Tom, Dick and Harry

The whole thing was built on sand. The Great Escape was about 30 feet down and it was quite a business getting the tunnel made through sand. It was a man from ... oh, the mining area, Ontario, who planned the whole tunnel. We had four tunnels at one time or another. Their names were Tom, Dick and Harry. The tunnel that we got out of was the main one, but we also had one under the camp theatre and there was another one that went just under the road out on the direction southwest. We had the main tunnel going west. The problem was to get rid of the sand that you took out of the hole. We had bags under your coat. You’d take it out onto the sports field and let the sand out and kick it around till you lost it. The engineers did, I think, a wonderful job of building the tunnel. It was about 30 feet down and about 300 yards to the wire and under the wire to get out. A friend of mine from Ottawa was the last one out and he was guiding people into the woods when they got out of the tunnel. And a German guard came along and went to water his pony at the edge of the woods. And the same fellow who was guiding the prisoners out of the tunnel said, “Don’t shoot!” So that was the end of the escape. A few of the people who went out, did get back in. Of course, they told us what had happened to them all. The German guards had just taken people into the woods and shot them. General Goring was our opposite number and he was responsible for the prisoners and he’s a good military person himself. So he treated us well and he was the one who talked Hitler out of shooting the whole lot. And there was, as you know, a hundred people got out of the escape and Hitler wanted to shoot them all but Goring and his guards decided to cut them down to fifty which he did, and these are the fifty up on the picture up here. So that … we were lucky we weren’t all shot.