FORMER POWs: From left, Jimmy James, Churchill, Peter Fanshaw and Nelson (Image: PETER CORNS )
AFTER two days cowering in a hayloft, RAF squadron leader Richard Churchill knew his brief taste of freedom was about to end. Farmers stabbing wildly into the hay with their pitchforks were getting closer and closer. Unarmed, cold and hungry, he and his fellow escapee Squadron Leader Bob Nelson faced a tough choice: either take on their pursuers or come out quietly with their hands up and risk a firing squad later on.
Richard Dick Churchill, RAF bomber pilot (Image: Handout)
Both took the sensible decision to give themselves up and lived to see their extraordinary actions immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape.
With Churchill's death this week, aged 99, there is no one left of the 76-strong party that escaped from the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Poland.
His passing is given added poignancy by the fact that next month marks the 75th anniversary of the operation the PoWs dubbed Operation Escape 200, so-called because that was the number of men they wanted to escape on that freezing day.
Like many of the Britons in the camp, Churchill had been shot down, in 1940 at the controls of his Handley Page Hampden over Ludwigshafen while on his 26th combat mission.
Under the guidance of Squadron leader Roger Bushell, known as Box, he was one of those working in great secrecy to dig three tunnels, nine yards down.
Often excavating with spoons, they used some 4,000 bed boards, 90 double bunk beds and 635 mattresses to help keep the tunnels passable in the sandy soil. Churchill was paired with Nelson the day before the break-out on March 24, 1944.
They were the 50th and 51st of the 76 Allied airmen who managed to get outside the perimeter fence of the camp, which the Nazis had said was impossible to
