Subtitles ripped by ltt@GreatDreamers.cn
Stalag Luft III.
March 24, 1944.
An extraordinary group of Allied prisoners of war
are making history.
In one night, 76 escape
from one of the most secure prison camps in Nazi Germany,
along a tunnel they dug under the noses of their German captors.
Some of us are going to try and get out whatever happens.
This is the Great Escape.
The largest mass break-out of World War II.
How did those men dig a 100-metre-long tunnel
undetected by the guards?
Imprisoned in a POW camp,
how did they equip themselves to escape
and to travel across Germany?
Now a team of archaeologists
and engineers have gathered at Stalag Luft III to find out.
They believe the answers lie buried in two tunnels
that the POWs named Harry
and George.
The wheels off the trolleys? From the tunnels?!
Both tunnels have remained untouched since the end of the war.
Good grief! That is stunning!
It's time for them to give up their secrets.
It's iconic, it's unique.
It's the Great Escape.
It was surrounded by pine trees.
And I hate the smell of pine, even today.
Nothing but barbed wire,
goon boxes
and dirty grey dust.
My first impression was a feeling of utter despair,
utter despair.
There was the entrance gate, which was shut.
The gate opened and I thought, "God, what have I let myself in for?"
120 miles from Berlin,
on what was then the Eastern border of Germany,
Stalag Luft III opened its doors for business
in the first half of 1942.
It was huge.
At its peak, it housed more than 10,000 men
in five compounds across the 60-acre site.
The prisoners were all Allied aircrew,
shot down in bombing raids over Europe.
But this was no ordinary camp,
and they were not ordinary prisoners.
Stalag Luft III was to be
the Luftwaffe version of Colditz.
Escape proof.
We were regarded as the naughty boys, if you like.
These are the men who have been involved in escaping activities
all around the camp system before.
They really are, if you like,
the old boys club of the escaping world.
It really is like putting all your rotten eggs
into one basket.
To contain these rotten eggs,
the camp was ringed by double barbed wire fences,
bristling with watchtowers.
The accommodation huts were all raised off the ground
on brick pier bases, so guards could spot signs of tunnelling underneath.
Communal buildings like the camp theatre were isolated
and well-guarded.
And the whole camp was built on sand,
notoriously the most difficult ground to tunnel through.
It was their proud boast
that no one would ever escape from Stalag Luft III.
It was escape proof, and once you were in there, you were in there
until the Germans had won the war.
Today, all that remains of the camp,
in what is now western Poland,
are traces of the brick piles
that once supported the huts.
Now, historian Howard Tuck
and engineer Phil Westwood
want to bring the Great Escape back to life.
We could actually, if we find them, go into the workshop.
Yes! That's the plan.
They've been granted unprecedented permission to excavate the site.
They've been three years planning this.
1.5 metres...
It is exciting. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't. It's fantastic.
Although more than 100 tunnels were dug under the camp,
only four were properly engineered to last.
The team are here to dig two of them.
Tunnel George was dug under the camp theatre.
Although it was shallow,
perhaps just two metres underground,
it could still be intact.
The team believe it was used to store
much of the ingenious escape equipment
assembled by the prisoners.
They were storing rations down there, and bits of radio equipment.
You'd have had to have had an air pump down here.
George would have had the exact same materials
that were used in tunnels like Harry from the Great Escape.
The much riskier venture for the team is their hunt for Harry,
dug down from Hut 104.
This was the tunnel actually used for the Great Escape.
30 feet below the site of the hut,
at the base of Harry's shaft,
the targets are three chambers
which housed the equipment essential for using the tunnel.
A tool store,
a workshop,
and a room for the ventilation pump.
These chambers could still contain the key tools
and equipment that made the escape possible.
And they could finally reveal
the true genius of the escapers themselves.
How was it possible for them to dig this tunnel
under the noses of the German guards, make the little bits...?
The tools that they used, how did they breathe down there?
We know all this from films and seen it in books.
What we're going to do isreally see how it was done.
Those two trees are those over there.
The first challenge for the team is to find the original shaft
that led down to Harry.
This hut is closest to the road.
They know it was dug through the middle
of one of the brick piles that supported Hut 104.
That was the only way of getting from inside the hut
into the ground, undetected.
Don't go below a metre, Jamie.
But none of these brick piles is still visible
on the site of Hut 104.
Thereisa monument marking the rough location of the tunnel.
So you can see, we've dug up exactly...
And the geophysical survey has revealed a promising area
of disturbed ground just next to it...
Lift it up with a shovel, let me get a bar underneath.
..which Phil immediately investigates.
We need to go deeper.
What's that?
What d'you think?
I think that is really promising.
Itisfantastic.
One twenty.
One metre.
Itisthe right size.
I think so.
This is a square shape in the right place of the right size.
Mm-hmm.
Phil is convinced that this is the entrance to Harry's shaft.
He has to find a way to get a team of archaeologists
safely down to the chambers at its base.
He plans to dig his own new and much larger shaft
eight metres deep behind Harry,
and from there,
tunnel only four metres underground
to get to the sand filled chambers.
It's a big, time-consuming project.
For the plan to work,
they have to be certain that they've found Harry.
Iraia, the only archaeologist on site,
wants to check by having one more scrape with the digger.
The featureseemsto become less distinct.
It's just gone hasn't it?
There's no wood left at all, just the impression of the wood.
Phil thinks he knows why.
If the top timbers were thicker,
and we've now maybe gone past the top frame,
then we're down to essentially bed boards, sideways on,
so there would be very little evidence. It's only thin.
But you would not...
I would expect to have a bit more change in here.
OK.
Because the wood would get extremely thin,
just bed board width, obviously degraded. Quite hard to see,
probably, except for the corners.
The pressure is all on Iraia.
The rest of the archaeologists won't be on site for four days,
and Phil is on a tight timetable.
I'm still pretty confident we've got our shaft, actually.
I guess we are never going to have 100% certainty.
I'm sorry I can't find a fully constructed wooden shaft.
Yeah, no, no, yeah. Which is understandable, you know.
So many years pass.
Yeah.
I'm quite certain, how do you feel? Shall we go for this?
Yeah, I think we should.
That's a yes?
That's a yes, you will be happy to hear.
They've made their decision.
They'll now dig their new shaft as close as they can
to the site of this original.
To help Phil sink the shaft into this treacherous sandy soil,
he's recruited expert mining engineer Bill Shinkins.
To drive into this ground untreated is a nightmare.
They had to do it to get out.
We don't, but wewill.
January 1943.
The brains behind the Great Escape
has arrived at Stalag Luft III.
Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was a popular choice
to head the camp escape committee.
Roger Bushell was a charismatic man.
He was one of the natural leaders of this world.
If he walked into a room, you sort of,
well, sat up to attention, if you like.
Everybody admired him.
He hated Germans, and would do anything he could
to thwart them in what they were doing.
And he had the complete allegiance of everyone in the camp.
Bushell immediately began planning.
His goal was to disrupt the Germans
by springing as many men as he could in one go.
So he decided to dig not one,
but three tunnels out of three accommodation huts.
Each shaft would go down through one of the brick piles
supporting the huts.
He called these tunnels
Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Bushell calculated they could carry 200 men to freedom.
To function, each would have to be equipped
with a ventilation system,
electric light,
and a railway for transporting men and soil.
It was a wildly ambitious plan.
But by April 1943,
work had begun on Tom, Dick and Harry.
Four metres away from the site of Harry,
Bill and his team of miners are on their way down
to the chambers at its base.
Their shaft is an impressive structure.
Lined with steel box frames and timber shoring,
it's already several metres deep.
Bill thinks he'll be tunnelling the short distance to Harry
within a week.
Just as well. Because the battlefield archaeologists
who'll be doing the work inside Harry
have arrived on site.
Chief Archaeologist Tony Pollard
and his team face the challenge of excavating not just one,
but two tunnels,
deep down in this treacherous sand.
One of our huge ambitions here and it was a big ask,
of coming to Stalag Luft III,
was to get into a tunnel.
Hopefully, within the next two days, if we play this right,
we'll be doing just that.
A team of battlefield archaeologists have arrived at Stalag Luft III.
Here we go.
They're ready to begin their hunt
for the long-forgotten tunnel George.
This is completely integral
to the story of escape at Stalag Luft III
250 meters south of Harry and Hut 104 stood the theatre.
It was in the theatre, here where we are,
where one of the lesser known, but most important
tunnels dug at this camp was started and that is tunnel George.
Somewhere under the sloping structure of the auditorium,
untouched for nearly 70 years, lie the remains of that tunnel.
George was built after the Great Escape
for a very particular purpose.
George was not an escape facility.
We were advised that civilian unrest was rife
and the idea of George predominately was to get into the German quarters
and be able to protect ourselves
should civilians decide to attack the camp.
George would have given the prisoners
fast access to the camp armoury.
But the exciting prospect for the archaeologists
is that they believe the prisoners used the tunnel
to store escape equipment.
What's more, they think it was built to the same design
and in the same way as the other tunnels.
We would have had Klim tins as ventilation,
we would have had perhaps a railway.
You would have had to have an air pump down here.
George would have had the exact same materials
that were used in tunnels like Harry from the Great Escape.
The archaeologists believe that George isn't too far underground
and so might be relatively easily uncovered.
Maybe we'll find an escapers' kit,
anything connected with the forgery process,
I would find that particularly fascinating.
Anything that shows us how the prisoners here made good
their attempts to escape and have all the things they might need.
So it holds the promise of some unique finds.
Although maybe not straightaway.
Oh, oh, what's this? This looks interesting,
Looks like a toothbrush. What do you think of that?
Awesome.
It's in good condition.
Small as it is, the toothbrush is the first reminder
of the original inmates of Stalag Luft III.
They were all aircrew, mostly from the RAF,
who'd been shot down over occupied Europe.
Now six serving RAF officers,
all of whom have seen active service themselves,
have joined the team.
They're here on an official training exercise
to carry out a unique experiment.
We may not be in the same austere environment,
hiding from the Germans, but if we can make the things
that they did back in World War II, then that will be a big achievement.
127 feet.
To test their own ingenuity
and explore the extraordinary achievements of their predecessors,
the RAF team are going to build their own escape tunnel
using the same tools and materials that were available in 1943.
Pitting ourselves against guys who are basically legends
within our organisation is always going to be a challenge.
Masterminding their experiment is Cambridge University engineer, Dr Hugh Hunt.
He may be an academic,
but he loves getting his hands dirty finding out how things really work.
I'm always suspicious about what I read in historical accounts
particularly when it comes down to engineering detail
because people aren't very good at getting the detail right.
Talking about it, writing about it is one thing
but doing it is another.
The original escapers had to be incredibly resourceful.
They had no tools, so they had to steal,
adapt and recycle whatever they could lay their hands on.
All of these resources here...
In this replica of a prison hut,
Hugh has assembled a selection of everyday PoW camp paraphernalia.
We've got tins of milk powder.
But can Hugh and the team spot potential tools
and raw materials hidden within it?
< Any ideas?
I can see cutlery straightaway, useful for digging.
Digging. There's a hockey stick. They're made to be strong.
Here's a kit bag. Here's a big one of the Klim cans.
Klim is milk spelt backwards.
You can fashion a shovel out of that fairly easily.
A sand scoop out of a big can.
There's no one way of doing anything.
You guys will come up with different ways.
If we take out every other one as a starter and see how we go.
So the RAF crew begin to assemble
the raw materials they need to dig their tunnel.
At the site of the original Hut 104,
the engineers are racing to finish the huge shaft.
You've only got three screws in it.
They've sunk it exactly four metres
from where they found the entrance to Harry the escape tunnel.
Tony Pollard, with 20 years of battlefield archaeology behind him,
wants to see that 70-year-old entrance shaft for himself.
We found it on Monday, but late afternoon.
But the feature beneath the protective tarpaulin
is not quite what Tony expected.
Dark edge there. Not a lot for us to go on.
This isn't as dramatic as I expected.
There is something here, it's square.
How deep it is if it goes down, I don't know.
I would... I think we should have a trowel and have another look at it.
Heart in mouth, Tony scrapes at the shape.
But the more he scrapes, the fainter it gets...
..until finally he's forced to accept the awful truth.
I can understand everybody's excitement,
it's got wood in it, it's square-ish,
roughly the right place,
but to be frank I don't think it's our shaft.
So the team now have absolutely no idea where Harry is
and apparently no way of finding it.
Which means that the new expensively engineered shaft
could even be in the wrong place.
The quest for Harry is in crisis.
June 1943.
Roger Bushell and his team have been at work
on Tom, Dick and Harry for two months.
They're having to dig the tunnels through soft sand.
Digging through sand is notoriously difficult,
even the finest tunnel engineers and the most audacious escapers
will have real problems with the soil here.
To stop the tunnels collapsing in on themselves,
the tunnellers would have to find something to line them with.
Something of which there was an abundant supply.
Each bunk had something like 12 or 14 bed boards.
And the escape organisation people
would come round and say, "Two bed boards each bed,"
so in the end you were sleeping
on something like six or seven bed boards
which was bloody uncomfortable.
The bed boards were thought to be the idea
of 26-year-old Canadian spitfire pilot Wally Floody.
Before the war, he'd worked as a mining engineer in Ontario.
Now a prisoner, he took charge of the tunnelling.
A lot of the Canadians used to take part in sports, but not Wally.
He seem he seemed to live and breathe tunnelling.
Floody's plan was brilliant.
Because a square of four bed boards was just wide enough
to fit a man through.
And he also devised a brilliantly simple technique
for fitting the boards together without nails.
That fits in like that there
and I'll use that one over there, there we go.
That, look at that, it's just fantastic
because what it means is that the pressure
from the sand here can't cause a collapse.
But to mass produce notched bed boards to Floody's design.
Let's look inside this thing.
Hugh and the RAF team are going to try
and figure out how the original escapers might have made a saw.
They would have thought long and hard
about where to get materials to make saws from.
Whoa, that was the spring coming undone.
There we go. There must have been a wonderful moment
when somebody was sitting around,
listening to a gramophone record and said,
"Hey! There must be a spring in there which we can use to make the saw blade."
Well done.
Here it is!
Wahay!
Jim and Mikey begin the painstaking process of cutting teeth
into the blade with a file stolen from the engineers.
It looks pretty good.
So how long did it take you to do all of these teeth?
Ten, 12 hours of work all in all.
We've got to give it a go. >
< There's only one way to find out.
< Good start!
It's working! >
Now the RAF team have to cut notches in more than 200 bed boards.
Back at the site of the original Hut 104,
it's down to archaeologist Tony Pollard
to find the entrance to Harry.
If he can't, the hunt for the tunnel will be over.
He studies the floor plans and the records.
There has to be a way of getting the project back on track.
That feature whatever it was, was immediately outside the hut.
The quest to reveal the secrets of the escape tunnel Harry
at Stalag Luft III is hanging in the balance.
All the engineering work has had to be halted.
It's quite clear now from the archaeology that we've done,
that the thing that we thought was Harry, the top of the shaft,
is not.
Unless Tony can pinpoint the position of the original shaft,
the team will have to abandon the hunt for this tunnel.
He knows Harry was dug through one of the brick piles
that supported Hut 104.
He doesn't know exactly where Hut 104 was,
and none of the brick piles are visible above ground.
But he does have a plan.
He's realised all the huts in the camp were built
to the same standard design.
And at the remains of a hut just next to 104,
there is still evidence of the brick supports.
So with some careful measurements and an aerial photograph,
he's transposed the floor plan onto the area where Hut 104 stood.
Phil, H, just to recap on where we are.
We had our nice square down here
which we were very hopeful was the shaft of Harry.
Yeah.
That feature, whatever it was, was immediately outside the hut.
It was the right dimension.
It was roughly the right dimension, I'll grant you,
but it just does not tie in.
Tony knows from the records that the shaft was dug through
one of the brick supports under the front of Hut 104.
He's figured out where the three most likely
of those brick piles should be.
Phil's tent is getting it.
Tony quickly puts the mechanical digger to work.
There's nothing there.
But neither of his first two targets reveal anything except virgin sand.
It wasn't that one.
So we've got a long way to dig.
Everything now hangs on Tony's final target -
under the site office.
Everyone knows this is the last chance to find Harry.
I feel like one of those German ferrets who was
sent into the camp to check for escape tunnels and, erm, failing.
When you read the books, you tend to think,
"Well, how could they miss them?" It's more difficult than it looks.
Then, at last,
the substantial remains of a brick pile.
Whoa!
Stop! Stop!
We need to know more.
Keep digging.Keep digging.
What the...?Whoa!
That's a shaft.
Holy...!
I was only a foot out.
Now that looks like a shaft.
Can I go in? >
Yeah, go in.
I'm going in too.
Oh!
< Have we found it?
Yeah, I think so.
< That timber?
Oh... Timber lining!
This, at last, is the entrance to the most famous tunnel in history.
The space through which the 76 escapers descended
on their way out of the camp nearly 70 years ago.
Klim tin!
Klim tin on the edge, it's the ducting going down.
I can't believe it. It was right under my desk!
Oh man! Look at that.
What a thing of beauty.
Well done, Tony, well done. Really well done.
Really well done, good effort.
Brilliant.
We've got something to aim at now, haven't we?
You know where you're going now.
Yes, I know where I'm going!
It's very rare you get a crowning moment in a career.
But I've had a couple, and this is another one.
That is stunning.
But not everyone is jumping for joy.
Bill has measured the distance between the new discovery
and his new beautiful high tech, but unmoveable, shaft.
It's a long way.
Instead of four metres from the target which was the aim,
we're 13.5 metres from the target, and at a different angle,
which has given our miners an unfair challenge.
250 metres away, at the site of the old camp theatre,
the archaeologists are making more discoveries.
Tunnel George was dug under the auditorium months after
the Great Escape.
It would take the prisoners to the armoury in the guards' compound.
Even so, the archaeologists believe it was properly engineered,
with bed-board shoring, a trolley system and an air pump.
(BEEPING)
Tony...
It looks like they are right.
It's Richard for you.
Tony here, over.
'Tony, hello. Do you know anything about the dimensions of the wheels
'and axles of the trolleys used for the escape tunnels? Over.'
The wheels off the trolleys? From the tunnels?
Tony and Iain race to the theatre, to find Scott and Richard
scraping the sand delicately away from a truly remarkable object
I thought that call was a wind-up at first.
No! I mean, we've got two wooden circles with
what looks like a metal axle. I'm not sure,
but I thought I'd call it through. Good grief!
It is! It's...
It's exactly the right size, if you've seen the film.
That is stunning!
Scott and Richard have uncovered the axle and wheels
of one of the tunnel trolleys.
It's one of those moments like finding
the top of the shaft for Harry.
It's iconic, its unique. It's the Great Escape.
Trolleys were absolutely crucial to the success of the escape.
The diggers excavated more than 200 tonnes of sand
to make their tunnels, and the trolleys were used to transport this
spoil quickly back to each shaft so it could be dispersed.
And on the big night,
they carried the escapers from prison to freedom.
Hugh Hunt and the RAF officers are planning to build a trolley system
for their tunnel.
They've been relying on a single photo of a trolley,
taken by the Germans.
Now they have the real thing.
Here it is, now. It's absolutely fabulous.
This is the shaft in the middle. And the shaft,
I think, comes out of wood stoves that they used.
Now, I think that is a bit of Klim can.
And it's come along there and then that is the edge of the Klim can
and the flange would have been here.
Armed with their new knowledge,
the two flight lieutenants can get straight to work.
Hold it against the edge.
They've stolen iron bars from the engineers to use as axles.
They're using tin cans to make tyres,
and shaping wood to make the wheels.
That's another one on top of that down there.
Then we should have a fairly stable wheel, then.
To minimise friction,
they're using steel from the gramophone spring to make bearings.
And the whole lot is glued together with sap harvested from the trees.
Then the flange is going to have to go on top of that, isn't it?
Yes.
Just like the original - it's ingenious.
But it's yet to be road tested.
That's it.
Hello, guys!Hi.
89-year-old Frank Stone is surely the perfect man for the job.
Is it a similar size to the one...?
He has returned to the camp where he was a prisoner for three years.
I would say... Well, it looks as if it could carry quite a load.
Did you ever use the one that was in the tunnel?
I didn't, no. Well, I saw it being made, actually.
Do you want a go?
That's... Am I allowed to?
Of course you are!
As long as you're gentle with it!
Is it strong enough?Yes.
You guarantee?Yes!
I can't believe this! Fabulous.
Right.
Are you ready?
Home, James!
Frank was just 18 when he was sent to Stalag Luft III.
He was billeted in Hut 104.
It's the first time he's seen Harry in nearly 70 years.
I mean...
Sorry!
It is emotional, to think of that night,
the 24th March, I mean.
No, I feel very honoured to be invited to see this.
I feel honoured to have been given the chance to work on it.
It's unbelievable.
Frank, we've got a shaft which is what we expected to find, really.
The right sort of dimensions a bed-board wide.
What did surprise us was when we took away the rest of the earth
on this side and came across what is almost the same again...
Yeah.
It's a fairly rough shape.
But it's quite a substantial feature.
I thought, as I've been tinkering with it,
that they had problems with collapses...
Yeah.
..and they've had to pack this area to stop that.
Yeah, you see...
the chimney was there.
Yeah, OK.
So, the sand had collapsed
so there was nothing supporting the chimney.
Ah, so it's to stop the chimney coming down which would have
been pretty catastrophic.Yes.
So they've packed underneath it to secure it
while they were working on this. You see these?
Tony's found perfect evidence of just how hard it was to dig
through the sand below the camp.
It's a repair to a catastrophic collapse at the top of the shaft.
And you can see that they've slapped clay in,
they've put sand bags in, all sorts of other material to try
and secure and fill this void before it brings down the entire shaft.
This is the same problem that Engineers Bill Shinkins
and Phil Westwood are now wrestling with at their new shaft.
They're still two metres from the bottom.
And the sand of Stalag Luft III is fighting back with a vengeance.
Stalag Luft III.
July 1943.
Roger Bushell and his team have been digging
round the clock for three months to finish escape tunnels
Tom, Dick and Harry.
But his plan for the escape is suddenly thrown into turmoil.
The Germans began to build a new compound
right where Dick was supposed to exit.
And worse was to follow.
In October, the Germans discovered Tom.
The Germans blew it up,
but they grossly underestimated the power of their explosion
and blew the roof off.
Bushell and his team now had just one tunnel left.
Their only chance of freedom was Harry.
It is this tunnel, eight metres below the ground,
that engineers Phil Westwood and Bill Shinkins
are trying to reach with their vast steel-lined shaft.
They plan to burrow from its base to a suite of chambers
at the mouth of Harry.
But first, they've still got to finish the shaft.
And the clock is ticking.
We've got about 14 working days
to do what I think is essentially at least 20 days' work.
And it's a challenge.
What's slowing them down is the frighteningly unstable ground.
I've never drove through anything like this.
Every time they dig down,
they expose four walls of unshored sand.
These are under pressure from the weight of sand above.
Unless they can get the wooden shoring in place almost at once...
..the walls fall into the base of the shaft.
And with two metres still to go down,
they've just had a really big collapse
which has filled the floor of the shaft with sand.
It managed to fall in just before we managed to concrete it.
So we'll have to dig it out and start again.
Worse, it's created a huge unstable void
which Bill must now fill with concrete,
or the shaft could topple into it.
The problem is not the equipment. It's the ground conditions.
The sand is just soft beach sand. It just simply gives way.
If we don't stop it,
every level we go down, all that sand will follow us down.
If we don't do that, we cannot dig a tunnel at the bottom.
But Bill Shinkins is a determined man.
We're in no different position to the guys that had to do it.
If they can go 100 metres in this rubbish,
there's no way I can't go 13.5.
No way at all.
With a mixture of miners' guile and a lot of Polish concrete,
he and his team wrestle their way to the bottom of the shaft.
Now the chambers of Harry are just 13 metres of tunnel away.
The RAF team are ahead of Bill.
They've begun work on their tunnel, which they're calling Roger.
They've decided to build a section of it in the open air,
to practice their digging skills.
Just as well, because they've got a lot to learn.
If you dig it,
you almost have to shore it immediately before it dries
because then it'll collapse.
We dug this quite a while ago now and we've been
messing about with other bits,
and in the meantime it's dried and hence we've had a few collapses.
But there's more to escaping than just digging a tunnel.
Once they'd got out,
the original escapers needed identity papers
to get through the numerous German checkpoints.
Intelligence officer Jim Smith
has taken on the task of producing faked documents for the RAF team.
And already he's in awe of his predecessors.
I can't understand how they would have got that level of precision
with these documents.
I mean, in terms of painstaking process this is where it's at.
It's difficult. If you put one bed board out of place,
you can have a little tunnel collapse,
and you can rectify that error. I make a slip of the pencil
and if I can't correct that, that's a whole day's work gone.
Some of the forgeries they produced
were exceptionally good considering the materials they worked with.
I mean, making rubber stamps out of heels of shoes
and things like that. Quite remarkable achievements.
In order to cut the stamp, obviously, I had a Stanley knife
and I had a razor blade. These tools, on my first attempt,
they just weren't accurate enough for the process.
so we had to come up with our own ones.
We started off with the initial blade, just a razor blade,
between two pieces of rubber from a rubberised apron.
But then even using the corner of that was too fiddly.
It was too large a tool.
I used smaller piece of razor blade
to an even smaller piece of razor blade,
and, actually, that worked really well.
While Jim battles on with his stamps,
his fellow officers have completed the open section of Roger.
Reggie, time to swap over.
Now they face the much greater challenge
of driving the tunnel under the sand.
Need another board yet?
Yeah, I could do with a board now.
OK. There's one coming forward.
Progress is achingly slow as they struggle to manoeuvre
the bedboards into place.
The dowel on the top works beautifully.
The worst thing is the confined space.
There's hardly any room to move.
You're throwing the earth over yourself
as you try to get rid of it down the tunnel.
And, above everything else, it's hot work.
You can see how hard it was. I thought it was hard,
but this is really quite tough.
The problem they're facing is that every time they dig forward,
the sand above them is unsupported until they can shore it.
The slightest jolt with a bedboard or digging tool causes collapse.
Oh, fucking hell...
The original tunnellers had exactly the same problem.
But instead of a metre of sand above them, they had eight.
Severe collapses were frequent,
and tunnellers often had to be dug out.
You used to have falls, and that causes quite a panic.
It could be very nasty, actually.
You pulled the bloke out, type of thing,
if his head was covered, and killed yourself laughing.
That was the danger, before you got boards in, of getting a fall.
This is territory Bill and his team of engineers have just entered.
They're now, at last, tunnelling towards Harry.
The original tunnellers averaged two metres a day.
But so far, Bill's barely going at half that rate.
I just find it hard to believe how they managed at all. Amazing.
They had a small tunnel, in very small increments,
but they must have had terrible difficulty going any distance.
100 metres underground in this!
The problem for Bill and Phil is that their tunnel
must be wide enough to allow a team of archaeologists to work in.
Each step forward exposes a massive weight of unsupported sand,
making collapse almost inevitable.
So Bill decides on a risky strategy.
Driving supporting rods into the sand above the tunnel
may disturb it,
but Bill thinks it's the only way to stop it collapsing.
DRILLING
Using this technique, he drives forward another metre.
And then....
This is just a massive void now.
It's slipped down now, all that's down.
Yeah.
And we can't have men in there when that comes down.
Collapses like this are incredibly dangerous.
It's lucky no-one was injured.
Tons of sand have poured into the tunnel in seconds,
and opened a truly huge void immediately beyond its mouth.
Phil now realises what this could mean
once they get close to Harry itself.
If we get to the end and we're faced with a wall of sand
that the archaeology is inches behind,
as soon as we start to dig it, it will collapse
and destroy the archaeology.
Phil decides enough is enough.
The risk to both his team and the priceless remains of Harry
is just too great.
It's game over.
I'm gutted, absolutely gutted. I've been three years planning this,
and we're going to have to stop.
Absolutely gutted.
I don't know what else to say, I just...
I wanted to have my cake and eat it
and now it's gone, there is no cake.
We can't get to it and preserve it.
The chambers of Harry have eluded Phil.
It's now almost certain they'll remain hidden forever
beneath the devilish sand of Stalag Luft III.
But the hunt for George under the floorboards of the camp theatre
is very much alive.
Well, to my mind it looks like to all the world like a graveyard
for tunnelling equipment.
Wow.
Superb!
A team of battlefield archaeologists, engineers
and some of the last surviving veterans of the Great Escape
have gathered at the site of Stalag Luft III in Poland.
Their last remaining hope of revealing
the secrets of the Great Escape is one tunnel hidden
under the remains of the camp theatre.
It was called George.
The prisoners built it to get to the German armoury.
They wanted weapons in case their guards or the local populace
turned against them as the war neared its end.
George itself remains elusive.
But the archaeologists have found what
they think is a storage area for tunnelling equipment.
I'm not sure...
Good grief!
These are the wheels of a tunnel trolley.
And now, right next to that, another ghostly shape
is emerging from the sand, and Tony's very excited.
What we have here in front of you,
is what we think is one of the air pumps.
The air pump from the tunnel?
From the tunnel.
The air pump was essential to the Great Escape.
A kind of hand-operated bellows,
the pump drew fresh air from the surface down a duct
and delivered it to the end of the tunnel.
The constant flow of fresh air not only allowed the tunnellers
to breathe, it created a draught that drove bad air out of the shaft.
For me, the ventilation system wasthething about the tunnelling.
OK, the digging, yes, fine.
And the trolley system, it's all interesting.
But that ventilation system was out of this world.
It does appear to be a framework with a straight side
coming down here.
And possibly the shape of a hockey stick.
At the moment, it looks fairly rough, coarse wood there.
It looks like a notch.
And then cross beams running underneath it coming
out from that side.
Is that fabric we're seeing there?
Yeah. That looks like the decayed part of the bellows.
< I mean, is it moveable?
Yeah. It's very fragile.
Oh, yeah, it is.
And then, we've got the Klim tin at the end,
which appears to be the kind of nozzle.
That's a Klim tin?
So, that'll be the ventilation bit.
And you'd have other Klim tins attached to that to form the airway.
That would run down the tunnel, but as we now know from Harry,
it would run up the top, to draw air in from the outside world.
The discovery of the pump couldn't have come at a better time
for Hugh and the RAF officers.
This is the perfect size for making frames for this sort of thing.
They've been planning to build one for their tunnel.
Now, to guide them,
they've got not just a photo, but the real thing.
And they're soon hard at work.
That may be a bit tricky. >
The bellows are easy - World War Two kitbags.
A few bits of wood
and some hockey sticks make a thoroughly-authentic frame.
And the modern equivalent of Klim tins provide the air duct.
It's going to take a long time and my thumb is going to be extremely sore!
The air's going somewhere. There's nothing coming out.
But the key technical challenge is the valve system.
A pump needs valves so that
when the bellows are expanded they draw air only from the inflow
and when they're compressed, they push it only through the outflow.
Without valves, the pump would be useless.
There's no clue from either the photo
or the archaeology how the escapers made theirs.
But Ryan and Frenchie soon come up with an ingenious solution.
They're making their valve out of shoe leather
and a couple of tin lids.
This is extremely crucial to the ventilation system because
if you can't get air going in one direction down to the bottom
of the shaft, then there could be bad air down there
or there could be a lack of oxygen. It is crucial.
Without this, the pump doesn't work and the tubing
doesn't work, so this is actually the most crucial part
of the whole system.
It's better to visualise... >
When it's all assembled, the pump certainly looks the part.
But will it impress the man who operated the real thing?
Canadian Gordie King was training to be a bomber pilot
when, in June 1942, he was shot down over Germany
on his first mission.
He was one of the first PoWs to arrive in Stalag Luft III.
He was just 22 years old.
Frenchie. Nice to meet you.
Now he's come back to the camp for the first time since the war.
What will he make of Ryan and Frenchie's pump?
This is our air pump. What do you think?
Very good. Amazing! You built it exactly the way it was.
Really? Do you think, do you think it looks genuine?
Yes, it sure does.
It doesn't feel like there's a lot of air going out there,
but, yeah, when you push it hard.
Great!
< You would have operated this. How difficult was it?
Was it easy or quite tiring?
It was, er, it was tiring. It was a long time doing it, you know.
Periodically, we'd have to stop
because they had guards going by and they couldn't let anybody out...
Yeah.
..till they'd gone by so, you know, we did have some rest periods.
Do you want a go?
Do you want to have a try?
Yeah!
< Does it bring back any memories?
Oh, yeah! I think it's a bit higher up than ours.
Yeah. Anything you think we can improve?
No, I think that's just marvellous!
Really?
Now both pump and trolley have passed the PoW test,
the RAF team can begin to fit out their tunnel.
Can you slide it back your way a bit?
What I'll do is put a few boards over here to make sure that people don't
step on the Klim cans and crush them, and then this is
good to go and I can pump the air
down to the guys at the end of the tunnel.
Do you want to jump down in the tunnel?
With both systems in place, just one ceremony remains.
OK, you're through.
Roger is now ready.
You've got the air.
And so, too, are Jim's fake identity cards.
Well, here I have the pass for Frenchie to leave. As you can see,
I've attached his photograph here and also the stamp. I'm quite pleased
with this particular stamp. It came out with
the right amount of detail without looking too suspiciously perfect.
Overall, I'm very happy with that and I would hope that
when Frenchie fills out his own details,
and then the date, that hopefully this is going to see him through.
Now, the RAF team can put all their hard work to one final test.
One by one, they make their way down their tunnel.
It's awkward and fiddly.
But everything works perfectly.
And, less than ten minutes after they started,
they're out.
Job done.
Back at the camp theatre, the archaeologists are still
desperately searching for the entrance to Tunnel George.
And now, at last, Scott could be onto something.
Roughly five metres away from the tunnellers' storage area, he's been
exploring a patch of dark soil that appears to be subsiding into a hole.
And he's just uncovered a line of Klim tins still joined together,
neatly arranged along its lip.
That's remarkable.
< Oh, wow, look at that!
That's incredible.
Superb. Klim. There we go. Heard about this. There you go.
There's a preserved one, slightly better preserved. That's fantastic.
No mistaking that at all. Word for word. Klim. Milk.
Just three tins long.
Beyond that you can see where it's rusted you can see where it extends.
There's no doubt this would have been part of a ventilation system.
The other amazing thing,
which is extra exciting in this case, is beyond here it seems
to turn, and head down hill, and head down into the trench Ian's in.
The line of Klim tin ducting is a vital discovery.
Because the archaeologists are certain it will lead them
down to the entrance of George and the tunnel beyond.
The team's quest to find one of the tunnels
under Stalag Luft III is in its final days.
And it's come down to a single patch of dark soil
in the remains of the camp theatre.
Try and work out what this sloping timber is.
We need to level that off and see how far it goes back.
This, at last, is the top of the entrance shaft to George.
It's not yet much to look at
but there are clear traces of the wooden frame.
And, from inside it, Tony has just recovered a wonderful example
of the tunnellers' ingenuity.
I know exactly what that is.
That?
That's for holding the net up on a ping pong table.
Was this just chucked around, chucked away?
No, no. It had been used as a bracket to connect timbers in the shaft.
It was at a point in the structure where there was a right angle timber.
It would cause some difficulty in the construction.
They thought, "How can we fasten these timbers together securely?"
To my mind it's one of the best things we've found there.
I just think of the Germans giving the POWs
all these tunnel-making bits of kit to keep themselves amused!
And they did keep themselves amused.
But the bracket is just the beginning,
because as they delicately scrape away
the archaeologists reveal first the outline
and then the unmistakeable body of the tunnel itself.
Now Tony can show Hugh inside a structure
that no-one has laid eyes on for nearly 70 years.
Right, I'm going to give you a guided tour through George,
through our tunnel.
You can see the trapdoor. You can see the lip,
which enabled the trapdoor to sit flush.
It's hard to see, but look right the way down.
The tunnel is lined beautifully on either side with timber.
It's in good condition.
It is lovely.
Now, you see that ledge there, running along?
That is the step into a side chamber.
That's a big chamber.
It's pretty big. You can see the roof, it's full totally of sand,
but you can see the timbers that run off to the side of the shaft.
That would have given you a nice little place running off...
For the air pump?
I think you're dead on the money there.
If you step up to the tunnel itself and move along it in this direction,
you'll notice quite a difference.
Is that timber?
It is indeed. As you'll see we have a full wall.
Bed boards horizontally. Vertical framing joists.
We tried that technique in our tunnel and it is bloody difficult.
That's not original wire, is it?
It is indeed.
It's running along both sides, pinned just underneath the ceiling.
We think this is the lighting system for the tunnel
and it's been wired into the main system of the theatre itself.
But there's a twist, literally. George isn't straight.
We thought this tunnel went through the theatre in that direction.
Straight through, under the stage, towards the German compound.
The problem being, if they did that, they'd have to go under all of those walls.
So they've taken the line of least resistance. They've come round.
That's why we have this wonderful right angle.
And it changes direction and it runs under that wall.
And you think it will go down that way?
Exactly. Change direction again toward the German compound.
But the team didn't come here just to uncover a tunnel.
They also wanted to discover what was inside it.
And the answer is this wonderful array
of escape and tunnelling equipment
recovered from both the tunnel and the storage area.
We've got quite a range of objects.
Now, this is fantastic. These just came up yesterday.
These are trenching tools, used to dig the tunnel.
Look at that.
It looks as though it's been used in the tunnel.
An oil lamp. These would have been used in the tunnel
before your electrical cables arrived.
There was no electric power during the day, so we had to use these.
It was only at night you were able to siphon off the electricity?
And then these little bits of foil.
These are from cigarette packets
used to basically create metal that you can mould.
Solder.
Everything's got a use, Frank. Everything has got a use.
CHATTER
And these. A belt buckle...
I wonder if it's part of a fake uniform.
It could be, yes.
..and the handle to a briefcase,
both intricately fabricated parts of an escape disguise.
What a great collection, Tony.
And that's just a small part of it.
But the most remarkable discovery is still in the ground,
nestling next to a basin at the bottom of George's shaft.
To begin with, Tony doesn't pay it much attention.
There's a lot of stuff. Some things in there we haven't seen before.
I don't recognise that big square tin, for instance.
But when he finally gets the tin out of the ground...
..he can't believe his eyes.
I've been on project after project where stuff happens on the last day,
but to find this!
What have you got here?
It's a secret POW radio.
(ALL) Wow.
What's it made from and where did the parts come from?
I think it's a biscuit or a wafer tin that it's in.
There's a battery in the corner. The battery is fairly standard.
It's got these bigger bits of wire, which I suppose might be an aerial.
But then there's more wire down here. There's stuff in here, absolutely...
Does it still work?
That we have yet to find out.
The archaeologists have uncovered a remarkable story
under the floorboards of the camp theatre.
Beneath seat 13, the original POWs had created a tunnellers' paradise.
To the left, between the floor joists,
they'd carved out a workshop and store area for equipment -
klim tins, tools, the trolley and ventilation pump.
A few feet away was the entrance to tunnel George.
At the bottom of the shaft, a suite of chambers including the pump room.
Down a step lay the tunnel itself.
Intricately shored with bedboards, wired for light,
and equipped with the trademark trolley system.
Down the tunnel and beyond - the exit.
March 24th, 1944.
The 200 men selected to escape have gathered in hut 104.
Beneath them,
the tunnel they have painstaking constructed over the last year.
The atmosphere was very tense, very tense indeed.
At 8:45pm, the first escapers
lift the stove which conceals the entrance to Harry
and drop down into the tunnel.
I can only say it was damn difficult.
It was very low, the tunnel. I don't suffer from claustrophobia
but it was clearly going to be a difficult run.
When they got to the exit, they were in for a nasty shock.
The idea was that it would come up underneath the barbed wire
into a clump of trees which would hide it.
The news came back very quickly. Bloody thing is 15 feet short.
So they improvised.
Men outside and under cover used a length of rope
to signal when the guards weren't looking.
Even so, progress was agonisingly slow.
At about 5am, there were still more than 100 men
crammed into the hut and the tunnel waiting to escape.
Then a German guard finally spotted a man emerging from the exit
and raised the alarm.
KLAXON SOUNDS
Then of course there was panic. As they say, chaos reigned.
All we could do was try and destroy
all evidence of escape activities in the nearest stove.
Then the hut opened and in came the Germans with their dogs.
In spite of all the problems,
a remarkable 76 prisoners had managed to escape
and were already fanning out across Europe.
Thousands of troops that the Germans could ill afford to spare
were dispatched to find them.
Bushell's plan to divert the Nazi war effort had worked.
But it came at a terrible cost.
73 of the 76 who'd got out were re-captured.
And 50 of them were executed on the direct orders of Hitler himself,
including Roger Bushell.
A mass of doom enveloped the whole camp.
And so many of us had friends that were shot.
All of us knew those 50 and I can only say it was terrible.
Terrible. Absolutely ghastly.
Here were 50 fellows, 50 of our own friends,
who were with us in our mess, in our rooms last night, are dead.
Archaeologist Tony Pollard has one final mission to accomplish.
He's discovered who made the radio
and he's on his way to return it to its creator.
One of those fancy James Bond case moments but...
This is the first time
Frank Stone has seen his radio in nearly 70 years.
It's not the prettiest wrapping paper...
This is like Christmas.
Oh, gosh!
And that's the one from George.
We found this in the bottom of George under the theatre
the day after you left Poland.
Yeah.
Oh, gosh.
Yes, the old battery.
Yeah.
Well, what was it? 70 years ago?
To see it now, I mean, it is fantastic.
I always knew it was there, you know, but...
God!
With Frank and his radio reunited,
the quest to reveal the secrets of the Great Escape is finally over.
Home, James!
The experiments, the extraordinary archaeology...
..and even the failure to reach Harry
have together revealed one thing.
That the men behind the Great Escape
were even more skilful, determined, and ingenious
than anyone could ever have imagined.
To me it was a privilege to be involved with it.
People say, "Oh, how unlucky you were."
No, I was very lucky to have taken part in all this.
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