Thanks Trump!  Believe I mentioned before that a brother of an old friend and colleague, Russell Cochran, was among those shot. His death is mentioned in the book. Russell's other brother was a Hurricane pilot and died from wounds received during Battle of Britain. Russell himself escaped near death at the hands of the Irgun in Palestine.



Ivan


----- Original Message -----

From:Trump Bradley

To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;

Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2011 6:14   PM

Subject: Fw: Fourth Stalag Luft III   Tunnel Found




Subject: FW: Fourth Stalag Luft III Tunnel Found


From   Jerry Strait
===========================



Jerry-sorry this is so long-my   brother was in the army for a long career and he loves America so much he took  
unbelievable risks for freedom which I still cannot mention-did my family   like him gone so long--absolutely not!!
we all wanted him to retire early   but of course he never did-I just wish my Dad had lived to see him come home;  
enjoy the things he sends/cm





This is fantastic reading. Take the couple of minutes   and learn some history about some very brave men of World War   II.


Gary Miller



A   story for all… from the Purple Heart Association


Subject:  Fourth   Stalag Luft III Tunnel Found



Some interesting               history.


DaliyMail.co.uk
November 20,                 2011

Fourth                 Stalag Luft III Tunnel Found

The classic Steve McQueen                 movie immortalised three tunnels at Stalag Luft III PoW camp,                 now astonished archaeologists have discovered a fourth called                 George

By CLAUDIA                 JOSEPH


It                 has lain hidden for nearly 70 years and looks, to the untrained                 eye, like a building site. But this insignificant tunnel opening                 in the soft sand of western Poland represents one of the                 greatest examples of British wartime heroism. And the                 sensational story became the Hollywood classic, The Great                 Escape, starring Steve McQueen.

We are standing in the                 notorious PoW camp Stalag Luft III, built at the height of the                 Third Reich, 100 miles east of Berlin. Ten thousand prisoners                 were kept under German guns here on a 60-acre site ringed with a                 double barbed-wire fence and watchtowers.

They slept in                 barrack huts raised off the ground so guards could spot                 potential tunnellers, but the Germans did not count on the                 audacity of British Spitfire pilot Squadron Leader Roger                 Bushell, played by Sir Richard Attenborough in the 1963 film. He                 was interned at the camp in March 1943. With him were about                 2,000 other RAF officers, many of whom were seasoned escapers                 from other camps, with skills in tunnelling, forgery and                 manufacturing.



Frank Stone, seated, with Dr Tony Pollard on                 the site of George

From them Bushell hand-picked a                 team for his ambitious plan: to dig their way out of                 captivity.

Three tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry                 were constructed 30ft underground using homemade tools. While                 Tom was discovered and destroyed by the Germans, Dick was used                 for storage.

The third tunnel, Harry, became the stuff of                 folklore on the night of March 24, 1944, when Allied prisoners                 gathered in hut 104 before crawling along the 100ft tunnel to a                 brief taste of freedom. Only three escaped; 73 were rounded up                 by the Germans and 50 were summarily executed.

Few could                 have blamed their devastated comrades for sitting out the                 remainder of the war. Yet far from being dispirited, a few men                 began work on a fourth tunnel nicknamed ‘George’, which was kept                 so secret that only a handful of prisoners knew about                 it.

Incredibly, George has just been uncovered after a                 team of engineers, archaeologists and historians excavated the                 site, a project filmed for a Channel 4 documentary Digging The                 Great Escape.

‘You have to admire these men,’ said chief                 archaeologist Dr Tony Pollard. ‘The Germans believed that the                 deaths of those 50 men would have acted as a deterrent for                 future escapees. But these men were even more                 determined.’

With us at the site are two of them: Gordie                 King, 91, an RAF pilot who operated the pump providing the                 tunnel with fresh air on the night of the Great Escape, and                 Frank Stone, 89, a gunner who shared a room with the ‘tunnel                 king’ Wally Floody, an ex-miner in charge of the digging. They                 stand, heads bowed, reminiscing about their former colleagues.                 It is the first time Gordie, who was shot down on his first                 mission to Bremen in 1942, has returned to the camp since he and                 the remaining prisoners of war were marched out on January 27,                 1945, as Russian forces approached.

‘It has been very                 emotional,’ he said. ‘It brings back such bittersweet memories.                 I am amazed by everything they have found.’
A widower with                 six children, he has vivid memories of working on tunnel Harry,                 performing guard duty and acting as a ‘penguin’ to disperse the                 sand excavated from the tunnels, whose entrances were hidden by                 the huts’ stoves.

They were called penguins because they                 waddled when they walked.

‘We would put bags around our                 neck and down our trousers, fill them with excavated sand, then                 pull a string to release it on to the field where we played                 soccer, all in a very nonchalant way,’ Gordie said.

‘One                 of my jobs was to look out of the window at the main gate 24                 hours a day and write down how many guards went in and out,’ he                 recalled. ‘Another was warning watch. If the Germans came into                 the compound, we would pull the laundry line down and everyone                 would stop what they were doing and resume normal duties. The                 guards were not exactly brilliant. They were taken from what we                 called 4F – not fit for frontline fighting.


Poignant memories: Frank Stone, left, and                 Gordie King with recovered artifacts including the pistol,                 below





‘I’m thrilled by it all,’ added Frank,                 who was shot down on his second mission: a bombing raid on                 Ludwigshafen oil refinery. ‘It’s like a war memorial for me. I                 don’t want people ever to forget the 50 men who died. The escape                 was thrilling and exciting but those men paid the price for                 it.’

Inevitably security tightened after the Great Escape                 and an inventory was taken by the Germans to gauge the extent of                 the operation. The roll- call of hidden items is astounding:                 4,000 bedboards, 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 62 tables,                 34 chairs, 76 benches, 3,424 towels, 2,000 knives and forks,                 1,400 cans of Klim powdered milk, 300 metres of electric wire                 and 180 metres of rope.

To prevent further escape                 attempts, the Germans filled in Harry with sand. So effective                 was the cover-up that when the remaining prisoners wanted to                 build a memorial for the 50 men who died, the exact site of the                 tunnel could not be agreed on.
Now, for the first time in 66                 years, the archaeologists have pinpointed the entrance shaft to                 Harry after compiling a map of the camp using aerial                 photography.

What was most surprising for the team was                 the structure within the shaft. The bedboards were interlocked                 to line the tunnel but the sand was so soft that plaster and                 sandbags were used to prevent it engulfing the tunnel.                 Amazingly, the ventilation shaft, which was made out of                 discarded powdered milk tins, was still intact.



Prisoner of War: Frank, ringed, during his                 days in prison

Dr Pollard, 46, who co-founded Glasgow                 University’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, said: ‘I was                 surprised at just how emotional I became when we found Harry. We                 were the first people to see the tunnel in decades. But it came                 to a point when we realised we couldn’t progress with the                 excavation. As soon as you drive a shaft into the sand, it is so                 soft it starts to collapse. It shows just how skilled those                 prisoners were.’

After abandoning Harry, the team set                 their sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumoured to                 have been dug underneath the floorboards in the camp                 theatre.

Using ground-scanning radar equipment, they                 found – beneath what would have been seat 13 – the trap door to                 a space that gave real insight into how the earlier tunnels                 would have been built.

To the left, between the floor                 joists, was a storage area for equipment – Klim tins, tools, a                 trolley and the ventilation pump – and abandoned sand. A few                 feet away was the entrance to the tunnel shaft, and at its                 bottom a separate chamber, which archaeologists believe was the                 radio room.

After abandoning Harry, the team set their                 sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumoured to have been                 dug underneath the floorboards in the camp                 theatre.

Down a single step lay the tunnel itself,                 intricately shored with bed boards, wired for light and equipped                 with the trademark trolley system used to shift both sand and                 men quickly and silently through the tunnels. It looked like a                 miniature railway with trolleys running on tracks linked by rope                 and pulled along by men at either end.

‘George turned out                 to be an absolute gem,’ explained Dr Pollard. ‘We found the                 shaft and excavated the tunnel which ran the entire length of                 the theatre. It was incredibly well preserved, with timber-lined                 walls, electrical wiring and homemade junction boxes, and was                 tall enough to walk through at a stoop. The craftsmanship is                 phenomenal. You can even see the groove on the top of the                 manhole cover, where it would swivel and slot into the                 floorboard above.

‘It was built at a time of heightened                 security at the camp. It is a fighting tunnel, not an escape                 tunnel. It was heading for the German compound from where the                 prisoners hoped to steal weapons and fight their way                 out.

The men knew the end of the war was nigh and they                 were playing a dangerous game. To see what most of the prisoners                 never saw was a real thrill. The Germans obviously discovered                 Harry but they never had a clue about George.’

The                 massive collection of artefacts found inside the tunnel included                 trenching tools; a fat-burning lamp crafted from a Klim tin;                 solder made from the silver foil of cigarette packets for the                 wiring system; a belt buckle and briefcase handle from the                 escapers’ fake uniforms as well as a German gun near hut 104.                  They also uncovered the axle and wheels from one of the                 tunnel trolleys, identical to the one used in Harry, and the                 remains of an air pump; a kind of hand-operated bellows which                 drew fresh air from the surface down a duct to the                 tunnel.

But the piece de resistance was                 a clandestine PoW radio crafted from a biscuit box and                 cannibalised from two radios smuggled into the                 camp.



Tunnel vision: A tunnel reconstruction showing                 the trolley system, tried out, below, by Frank, 89





Frank was instrumental in making                 the coil for the radio, which he moulded from an old 78 record.                 ‘I helped with the work on the construction of the radio, doing                 the soldering and things like that,’ he recalled, ‘cutting out                 bits of tins and whatever we needed for the                 equipment.’

Gordie added: ‘I remember one day walking                 around the camp with a friend when we saw this huge coil of                 wire. We grabbed it, covered it up with our coats and took it                 back to the hut. The Germans could not understand where the wire                 went. Until then we had had to rely on old tins of margarine                 with a wick in them, made from pajama cord, to light the tunnel,                 but they were smoky, used up oxygen and were continually getting                 knocked out.’

On the night of the Great Escape, 200                 prisoners, allocated consecutive numbers, gathered in hut 104 to                 make their escape, each a few minutes apart. The leaders were                 dressed in German uniforms or specially tailored civvies and                 kitted out with maps, compasses and forged                 documents.

Gordie, who was slot 140, remembers sharing                 final words with many of the escapers, wishing them luck and                 complimenting them on ‘their impressive disguises’.

‘It                 was quite exciting,’ he said. ‘Only the key German-speaking                 officers, who had a good chance of bluffing their way through,                 were given documents and civilian uniforms. The rest of us were                 so-called hard-a**ers, who were expected to get out and                 run.’



War classic: Steve McQueen on the set of the                 classic movie, The Great Escape


According to                 Roger Bushell’s plan, thousands of German soldiers and police                 would be deployed to hunt the escapers, preventing them from                 fighting the Allies. But after 76 men had escaped, the remainder                 were caught leaving the tunnel by German guards. Seventy-three                 of the men who got away were rounded up over the next few weeks                 and 23 were returned to the camp. The other 50 were shot in the                 back of the head by the guards at the side of the road. Only                 three escapees, Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Muller, and                 Dutch fighter pilot Bram van der Stok, succeeded in reaching                 safety. Bergsland and Muller got to neutral Sweden and Van der                 Stok made it to Gibraltar via Holland and                 France.

‘Afterwards the morale in the camp was very                 depressed,’ said Frank, tears in his eyes. ‘It was eerie. We had                 a period of mourning and held a memorial service. People just                 wandered around the camp quietly.’

‘A mass of doom                 enveloped the whole camp as so many of us had friends who were                 shot,’ added Gordie. ‘My close friend Jimmy Wernham, who came                 from the same town as me, was one of those who didn’t come                 back.

‘Before he went out, he took his ring off and gave                 it to his roommate Hap Geddes, who wasn’t going out, and said,                 “If anything happens to me, I want you to take this ring and                 give it to my fiancee.” After the war, Hap took the ring back to                 Dorothy and struck up a relationship with her. He ended up                 marrying her. He is still alive and living in                 Canada.’

Frank added: ‘I hope that what has been revealed                 will remind everybody what we went through and how we met the                 challenges. It was a privilege to be                 involved.’



Many of the Verman Stalags were in POLAND, like the Verman death camps, the Stalags were located in Salesia.  It was a geographic considerations.  Near end of war in one camp there were 10,000 RAF, USA, Frogs, etc.  a Luftwaffe fighter was doing loops over assembled POWS, the American & British started to chant in unicense, "DIE YOU BASTARD" the kraut crashed.  Was in psychic or suicide we will never know, only the kraut knows but it is cause for wonder.



There is always hope the POW's thoughts killed the pilot.



  Ira