilot boat drew near, Pedersen breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the face of a friendly captain. He knew him very well – he was a very reliable man indeed. It was a cold winter’s day and even colder in the open sea. When the pilot’s boat drew alongside the Jacobsen, Pedersen was going to make sure all the German passengers would be in the warmth of a cabin on the opposite side of the ship. While they were being distracted by cups of hot chocolate and an unusually garrulous member of the crew, the three escapers were planning to make a run for it only a few feet away. In the event of one of the Germans somehow seeing what was going on, Pedersen had given the order that they land a punch on him – ‘but not too hard’ – to make it look as if they had taken him by surprise too.

In the end it did not prove necessary for such amateur dramatics. The pilot boat drew alongside. The situation was quickly explained by one captain to another. The three men were ordered to leave their hiding places swiftly and board the boat. They did so and it promptly set off full steam ahead for the Swedish coast. On 11 November Williams and Codner disembarked at Stomstad. They said a grateful goodbye to the pilot, and like Philpot before them they were taken to a police cell where they were given a welcome bath and warm meal. Shortly afterwards they were taken to the British Legation in Stockholm. One night they sat down in a cinema, this time to enjoy a film in English. It was James Hilton’s classic Random Harvest and the two men wept tears of joy for the sentimental vision of England the movie evoked. On 15 November, Williams wrote to his mother in London’s Golders Green: ‘Dear Mother, Just a line to let you know that I have escaped the “Nazi Hell Camp” and am in Sweden. I am quite fit and shall be in England, I hope, in about a week. Do not worry if I am a bit longer as transport is rather unreliable . . .’

Presently Williams and Codner were both repatriated to Britain. Williams’ experiences were put to good use by the RAF. He went on a tour of RAF camps on behalf of MI9, lecturing about escape and evasion techniques. One MI9 officer warned Williams’ audiences, however: ‘The experiences Flt. Lieutenant Williams describes are not necessarily consistent with MI9 teaching and whilst successful in his case, they may have unfortunate results if attempted as a general principle.’ Some time later the news that all three men had got home reached Stalag Luft III. For one night at least there was cheering and happiness throughout the camp.

There was, however, a dark epilogue to the famed wooden horse escape that only emerged after the war. Williams and Codner could not have known as they boarded the pilot boat that they had been spotted by two German trawlers nearby. As their boat made for the Swedish shore, the German trawlers closed in on the Jacobsen. To his horror, Pedersen realised the whole thing had been witnessed by German Army officers on board the trawlers watching with binoculars. Soon afterwards one of the trawlers came alongside the Jacobsen and a boarding party of armed guards stormed the Danish vessel. The crew were ordered on deck, some of them pulled out of their beds half-naked. For several hours the men were harshly beaten and battered with rifle butts. They stuck to their story that none of them had known there were escapers on board. The Germans informed them that they would be escorted back to Denmark and the three ships set sail, the two German trawlers circling the Danish ship, the officers keeping a watchful eye with their binoculars once more. Oddly, they did not leave a guard on board. The omission allowed Pedersen to dispose of the incriminating photographs. It probably saved him his life. When the Jacobsen arrived in Denmark, the interrogation of the crew continued. Eventually an angry German sergeant told them he was going to shoot the youngest crewman, who was barely out of his boyhood. Pedersen had seen many of his compatriots shot for less. He confessed that he had helped the escapers, but that none of the crew knew anything about it. The Germans didn’t believe him, but they couldn’t prove it, and with the thankful absence of the photographs they could not pin anything more on the Dane. Pedersen escaped being executed, too, but nevertheless spent the rest of the war in a concentration camp.

The success of the wooden horse escapers taught the members of East Compound a vital lesson. So long as the tunnel entrance could be hidden, then a successful tunnel really could be built. In fact, in the following spring the prisoners began such a tunnel called, for some reason lost in time, ‘Margaret’. They were to use the morning and afternoon roll-calls to camouflage their tunnelling activities. In the morning, while hundreds of men assembled for the morning roll-call, a couple of their number would dig a tunnel in the middle of them, and remain for most of the day down the tunnel. In the evening they would emerge during roll-call. The excavated sand was carried away by all the other men, hidden in bags beneath their winter greatcoats. The digging began in January 1944 and Margaret was complete by the following March. Everything was ready for a team of five men to go out when another attempt forced the escape to be postponed. That was through a tunnel called Harry.