AFTER two days cowering in a hayloft, RAF squadron leader Richard Churchill knew his brief taste of freedom was about to end. Farmers stabbing wildly into the hay with their pitchforks were getting closer and closer. Unarmed, cold and hungry, he and his fellow escapee Squadron Leader Bob Nelson faced a tough choice: either take on their pursuers or come out quietly with their hands up and risk a firing squad later on.
Both took the sensible decision to give themselves up and lived to see their extraordinary actions immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape.
With Churchill’s death this week, aged 99, there is no one left of the 76-strong party that escaped from the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Poland.
His passing is given added poignancy by the fact that next month marks the 75th anniversary of the operation the PoWs dubbed Operation Escape 200, so-called because that was the number of men they wanted to escape on that freezing day.
Like many of the Britons in the camp, Churchill had been shot down, in 1940 at the controls of his Handley Page Hampden over Ludwigshafen while on his 26th combat mission.
Under the guidance of Squadron leader Roger Bushell, known as Box, he was one of those working in great secrecy to dig three tunnels, nine yards down.
Often excavating with spoons, they used some 4,000 bed boards, 90 double bunk beds and 635 mattresses to help keep the tunnels passable in the sandy soil. Churchill was paired with Nelson the day before the break-out on March 24, 1944.
They were the 50th and 51st of the 76 Allied airmen who managed to get outside the perimeter fence of the camp, which the Nazis had said was impossible to breach.
Avoiding roads, they walked in temperatures of -20C through forests and over streams but after two days, in desperate need of rest, they took the fateful decision to shelter in a barn.
Raging with embarrassment, Hitler ordered thousands of troops to round up the escapees. Fifty were executed but Churchill and Nelson escaped, probably because of their surnames.
It would appear senior Nazis wrongly assumed Churchill was related to Winston Churchill and Nelson to the hero of Trafalgar and that one or both might prove a valuable bargaining chip at some point in the future.
Richard Churchill once said: “Bob reckoned Nelson and Churchill had a good ring to it, and they would hang on to us.”
But on the whole he preferred to look forward: “I’d rather not dwell on what happened 60 years ago. I’d rather concentrate on what my five grandchildren are going to do with their lives.”
After the war Churchill had hoped to stay in the RAF but failed a medical due to hearing loss suffered when he was shot down.
He met Patricia on a railway platform when she offered him a sugared almond, a gesture which led to marriage and two sons. Patricia died in 2013 but Churchill remained at their farmhouse in Crediton, Devon.
There are at least two remaining RAF veterans of Stalag Luft III: Charles Clarke, who was deemed too young to escape, and Jack Lyon, who was in the tunnel when it was uncovered.
Clarke, 95, said: “It is very sad because there are so few of us left. Churchill was a great man. I was a boy among men. It’s remarkable that he was not shot along with the 50… because of his name.”
Air Vice Marshal David Murray, chief executive of the RAF Benevolent Fund, said: “Dick took part in one of the most audacious prisoner-of-war escapes during the Second World War and embodied the spirit of the RAF, tenacious, resilient and incredibly brave in the face of adversity.”
Veterans will be remembered when the RAF Benevolent Fund fund presents The Great Escape With Dan Snow on the 75th anniversary, March 24, at London’s Hammersmith Apollo.
There will be a mention of the three successful escapers: Norwegian pilots Per Bergsland and Jens Muller and Dutchman Bram van der Stok.