Authors: Simon Read
Heinrich Hilker: Local Gestapo agent and gunman
Max Dissner: Section head of local Gestapo and suspected gunman
Stalag Luft III sat in a clearing of dense pine forest just south of Sagan, some five hundred miles north of the Swiss border and two hundred miles south of the Baltic coast. Two fences measuring ten feet high, crowned in barbed wire, encircled the compound. The seven-foot space between the fences was a no-man’s-land of additional barbed wire. Thirty feet inside the interior fence, strung no more than eighteen inches high, was a single strand of barbed wire that prisoners were forbidden to cross. Breaching the wire was likely to result in a deadly burst of machine-gun fire from one of the guard towers, which were strategically placed every 330 feet along the outer perimeter fence. At nightfall, guards in the towers swept the camp grounds with wide-beam spotlights.
Built on Hermann Göring’s orders, the camp—its full name being Stammlager Luft III, or Permanent Camp for Airmen 3—was designed to be escape-proof. The compound’s location was chosen, in part, because of the ground: yellow sand beneath a thin layer of gray, gravelly dirt. The soil’s lack of solidity would make tunneling virtually impossible. If an intrepid group of men considered digging their way out, the tunnel’s necessary length would most likely dissuade them from pursuing their scheme. The barrack blocks were set at least one hundred feet back from the fence; to reach the cover of the forest, a tunnel would
have to stretch at least two hundred feet. The barracks, 160 feet long by 40 feet wide, with tarred roofs and timber-panel sides, were built with trapdoors in the floors and ceilings, allowing guards to make spot inspections to ensure prisoners weren’t secretly stashing away contraband to assist in escape. In past breakouts from various camps, prisoners had tunneled their way out by removing the flooring of their barracks and digging into the ground directly underneath. Because the barracks at Stalag Luft III were set on stilts, this was not possible. Concrete pilings that served as foundations for the washroom and kitchen in each block, however, were dug into the earth. Through these, prisoners would have to dig before they even hit soil.
If such a task were possible, the next dilemma faced by a tunnel crew would be hiding the excavated dirt. The gray topsoil in the compound, the Germans believed, would thwart any attempt to discard and hide the yellow sand that was dug up from underneath. Little, however, was left to chance. The Germans sunk microphones ten feet underground to pick up the sounds of any subterranean activity. In addition to the guards in the towers, “ferrets”—as the prisoners called them—routinely patrolled the camp grounds and stalked the edge of the woods. Canine units covered the perimeter along the outer fence. During the summer months, the sun baked the camp and rendered the ground dry as bone. Winter brought temperatures below zero, heavy snow and torrential rains, turning the soil into a thick, sticky sludge. It was here to Stalag Luft III, the largest of six “main camps” built in Germany, that prisoners began arriving in March 1942. Squadron Leader Roger Joyce Bushell was thirty-two years old when he arrived in the autumn of that year. He had already been a prisoner of the Reich for two years.
His Spitfire was knocked from the sky on May 23, 1940, in combat over Dunkirk, when a Messerschmitt 110 challenged him head-on. Machine guns blazed, and both pilots found their mark. The Messerschmitt spiraled to earth, while Bushell—his cockpit filling with smoke—was forced to make an emergency landing. He brought the plane down in a field and escaped the fiery wreck with only a fractured nose. Not long thereafter, he was taken into custody and shipped off
to Dulag Luft, the German reception center for captured Allied airmen, outside Frankfurt. The Germans quickly found out that Bushell was not a man content to sit out the war in relative safety.
He was born in South Africa, the son of an English mining engineer, but educated in England. He read law at Cambridge, where he excelled at academics and more physical pursuits, landing a place on the university’s skiing team. His passion for speed earned him a reputation for fearlessness on the slope and the ranking of fastest British downhill skier on record in the early 1930s. During a competition in Canada, he suffered a nasty spill, the tip of one ski tearing at the corner of his right eye. The stitches required and the resulting scarring left him with a permanently drooped eye, giving him a somewhat sinister look. Scarred or not, Bushell could be an intimidating presence, an amalgamation of high intelligence, powerful build, and forceful personality. Such attributes served him well as a defense lawyer in the courtroom before the war and would prove an even greater asset in captivity. He joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in 1932 and was posted to 601 Squadron, where—just as on the slopes—he built his name on risk-taking, going so far on one occasion as to land his plane at a country pub for a pint. In October 1939, one month after the war’s outbreak, he was promoted to squadron leader and charged with creating a night-fighter squadron on England’s south coast. By the time Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on France and the Low Countries in May 1940, Bushell’s squadron was taking to the skies in Spitfires. It was shortly thereafter that he found himself in enemy hands.
By the time he arrived at Stalag Luft III, Bushell was a seasoned escape artist. His most recent adventure entailed jumping from a train while being transferred from one camp to another. Accompanied by a fellow escapee—a Czech officer with the RAF—he had made his way to Prague, where he and his compatriot were caught hiding in the apartment of a local resistance member. The two men, ratted out by a porter in the apartment building, were turned over to the Gestapo, who subjected both men to brutal interrogations. The Czech family that dared house the escapees was butchered. After failing to elicit confessions of sabotage, the Gestapo shipped both men off to separate camps: the Czech officer to Colditz,
Bushell to Sagan. Although Bushell never revealed what happened to him while in Gestapo custody, those who knew him beforehand noticed a harder edge to his personality upon his arrival at Stalag Luft III. In the camp already were numerous prisoners Bushell had conspired with in various compounds during his years of captivity. What the Germans believed to be sound policy, putting their most troublesome wards all in one camp, would prove a great asset to the determined Bushell. Assuming command of the camp’s escape committee, dubbed “X-Organization,” Bushell—codenamed “Big X”—hatched a plot to break out 250 inmates.
The audacious plan called for the simultaneous digging in the north compound of three tunnels named Tom, Dick, and Harry; speaking the word “tunnel” would be strictly forbidden. To avoid the camp’s underground microphones, vertical shafts to each tunnel would be dug thirty feet down before horizontal digging commenced. Tom would cut west from Hut 123, which, of the three barracks selected, was closest to the wire but the farthest away from any guard tower. Dick would head in the same direction from the next hut over, number 122, slightly farther away from the camp’s perimeter fence. Harry would start under Hut 104, directly opposite the camp’s main gate, and cut a northern line into the woods. Elaborate trapdoors were devised to hide the entrance to each tunnel.
Tom was concealed in a dark corner of a hallway near the kitchen, above the stove’s concrete foundation. The trapdoor was a mere eighteen inches square, just wide enough for a man to climb in and out. The entrance to Dick was in the washroom, beneath a grille-covered drain, which usually had several inches of wastewater sitting at the bottom, offering the perfect camouflage. To create the tunnel entrance, the prisoners drained the water, chiseled away a slab of concrete from one side of the drain and substituted their own manufactured replacement that could easily be lifted in and out. A sealant made of clay, soap, and cement was used to waterproof the slab’s edges before the drain was filled again. A cast-iron stove in the corner of a room in Hut 104 was chosen to hide the vertical shaft that would grant access to Harry. The stove sat on a square bed of tiles, which had to be individually removed
to access the hut’s stone foundation beneath. The tiles were fitted into a special four-foot-square frame, which could be removed as one whole piece to gain entrance. The stove was always kept hot, so to remove it from the tile base, a set of lifting handles were made out of bed boards. A pipe extension, made of empty milk tins, was used to keep the stove attached to the hut’s chimney when it was off the base.
The actual tunneling began in April 1943 and became “a standard pastime at Stalag Luft III.” More than six hundred men took part in the escape’s preparation and planning. An elaborate lookout system was established to monitor the guards. “Stooges,” the name for prisoners serving as lookouts, were positioned throughout the camp and used a series of signals—the tamping of a pipe, the doffing of a cap, turning a page in a book—to notify the men in the huts of approaching “ferrets.” One “stooge” would always be assigned to monitor the camp’s main gate. Dubbed the “duty pilot,” he would sit in a chair, perhaps appearing to catch some sun or idly flip through a book, all the while keeping track of the guards who came and went, relaying the information to other “stooges” through their various signals. The Germans were not entirely ignorant of the “duty pilot’s” presence, though they were hard-pressed to ascertain the plot in which he played a role. Underground, the diggers sweat and toiled in miserable conditions. One digger would lie on his stomach and hack away at a wall of earth, piling the dirt and debris near his head. Eventually, he would push the pile down toward his waist, where the digger behind him would load it into a wheeled trolley. Another man, at the far end of the shaft, would pull on a rope to wheel the trolley in and load the dirt into sacks for later disposal. When done, the diggers would pull the trolley back to their end of the shaft, and the slow, painful process would repeat itself.
Men of large physique found the tunnel work particularly uncomfortable. Even for the smallest, lightweight man, conditions were too cramped to turn around. If one digger wanted to trade places with another, the two of them would often have to crawl over each other. The men worked in long, woolen underwear, which became increasingly uncomfortable as they perspired. Some men chose simply to work
naked—but there was little relief from the stifling conditions. “Digging was the worst. You had a fat lamp by your head, you sniffed fumes all day, and when you came back up again you did nothing but spit black.”
The digging generated tons of dirt, all of which had to be discarded somehow. Because the soil underground differed in color from the compound’s topsoil, this presented a considerable problem—one that fell to Lieutenant Commander Peter Fanshawe, head of dispersal, to solve. He soon devised a contraption made from the cutoff legs of long, woolen underwear. The bottom of each leg was fastened shut by a pin attached to a length of string. The idea was to fill such trouser bags with dirt from the tunnels. More than one hundred prisoners, codenamed “penguins,” would wear the contraption inside their trousers, the length of string from the bag easily accessible in their pockets. Pulling the strings would release the pins holding the sacks closed and discard the dirt down the penguin’s leg. All they had to do was tread the small amount of dirt into the ground. Prisoners were more than happy to surrender their woolen underwear supplied by the Red Cross. Itchy and coarse, it was a despised piece of clothing.
As part of his ambitious plan, Bushell ordered that all escapees be issued with pertinent travel documents and identity papers. The task fell to a forgery department—named Dean and Dawson after the London-based travel agency—headed by Flight Lieutenant Gilbert Walenn, the twenty-six-year-old son of a London graphic artist, who shared his father’s talent. Health-conscious and sporting a large, red handlebar mustache in the RAF style, Walenn neither smoked nor drank, believing both vices would inhibit his physical prowess should he make it out beyond the wire. His department relied very much on the camp’s established blackmailers and scroungers to acquire the necessary German documents for replication. For bars of chocolate, cigarettes, a tin of real coffee, and assorted other goods that arrived for the benefit of prisoners via Red Cross packages, certain guards could be swayed to lend a hand. Once that line had been crossed, there was no going back. Walenn and his team of fifty artists would eventually produce four hundred documents, including forged travel passes, permits for foreign workers, identity cards, passports, and more. German gothic
font and various emblems found on the source materials were painstakingly recreated by hand, as was any typewritten script. Official stamps were replicated by carving patterns out of boot heels; black boot polish was used for ink.
Australian Flying Officer Al Hake oversaw the production of two hundred compasses. The pointers were made from magnetized sewing needles, the compass bodies from shards of gramophone records softened by heat and molded into shape. Pieces of broken glass were cut into circles for the compass covers and soldered into place using a makeshift blowtorch devised from a fat lamp and empty food tins. “Made in Stalag Luft III” read the inscription on the underside of each compass. Elsewhere in the camp, a tailoring department busied itself turning blankets and RAF uniforms into civilian suits, workmen’s clothes, and German military apparel. A cartographic team was set up under Flight Lieutenant Des Plunkett to produce maps of Germany showing not only the locations of towns, villages, rivers, and other landmarks, but details of topographic features that might aid or hinder an escapee’s progress. Information for the maps was passed on to Plunkett and his men from turned guards and fellow prisoners familiar with Germany before the war. Knowledge, no matter how scant, of the cultures, customs, and languages of other European countries was also deemed beneficial to X-Organization’s endeavor.
All the while, the digging continued, using makeshift tools and other materials scrounged from the camp or blackmailed from guards. Upon arrival in the camp, a prisoner was issued a “bed-stead and mattress, knife, spoon, fork, mess-tines, cup, 2 blankets, 3 sheets and 1 towel.” Construction of the tunnels alone required the requisitioning of nearly 1,219 knives, 582 forks, 408 spoons, 246 water cans, 1,699 blankets, 192 bedcovers, 161 pillowcases, 1,212 pillows, 655 straw mattresses, 34 chairs, the frames of 90 bunk beds, 3,424 towels, 10 single tables, 52 twenty-man tables, more than 1,200 bed bolsters, nearly 1,400 beaded battens, 76 benches, 1,000 feet of electrical wiring, and 600 feet of rope. Four thousand bed boards were used to shore up the tunnels. Lights wired into the camp’s electrical supply provided illumination underground; air pumps made of discarded kit bags, empty
powdered-milk tins, wood framing, wire mesh, and tar paper supplied fresh air to those doing the digging.