Best Little Stories from World War II by C. Brian Kelly

Author:C. Brian Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Based upon King’s Cliffe Remembered, 20th Fighter Group Association, 1988.

Only Harry

TOM, DICK, AND HARRY WERE THEIR names.

Only a relative few of the men residing at Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Germany, sixty miles southeast of Berlin, ever heard of them or knew they were there.

Of the three, only Harry would go places. Both Tom and Dick came to no good end.

Tom’s game was up when the Germans cut down trees on his side of the sprawling POW camp devoted to captured enemy aircrews. Dick capitulated to construction of a new compound right over his head.

That left Harry as the one and only escape possibility for the seven hundred RAF and American airmen held in Stalag Luft III’s North Compound—a number that was small potatoes, really, by comparison with the entire camp and its ten thousand POWs of many nationalities.

The men in North Compound who knew Harry best were the leaders of “X Organization” and various moles, forgers, watchers, carpenters, and others conspiring to assure Harry’s ultimate success.

The X leader was Roger Bushell, a South African lawyer in civilian life, a fighter pilot in war. Shot down at Dunkirk in May of 1940, he was a known escaper who had been warned he would be shot as a saboteur if he attempted to escape again.

Undeterred by such threats, the POW leadership in North Compound was so determined to mount an escape that it had authorized the simultaneous construction of three separate tunnels—Tom, Dick, and Harry.

The hard, highly secret work underground called upon talents of Welsh miners, American carpenters, British artists and tailors, and forgers from all over. They were needed, variously, to dig the tunnels and shore them up, to devise fake civilian clothes from available uniform items, to produce false identity papers, railroad tickets, and the like.

This was a massive effort with perhaps six hundred POWs taking part…and only two hundred or so actually expected to make use of a good, completed tunnel in one night of undetected use.

The men had moved into North Compound in April 1943. Work began soon after.

In the summer of 1943, the Americans of North Compound suffered a morale blow—they were moved to a newly constructed South Compound that August. They had to leave the tunnels behind. Then came the demise, strictly through circumstance, of Tunnels Tom and Dick.

Harry, though, grew and grew…until, finally, in early 1944, he was ready for the big breakout…today known as the Great Escape.

The chosen night of March 24, 1944, came at last. Bitter cold, six inches of snow on the ground.

The men, many trembling in anticipation, were ready and eager to go. Everybody had his place in an invisible pipeline running from various barracks to Harry’s mouth.

Picked in advance, seventy of them would go first as reward for their effort in building the tunnels, prepping for the escape, and/or their fluency in a Continental language. Carrying their phony paperwork and tickets, they would ride trains and try to distance themselves from Sagan quickly. Another 150 RAF crewmen had won their places in the Harry pipeline by lot.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.