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00:00In the shadows of history's darkest conflict, a flame of courage burned bright behind the walls and barbed wire of prisoner-of-war camps.
00:11Awe-inspiring tales of valor and resilience as captured soldiers, sailors and airmen dared the impossible to win their freedom.
00:23They dug tunnels, stole planes, forced their way through deadly jungles and marched huge distances pursued by death squads.
00:34Some of these stories have become the stuff of legend, but many remain shrouded in mystery, even today.
00:43These are the greatest escapes of World War II.
00:53In this episode, forgotten by history.
01:04The German mass breakout that stunned wartime Britain.
01:11The astonishing secret behind the daring escape of an American bomber crew trapped in the Soviet Union.
01:21And the Trojan horse of Stalag Luft III.
01:37Bridgend, a quiet market town in Wales.
01:40It isn't where you'd expect a dramatic breakout from a prisoner-of-war camp.
01:47But in March 1945, it's where the biggest German escape attempt of World War II takes place.
01:59The town of Bridgend is right on the South Wales coast, between Cardiff and Swansea.
02:12And it's a market town.
02:14So back in its day, it didn't have necessarily a big population.
02:18It's such an unlikely spot for such a mass breakout.
02:22You know, it's a very sleepy, tranquil, Welsh countryside location.
02:29Built on the outskirts of town, Island Farm, as it was known, wasn't originally designed as a POW camp.
02:37The Ministry of Defence, early on in the onset of war, decided to build one of the biggest factories in Great Britain.
02:45An ammunitions factory.
02:47And it had a workforce of 40,000 people.
02:50Originally, Island Farm was actually used as an accommodation for some of the women that worked at this factory.
02:58But they didn't want to be separated from their families late at night when they'd finished their shifts.
03:03So it ended up being abandoned.
03:10But then when we have D-Day, when we have the Normandy landings,
03:14and we have all of this fighting through towards German-occupied territory.
03:22There is this influx of German prisoners of war coming in.
03:27Rather than leaving them close to the front lines,
03:29where they could return back to the fight if they were successful in escaping,
03:33they were shipped over to Great Britain.
03:35At its peak, Island Farm, or Camp 198, as it's officially called,
03:48houses 1,600 German prisoners.
03:53The town turns out to watch the first arrivals,
03:57mainly officers marching from Bridgen Station.
04:00One story in particular shows that you shouldn't be complacent,
04:05even during the transit of prisoners,
04:07because at the end of the day,
04:09the Germans had been very careful to observe their surroundings
04:13and try and see how they could use them to escape
04:16before they'd even got to Island Farm.
04:19Right at the start of the war,
04:20the Ministry of Defence had decided
04:22they were going to remove every single sign in Great Britain.
04:25But to these resourceful prisoners,
04:29that decision wouldn't matter.
04:32What did the Ministry of Defence forget to do?
04:35They forgot to take the maps down off the back walls of the railway carriages,
04:39the very railway carriages that had brought our prisoners to the camp.
04:45One of the men, with nothing to write on or draw on,
04:48he actually took the tails off his shirt
04:50and started to very carefully and surreptitiously trace the outline
04:55because he thought it could well be useful later on.
04:58The calibre of the prisoners at Island Farm was particularly high.
05:02These men were young, energetic, resourceful.
05:05They weren't hampered by any sort of class system.
05:09So they were keen to work together and to get out.
05:12As with Allied officers, German officers believe it's their duty
05:18to escape and return to the fight if they possibly can.
05:24It was understood that it was your patriotic duty
05:27to try to escape, to be of use to the war effort.
05:30If you want to look at their motivation,
05:32I think you've got to go back to this uber-patriotism.
05:36Now these people are the Nazi elite,
05:39and they are really dedicated Nazis.
05:43They would see nothing else as their goal
05:46but to escape and get back into the war, one way or another.
05:59The British camp authorities leave the prisoners
06:01almost entirely to themselves.
06:04Guards rarely enter the accommodation huts.
06:08And Island Farm becomes largely self-governing.
06:14For some of the officers incarcerated in the camp,
06:17they had lost their passion for the Nazi regime.
06:20They were starting to realise that it was an abject failure.
06:24But there was a very pro-Nazi atmosphere within the camp.
06:28All these Germans together,
06:30determined to fight back against the British.
06:33The Germans at Island Farm were disciplined,
06:38organised,
06:39and focused on picking their moment
06:42to exploit the relaxed attitudes
06:45of the camp authorities towards them.
06:49And they were determined to do that
06:51in the most spectacular way possible.
06:54by 1945, the Island Farm camp at Bridge End was becoming overcrowded.
07:12Which only added to the difficulties the British authorities faced
07:15with trying to keep control.
07:20The minute the Germans got to Island Farm,
07:22they were already trying to brainstorm these ideas
07:25about how to get out.
07:27And some of them were incredibly bizarre.
07:29So, for instance, there was the idea of using electrical cables
07:32and trying to actually zipline out of the camp.
07:35But, of course, they were worried about getting electrocuted.
07:38So, this ended up being discarded quite quickly.
07:41There was talk of a hot air balloon,
07:43but could you imagine the sheer size of a balloon
07:47that's strong enough to lift several Germans over a fence?
07:50You don't know which way the wind is going to blow on the night.
07:54And the other idea was these were fit, healthy young men.
07:57So, perhaps they could quite literally pole vault over the wire.
08:01But the issue was there were two layers of wire.
08:04It was quite wide,
08:05and it would take an Olympic athlete to be able to clear that.
08:08So, that one was put aside as well.
08:13So, they decide to go under, not over the fence.
08:18Prisoners with mining experience.
08:19Plan two tunnels.
08:22One of them a decoy intended to fool the British authorities.
08:29While the other would tunnel from Prison Hut 9
08:32to a neighboring farmer's field.
08:38Tunnelling out of prisoner of war camps
08:40always presents huge challenges.
08:43But at Island Farm, there's a unique problem.
08:46There's two characteristics of the soil below ground here at Island Farm
08:51that are going to give the Germans a hard time.
08:53First one is the fact that the soil is very, very clay.
08:56So, it wouldn't disperse or disintegrate or dissolve in the toilet system.
09:00It would have blocked the drains up very, very quickly.
09:03And the other issue with the color of it, the soil being very orange below ground here.
09:09You can't disperse that type of colored soil above ground.
09:12The solution relied on a clever bit of home improvement.
09:17So, the Germans decided that they were going to hide the soil.
09:22So, there was a theater in the camp.
09:25They went to the theater and they got some of the hardboard from the back of the stage.
09:29And they managed to bring some of that hardboard back to the hut.
09:33And they made a false wall out of it.
09:37So, a big false cavity with a false vent in the top corner.
09:41And as the soil comes out, you squish the soil up into a clay ball
09:44and hide the soil in the cavity.
09:47The bunk beds are then rearranged so that the guards hopefully won't notice that inside the hut,
09:54it suddenly got a lot smaller.
09:58As the tunnel gets longer, digging teams hit a new problem.
10:05Oxygen levels become too low for strenuous work.
10:12So, an ingenious ventilation system is created by the German engineers.
10:17Using pilfered milk cans and makeshift bellows to pump in fresh air.
10:24The Germans themselves were very cunning in some of the things they did.
10:28They reran the electrical cable from the main hut supply,
10:32the lighting supply, down the tunnel.
10:34So, their tunnel was floodlit.
10:36I think the guards didn't realize that the tunnel was going on
10:39because of all the ingenuity, the cover ploys that were used.
10:45They actually put on a theatre performance and it actually orchestrated it
10:49to a point where they would need to applaud really loudly
10:52and to create this rowdy scene in order to make sure that they're covering the noises.
10:56They put the toilets on continuous flush, so if the guards were listening,
11:02if they did have buried microphones, they couldn't hear.
11:05But it wasn't just theatre and performance that the German prisoners were using
11:12in order to distract the British guards.
11:14They were also using art in itself.
11:16And this was most notably seen when one of the German soldiers
11:20had actually painted a rather rude portrait of a lady,
11:24a rather well-endowed lady.
11:26They put this painting up further towards the ceiling because if the guards came in,
11:33they were going to look up at that rather than to the tunnel below.
11:37So, the guards go into the room to do a room inspection
11:40and their eyes have automatically drawn away from the activity under the floor
11:44to the activity on the wall.
11:46When you are escaping, you are thinking about the psychology of the people you're escaping from.
11:52And, of course, that means how to allure them, how to distract them, all of that.
12:05The signs of an escape attempt were there to be seen,
12:08if only the guards were alert to them.
12:11But they're not.
12:13They never noticed benches being stolen from the canteen.
12:19And beds being dismantled for the wood needed to reinforce the tunnel walls.
12:26They started taking off wood from their beds with that classic German precision
12:31of taking a little bit off each time on every bed
12:34so that they all slightly drop at the same rate,
12:37and therefore they're all the same height.
12:39If you're doing a room inspection of 16 hundred beds,
12:42you know, if the beds are concealed and it might be the leg is against the wall
12:46or hidden out of sight, that type of thing.
12:49In January 1945, the smaller decoy tunnel is found by the camp authorities.
12:58They congratulate themselves on the discovery,
13:02parading the German would-be escapees.
13:05And so don't go looking for the main escape tunnel,
13:09that's now only weeks away from being finished.
13:15It was incredibly hard to get together all the things that they would need
13:18once they had escaped.
13:20Food, for example, would need to be squirreled away
13:23as Russians were given out on a daily basis and saved somewhere.
13:27These men are really resourceful.
13:30They're really, you know, throwing everything at their escape.
13:36Late in the evening, on the 10th of March, 1945,
13:42the first of the 70 men in the escape party
13:46start crawling through the 9-meter tunnel
13:51that comes up just beyond the camp's perimeter fence.
13:54They split up and go in different directions,
14:01but all have the same goal,
14:03to make it back to Germany,
14:06where they'd be hailed as heroes.
14:11But getting safely through the tunnel
14:13is only the first step.
14:19Even as they try to melt away into the night,
14:22something happens which no one expected.
14:27There was a chap by the name of Hermann Schallenberg
14:29who was not part of the escape attempt.
14:32On the night of the escape,
14:33he saw the escape going on
14:35and decided he was going to have a piece of the action,
14:37so he grabbed his kit bag
14:38and dived down the tunnel before anybody could stop him.
14:42The unfortunate thing was the kit bag was white in color,
14:45so as he exits the tunnel,
14:47the white kit bags shone in the moonlight
14:49and one of the guards in the guard tower
14:51spots the kit bag moving and shoots him.
15:00The alarm's raised,
15:03barely believing what's happened.
15:05Camp authorities at first think they've stopped the escape
15:08before it had time to get going.
15:10But they find prisoners in a nearby wood
15:16and then start hearing from police
15:18who are capturing more even further away.
15:22So the very next day, it's announced on the news,
15:26it's all over the wirelessly of South Wales.
15:29There was a real panic in the beginning,
15:31the 70 Germans on the run.
15:37With the war entering its crucial end game,
15:40one of the biggest manhunts in UK history
15:42is launched to recapture the escaped Germans.
15:48Home guard, police were involved.
15:52Planes flying over South Wales.
15:54They started going to farms all in the area,
15:58searching people's barns and so forth.
16:08Four of the men immediately make a beeline
16:10for a car that's parked
16:12and they've already fashioned an ignition key out of nails.
16:15They're ready to take it.
16:17They start pushing it down the road,
16:19they don't want to crack the engine.
16:20When some guards are coming the other way,
16:22they come into the camp to start their shift.
16:27But instead of trying to avoid them
16:29and just creating that sort of tense atmosphere
16:32as if they are in the wrong,
16:34they are very brazen.
16:36They go to the guards and they say,
16:38can you not give us a push?
16:41And they help to push them,
16:43they wave and they send them on their way.
16:46So they end up enlisting the help of the British guards
16:49without them even knowing it.
16:52They try to make it to the Welsh capital city, Cardiff,
17:04around 30 kilometres away,
17:06but get lost.
17:11Then there's another problem.
17:13Unfortunately for them, the car is starting to sputter
17:17and it's starting to slow.
17:19And it turns out that they are running out of fuel.
17:22Now, they can't just nip over and try and get some fuel
17:25from a local depot.
17:26They are going to be caught if they're not careful.
17:29And as a result, they try and change strategy.
17:32One of the men amongst them is actually a Luftwaffe pilot,
17:35and he has the idea of trying to get to an aerodrome
17:38and finding an aircraft that the four men can go off in.
17:43So they hit on the idea of trying to get a train.
17:45And they try and go south.
17:47They know that there's plenty of aerodromes down there.
17:50The problem is, is that they end up going north
17:53and they end up going all the way to Birmingham.
17:58Having managed to make it over 150 kilometres
18:00from Farm Island to Birmingham,
18:03they find an aerodrome just outside the city.
18:06They'd already spotted a plane over the wire,
18:10sitting on the end of a tarmac area,
18:13and he was all set.
18:14He was going to, at the right moment,
18:16was going to steal the plane and fly this plane to Southern Ireland.
18:20Daybreak was starting,
18:22so the Germans decided they were going to hide in a hedgerow.
18:25But the hedgerow they hid in belonged to a farmer,
18:28and his cows were in the field,
18:30and the cows mistook the four Germans hiding in the hedgerow
18:33as the farm hands, surrounded around them.
18:36And the farmer's back in his field,
18:38wondering why his cows aren't coming in for milking.
18:40He goes to investigate and finds these four Germans
18:43hiding in his hedgerow and apprehensive.
18:49The prisoners are caught before they can pull off their audacious plan.
18:56Another group of POWs makes it
18:58to the southern port city of Southampton.
19:03They'd stowed away on a freight train,
19:07using that hastily drawn sketch of the rail system,
19:10from the back of the POW's shirt,
19:13when they'd first arrived at the prison camp.
19:19They're on the run for a week before they're caught,
19:22and sent back to Island Farm.
19:27Considering the ingenuity that had been shown by the German prisoners,
19:30it is quite remarkable that in this really rural culture of Wales,
19:34the men were rounded up and recaptured very quickly.
19:38It seems strange that we haven't heard of the escape from Island Farm,
19:42that it is such an unknown when it comes to World War II mythology,
19:46and the way that we remember the war.
19:49Perhaps it's because it's a German escape as opposed to an Allied escape,
19:53and therefore people are not keen to hear about it or to learn about it,
19:58in the same way as something like the Great Escape or the escapes from Kolditz.
20:02None of the escapees made it back to Germany.
20:07A week after the breakout, every one of them had been recaptured.
20:18And by the end of March 1945,
20:20all 1,600 German prisoners are shipped out of Island Farm
20:24to make way for a new, even more select group of Nazi prisoners.
20:29Island Farm now becomes Special Camp 11,
20:36home to the most senior Nazi military commanders and officials.
20:42Awaiting trial at Nuremberg.
20:47Hutt No. 9 is now all that's left of the huge Island Farm camp.
20:52Seen of the least talked about mass breakout in the history of World War II.
21:03It's a massive story of a part of Bridgen's history,
21:07part of Wales's history, and then part of Great Britain's history.
21:11It's the largest escape from a POW camp in Great Britain.
21:15It's on a par with the great escape from Germany,
21:18and yet Bridgen's story is very little known.
21:33Pearl Harbour, Hawaii.
21:38Early on December the 7th, 1941.
21:43A day history turns.
21:48Within a few minutes,
21:50there'll be the world's most astounding airstrike.
21:54The Imperial Japanese Navy surprise attack
21:57on the American Pacific Fleet.
21:59That'll kill more than 2,400 people.
22:14And catapult the United States into World War II.
22:20The effect was that it galvanized the American public.
22:27It unified them, put us on a war footing,
22:30and Americans were bent on revenge.
22:33They had been a neutral country up until this point,
22:36and all of a sudden this attack gave them no choice but to come into the war,
22:41and they came in quite literally with a vengeance.
22:44They wanted to make it known that they were there to fight,
22:47and to get their revenge on the Japanese.
22:51Since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan,
22:57we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost,
23:02but will make it very certain that this form of treachery
23:08shall never again endanger us.
23:14But this was 1941.
23:15They didn't have the means that they would have later in the war
23:18to bring the fight to Japan,
23:20and so the only thing they could do
23:22was come up with the risky harebrained scheme
23:25that came to be known as the Doolittle Raid.
23:27Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle,
23:32a smart and daring Alaskan,
23:35is ordered to plan a revenge air raid on the Japanese home islands.
23:39It'll be a massive psychological blow.
23:43Without fighter escorts,
23:4816 stripped-down B-25 bombers,
23:51each with five men on board,
23:54will attack ten military and industrial targets,
23:58two of which are in the capital, Tokyo.
24:02The Doolittle mission, as a strategic bombing ring,
24:06was a pinprick.
24:08It was more of a harassment mission
24:10than it was a damaging raid,
24:14but it electrified the American home front
24:17at a time when morale was extremely low.
24:22The dangerous mission hits a serious problem
24:24even before the planes take to the air.
24:29Heading towards Japan at top speed,
24:31the aircraft carrier with Doolittle's raiders on board,
24:35USS Hornet,
24:36is spotted by a Japanese patrol boat.
24:41Knowing Tokyo has been alerted,
24:43and any delay could spell disaster,
24:48Doolittle and his men take off immediately.
24:54But this means it's now going to be
24:55a much longer flight than planned,
24:58and that they may well run out of fuel
25:01before they can make it back to the Hornet.
25:04The men fly anyway.
25:06The attack is a spectacular success.
25:09They hit their targets,
25:11but then have to ditch into the sea,
25:13or crash land in China.
25:15The attack is a spectacular success.
25:18They hit their targets,
25:20but then have to ditch into the sea,
25:21or crash land in China.
25:22Most of the crews survive.
25:23But the 16th bomber,
25:25without enough fuel even to make it to China,
25:27lands on a remote airstrip,
25:29at Promorski Cry,
25:31in the far east of the Soviet Union.
25:32They didn't know it,
25:33but they'd flown into the sea.
25:34They land in China.
25:35They didn't know it,
25:36but they'd flown into a massive new problem.
25:38The Russians found themselves in a real bind.
25:41bomber, without enough fuel even to make it to China, lands on a remote airstrip at Promorsky
25:49Krai in the far east of the Soviet Union.
25:58They didn't know it, but they'd flown into a massive problem.
26:05The Russians found themselves in a real bind when this American aircraft landed on their
26:10soil, because even though the Russians and the Americans were allies in the war against
26:15Germany, the Russians had not yet declared war on Japan.
26:19It must be remembered that the Japanese had a huge army, the Kwantung Army, 700,000 strong
26:27in Manchuria, right up on the border with the Soviet Union.
26:30The last thing Joseph Stalin wanted to do was provoke the Japanese.
26:36So what are they to do?
26:42Under international law, when combatants like these five airmen enter a neutral country,
26:48they must be interned until the end of the war.
26:52Technically, in this war against Japan, Russia was neutral, and so therefore they were obliged
26:57to simply hold on to the Americans to keep them safe and well.
27:02But the message from Washington DC to Moscow is clear and unambiguous.
27:09Send our airmen back now.
27:15The Soviets don't want to keep the American crew, but they can't just let them go either.
27:27The Americans aren't badly treated, but the winter is bitterly cold, and rations are tight.
27:39From such a remote location, escape is impossible.
27:46The months drag by.
27:51Eventually, in March 1943, they transferred to the city of Ashgabod, in Soviet Central Asia,
28:05near the border with Iran.
28:11Traveling to their new location, they bumped into an extremely friendly and talkative English-speaking
28:18Russian passenger named Kolia.
28:22They began conversations with him on the train.
28:26They were able to get his sympathy and his understanding.
28:31And eventually, he agreed to work with them.
28:33He has connections.
28:35It seems that he will be able to move them around, and they start to form the idea that
28:38maybe they can escape from the Russians.
28:42Kolia stays in touch and slowly bonds with the Americans, who eventually ask for his help
28:51to escape.
28:52The plan was that they were going to be taken by truck to the Iranian border and then cross
29:00into Iran.
29:02This is something that was almost unheard of.
29:04This is the kind of thing that films are made of.
29:07It was an extraordinary plan they came up with to escape from Russian interment and eventually
29:12find their way back to America.
29:15They were going to need a lot of help to pull this off.
29:19Their friend Kolia introduces them to a smuggler, who, for a price, says he can get them all
29:26into British-occupied Iran.
29:38On May 10, 1943, the smuggler hides the five Americans in the back of a truck for the 240-kilometer
29:49drive to the Soviet-Iranian border.
29:57Once they reach it, the driver orders them out and makes them crawl under a barbed wire fence
30:03across the border.
30:04They were able to slip under the fence.
30:09It had to have been a very nerve-wracking moment for them to approach the fence and face the
30:16possibility that they might be recaptured or perhaps even fired upon.
30:27As planned, another truck then takes them to the British Consulate in the Iranian city
30:33of Meshed, before they're driven in secret to India.
30:41From there, they finally return, triumphant, to Washington, D.C., 400 days after they'd bombed
30:49Tokyo.
30:50It's a tremendous amount of area that they had to cover.
30:59And it's just unbelievable that they were actually able to make it all happen.
31:06The men have pulled off what seems to be one of the greatest escapes from the Soviet Union.
31:12It's almost, well, it is, too good to be true.
31:19The whole thing is a ruse.
31:23It's a setup.
31:24The USSR are able to get out of the situation that they didn't want to find themselves in
31:30by essentially enabling the escape.
31:34Kolya was an agent of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.
31:40He was a secret agent who was assigned to arrange the escape of American aviators.
31:50Their friend, Kolya, had arranged every single detail of their so-called escape.
31:58The border fencing had been put up for their benefit.
32:02The border guards turned a blind eye, knowing full well that the Americans were there.
32:07The crucial element of this plan was that the Americans had to believe not only had they
32:12pulled off this escape, this miraculous escape themselves, but that it had been their idea
32:16from the start.
32:18So it was an incredibly elaborate ruse played on the Americans.
32:23It wasn't long before some of the airmen themselves became increasingly troubled about their own
32:28story.
32:32The plan was very complicated.
32:34It relied on everything going just right and it had come off without a hitch.
32:38And I think they were suspicious that the Russians had made it easy for them.
32:42Decades later, the man they called Kolya admitted that the plan had been thought up by none
32:52other than Generalissimo Stalin himself.
32:59The secret agent had been ordered to make absolutely sure the Americans believed that they'd organized
33:07their own escape without any official assistance whatsoever.
33:14The greatest ever fake escape in history was so good that it would be used again.
33:26It became the blueprint technique for other American servicemen stuck in Russia during World War II.
33:47Zalag Luft III, a POW camp in Silesia in German-occupied Poland.
33:57It's famous for the Great Escape, a mass breakout of Allied prisoners in March 1944, immortalized
34:06in the film starring 1960s heartthrob Steve McQueen.
34:15And just five months earlier, another dramatic, not to say theatrical escape attempt, takes
34:22place at that same camp.
34:28And of all things, the most important prop is a humble, homemade gymnastics vaulting horse.
34:42The Allied officers of Stalag Luft III are constantly preoccupied with escape plans.
34:55They find it is good for morale and their sense of togetherness.
35:01They had this sort of stigma that came with being a prisoner of war, and they wanted to change that kind of status if they could.
35:09So they were very much determined to try and plot and to escape as soon as possible.
35:14And of course, to use their ingenuity to try and outwit the guards.
35:18Canadian-born RAF Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpott runs the camp's escape committee.
35:31Prisoners need to get their plan approved by his committee before any breakout attempt is made.
35:38So scarce resources can be shared, and to ensure it won't affect other plans already underway.
35:49Escape at Stalag Luft III is an extremely organized business.
35:57Two British officers, Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams and Lieutenant Michael Codner, take a plan to Oliver Philpott.
36:10It'll require the construction of a gymnastics vaulting horse to disguise one of the most ingenious escape attempts ever conceived.
36:22One of the things that always fascinates me about these escape stories is the most ridiculous ideas are the ones that seem to work the most effectively.
36:33Inspired by ancient Greece, the prisoners set about building their very own Trojan horse, World War II style.
36:44Plywood from Red Cross care packages is used to build the horse that'll be set up in the exercise yard.
36:52It seems somewhat bizarre that some gymnastic apparatus could have been turned the way it was into something that would enable a huge escape attempt.
37:09So they build a wooden vaulting horse, have men hidden away inside it who could begin tunneling.
37:14A scheme that seems too ridiculous to actually work, but it worked much more effectively than anyone could have imagined.
37:19The prisoners persuade the camp authorities that the horse will help them stay fit and occupied.
37:29But there's also another purpose. It will in effect, act as a manhole cover.
37:35They needed some means to dig a tunnel. It was very difficult to begin the construction of a tunnel, and this provided the perfect solution.
37:46The men executed this plan with insane precision, so they made sure at certain points to knock over the wooden horse to show that nothing was underneath it.
37:57It's almost like a magician's trick towards the German guards, because it's almost a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't situation.
38:04Each day, the horse is carried to the same spot in the exercise yard, an unseen prisoner clinging to its underside.
38:14Once in position, he removes a cover hiding the mouth of the tunnel.
38:26He drops down into it, and after a few hours digging and bagging up soil, waits for the horse to be carried out of the yard.
38:33The wooden horse was so successful because it was equally bizarre and brilliant, and often the simple plans are the ones that work the best.
38:44But it's also just hoping that there's a lack of imagination almost amongst the guards in order to make sure that you're out thinking them and that you're always ten steps ahead of them.
38:54At the same time, fake identity documents are being made, ready for the escape.
39:03Some people would consider the forgery of documents and creating stamps and uniforms as being a little bit dull.
39:09But at the end of the day, those details are so important because that bid for freedom is only part of it.
39:16You've got to sustain your journey.
39:19Once a prisoner is outside the camp, they then have to flee.
39:22They have to blend in with the local people.
39:25They had to have clothing.
39:26They had to have food.
39:27They had to have forged documents in case they ran into German patrols.
39:33For three months, Codner, Williams and Philpott dig until the tunnel's finally ready.
39:44The fact that they were digging the tunnel using bowls and tins and that noise was being made above,
39:50with the guys actually jumping over this piece of apparatus, this wooden horse, shows a huge, huge dedication to the fact that they were absolutely determined to escape from the camp.
40:01The amount of time, patience, commitment and dedication that it takes to be able to dig your way out with a bowl is insane.
40:11Many of the men would be malnourished to begin with.
40:14They probably wouldn't be in their best physical shape after having been in the camp for such a length of time.
40:19And now to have to construct the back-breaking work of digging a tunnel, it's really just extraordinary.
40:31October the 29th, 1943.
40:366pm.
40:42A completely moonless night.
40:45Unnoticed by guards, the three men slip into the tunnel.
41:01Once out beyond the perimeter fence, the men split up as they had prearranged.
41:10Philpott gets to Sargon Railway Station and heads to Frankfurt.
41:15He sleeps rough, using his fake identity papers, while catching trains to Danzig.
41:23There he stows away on a ship, travelling across the Baltic to neutral Sweden.
41:33Eric Williams and Michael Codner make their way through German-occupied Poland.
41:47They manage to hitch a ride on a boat, sail to Sweden,
41:54and reunite with Oliver Philpott at the British Embassy in Stockholm.
41:59It must have been a truly euphoric feeling, because at the end of the day,
42:04you've all come against the odds.
42:06You've all managed to survive.
42:08You're all on your way to freedom.
42:10To find your two comrades and all three of you reunited in the Embassy
42:14must have just been an extraordinary feeling to all come together
42:18after this harrowing escape attempt.
42:20And we can only imagine the elation that they felt at that moment.
42:24They returned to England as heroes.
42:31The only men to successfully escape Starlog Luft 3's heavily secured east compound
42:38and make it home alive.
42:40Those who'd brave any danger for freedom had to be made of the right stuff.
42:55Men with determination, nerves of steel, and a fine sense for the theatrics of the art of escape.
43:07I think it's incredibly important to remember these stories,
43:12and not just the big stories that have been told in the films and on television.
43:17It's important to remember the smaller stories, too.
43:20These people risked literally everything with that hope that it would lead to their escape.
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43:54Transcription by CastingWords
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