THE LAST ESCAPE

by Bruce Heydt

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From 1939 to 1945, R.A.F. pilots and air crews waged war on Germany from inside Hitler’s Third Reich. During the course of England’s defence of France and the strategic bombing campaign against targets in occupied Europe, British airmen were inevitably shot down and taken prisoner. The experience always left the stunned pilots apprehensive and disoriented, and their German captors typically greeted the prisoners with the words: ‘For you the war is finished.’

Wing Commander Harry ‘Wings’ Day fell into German hands on Friday, the 13th of October, just five weeks after Britain’s declaration of war. Unlike the younger airmen captured in the early days of the conflict, this 41-year-old veteran of the ‘Great War’ had a keen perspective on what lay ahead. Day told his dispirited companions: ‘1918 may seem a long way off to some of you. At the beginning of that year it looked as though we had lost the [First World] war. It may seem to some of you now that you have already lost this one. But we beat the Germans in 1918 and what you have already done will help to beat them again. For you the war is not over.’

In order to restore the prisoners’ shattered morale, Day assigned them a formal mission, just as if they were still serving in active R.A.F. squadrons. Henceforth, he told them, their contribution to the war effort would be to escape.

Early in the War, none of the British or Allied prisoners knew much about how to break out of an internment camp, but their guards knew as little about how to prevent it. The prisoners tested their captors’ skills frequently, but did not coordinate their efforts, so that several different groups often worked out their own schemes simultaneously. These escapes often succeeded to the extent that the prisoners got beyond the barbed wire and guard towers that surrounded the camps, but rarely did they have the resources necessary to make it back to England, and the Germans recaptured most within a few hours or days.

Few of the escapees could match the exploits of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, a South African-born R.A.F. officer. Twice he broke out of camp, and on the first attempt he came to within a few yards of the German-Swiss border before being caught. A second escape might well have succeeded if he had not had the bad luck of breaking out of camp just before assassins killed Reichsfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. The Germans launched a massive manhunt for the killers, and in the process, they stumbled upon Bushell hiding in Prague.

Wing Commander Day learned from these early defeats. He knew that if such small scale, impromptu operations had failed in the past, they could not succeed in the future, as German authorities tightened security to deal with the threat. Day, then being detained at Stalag Luft III–a prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan, Germany–coordinated all future escape efforts by establishing an official planning committee called the X Organization. He selected Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Buckley to mastermind the group, but in March, 1943 Buckley was killed during an escape attempt and Bushell took over control of the X Organization.

Buckley’s failure, and others before it, inspired Bushell’s strategy. Though unsuccessful, Buckley and a few companions sent German authorities into a near panic, forcing them to commit combat troops, which could otherwise have been deployed at the front, to the task of hunting down the escaped prisoners. This clearly indicated how important the prisoners’ contribution to the war effort could be.

Bushell planned to repeat Buckley’s effort on a massive scale. The Germans classified any breakout involving more than five prisoners a ‘mass escape’. In contrast, Bushell planned to equip no less than 200 British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, and other Allied air force captives with clothes, identity papers, rations, and everything else they needed to reach neutral Sweden or Switzerland, and to dig three tunnels out of Stalag Luft III to get them on their way.

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