It was the culmination of years of intensely secretive planning. It was an astounding achievement of hard work and incredible ingenuity.
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Tony Pengelly, from Ontario was the master forger making all the carefully crafted documents for potential excapees CLICK TO ENLARGE
It was a tale of courage and daring, but also with the knowledge that for the most part it would fail, at least in one sense.
We are approaching the anniversary of that event 70 years ago.
Canadian Wally Floody-shown in this camp photo- was a miner in northern Ontario. He was the tunnel king CLICK TO ENLARGE
On the cold night of March 24-25, 1944, dozens of Commonwealth prisoners crawled from a tiny hole outside the wire of the German Stalag Luft III prison camp in Poland and made their way into the woods and beyond. It became known as “The Great Escape”.
The plan was seemingly simple, dig a tunnel, four actually, from the prisoner huts, out under the fence and into the woods.
In reality however, it was exceptionally complex, and required an amazing variety of skills to pull it off. Old military clothes had to be made into civilian ones, escapees had to learn languages, authentic documents had to be prepared, maps, compasses, suitcases and more all created secretly and virtually out of scraps.
Even if few actually made it back to Allied forces, the idea was that the escape would tie up vast numbers of German resources in tracking the escapees down. In that aspect it succeeded. However for fifty of the escapees the effort ended in their cold-blooded murder.
Almost two decades later Hollywood picked up this amazing tale. The 1963 release of “The Great Escape” featured some big name movie stars and was a huge success. But it was wrong. Although virtually no Americans were involved, they turned it into an American story
A new book seeks to set the record straight.
Ted Barris is professor of journalism and broadcasting at Centennial College in Toronto, and author of several books, including “The Great Escape- A Canadian Story”
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