All day long on March 23, the atmosphere was electric across the North Compound. Behind barracks doors – all with stooges at the watch – kriegies collected their forged maps, manufactured compasses and food rations. They stitched them into shirt pockets, jacket linings and pant legs.

Meanwhile, Robert Ker-Ramsey, staying behind in Stalag Luft III with Tony Pengelly as escape committee veterans, made last minute adjustments underground. He covered the trolley tracks with fresh blankets to muffle the sound, rigged new tow ropes (passed through the main gate by the Vorlager on the premise they would be used for a North Compound boxing ring) on the trolleys, and installed light bulbs (taken from the barracks huts) in every socket available along the full length of “Harry.”

Roommates John Travis (one of the tunnel engineers), Roger Bushell (Big X) and Bob van der Stok, modeled their civilian outfits for Canadian air officer Gordie King. Van der Stok, the Dutch flyer, was going out in the first 20 of the escape order. He emerged from his bunk area in his escape apparel; unlike the fake German corporal’s uniform he’d used during Operation Bedbug, this time van der Stok wore a civilian business suit, handmade by Tommy Guest’s tailors.

“How do I look?” he asked his roommates. “Immaculate,” Gordie King told him.

Pilot Officer Gordon King, from Winnipeg, had arrived just in time for the move from the East Compound to the North Compound in 1943. At 19, in 1940, he knew Morse code, so the air force streamed him into the wireless air-gunner trade, but he was upgraded to pilot training. The RCAF rushed him overseas and sent him, as Second Dickie (observing pilot) on several large bombing operations, including the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany, on May 31, 1942. A few nights later, without security in numbers and piloting a Wellington bomber, he and his crew were shot down and captured.

King arrived at Sagan, barefoot, having lost his boots when he bailed out. At the train station he faced the mile-long walk to the compound with nothing on his feet; somebody loaned him footwear he’d never seen before – wooden Dutch clogs. They served him well as he joined the officers’ work crews preparing the North Compound and then later relied on them while working on the tunnel bellows pumping fresh air up the Klim-can air ventilation shaft to the farthest reaches of Tunnel “Harry.”

As the final preparations came together at the base of the shaft to “Harry,” King volunteered to pump the bellows through the night until his turn came, way down the list. Every component in the escape mechanism – no matter how small or large – needed the commitment of every man on the escape team.

“I was a hard-arser,” King said. “I had a map of the area, a little package of food, and my compass just waiting my turn.”

Remarkably, in the final days before the breakout, the anti-tunnelling guards at Stalag Luft III, didn’t appear to notice the diminished movement of POWs outside and around the barracks huts. Perhaps the repeating nighttime snowfalls and early spring chill in the air, helped disguise the fact that kriegies all over the North Compound were busily focused on indoor escape activities. The product of more than a year’s work from Tommy Guest’s tailors, Des Plunkett’s mapmakers and Al Hake’s compass builders, was now being distributed among the 200 men on the final escape list.

Just 22, and only a year inside the wire, George Wiley was typical of the kriegies in final preparation mode. He’d flown Kittyhawks (with 112 Squadron) in support of the British Eighth Army in Tunisia where he was shot down in March of 1943. Welcomed into the escape committee as a penguin working with John Colwell dispersing sand beneath the raked floor of the theatre, with “Harry” virtually completed, Wiley then moved from the basement to the stage. With subtle hints about his extracurricular activity in X Organization, that winter he wrote home to his family in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

“I’ve got an important part to play in one of our kriegie plays, and I’m a bit nervous about doing my part well,” he wrote. Then, he signed off, “May see you sooner than expected.”

RCAF observer James Wernham had served in both the Commonwealth air force and the escape committee among the longest. At 25, he’d participated in the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, Germany (Operation Millennium); but he’d been shot down over Holland about the time the Germans first moved captured officers into Stalag Luft III. He discovered the way to boost his own morale and that of his fellow kriegies in the prison was working backstage and on-stage at the North Compound theatre.

James Wernham and George Wiley would exit the North Compound through Tunnel “Harry” 32nd and 33rd respectively.

In Hut 112, Wiley prepared himself for his first escape attempt. He approached his roommate Alan Righetti, handing him his watch and some personal items; he asked Righetti to pass them along to his mother back in Windsor if things didn’t work out. Righetti, a veteran of earlier escape attempts, joked that Wiley would likely be home before Righetti; still, he accepted Wiley’s belongings and promised he’d fulfill the obligation.

On or about the first day of spring, 1944, the Sagan area of Silesia still had six inches of snow on the ground. Still, the air above the ground was mild. The escape committee met in Hut 104 and decided to delay the breakout at least while the nights were still moonless.

There was more snow over the next couple of nights. But when X Organization met next in Hut 101, the section heads knew a decision had to be made right away to give Ker-Ramsey time to prepare Tunnel “Harry” for the wear and tear of the escape and to allow Pengelly leeway to have all the required documents signed and date-stamped with as timely a date as possible. They settled on Friday, March 24, as the breakout day.

At that meeting of the brain-trust, the section heads then focused on the plight of the hard-arsers in the snow and the cold of the night. Wings Day and Roger Bushell agreed the hard-arsers’ chances of escaping were slim anyway, but even if they were only on the loose for a few days, the resulting chaos across Germany rounding them up would have as desirable an effect as if they all got back to Britain. Bushell gave his blessing to the March 24 date.

Don “Tiger” McKim, an RCAF flying officer who’d been shot down in December 1942, was into his second winter at Stalag Luft III. Because of his diminutive size and claustrophobia, he had worked as a stooge carrying messages and relaying warnings.

“The Germans knew there was a tunnel, but they were tearing their hair out because they couldn’t find it,” he said. “They knew there was a tunnel; at least we thought they knew. They were aware of the dirt, but they didn’t know how much dirt.”

In March, McKim said he felt the stress of the last days before the breakout, awaiting word of whether his name was on the list of hard-arsers. Just in case, he prepared his warmest clothing and whatever food he could assemble and stitch into his clothing.

“Then came the lottery on who would go,” he said, “My name wasn’t pulled from the hat… But the place was really tense.”

After nearly three months of furious activity, moving the last of the excavated sand from the trapdoor of Tunnel “Harry” to the trapdoor under a seat in Row 13 at the North Compound theatre, the dust was quite literally settling for the sand dispersal team. The basement of the theatre had become the final burial ground for 30-to-50 tons of “Harry’s” sand.

Meanwhile, life under the lights – one floor up – went on as usual.

The theatre troupe made a couple of offbeat choices to complete its 1944 winter playbill. In late March, the POW thespians presented the farcical black comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

Ironically enough, next came “Escape,” a 1926 play be celebrated British Novelist and playwright John Galsworthy. The storyline followed the life of a law-abiding man who met a prostitute, accidentally killed a police officer defending her, and then escaped from prison. The POW production featured longtime kriegies Peter Butterworth as the shopkeeper, John Casson as the parson, and, of course, taking on the female leads were John Dowler, Malcolm Freegard, and Tony Pengelly.

“I spent much of the war in drag,” Pengelly said later.

The next production up required a slight alteration. Roger Bushell, who had been learning lines and rehearsing the blocking for the March 24 premiere of “Pygmalion,” had to inform his understudy, Kenneth Mackintosh, that he would have to take over the role of Professor Higgins. Bushell had a previous engagement.

(Incidentally, one air force officer arrived at Stalag Luft III that winter with unused tickets in his pocket to a production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” being staged at the Hudson Theatre in London; his tickets were honoured at the North Compound theatre.)

With the potential of even short-lived freedom waiting for them perhaps just days away and at the end of nearly 400 feet of completed shafts and tunnel works, hundreds of kriegies contemplated that potential.

Frank Sorensen, the Canadian Spitfire pilot shot down over North Africa in April 1943, felt the anticipation and excitement as much as any man inside the North Compound of Stalag Luft III. In numerous letters home to his family, Sorensen sometimes exhibited what fellow kriegie Albert Wallace described as  a “barbed-wire happy” attitude, that is, an obsession for getting out of prison.

“Indoor life in a kriegie camp,” Sorensen wrote on March 20, 1944, “does not make time go any faster.”

However, several realities in the compound influenced Sorensen’s eventual decision to forfeit his higher position (lower number) on the escape list. X Organization intelligence suggested the first escapers – fluent in German and dressed like businessmen or travellers – stood the best chance of getting away safely if they caught the fast morning trains leaving Sagan. Sorensen deduced those same express trains would also face the greatest scrutiny and surveillance by German police and railway guards. Sorensen therefore considered going through the tunnel lower on the list to catch a later, slower train, where his presence might attract less attention.

But Sorensen weighed yet other considerations. Among his closest friends inside the wire was James Catanach, an Australian officer who’d grown up in a tightly knit family… and Arnold Christensen, a New Zealand officer who shared Sorensen’s Danish heritage. Both Catanach and Christensen had been imprisoned longer than Sorensen had, and in the grand scheme of the mass breakout, their successful escape seemed to hold greater emotional significance, at least in the way Sorensen looked at it.

So, for strategic purposes or matters of the heart – or both – Sorensen chose to trade his earlier spot on the escape list for a higher number and later exit through the tunnel.

Even as the upper echelon of the escape committee contemplated its last crucial decision – exactly what night the breakout would occur – the jostling of X Organization personnel for positions in the order of escape seemed to change daily.

For Canadian Fleet Air Arm pilot Dick Bartlett – the officer in charge of hiding the shortwave radio inside various POW camps since being shot down in 1940 – it seemed he would be a high-priority escaper. He’d even been assigned position number 16 in escape list and paired with Norwegian pilot officer Halldor Espelid, who was 15th. Then, suddenly, Nils Fugelsang, another Norwegian officer, arrived in the North Compound, and Bartlett offered to give up his spot to Fugelsang, who with Espelid, the committee figured, would have a better chance of getting all the way back to England.

(For those paying close attention, ironically, in the movie script, the Roger Bushell character was renamed “Roger Bartlett.”)

The situation turned out to be more cut and dry for the pilot Barry Davidson. Among the longest serving members of the escape committee, the scrounger initially was given the number 78th position in the list going through the tunnel. But suddenly there was a problem with Davidson’s profile in the North Compound.

“I had been seen talking to one of the guards, shortly before the escape,” Davidson said. “He hated the Nazis and had sympathy for the POWs. We had such a good security system that (X Organization) knew the Germans had seen me talking to him… My relationship with this guard would have risked his life had I gone. So Roger Bushell asked me if I’d step back and not go out.” Reluctantly, Davidson agreed.

In the last days before the mass breakout, work reached completion all major sections of X Organization activity. Tommy Guest’s tailors put the final stitching and buttons on clothes for kriegies with low numbers and high linguistic capability about to go through “Harry” in the first wave. Al Hake’s assembly line in Hut 103 stowed as many as 250 homemade compasses in Tunnel “Dick” for safekeeping. And Des Plunkett’s team of mapmakers completed mimeographing 4,000 escape maps. One such map was distributed to designated hard-arser Keith Ogilvie.

“I was one of the great majority who (was to go) out in (air force) uniform,” Ogilvie told members of the Ashbury Journal in 1971, “creating a smokescreen to enable the chaps who were better equipped with civilian clothes and passes to get away on the trains. We had maps and our hope was to get into Czechoslovakia.”

Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie was an Ottawa-born RAF fighter pilot, who had been shot down over Lille, France, early in the war. In fact, the Germans scored propaganda points in the event when William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, the British-born fascist who became the Nazis’ chief English-language broadcaster) announced Ogilvie’s capture immediately after it happened on July 4, 1941.

At Stalag Luft III, Ogilvie joined escape committee activity by lifting the wallet of a guard and rushing it to Tony Pengelly’s forgery team for examination. Ogilvie then informed the guard he’d found the wallet on the floor. Worried about the consequences of prison authorities discovering he’d lost his papers while inside the compound, the guard thanked Ogilvie profusely. Another guard had thus been tamed and vital identification papers had made their way to the forgery group for replication.

In this final week of winter in March, Ogilvie recalled his feelings about the looming escape, as “much the same feeling one would have before playing an important football game. (I) was keyed up and anxious for the show to start.”

The Ides of March brought a shift in the escape committee’s manufacturing and preparation. Where they had previously focused on the fashioning of tunnelling tools and manipulation of materiel for underground construction, kriegie engineers began transforming food tins into water bottles for the escapers.

Roger Bushell called for one last levy on the Red Cross parcels, so that a cooking crew in Hut 112 could mix every ounce of sugar, cocoa, raisins, milk and biscuits into a stewing pot to create a concoction of high-calorie fudge for the escapers to consume outside the wire.

Unlike the kriegies with higher linguistic capabilities (working with German scholar Gordon Kidder in his so-called “culture appreciation classes”) RCAF navigator John R. Harris prepared himself among the “hard-arsers” masquerading as a Hungarian ironworker in transit. He was number 179 on the escape list, should his turn arrive.

“We spent the (last week) in a frenzy of secret activity,” John Harris wrote, “as we prepared our clothes, acquired quantities of compact, nourishing food, and collected our forged papers,” Harris wrote. “I was provided a with a very official looking Nazi document which affirmed that I was Antoine Zabadose.”

Meanwhile section leaders Robert Ker-Ramsey and Johnny Marshall began assembling the escapers in small groups to explain – when the time came – how to get through the tunnel.

“Most of us had never been beyond the trapdoor at the mouth of ‘Harry,’ Harris wrote, “but we were given a cook’s tour of the tunnel, so that we would have some idea of what faced us once we went below ground.”

The escape list largely determined during the March 14 meeting began to disseminate through the barracks huts the next day.

Among those Canadians learning their position on the list, George McGill, who had conjured up diversions during earlier escape attempts and later a tunnel security leader, would be 75th into the tunnel. Gordon Kidder, who with fluency in European languages had taught fellow kriegies how to converse in German on the outside, would be 31st on the list. Hank Birkland, the last of the Canadian tunnellers after the Feb. 29 purge, would exit the tunnel 51st. And Tommy Thompson, the Canadian pilot who’d personally earned the wrath of Herman Göring for waking the Reichsmarschall in the September night he was shot down in 1939, would be 68th out the tunnel.

Weighing on the minds of so many of the active escape committee personnel were the details of duty. As a section head in the forgery team, Tony Pengelly had directed the production of many of the escape documents. He knew their design, detail and delivery better than almost anyone inside the wire. But also wondered whether, on the night of the escape, somebody in his branch of Dean and Dawson should stay behind to check that every identification card was in the right hand s of the right escaper as he entered “Harry” on his way out. Nothing could be left to chance.

“As a prisoner of war… it was the greatest decision of my life,” Pengelly said. “There was this responsibility, and on my acceptance or rejection of it, depended my chance at freedom.” In the end, Pengelly decided to forfeit his spot, number 93 on the escape list.

Meanwhile, George Sweanor, who had even more to hurry home to, including a new bride and a newborn daughter he had never seen, had trepidations about the entire enterprize.

“I argued that a mass escape would cause a desired disruption to the German war effort, yes, because it would take a lot of people to track us down,” Sweanor said. “But there was really little hope of anybody getting home. … I felt relieved (that) my name was not drawn.”

March 14, 1944, proved a crucial day in the history of The Great Escape. Diggers reported the upward vertical shaft, the exit from “Harry,” was complete. The wooden ceiling just beneath the pine-tree roots, presumably in the forest beyond the wire, was secure. That day also marked the return of Unteroffizier Karl Griese, perhaps the most rabid anti-tunnelling guard prowling the North Compound.

Meantime, in Hut 110, the escape committee conducted a two-hour meeting in the library. Big X, Roger Bushell led a discussion about the timing of the breakout. The committee considered three possible dates – March 23, 24 and 25 – the next three nights without potential exposure by bright moonlight. March 25 was a Saturday, which likely meant additional train traffic and potential congestion along some of the railway routes through Sagan; that would affect the first wave of fluent speakers making their way through train stations.

The committee members would wait to see what the weather would bring on March 23 and 24. The section heads debated whether a mass escape in bad weather – with freezing nighttime temperatures and with several feet of snow on the ground – might jeopardize attempts to get away by the hard-arsers, those escaping on foot and relying on survival skills to put distance between them and Stalag Luft III.

Bushell and the X Organization section heads agreed they would go on either Thursday, March 23, or Friday, March 24, depending on the weather. The committee hoped between 9 o’clock on the night of the escape and 5:30 the next morning the tunnel could spring more than 200 kriegies – one every three of four minutes – across the occupied European countryside.

The final item on the meeting agenda was drawing the names and determining the order on the list of escapers. The first 30 names selected came from a list of the best German speakers. The next 20 names came from the most prominent escape committee workers. Then, 30 more were drawn from a list of stooges, penguins, tailors, compass and mapmakers and forgers. Finally, all remaining names were pulled from a hat to bring the total number to about 200. Tony Pengelly, a forgery section head, recalled the tension of this moment.

“When the time came close,” Pengelly wrote, “we drew lots intensely, in small groups. Mere slips of paper they were, holding the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of freedom – and for the lucky ones, how long he would be after the first to leave. I drew number 93.”