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It was a tale of such extraordinary courage, drama and tragedy that it was immortalised in the film The Great Escape. Now the ageing pages of a Second World War diary have revealed an even more remarkable first-hand account of the circumstances of the famous prisoner of war break-out.
For as 77 determined Allied officers made their bid for freedom from beneath the wire fences of Stalag Luft III, another British serviceman still within the camp was documenting their exploits in a meticulously-kept diary.
Flight Lieutenant Ted Nestor wrote about the escape in coded form - calling it 'The Spring Handicap' with '100 under starters orders'. Later he added a diagram showing the hut from which the escape was launched, with red dotted lines showing the route of a tunnel leading under the camp fences and to the outside, trees marked in green - entitled 'the tunnel through which the escape was made'.
Stalag Luft III was a Luftwaffe-run PoW prison for 10,000 captured servicemen in Silesia, now Poland. Over the next year-and-a-half the young navigator kept a detailed record of daily life there, including his comrades’ dramatic escape plan – one of the most famous acts of heroism of the war.
The escape, later made famous in a blockbuster film starring Steve McQueen, was on March 24, 1944.
Flt Lt Nestor, who was born in Waterloo near Liverpool, writes about the ‘Great Escape’ in code, as if it were a horse race, describing how just prior to the escape the men were ‘under starter’s orders’.
In a later entry, which he titles ‘The Escape’, he records in detail the size of the tunnel, where the exit was and how they learned that many of the escapees had been killed.
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