ERIC WILLIAMS
The man that conceived the idea of the "Wooden Horse Escape from Stalag Luft 111" and escaped via The Horse to Sweden where he wrote his story, which went on the be a film.
Eric Williams, Royal Air Force bomber captain, was shot down over Germany in 1942 and imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, the infamous German POW camp. Digging an underground tunnel hidden beneath a wooden vaulting horse, he managed to escape after ten months and, accompanied by a fellow officer, made his way back to England. In his thinly fictionalized book Williams related his story in three distinct phases: the construction of a tunnel (its entrance camouflaged by the wooden vaulting horse in the exercise yard) and hiding the large quantities of sand he dug; the escape; and the journey on foot and by train to the port of Stettin, where Williams and his fellow escapee stowed away aboard a Danish ship, the Norensen. From painstakingly digging the tunnel to secretly depositing the dirt and gravel around the camp to dodging searchlights and search dogs and climbing barbed wire fences, this is an escape story hard to beat. For sheer heroism, courage and perseverance, this arguably became the most ingenious POW escape of WWII. The Wooden Horse became a legend among
servicemen long before its publication in 1949 and remained one ever since.
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