The Great Escape Read Online Free Page A

above collapsed the new dummy tunnel as Floody was crawling naked along it. Ten feet of it came down along his body but by a miracle he had his face just over the trap door to the secret shaft and could breathe. The tunnel team dug madly for an hour and got him out. He was lucky.
    They dug another shallow dummy tunnel, sank another deep shaft and at last made contact again with the main tunnel.
    They’d been working for months now, and the X organization was slowly growing all the time. Tim Walenn and a couple of men who’d been artists before they became airmen started a little factory for forging papers and passports. Tommy Guest organized a tailor shop to convert uniforms into rough civvy clothes. More metal workers and carpenters joined Johnny Travis. The tunnel pushed on till it was over three hundred feet long; less than a hundred feet to go now, but the sand was rising blatantly under the new dispersal hut.
    A gang of ferrets raided the hut one morning, cleared everyone out, and almost took it apart. Underneath they found fresh sand over the exit of the dispersal tunnel, dug down to the trap door, and traced it right back to the deep shaft. They blew up the lot.
    Buckley, Wings Day, the Dodger and others were purged to Schubin, a camp up near Bromberg, in Poland. In the train going there the dogged Dodger prised up a floorboard in his cattle truck and jumped out. A guard saw him and a posse jumped off the train and persuaded him to come back at pistol point. Paddy Byrne got out too. Also caught.
    Within a week of arriving at Schubin, Buckley, Wings and company were tunneling from one of the lavatories, and this time there was no hitch. The tunnel was 150 feet long when they surfaced outside the wire, and nearly forty men got out through it.
    It wasn’t discovered till
Appell
(counting parade) next day, and even then the Germans nearly missed it. Normally we paraded in five ranks for appell, but that morning some sections paraded in fours. The German officer had nearly finished counting when he noticed some of the fives he was counting were not fives but fours, and his blood pressure nearly sprayed out of his ears.
    Five thousand troops turned out for the search, and before long the escapees had nearly all been caught. Wings Day was out for a week till a Hitler Youth boy spotted him hiding in a barn, and the local Home Guard winkled him out with shotguns.
    Two they never caught and this was tragedy. Jimmy Buckley and a Danish lad in the R.A.F. got to Denmark and started out in a little boat from the Zealand coast. Five miles across the water lay Sweden and freedom. No one ever found out exactly what happened. Maybe they were rammed, or shot, or just capsized. The Dane’s body was found in the sea weeks later. They never found Buckley.
     
    Late in 1942 Roger Bushell arrived in Sagan. The Gestapo had grilled him for several months, trying to pin charges of sabotage and spying on him, but Bushell’s tough and nimble brain had kept him clear of the firing squad. They would probably have shot him in any case if Von Masse, chief censor officer at Stalag Luft III, who knew and liked Bushell, hadn’t heard that the Gestapo was holding him. Von Masse’s brother was a
Generaloberst
(colonel-general), and he used this influence to have Bushell handed back to the less lethal custody of the prison camp.
    In Prague Bushell’s Czech host had given him a smart, gray civilian suit, and it never occurred to the Gestapo, who dealt mainly with civilians, to take it from him. Roger wore a tattered old battle dress back to Sagan and carried his suit with him, wrapped in paper. Von Masse met him when he got to the camp, and Roger went for him with bald-headed fury over the way the Gestapo had treated him. Von Masse apologized.
    “Don’t blame us, please, for what the Gestapo do,” he said. “They’re not the real Germany.” He added warningly: “What I particularly want to say is that you’re lucky to get back this time. You