Eric Williams. Stalag Luft III
Besides the mass escape immortalized in film as The Great Escape, Stalag Luft III was the site of one of the most ingenious escapes ever conceived. It was carried out almost fully in the open, under the eyes and ears of the German guards tasked with preventing Allied prisoners from eluding their authority. The idea of Eric Williams and Michael Codner, it was based on the legendary tale of the Trojan Horse from Homer’s Iliad, with a twist.
The Trojan Horse was used to get people in where they didn’t belong. In Williams’s and Codner’s plan it was used to get people out. The two fliers built a wooden vaulting horse, big enough to hold three men inside, which was placed in the same spot near the wire every day. While other prisoners got their exercise vaulting over the outside, the men inside tunneled towards freedom.
At the end of the day the hole in the ground was covered with a wooden plank, and then with surface soil. The dirt excavated that day was carried back inside the horse to a storage space, then dispersed throughout the compound. A third conspirator, Oliver Philpot, joined the pair in part to prevent the Germans from noticing the same two prisoners being absent from exercise every day. Meanwhile other prisoners helped gather civilian clothes and papers, as well as local train schedules and landmarks which would help the escapees keep their bearings as they made their way to freedom. The harshness of the winter in the area made the prisoners aim for a escape before the winter of 1943-44 set in.
By the end of October 1943 one man remained in the tunnel at the end of the day’s digging, breathing through airholes poked through the surface. Joined later that evening by the other two, the three escapees broke out of the tunnel and traveled toward Baltic ports, with Philpot traveling alone.
All three reached neutral Sweden, where the Swedish authorities took them into custody before surrendering them to the British for being in Sweden without appropriate documentation. All three made it back to England and further service in the war, which all three survived.