Finally, every escapee received a homemade compass, fashioned by magnetizing strips of metal cut from razor blades and mounting them in cases made from melted phonograph records.

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Despite incredible ingenuity and every precaution, however, German guards discovered tunnel Tom when one of them accidentally dropped a pickaxe, breaking a corner from the cement slab that covered the entrance. The Germans immediately collapsed the nearly completed tunnel with a charge of dynamite, but Tom took its revenge. The Germans had no idea how much dynamite they needed for the job and in the end they grossly overestimated. The blast not only collapsed the tunnel but also damaged the drainpipes running from one of the German barracks. In trying to make repairs, the Germans toppled one of their own guard towers.

Though disheartened by the setback, the POWs continued to work on the two remaining tunnels. Eventually, Bushell halted work on tunnel Dick and used it as a place to hide the sand removed from Harry, which the tunnellers finished in mid-March, 1944. It ran for 336 feet from its entrance under the stove to the exit shaft, which rose to within a foot of the surface. The remaining distance was to be broken through only at the moment of escape.

Bushell scheduled the breakout for the night of 24th March. The 200 escapees gathered in the barracks over the tunnel entrance in preparation for making their way, one by one, through Harry. Each prisoner descended the entrance shaft and laid down on a trolley car waiting at the bottom. A POW at Piccadilly Circus pulled the trolley through the tunnel by rope. At the first transfer station, the escapee switched to a second trolley for the ride to Leicester Square and on to the exit shaft, while the first trolley was pulled back down the tunnel toward the entrance for the next passenger.

Harry was only two feet high and two feet wide, and a bump of a head or an elbow against the side usually resulted in a cave-in, so even with the trolleys and some good luck, Bushell expected it would take all night to pass 200 men through the tunnel. Problems threw the schedule into disarray right from the outset, however. The remaining foot of soil separating the exit shaft from the surface proved to be a major obstacle. A wooden frame that prevented an accidental cave-in from exposing the exit had frozen into place and the tunnellers worked at it for half-an-hour before it came free. Then, the first prisoner to poke his head through to the surface discovered that a gap in the ring of trees encircling the camp left the exit easily visible from both a nearby guard tower and the route walked by a sentry outside the barbed wire.

With no other choice, Bushell decided to risk going ahead with the breakout, relying on a prisoner watching from the woods and tugging a signal rope when it was safe for each subsequent escapee to make the dash from the tunnel to safety.

One by one the prisoners exited and started on their way, but just a short time later a cave-in halted the flow of escapees for another 30 minutes. Even when traffic resumed, only a handful of POWs made their way through Harry each hour, far below Bushell’s planned rate of one every four minutes.

As dawn approached, the POWs in charge of the tunnel told those who had not yet got through to hide their escape gear and return to their own barracks, since there was no longer any hope of them getting away. At the same instant, outside the wire, the prisoners’ luck ran out. The German sentry who had been within gunshot of the escaping POWs all night finally noticed steam rising from the ground near the woods and, taking a detour from his usual rounds to investigate, discovered the tunnel’s exit.

While the game was up, however, the Germans did not immediately learn the location of the other end of the tunnel. None of the guards was anxious to climb into Harry’s exit and trace the tunnel back to its origin. One finally consented to do so and climbed down into the hole, but when he did not reappear for more than an hour, his superiors naturally became concerned. A search of every barracks in the compound had failed to disclose Harry’s entrance, and finally the camp Commandant swallowed his pride and asked the British prisoners to please rescue the missing guard. By then they had already done so on their own initiative, after hearing cries for help coming from beneath their barracks floor.

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