![]() ![]() The captives excavated at least 100 tons of sand, which they stuffed into concealed socks and discreetly sprinkled and raked into the soil of the small gardens tended by the prisoners. Working in claustrophobic conditions, diggers stripped to their long johns or took off all their clothes so that the bright golden sand wouldn’t stain them and raise the suspicions of the German guards. ![]() From a trap door concealed below a heating stove always kept lit to discourage the Nazi guards from getting too close, they burrowed down more than 30 feet to be out of the range of the microphones. Inside Hut 104, the prisoners building the Harry tunnel toiled for days chipping away at the building’s support columns to avoid being seen working underneath the barracks. The plan called for each tunnel to stretch for more than 300 feet to the protective cover of the forest outside the camp’s perimeter fence. In the spring of 1943, Bushell and over 600 prisoners of war began building three tunnels with the code names of Tom, Dick and Harry. The secret operation was led and organized by Roger Bushell, a Royal Air Force pilot who had been shot down over France while assisting with the evacuation of Dunkirk. They Built Three Escape Tunnels: ‘Tom,’ ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ WATCH: Full episodes of Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman online now and tune in for all-new episodes Tuesdays at 10/9c. For the aviators, the penalty for being caught trying to escape-generally 10 days in solitary confinement under the rules of the Geneva Convention-was worth the risk. The Nazis, however, didn’t account for the daring and ingenuity of the British, American Canadian and other Allied flyboys who toiled for nearly a year to construct a tunnel that would allow them to flee from captivity. In addition, the camp was built atop yellow sand that would be tough to tunnel through and difficult to conceal by anyone who tried. When the Nazis built the maximum-security camp 100 miles southeast of Berlin to house Allied aviators captured in World War II-many of whom had made previous escapes-they took elaborate measures to prevent tunneling, such as raising prisoners’ huts off the ground and burying microphones nine feet underground along the camp’s perimeter fencing. ![]() Although the German Luftwaffe designed the Stalag Luft III camp to be escape-proof, the audacious, real-life prison break immortalized in the 1963 movie The Great Escape proved otherwise. The mass escape of 76 Allied airmen from a Nazi POW camp in March 1944 remains one of history’s most famous prison breaks. ![]()
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