OK, so Hollywood exaggerates. A POW never tried to jump a motorcycle over 20 feet of barbed wire, like Steve McQueen did in 1963’s WWII classic “The Great Escape.” But the flier McQueen played was based on a real hero, who was just as daring as his fictional counterpart. William Ash never visited a POW camp he didn’t try to break out of — from movie-worthy tunnel schemes to mundane dashes away from guards. Steve McQueen rides the famed motorcycle from “The Great Escape.”Photo: Getty Images His dozens of attempts at escape earned him the nickname the “Cooler King” for all the time he spent in solitary confinement after getting caught. That’s also the nickname of McQueen’s character, Capt. Virgil Hilts, as well as the title of a new biography by Patrick Bishop on Hilts’ irrepressible true-life inspiration. Ash may not have succeeded in getting away, but he never stopped trying, he never gave up hope. And he rightly earned his moniker. In fact, on the night of the actual “great escape” from POW camp Stalag Luft III in Germany, Ash missed out because he was in the cooler for a previous failed bust-out. Fighter pilot Bill Ash was a Texan who so badly wanted into the war against Nazi Germany that he renounced his US citizenship to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. At 22 years old, Ash was s down over France in 1942 and was captured. Life in POW camps, especially those run by the Luftwaffe, was comparatively civilized for wartime. Red Cross supplies were plentiful — and often used to bribe guards to look the other way — and prisoners were given relative freedom to go about their daily hobbies, which really meant time to plan and execute escapes. Some breakouts were hardly more than a gesture of frustrated defiance. Once, while unloading a goods train from the nearby town, Ash dropped and rolled beneath the freight cars. A few hundred yards beyond the rail bed were the woods, and Ash “set off like a greyhound.” In daylight and with guards positioned atop the trains, Ash’s dash was so futile that the Germans even enjoyed a laugh while allowing him to near the trees before sending guards on bicycles to head him off. “There are few experiences more depressing,” Ash would recall after the war, “than racing as fast as you can for an unattainable target while your enemies overtake you in a leisurely manner and are waiting for you, guns at the ready, just in front of your objective.” Just like McQueen in the film, so too did Ash attempt the “mole method” of two men finding a blind spot not far from the camp’s fence, digging down a mere 18 inches and then boring through the ground by simply passing dirt behind them. Air came from poking holes up through the ground at regular intervals. It even worked, though freedom was short-lived as the escapees still had to flee undetected across hundreds of miles of German fatherland where any farmer, laborer or even schoolchildren would point them out if spotted. The harshest punishment allowed by the Geneva Conventions was 30 days in solitary, so that became Ash’s all-too-regular sleeping quarters with its cement floor and tiny, barred window. During the war, he spent more than six months in the cooler, most after failed escapes numbering in the dozens. “Escaping is quite addictive,” Ash once said. Though he missed out on the real-life “Great Escape” while in solitary, he led a tunnel plot of his own while at another camp, Oflag XXIB in Poland. Among Ash’s countless breakout schemes, it was his most complex, daring and nauseating. With the disposal of dirt from the tunnels always a risk — it’s darker than the surface dirt and thus easy for guards to detect when spread in the compound — Ash’s escape committee had this flash of genius: Why not dig a tunnel horizontal from the latrine, where tunnel dirt could simply be dropped into the cesspit and be lost amid the fetid waste? Of course, the downside to tunneling out from the wall of the latrine meant the diggers at first had to be held by the ankles — hanging upside-down through the holes that served as toilet seats and with their heads just feet above the foul-smelling slop of excrement — as they chiseled out bricks in the wall and began to dig horizontally. Twenty-five diggers, including Ash, labored in two-hour shifts, creating a tunnel that extended 150 feet out to beyond the wire and into the woods. In March 1943, 35 prisoners escaped through that tunnel and headed cross-country in hopes of freedom. None made it. Hiding during the day and traveling at night, he was on the outside for four days before a member of a local guard spotted him at a railway crossing and ended his run with the click of a raised rifle. It was back to the cooler for Ash. The war was nearly over by the time Ash was finally free. As the Russian army approached in January 1945, the Germans were largely uninterested in keeping an eye on the POWs. Still, Ash wasn’t willing to wait for liberation. He took off running toward the cannons. As he approached the Russian infantry, Ash shouted, “Don’t shoot! I’m British. Actually, I’m American. And Canadian. It’s a long story.”
↧