The death of Sydney Dowse leaves only three British survivors of the “Great Escape” by Allied air force officers from the German prison of war camp Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Hitler issued an order that all those recaptured were to be shot but was allegedly persuaded to reduce the figure to 50. Seventy-six men got away but only three reached safety. The 23 survivors of those recaptured were sent to prison or concentration camps. Dowse was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, from where he again escaped. In all he made five escape attempts.

As an RAF Flight Lieutenant, Dowse had baled out from his photo-reconaissance Spitfire of 608 Squadron over Brest in August 1941, after taking photographs of the German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst sheltering in the port. Landing in occupied Brittany, he tried to make contact with the French Resistance but was taken prisoner and sent for treatment at a hospital in Germany near Weimar, from where he made his first escape. Wearing civilian clothes acquired in hospital, he travelled by train westwards to Mönchengladbach but was intercepted on the Dutch-German frontier three days later.

Sent to Stalag IXC at Bad Sulza, a camp for captured airmen near Leipzig, he escaped from there by mingling with a fatigue party working outside the wire. Again taking a train, he almost reached the Belgian frontier, but was recaptured in a state of extreme exhaustion while trying to cross it in deep snow. After several days in hospital, he was sent to Oflag VIB, at Warburg.

This was a desolate place, west of the Weser on a plateau three miles from Warburg station, housing 2,500 officers. When Dowse arrived, the inmates were still clearing it of rats and fleas as well as planning a variety of escapes.

Dowse joined in the construction of several tunnels from Warburg, from one of which six officers escaped in April 1942. Later, in June 1943, an escape, which became famous as the “Warburg Wire Job” using articulated ladders to scale the wire, led to the escape of 65 prisoners from this camp in June 1943. But before then Dowse had been moved to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, in Silesia, which housed officers of the Allied air forces.

The camp stood in a pine forest clearing with huts on stilts to prevent tunnelling. When Dowse arrived it held 900 Allied airman and was seriously overcrowded. His jovial and easy-going manner soon won him friends and he was popular with the more relaxed of the German guards.

He took pains to cultivate the friendship of a Corporal Hesse who worked in the letter censorship department of the camp headquarters, which proved useful in gaining information about the guards’ activities such as room searches. As arrangements for a mass escape through a 300-foot long tunnel were nearing completion in February 1944, Hesse warned Dowse that the officer masterminding the escape, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, a persistent escaper, would almost certainly be shot if he was caught trying to escape again.

The mass escape was to be made through a tunnel code-named “Harry”, work having been halted on two others, “Tom” and “Dick”, dug at the same time as an insurance against detection. When Tom was discovered, Harry was judged to offer the best chance of escape and the 2ft-high tunnel, 30ft below the surface, was completed, after two months of feverish work in claustrophobic conditions, on March 14, 1944.

The moonless night of March 24 was chosen for the breakout by 200 men. The first 30 were fluent German speakers and so judged to have the best chance of making a “home run”, the next 70 had all worked on one or more of the tunnels, and the final 100 were taken out of a hat from around 500 volunteers.

As one of the German speakers, Dowse was allocated number 21. He planned to team up with a Polish officer, Stanislaw “Danny” Krol, and head for Poland in the hope of making contact with the Polish underground movement. They were both well prepared and carried a three-week supply of German food vouchers that Dowse had persuaded Hesse to provide.

The escape was delayed because the exit hatch took longer to dislodge than expected. Then it was discovered that the exit was some 25ft short of the edge of the forest which they had relied on to provide cover from the sentries’ watchtower. Despite these setbacks, the escape got under way at 10.30pm and shortly after 2.30am 80 men had gone through the tunnel. Four of these were supervising the exit and dispersal procedure when a prowler sentry outside the wire stumbled across the exit hole and fired a warning shot to alert the guards.

Krol had gone through the tunnel ahead of Dowse and miraculously the two met in the woods beyond the wire. Their plan had been to catch a train to Berlin then Stettin (now Szczecin), but the delays in the tunnel meant they had missed the first one. Not wishing to hang about Sagan station waiting for another, they decided to follow the line of the railway eastwards and walk the 80 miles to Poland.