Rose was so chuffed with his construction that he returned to the jail a few days later and led another 15 men to freedom. Their 15 metre tunnel started in the store's cellar and ended in an empty shed. Rose, one of 1,200 Union officers locked up in a former grocer's warehouse in Richmond, Virginia, during the American civil war, dug his way to freedom with a few colleagues using pocket knives and pieces of scrap wood. In the end, all three of those who had come up with the plan escaped and made it back to Sweden. At the end of each vaulting session, the digger placed wooden boards, cut to fit, in the hole, and filled the space with sandbags and dry sand kept for the purpose.Īs the tunnel lengthened, two men were hidden inside the horse while a larger group of men exercised. As several prisoners went through a vigorous gymnastic routine, another prisoner, concealed inside the horse, began to dig a tunnel. But the prisoners conceived a plan which saw them carry a vaulting horse, made largely from wood from Canadian Red Cross parcels, to the same spot each morning. The accommodation huts, where a tunnel entrance could be concealed, were a long way from the perimeter fence. The wooden horseĪnother escape from Stalag Luft III came after three prisoners hatched an ingenious plan for tunnelling their way out right under the noses of their guards. Their story inspired the Hollywood film The Great Escape, which starred Steve McQueen. Only three, however, reached freedom: 50 escapees were shot, on orders from Hitler, and the remaining prisoners were sent to a concentration camp. On 24 March 1944, 76 men crawled through Harry to escape the prison. To hide the dirt produced by tunnelling, the men carried it in their trousers and scattered it, as inconspicuously as possible, on vegetable patches and elsewhere in the prison grounds. The prisoners made tools out of tin cans and used wood from their beds to support the tunnel walls and keep them from collapsing. The plan was the idea of Roger Bushell, a Royal Air Force squadron Leader.Ĭonsidering what the men had at their disposal, the three 9 metre-deep tunnels were technological marvels, featuring electric lighting, a railway and an air ventilation system.
However, a group of prisoners managed to escape through three elaborate tunnels, which they named Tom, Dick and Harry. During the second world war, hundreds of allied prisoners were held in the Stalag Luft III camp, which the Germans had built to be escape-proof, even planting seismographs in the ground to detect the sounds of tunnelling.
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