In March 1944, 76 Allied airmen crawled out of a German prisoner-of-war camp through a secret tunnel. Their daring mass breakout became known as the Great Escape.

The story was turned into a 1963 Hollywood film, The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, and most people still picture him on a motorbike when they hear the name. Few know the man who planned it was born in Springs, or that three young South African Air Force (SAAF) pilots crawled through the same tunnel and never came home.

On the night of 24–25 March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped from Stalag Luft III, a German prison camp for captured aircrew. Only three reached safety. Fifty were murdered by the Gestapo on Adolf Hitler’s orders. Four of the men in this story had South African roots: Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, and Lieutenants Johannes “Boetie” Gouws, Rupert Stevens, and Neville McGarr.

Big X

Roger Joyce Bushell was born in Springs, on the East Rand, on 30 August 1910. His English-born father was a mining engineer. Roger spent school holidays at his grandparents’ house in Hermanus, and was schooled in South Africa until he was 14.

He then went to Wellington College in England and studied law at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He became a top-class skier and a barrister at the Old Bailey, and flew with the auxiliary reserve of the Royal Air Force (RAF) on weekends.

In May 1940, on his first combat sortie over Calais during the Dunkirk evacuation, his Spitfire was shot down. He became a prisoner, and an obsessive escaper. His first breakout ended about 100 metres from the Swiss border. His second, a jump from a moving train, got him to Prague before he was caught again.

By October 1942 he was at Stalag Luft III, near Sagan (now Żagań, Poland). He quickly took over the camp’s escape committee. His codename was “Big X”.

Tom, Dick, and Harry

Bushell’s plan was audacious: dig three tunnels at once, so that if the guards found one, the others would survive. They were codenamed Tom, Dick, and Harry. The goal was to get more than 200 men out in a single night.

Around 600 prisoners worked on it. Some dug. Others forged travel papers, tailored civilian clothes from uniforms, or stood guard. The yellow sand from the tunnels was a giveaway on the grey camp soil, so “penguins” smuggled it out in bags inside their trousers and scattered it across the compound. The trick lived on: in the 1994 movie, The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne gets rid of the rubble from his tunnel the same way, shaking it out of his trouser legs in the prison yard.

The South Africans each had a job. Boetie Gouws was one of the sand dispersers. Neville McGarr volunteered to dig, but he was too big for the narrow shafts, so he ran security teams that watched for German “ferrets” (guards who searched for tunnels).

The Night of 24 March 1944

Harry broke the surface on a freezing March night, but short of the tree line. That mistake slowed everything. Instead of more than 200 men, only 76 got out before a guard spotted the 77th man at the exit in the early hours of 25 March.

Gouws and Stevens were among the first through, paired as the third pair out. Both spoke German, so they were given early places and travelled by train. Bushell left early too, with French pilot Bernard Scheidhauer, catching a train at Sagan station.

McGarr’s escape started badly. He briefly got stuck in the tunnel because of his size. Once free, he went on foot into the snow-covered woods, with little chance of getting far.

Four South Africans, Four Murders

All four were recaptured. All four were among the 50 the Gestapo shot, in breach of the Geneva Convention.

Boetie Gouws came from an Afrikaans-speaking farming family in Bultfontein, in the Free State. He captained his school rugby team, and first failed the SAAF entrance because his English wasn’t good enough. He studied, tried again, and got in. A German ace shot down his P-40 over the Western Desert in April 1942.

Rupert Stevens came from Cape Town and flew Maryland bombers with 12 Squadron SAAF. He and Gouws headed for neutral Switzerland by train, via Breslau. Gouws was caught at Lindau, on Lake Constance right on the Swiss border, and Stevens at Rosenheim. Both were handed to the Munich Gestapo, and on 29 March they were shot beside the autobahn near Schweitenkirchen.

Neville McGarr was born in Johannesburg and raised in Durban. At 12, polio paralysed him from the waist down. He fought his way back to walking, and later played first-team rugby at Glenwood High. Shot down over Libya in 1941, he walked three days through the desert, with one shoe, before he was captured. After the escape he was caught on 27 March, held at Görlitz prison, and taken away by the Gestapo on 6 April 1944. He was never seen alive again.

Roger Bushell reached Saarbrücken, near the French border, before he was caught. He was shot on 29 March 1944, aged 33.

Why We Forgot Them

The 1963 Hollywood film made the escape famous, and also blurred who was there. Bushell became “Roger Bartlett”, played by English actor Richard Attenborough. The American heroes on screen were mostly invented: the real American prisoners had been moved to another compound before the breakout. No South African appears in the film.

The record books didn’t help either. Bushell served in the RAF, so official tallies list him as British. That leaves South Africa with “three” of the 50, and its best-known escaper filed under another flag.

Then there’s distance. The men died in Germany and were buried in Poland. Their families were thousands of kilometres away, and their stories mostly stayed inside those families, a few school archives, and military history circles.

Remembering Them

The killers didn’t all escape justice. British military courts in Hamburg tried the Gestapo men responsible in 1947. Most were sentenced to hang. Among them were Johann Schneider, who shot Gouws and Stevens, and Emil Weil and Eduard Geith, who stood by as he did it. All three were hanged at Hameln prison.

At home, the memory survives in small places. Bushell’s parents retired to Hermanus, and his name is on the war memorial near the Old Harbour. Gouws, Stevens, and McGarr were each given a Mention in Dispatches, because no other bravery award could then be given after death.

Eighty-two years on, the Great Escape is still one of the most retold stories of the war. It’s worth remembering that a boy from Springs planned it, and that a farm boy from Bultfontein, a polio survivor from Durban, and a bomber pilot from Cape Town gave their lives in it.