Spitfire Recon Wreckage Found

[rwanttaja]

I would add that the movie, while excellent, took many liberties as movies do, but the book of the same title (written, IIRC, by a prisoner who was there) was excellent. And the proper term is "murdered", not "executed", since the POWS at that point were considered noncombatants and had committed no crime.

It's semantics, I know, but the killings were performed in accordance to the law of the country in which they occurred. Contrary to international law, and agreements Germany had signed, of course. Horrible either way.

Paul Brickhill, the book's author, had been shot down in Tunisia in 1943, and was a minor cog in the escape organization. After the fifty had been killed, word came down to the POWs that any future escapees would be killed. They kept working on the fourth tunnel, "George", as a potential escape route because the rumor was they'd be killed anyway, if the Germans lost the war. One prisoner decided to escape in a garbage wagon. He was re-captured just a few hours later by "good-tempered Wehrmacht soldiers" and brought back to camp.

To bring it back to airplanes, the fun scene where James Garner steals a German plane and attempts to fly it back to England is fictional. One of the escaped prisoners did try the same thing but never got off the ground; he was caught by a guard while trying to get the plane started.

IIRC, this was an anecdote Brickhill provided regarding an earlier escape, not during the Great Escape. Brickhill says that the POWs were trying to start an airplane when a guard came up and asked what the hell they were doing. Nabbed, one of the POWs said, "We were just going to borrow it for the weekend...."

And, of course, Bob Hoover eventually did manage to escape and steal a German airplane.

One of the things that baffle me is why the moviemakers changed the "traps" for the three tunnels...the hidden entry points to the vertical shafts. The huts had floors eighteen inches off the ground and were open below so that the "ferrets" (German anti-escape specialists) to examine the dirt to see if digging was going on. There were solid concrete foundations under the stoves and showers.

"Harry," which was eventually used in the escape, was underneath a stove. "Dickie" was in a shower drain, and Tom, incredibly, was in a flat, featureless stretch of concrete. It was a square of concrete cut out of the middle so closely that only a fine line could be seen; a paste of powder and water was used to hide the line. Incredible workmanship, considering tools available.

Like in the movie, "Tom" was the first tunnel found. One of the Germans, tapping the floor with a lone spike, happened to catch the edge of the trap. In the movie, "Tom" was under a stove, and the trap for "Harry" was in the shower instead.

I think they changed it because the real "Tom" would have been difficult to depict; moviegoers would find it hard to be believe they could have gotten away with it. That's the difference between fiction and real life; fiction has to be believable....

One of my retirement projects is a novel set in a POW camp in Germany, so my brain is kind of full of these sorts of detail right now. The research is the fun part. :-)

Ron "Mabel...I love ya Mabel..." Wanttaja