Major Anthony Rolt

After a stretch at Stalag VIIB in Bavaria, from where he also made an escape attempt, Major Anthony Rolt was sent to Colditz Castle in the early 1940s, the Sonderlager for persistent escapers. It was in Colditz that he teamed up with two RAF officers, Flying Officer Bill Goldfinch and Flight Lieutenant Jack Best, and Lieutenant Geoffrey “Stooge” Wardle of the Royal Navy to build the glider that they planned to launch from the castle roof.

By that stage of the war, spring 1944, it was apparent Germany would be defeated and it was feared that the SS might embark on wholesale slaughter of the Colditz prisoners as an act of reprisal. The glider was to provide the prisoners with a possibility of carrying news of any such atrocity to the outside world.

It was Rolt who devised the location for the glider workshop. Mud-plastered mattress covers stretched over wooden frames made a false wall at the end of an attic. Work began in May 1944 with a completion date scheduled for the following spring.

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Squadron Leader "Jimmy" James

"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. 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.

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Flight Lieutenant Michael Shand

“Mic” Shand was one of the 76 officers who escaped through a tunnel from Stalag Luft III in Silesia, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, on the night of March 24, 1944. This “great escape”, as it became known, was an outstanding example of planning, organisation and determination intended to allow 200 Allied prisoners of war to get away. By an unlucky chance, a German sentry stumbled across the exit point beyond the wire as the 77th man emerged. All but three of those who got out were recaptured and, of those - on Hitler’s order - 50 were shot by the Gestapo.