Veterans remember role in 'great escape'

In hot weather, the guards at the infamous Nazi prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III used to take off their belts and leave them lying in the sun. Reg Cleaver's job was to sneak up and quickly take an impression of the buckles with a chunk of prison soap. This helped him make the mock uniforms that enabled British airmen to pose as German soldiers after escaping.

Yesterday, Cleaver, a former RAF flight sergeant, now white-haired and 87, joined a small group of surviving inmates of the camp immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape to mark the 65th anniversary of one of the most famous sagas of World War II.

Cleaver and six veterans, all in their 80s and 90s, gathered at the site of the former camp near Sagan. They stood in silence for a moment near the exit of "Harry", the 106m tunnel dug by Allied prisoners which enabled 76 airmen to escape on March 24, 1944. Then they drank a toast to their fallen comrades.

Some fought back tears as they remembered the 50 men who were captured after their escape and shot dead on Adolf Hitler's orders as a deterrent. Only three of the escapers made "home runs" to safety and 23 were returned to captivity. Now all of the escapers are dead, but these men yesterday were among the cast of hundreds who enabled them to perform their heroic feat. "At the time, you didn't think you were doing anything particularly special," said Cleaver,
who lives in Brinklow, near Rugby. "It was simply considered your duty to help organising a break-out."

Cleaver survived after his plane crashed in Holland. He was hidden by the Dutch resistance, but he was caught by the Gestapo and dispatched to Stalag Luft III. He used to make fake German uniforms from cloth dyed with ink, and Army belt-buckles from soldering iron softened in a makeshift heater constructed out of tin cans.

When the Germans announced they had shot 50 of the escapers, he was in another camp. "I remember all of us shouting, 'Bastards' at the Germans for what they had done," he said. He weighed only 41.2kg when he was finally freed by British troops in 1945.

Frank Stone, 86, a former tail-gunner, was on the list of escapers due to make the run for freedom, but did not make the tunnel before the camp guards discovered it, that moonless night. "Nobody could sleep that night. The atmosphere was electric."

Stone's chief task had been to get rid of the tonnes of bright yellow sand that were dug out to build the three escape tunnels "Tom", "Dick" and "Harry". The prisoners resorted to tricks such as hanging pouches from old socks inside their trousers and sprinkling the sand on the ground as they walked about the camp.

But life at Stalag Luft III did not only mean bad food, boredom and plotting to escape. Some of the inmates cracked under the strain of being locked up by the Germans for so long or being incarcerated alone in the camp's "cooler" for weeks on end. One of them was airman Jimmy Kiddel who committed suicide by trying to scale the perimeter fence in full view of a watch-tower manned by an armed guard. He was machine-gunned to death. The scene is acted out in
the 1963 film.

Stone, who is from Hathersage in Derbyshire, saw it happen. "It was something I will never forget," he said yesterday. "He went berserk and it was dreadful."

Stone was force-marched nearly 160km to the west during the closing stages of the war before he was liberated.

But the airman who had the misfortune to spend most of the war in PoW camps was Bill Fripp, a navigator on an RAF reconnaissance aircraft shot down over Germany in October 1939. He was held in a dozen camps before being freed. At Stalag Luft III, he was ordered to stay on rather than escape, because he had built up contacts with the Germans which were useful for planning future break-outs.

Fripp, 95, came back to pay his respects to his former pilot, among the 50 men shot on Hitler's orders. "It has been an emotional and thought-provoking return," he said yesterday. "I have forgiven the Germans, but I won't forget what they did."

- INDEPENDENT