Aussie soldiers and airmen in two great escapes

Good fortune awaited only two of the seven Australian airmen who made their way through the Great Escape tunnel in the early hours of March 25, 1944. Flight Lieutenants Paul Royal and Bill Fordyce survived. Royal, a key figure in the escape organisation, got out and away, but was later recaptured. He avoided execution when he was collected from a holding camp, not by Gestapo, but by Luftwaffe guards who took him and a small group safely back to camp.

Decades afterwards, Fordyce told a TV interviewer he was the last man into the tunnel which was closed behind him, because "it was broad daylight by this time." When he reached the exit the guards were shooting down the shaft. "So the only thing I could do was to crawl back (into the camp)," Fordyce explained.

The other RAAF tunnellers - Squadron Leaders James Catanach and John Williams, Flight Lieutenants Reginald Kierath and Thomas Leigh and Warrant Officer Albert Hake - were doomed men. They got out of the camp but were executed after being captured. Post war investigations by the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) of the RAF revealed that Catanach, who spoke fluent German, was shot through the heart from the back. His killer, Gestapo Officer Johannes Post, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. He was hanged on February 26, 1948.

Actor Coburn's character in the Great Escape movie was based partly on the Australian Hake who was critically involved in preparations for the breakout. He was in charge of a "factory" which produced 250 compasses from broken gramophone records and window panes, gramophone needles and sewing needles. Anton Gill in his recent book The Great Escape, records that, in case an escaper was caught with a compass and suspected of being a spy, Hake stamped each one with "made in Stalag Luft III". Gill also relates that a Gestapo officer told the SIB how Hake and five other recaptured POW's were interrogated then informed that, by order of the Supreme Military Commander (Hitler), they had been sentenced to death. They were driven away for execution, but showed "considerable calm."

Many years later Lionel Jeffries attended a memorial ceremony with other Stalag Luft III prisoners in the Polish city of Posnan where the ashes of their murdered colleagues are interred. Each grave, he noted, was marked with an inscribed headstone.

Jeffries also mentioned that, for a fleeting moment in The Great Escape movie, one of his own contributions to tunnel activity was shown: "This was in the use of a knot hole in a black out shutter through which the entrance to the camp could be kept under surveillance. The entry of a German guard was reported and the message relayed to cause a stoppage of work."