The Great Escape. from BBC Online

Transcription

1 The Great Escape from C Online ACKGROUND The article below is from the Web site of the ritish roadcasting Corporation (C). It tells the story of one of the most famous real-life escapes in the last century. During The Great Escape of World War II, 76 captured men from many different countries escaped a Nazi prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Poland. On March 24, 1944, World War II prisoners of war staged the biggest ever breakout from a German prison camp The Great Escape. y mid-1943, many captured Allied airmen 1 had been moved to a single prison camp in Germany: Stalag Luft III. The camp lay close to the town of Sagan in Silesia, which was then part of Germany. The camp s location was ideal as far as the Germans were concerned. Sagan lay in a part of Germany that jutted out into Poland and bordered with Czechoslovakia. Escaping prisoners usually went for one of three destinations: The neutral countries of Sweden, Switzerland, or Spain. A And Sagan was about as far as it was possible to be from all three. What s more, the ground itself suited the Germans. POWs were fond of digging tunnels as a means of escape, but this was thought very difficult, if not impossible, at Sagan. Here the soil gave way to a soft, golden sand just a few feet under the surface. The fine sand would make tunneling very difficult and dangerous. A The word neutral means not taking sides. Why would escaping prisoners try to go to a neutral country? 10 Life ehind the Wire It s important to consider the mentality of the Allied airmen who spent much of the war behind the wire at camps like READING FOCUS Underline one sentence in this paragraph that you think might support the article s main idea, which is stated in the first sentence of the article Allied airmen: air force pilots of the Allied countries, those countries battling the Axis powers in World War II. From The Great Escape from C web site, March 23, 2004, accessed May 2, 2006, at print/shropshire/history/2004/03/great_ escape_01.shtml. Copyright 2004 C World Service. Reproduced by permission of C Worldwide Limited. The Great Escape 43

2 A QUICK CHECK The Life ehind the Wire section lists several details describing how life was difficult for the captured airmen. Underline each of the hardships they faced. Australian War Memorial Negative Number ART Stalag Luft III. y the time of the Great Escape there were 10,000 airmen at the camp of all nationalities: ritish, American, French, Polish, elgian, Dutch, Canadian, Australian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, New Zealand, South African, Greek, and Czechoslovakian. All had suffered the trauma of having to escape crippled aircraft by parachute. Many had survived by chance, while the rest of their crews had been killed. They were generally wearing their only possessions. Then they had found themselves in an alien environment and at the mercy of their enemies. They were herded into camps, given little food and expected to sit out the war and behave themselves. ut these POWs didn t see things this way. Although they were no longer fighting the war, they believed it was their duty to make life as difficult as possible for their captors and to escape. A The Escape Plan Escape attempts were usually limited to two or three men at a time, but one man was to change this. Squadron Leader Roger 44 The Great Escape

3 ushell, a South African RAF 2 pilot who led the camp escape committee, came up with a daring scheme. He decreed that there were to be only three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry, and they were to be all built simultaneously on identical lines, Great Escape survivor Jimmy James told C Radio in an interview in No other tunneling was to be allowed because previously we had all been burrowing like bunnies all over the place. ushell who had already been warned he would be shot if he escaped again was nothing if not ambitious. The tunnels would be an escape route for some 250 men, which would in turn cause immense problems for the Germans. He immediately recruited men to work as forgers, tailors, tunnel builders, and a host of other occupations required for the break-out. In April 1943 planning began in earnest for the Great Escape. Each of the three tunnels had its own ingeniously concealed entrance. Harry was under a stove in one of the prisoners huts, while Dick s entrance was in a drainage sump 3 in a washroom. They would each begin in the prisoners huts with a vertical shaft 30 feet deep and then a horizontal tunnel about 300 feet long. A second vertical shaft would provide the exit beyond the wire fence and into a wood. C Digging the tunnels in the sand of Sagan was tough enough, but this in itself was only part of the problem. The tunnels had to be lined with wood to prevent collapses, and this wood had to come from somewhere. Anything that could be spared was used: bed boards, chairs, tables, and even the interior roof bracing from the huts. One American airman who worked on the tunnels remarked that it was a miracle the prisoner huts didn t collapse. Disposing of the soil dug out of the tunnel known as dispersal was another problem, and this was part of the role of Jimmy James: Dispersal affects security because if the Germans see a whole lot of extra earth around the place they C LANGUAGE COACH Some letters, when pronounced together, blend to make one sound; for example, the ti in nation is pronounced as a sh sound. Circle one word in this sentence with two letters that blend to make one sound when pronounced. Which letters blend, and what sound do they make together? The word ingeniously in line 53 means in a clever way, brilliantly. How were the tunnel entrances ingeniously hidden? 2. RAF: Royal Air Force. 3. sump: pit for the collection of waste water. The Great Escape 45

4 A READING FOCUS What is the main idea of Jimmy James quote? QUICK CHECK List all the tasks that the prisoners had to complete to make the escape possible. Circle the task that you think would have been most difficult, and explain why know there s a tunnel going on. We got round it by the penguin method, which was suspending two sacks down each trouser leg and operating a string from each pocket which activated a hole at the bottom from which the sand trickled out. The penguin used to go round, often in a great coat looking like a penguin, trickling this stuff out. The trouble was that it was a different color to the earth in the compound, and so we had to have a chap shuffling along behind him kicking it into the earth. In the summer of 1943 we dispersed 130 tons of sand from the three tunnels, which were all being dug simultaneously. There were, I think, 200 penguins employed in the organization. They made 25,000 trips. A Of course, building the tunnel was only half the battle. It had to be concealed from the German guards, but the escape required a huge effort by prisoners secretly making civilian clothes, maps, compasses, and most importantly the mass of documents and papers anyone needed to travel in Nazi Germany. During the tunnel building, the prisoners had to cope with all sorts of setbacks, from roof falls to a lack of oxygen at the digging face. This was overcome by an ingenious ventilation device which sent air down a pipe made of Red Cross milk tins Australian War Memorial Negative Number ART The Great Escape

5 stuck end to end. A mini trolley railway was also built in the tunnel floor, making it quicker to get from one end to the other. C 100 Meanwhile, the prisoners used candles made from mutton 4 fat (skimmed from the top of the daily soup) to allow them to work in the dark underground. Things improved in this department when an enterprising prisoner stole a length of electrical Enterprising means energetic; creative. How were the prisoner s actions enterprising? wire and associated fittings, then connected it to the camp s electricity supply, providing electric lighting in the tunnel. C Other problems were harder to overcome. In July 1943, Tom, the first tunnel, was discovered by the Germans, who gleefully destroyed it just a week before it was ready to be used. The discovery put the escape back months, mainly because work on the other two tunnels was halted for a while. ut in January 1944, work restarted on Harry and Dick, and by March, all was ready. 110 Escape and a Terrible Retribution In all, 220 men were picked to go on the escape. Most had to D draw lots for their place, as so many people had worked on escape preparations that there wasn t room for all of them. The date for the escape was set for the night of March 24 25, Prisoners who were to go on the escape were told to Academic Vocabulary Recall that the word effect means result. What effects did the short length of the tunnel have on the escape? 120 report to hut 104, where the entrance to Harry sat under a stove. Nervously, those selected to go gathered in the hut in their civilian clothes. One of them caused great consternation when he arrived in the hut he was dressed as a German soldier! Then, after months of preparations, things started to go wrong. First, the exit trap door of Harry was frozen solid, which delayed things for an hour and a half, while as soon as the first man broke through at the tunnel exit, another problem was discovered. The tunnel was too short. Instead of emerging in the trees, it came up in open ground well short of cover and too close to a guard tower. It was decided to press ahead anyway, and a system with a look out and a rope was set up so those emerging from the tunnel could be told when the coast was clear. D 4. mutton: sheep meat. The Great Escape 47

6 The first escaper emerged at 10:30 p.m., but then disaster A READING FOCUS 130 struck again. An RAF bombing raid on erlin knocked out the Jimmy James describes the many emotions he felt on the night of the escape. Which of these emotions best supports the main idea of this article? power supply for the camp and therefore the tunnel. The flow of prisoners reduced to a trickle, and then part of the tunnel collapsed and had to be repaired. Jimmy James, thirty-ninth in line to escape, finally emerged into the freezing air after 1 a.m. In a 2004 interview he described the moment he emerged from the tunnel: It was a combination of surprise that we had made it and nervous tension, but mainly I was very excited. We Word Study Many words have multiple meanings. Here, scrambled means crawled quickly. Use a dictionary to find a different meaning of scrambled. Write a sentence using scrambled with this different meaning. 140 were relieved to get out and that nothing had happened we just hoped for freedom. You do sense fear when you have got out and are running away from the compound. There was a sense of exhilaration. A ut the escape was not going well. Thanks to these delays, only about a dozen men per hour were getting out. It was 5 a.m. and dawn was approaching. Then, after many close calls, a German guard practically stumbled across the tunnel exit. The game was up. A shot was fired, and Allied airmen emerged, hands up, from the trees. The guard blew his whistle and the camp sprang into life with shouts and the barking of German search dogs. C QUICK CHECK What went wrong during the escape? Down in the tunnel, the five men waiting scrambled as fast as they could back to the hut, terrified that a German might jump into the tunnel exit and spray machine gun bullets in their direction. They made it back to the hut, but were all thrown into solitary 5 shortly afterwards. The Germans were beside themselves with rage on discovering the escape even more so when they found that 76 men had got away. A search for the escaped prisoners began immediately, but darker events unfolded 100 miles away in erlin. C There, an enraged Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, 6 decided between themselves that an example would 5. solitary: solitary confinement in prison. 6. SS: Abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, which began as Hitler s personal security detail. Under Himmler, the SS expanded, with an army division and another that oversaw concentration camp operations. 48 The Great Escape

7 D GERMANY erlin POLAND Stalag Luft III Sagan Prague CZECHOSLOVAKIA Academic Vocabulary Authors use various methods to convey, or communicate, key points in a story. The last sentence of this article is in a paragraph by itself. What is the impact of this sentence? Would it have been different if it had been included in the previous paragraph? Munich Vienna AUSTRIA Map depicting Germany and its surroundings during World War II be made of the escapers. Instead of being dealt with by the civilian police, the prisoners would be handed over to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Then they would be shot. To start with, the Nazi leaders insisted that every recaptured escaper would be killed, but eventually, they decided on more than half. The Gestapo immediately set to work on a list of 50. In the meantime, many of the escapers were being rounded up. Most were captured within a few miles of Sagan. One by one those selected were handed over to the Gestapo. They would be driven singly or in pairs out into the country, and then offered the chance to get out and relieve themselves. Then, with their backs turned, they were shot in the back of the head. The remaining prisoners at the camp were told that each of the murdered men had been recaptured and then shot when trying to make a second escape. Of the 76 who escaped, only three two Norwegians and a Dutchman made it back to ritain, and most were not at liberty for long before being recaptured. Fifty were shot by the Gestapo, including escape mastermind Roger ushell. Four of the surviving most determined escapers, including Jimmy James, were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp apparently to die. Instead, they all escaped. D The Great Escape 49