It was film night in Stalag Luft III and the dwindling band of surviving PoWs was marking the 65th anniversary of the daring breakout by watching The Great Escape. Even though this is Hollywood’s celebration of their story and ensured their enduring fame, it wasn’t the Nazis they booed — it was Steve McQueen and his motorbike.

“We were not impressed when that film came out,” said Reginald Cleaver, 86, a flight engineer who had been shot down over the Netherlands and who helped to make disguises for the escape. “The bits about the way the tunnel was dug and how things started was quite accurate, but the later bits were nonsense.

“The Americans played no part in the escape. To have Americans riding motorbikes was ridiculous.”

The veterans were not about to let Hollywood spoil things for long. They had come to remember the breakout and to honour the 50 escapers who were executed on Hitler’s orders as a deterrent to others. In a poignant, candle-lit ceremony they drank a toast at the exit of tunnel Harry — one of three dug by the prisoners, along with Tom and Dick, and the one that 76 men managed to crawl along — and poured champagne on the earth in memory of the dead.

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Frank Stone had hoped desperately to be part of the Great Escape, which he had spent many months helping to plan, but his name was drawn out of the hat too late. When the inmates drew lots to select the 200 who would go through the tunnel on the first night — March 24, 1944 — Warrant Officer Stone, then 21,was number 215. The lottery may have saved his life.

Yesterday Mr Stone, 86, returned to Stalag Luft III, on the outskirts of Zagán, in western Poland, for the first time since the war. “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old,” he said at the ceremony. “We shall remember them.”

Mr Stone’s memories of the event were vivid. “We finished Harry around March 12 then had an anxious wait for a moonless night,” he said. “Everyone was on tenterhooks when it was happening. I lay in my bunk and around 5am I heard a gunshot. I knew the game was up.”

Mr Cleaver, the PoW who had helped to make the disguises and now lives in Brinklow, near Rugby, recalled his part in the plot. “On a sunny day the guards would take off their belts and leave them lying around, so I would press the buckle into soap to make an imprint,” he said. The buckles featured a raised German eagle with a swastika and the words “Gott mit uns” .

“We would then cook up some home-made solder made from Red Cross food tins, make fake buckles and spend hours polishing them.”

Alfie Fripp, 94, was moved from Stalag Luft III to a different camp three months before the breakout but Mike Casey, the pilot he had flown with as a navigator before they were shot down, was one of the 50 to be murdered.

“It does my old heart good to be here,” said Mr Fripp, who later took part in the Berlin airlift. “The most important thing is saying goodbye to those who died, especially my pilot.”

He remembered the moment his German guards told him the escapers had been shot and read out Casey’s name: “We were determined not to show our anger so we gave them three cheers.”

Three of the escapers made it home, but all have now died. Their names are inscribed on a memorial that runs along the route that Harry took, but it is the 1963 film — which the survivors watched in a replica PoW hut — that has immortalised the event.

The first half depicting life in the camp, the veterans say, is authentic: the machinegunning of a man who snaps and tries to scale the fence reflects the death of Mr Stone’s close friend Jimmy Kiddel, for example.

Richard Attenborough plays the man regarded as the real mastermind, Roger Bushell, a fighter pilot, barrister and international ski champion. Bushell, shot down in 1940, was a serial escaper who spent several months in the hands of the Gestapo. He was one of those shot after the breakout.

But the veterans were not amused by McQueen’s character, Virgil Hilts, and his motorcycle. “McQueen glamorised it, he made fun of the whole situation,” Mr Fripp said. “It was serious for the people that went through it.”

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