Great Escaper Eric 'Digger' Dowling Passes Away in England at 92

'Great Escape' veteran Eric Dowling dies at 92

By JILL LAWLESS – 1 day ago

LONDON (AP) — Eric Dowling, who helped plan the mass wartime breakout from a German prison camp that inspired the movie "The Great Escape," has died at 92.

Peter Dowling said his father died at a nursing home near Bristol in southwest England on July 21, a day before his 93rd birthday. The Aabletone Nursing Home on Thursday confirmed the death.

Seventy-six Allied prisoners escaped from the Stalag Luft III prison camp on March 24, 1944, in a daring breakout. All but three were recaptured, and 50 were shot on the orders of Adolf Hitler to deter future attempts.

The escape attempt was one of the most celebrated incidents of the war, recounted in a 1963 film starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.

Dowling played a key role in planning the escape. He forged documents, made maps and was nicknamed "Digger" for his work helping to excavate the three escape tunnels, code-named Tom, Dick and Harry.

Over almost a year, prisoners surreptitiously dug the tunnels 30 feet (9 meters) underground, shored up with bedboards and wired with stolen electrical wire. Tom was discovered by guards and Dick was abandoned, but the 300-foot (90-meter) long tunnel Harry was eventually completed.

Dowling was not among the more than 200 prisoners chosen by lottery to make the escape attempt on the cold and moonless night. By the time German guards discovered the breakout, 76 men had crawled free.

Many of the film's characters were composites of real people. Peter Dowling said the one that most resembled his father was a flight lieutenant nicknamed "The Forger," played by Donald Pleasance.

But he also said his father was not a fan of the movie.

"He wasn't the greatest admirer of Americans and it didn't go down too easily that one of them should be playing the starring role," Peter Dowling said. "A lot of the reality of digging tunnels was left out too."

He said his father felt the scene in which McQueen attempts to race to freedom on a stolen motorcycle "was well over the top."

Born in southwest England in 1915, Flight Lt. Eric Dowling flew 29 missions as a navigator with the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. He was shot down in April 1942 and sent to the prison camp for Allied airmen near Sagan in eastern Germany — now Zagan, Poland.

After the war, Dowling served as an RAF air-accident investigator and later worked for British Aerospace on the supersonic Concorde jet.

Dowling's wife, Agnes Marie, died in 1997. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

RAF Legend, 'Great Escaper' Jimmy James Flies Final Mission

I received notice from Marilyn Walton that the great RAF pilot and Great Escaper Jimmy James passed away in England recently. I am pasting his obituary from the London Times here.

From The Times
January 18, 2008
Squadron Leader Jimmy James
RAF pilot who was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III

“Jimmy” James was one of 76 officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III on the night of March 24, 1944, and was fortunate not to be among the 50 executed on Hitler’s order on recapture. He was sent instead to Sachsenhausen concentration camp from where he tunnelled his way out, only to be caught again after 14 days on the run.

He was the second pilot of a Wellington bomber shot down south of Rotterdam in June 1940. Initially hopeful that German security would not be too tight, the Netherlands having been overrun only in May, he planned to acquire a boat to sail back to England, or at least get him far enough from the coast to be picked up. A Dutch farmer gave him food and shelter but for one night only as his presence was certain to become known: the local police arrested him before he could move on.

After routine interrogation by Luftwaffe intelligence officers and the Gestapo, he began his life as a prisoner in Stalag Luft I at Barth on the Baltic. This seemed ideal for boarding a neutral merchant vessel to Sweden, but the tunnel through which James and others dug to get out of the camp was discovered by a sentry on the night of the escape before it was his turn to go through.

A year later, in September 1941, he and a fellow prisoner dug a tunnel from an incinerator to a point beyond the perimeter and made detailed plans to walk to Sassnitz and take the ferry to Sweden. Unfortunately, although the pair snatched the opportunity of the camp lighting failing unexpectedly to crawl from their hut to the incinerator, a prowler sentry appeared as James was about to move from under the hut. His companion got clean away and reached home via Sweden.

Although involved in several other escape plans, none reached fruition before he was moved to Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia.

In January 1944 he joined the group in Stalag Luft III planning what eventually became the Great Escape through a 365-foot tunnel nicknamed “Harry”. (“Tom” and “Dick” had been put on hold as Harry seemed more promising and demanded a large work force). Harry had been partly dug some months previously but closed when many of those working on it were moved to Poland. It had a vertical shaft below a stove platform in one of the huts, and James was put in charge of a team dispersing the sand dug from the tunnel at night by placing it in the space under the camp theatre.

After several alarms and near-discovery the tunnel was completed to the exit point in a wood beyond the perimeter wire and no fewer than 200 camp inmates were selected to make the break attempt on the night of March 24. The first 30 were chosen by the escape committee because they spoke fluent German and so had the best chance of making a “home run”. The next 70 were chosen from those who had worked on the tunnel, and the final 100 were names taken from a hat of 500 volunteers.

James was allocated place number 39. His plan was to join a group of 12 who, with papers indicating they were foreign workers at a local wood mill going home on leave, would travel the first leg of their journey by train, heading for Czechoslovakia where they hoped to make contact with the local resistance. All went well for them until, having made one successful train journey, they attempted another only to be arrested at the station by police alerted by the mass escape. A sentry had stumbled on the mouth of the escape shaft at 5am on March 25, by when 76 officers had got away. At first Hitler ordered all those recaptured to be shot but allegedly due to pressure from Goering, who feared reprisals against Luftwaffe prisoners in Allied hands, the order was changed to “more than half to be shot”.

Of the 76 who escaped, three — a Dutchman and two Norwegians — reached freedom, the rest were recaptured. Fifty were executed, 15 returned to Stalag Luft III and eight, James among them, sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, after the Gestapo had interrogated him about the escape at its infamous Albrechtstrasse headquarters in Berlin. On arrival in Sachsenhausen, 17 miles north of Berlin, he met up with the other seven who had escaped from Stalag Luft III. They were not put in the main compound of the camp but in a Sonderlager (special camp) along one side. To their surprise, this lent itself to construction of a tunnel from below the corner of a hut a mere 120 feet to a point beyond the outer wire fence.

Using a table knife with a serrated edge, James and Flight Lieutenant Sydney Dowse dug the tunnel while the rest of the group kept watch. They were joined by Lieutenant-Colonel John “Mad Jack” Churchill, captured during a commando raid on the Dalmatian island of Brac, whom the Germans suspected of being related to the Prime Minister. By the second week of September 1944, the tunnel had reached the point for the exit shaft to be made. It was decided that six officers would escape in pairs, Jack Churchill and James travelling together.

The breakout was made on the night of September 23. Churchill led the way northwards to the Berlin-Rostock railway, which they followed on foot for three successive nights before jumping a goods train bound for Neustrelitz. After two nights’ rest in woods, eating vegetables taken from a station garden, they continued on foot along the railway until bumping into a group of Russian prisoners. Fed by the Russians, the pair continued on foot for eight more days until they were captured while sleeping by three members of the Volkssturm — the German equivalent of the Home Guard. They were back in Sachsenhausen by the next day — locked in the Zellenbau cell block, regarded as death row, where they stayed until February 1945.

The final saga of Jimmy James’s war involved a laborious journey with other hostage-prisoners via Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps to the Austrian Tyrol, where they were finally liberated by the American Army on May 3, 1945.

Bertram Arthur James was born in India where his father was a tea-planter. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and worked in British Columbia from 1934 until volunteering for flying training with the RAF in 1939. He was awarded the MC and mentioned in dispatches for his escape attempts.

Granted a regular commission in the RAF he retired as a squadron leader in 1958. He was the general-secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office-sponsored Great Britain-USSR Association, until joining the Diplomatic Service in 1964. He held posts in Africa, Western and Eastern Europe and London. He retired in 1975, when he visited Sachsenhausen with Jack Churchill and other survivors. He served as the British representative on the International Sachsenhausen Committee until shortly before his death.

He is survived by his wife, Madge, whom he married in 1946. Their son predeceased him.

Squadron Leader B. A. “Jimmy” James, MC, survivor of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, was born on April 17, 1915. He died on January 18, 2008, aged 92

The Great Escape--Movie Vs. Reality--Pretty Close!

One of my favorite movies is 'The Great Escape', which is a fairly accurate rendering of the actual event at Stalag Luft III. The characters are all based on real people, and the events, other than the fanciful motorcycle jump into Switzerland, are real.

The best site about the Great Escape, for further reading, is run by b24.net at http://www.b24.net/pow/greatescape.htm.

The best book source on the Great Escape is The Great Escape, by Paul Brickhill.

Another good book is called The Wooden Horse.

My personal favorite is written by Jerry Sage, who was the basis of Steve McQueen's character in the movie. His book is called simply, SAGE, and can be found on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Sage-Jerry/dp/0440075807

Sage remains one of the most fascinating characters of World War Two. Here is his biography on the Air Force Website:

"Major Jerry M. Sage was an Army Special Operations paratrooper who was wounded and captured in February 1943 while blowing bridges behind General Erwin Rommel's lines in North Africa. He posed successfully as a shot-down airman (and thus avoided being shot) and was brought into Stalag Luft III in April 1943. He was a great leader and was very active in organizing and executing escape attempts. After escaping from South Camp twice, the Germans got tired of his trouble-making and sent him to the U.S. Army officers camp, Oflag 64. He again escaped when this camp was evacuated in January 1945 and got home early through the Russian lines."

For more on the movie and reality, I am quoting below from the outstanding website article written by Rob Davis at the following web address: http://www.historyinfilm.com/escape/real1.htm

"Background on the Film

The feature film of the Great Escape was made by the Mirish Company and released in 1963. The director, John Sturges, had bought the rights to Paul Brickhill's book and was well known for films such as Gunfight At The OK Corrall, Bad Day at Black Rock, and The Magnificent Seven. Filming on The Great Escape began in the summer of 1962.

The screenwriter was James Clavell (of SHOGUN and KING RAT fame) who was himself a PoW of the Japanese during WW2.

The prisoner-of-war camp was renamed Stalag Luft Nord and was built amongst pine forests near Munich in Bavaria, with interiors shot at local studios. One of the technical advisors was former F/Lt Wally Floody, a Canadian mining engineer and wartime Spitfire pilot, who had been responsible for the tunnel traps and their camouflage.

Nearly all of the incidences, both serious and humorous, which are shown in the film are completely true, although there is some inevitable telescoping of events, and many characters are rolled into one. In particular, the method of "stooging" (keeping watch for German guards and ferrets) is well demonstrated, and the method of constructing the tunnels is extremely accurate.

There was indeed Christmas Carol singing taking place to mask the sound of "manufacturing" and "building" whilst escape materials, air piping, and compasses were made, and concrete plinths pierced. (The Germans did not seem to notice that, at the time, it was nowhere near Christmas.) The trap for "Dick" in the wash-room floor is particularly well shown - the Germans never found it, because 'Dick' had a perfect disguise. In the film, whilst the escape takes place through the tunnel called 'Harry' the trap is portrayed as being in the wash-room floor, and is definitely that of 'Dick' in real life.

The camouflage of the traps used for 'Tom' and 'Harry' is again extremely accurate and reflect the advice given by Wally Floody. Manners of the guards and ferrets, and even the way some of them were suborned, is again quite true to life. "S/Ldr Roger Bartlett" gives a good impression of the driving power behind Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, but his sister said that Dickie Attenborough, who played the part, looked nothing like him. Dickie even had the facial scar of Bushell, incurred in a prewar-skiing accident (he was an Olympic skier) which often caused him discomfort."

My note---Attenborough was himself a POW during the war--RM

"Group Captain Ramsey", the SBO or Senior British Officer, has the severe leg injury suffered by his real counterpart, G/C Herbert Massey, who in real life was repatriated shortly after the escape, and who was instrumental in bringing the atrocity to the attention of H.M. Government.
The sequence where several prisoners hide in an outgoing lorry loaded with cut tree branches actually happened, almost exactly as shown; also, the piece where Bronson and Coburn try to escape masquerading as Russian prisoners is remarkably close to an actual escape attempt. True, too, is the scene where McQueen, having removed numerous bedboards, watches helplessly as a fellow prisoner crashes through his fatally weakened bunk and lands on the man below.

Steve McQueen (Hilts, the Cooler King). Likely to be an amalgamation of several characters, he has no direct counterpart, although one likely candidate is Jerry Sage. The sequence where McQueen sees a blind spot in the guards' coverage of the perimeter wire is true; this escape was by Toft and Nichols, who cut through the wire but were soon recaptured. The motorcycle sequences are pure Hollywood and were put in at McQueen's request; he did nearly all the stunt riding himself, as the long shots show. The single motorcycle was in fact a pair of 1961 British 650cc Triumphs, mocked up in German colours; the final leap is believed to have been done by the American rider Bud Elkins, as it proved impossible for the film company to obtain insurance cover for McQueen to do it himself. For the final leap, there is obviously a ramp just out of camera frame, over which the rider launches the motorcycle to get the necessary height for the jump over the barbed wire fence.

There was indeed a group of prisoners (headed by Jerry Sage and Davey Jones) who manufactured raisin wine and distilled raw liquor from vegetables and virtually any ingredient. The party on the 4th July actually happened, although 'Tom' was not discovered on this particular day."