The Great Escape Read Online Free

two huts, and then came the master stroke! They dug two shallow camouflage tunnels about thirty feet long and stopped them there. Halfway along each of these they made a second camouflaged trap in the floor and under this sank a shaft twenty feet vertically and started the real tunnel from there. If the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnels they probably wouldn’t find the secret deep shafts, and the diggers could burrow down to the real tunnel from another direction. They were learning, growing in cunning.
    The ferrets did find one of the dummy tunnels, and then, by accident probably, hit upon the hidden trap door in it and that was the end of that one, the other tunnel forged ahead, the tunnelers hacking at the crumbling face in stinking darkness, passing the sand back in a metal washbasin drawn by plaited string. Special dispersers hid the sand under the hut and carefully raked it over so it did not seem obvious.
    They devised a crude form of ventilation for the deep tunnel. Short sticks were fitted into sockets in each other like a fishing rod and pushed up through the soil till they broke through the top, twenty feet up. A P.O.W. sentry (always know as a stooge) lay upon the sand above to hide the stick as it pushed through, and then he camouflaged and protected the hole with a stone. Stinking air filtered up through these little holes. They made conditions just possible for working below, but only just. After a couple of hours of blind digging at the face, men crawled painfully back up with splitting heads and retched up green vomit. Pretty often it was dry retching because on German rations you didn’t have much to bring up.
    Johnny Travis, a dapper little Rhodesian, had been a mining engineer until he was trapped for three days 4,000 feet down a gold mine once by a fall of rock. He had bad claustrophobia from that, but he still used to go down the tunnel and work close to screaming point for a couple of hours, then come up to vomit. The sand was so crumbly there were frequent falls and there was always a number two digger close behind to haul you out by the legs if you were buried. It was grim.
    Buckley noticed that Travis was a minor genius with his hands, making baking dishes from old tins, and shaving brushes from hunks of wood and bits of string. He pulled Travis out of the tunnel and started him making escape equipment — fat lamps from old tins with fuel made from margarine boiled to extract the water, and wicks made of pajama cord. He made shovels for the diggers from bits of metal from old stoves and filed down broken table knives for chisels. (Buckley got the bits of file from bribing German guards.)
    As the tunnel lengthened, the air got so bad they couldn’t go on. Buckley commandeered an old accordion from one of the prisoners, and they used this to try to pump some air in. Then Marshall, Travis and some helpers designed a rough pump from a kit bag, with old boot leather for valves. It was just finished when someone fell on it and smashed it. He made another, and the Germans found it before it could be smuggled below. He made another, and it pushed just enough air into the tunnel to enable them to carry on.
    The level of the dispersed sand was rising too noticeably under the hut so they dug a short tunnel back to the adjoining hut and started putting sand under there. The main tunnel was steered under the kitchen hut to disperse more sand there, but they were disappointed to find that there was no room underneath. There was a huge fall under that hut, and Wally Floody was nearly suffocated under half a ton of sand. It shook him up.
    Then the Germans found the shallow dummy tunnel. All of us held our breath, but the Germans missed the secret trap door in it. They destroyed the dummy tunnel, so Floody and Crump dug a new dummy tunnel from another room and sank another secret shaft to line up with the main tunnel again. They didn’t know the burrowing had undermined the hut foundations, and the weight