An RAF bomber pilot who was shot down in 1942 on his first raid over enemy-occupied Europe, Jack Harrison became part of the team that planned and executed the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III in 1944.
The breakout, from the camp in Silesia in March 1944, was the culmination of more than two months of feverish tunnelling, which involved the digging of three tunnels, christened “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”, the longest of which, Harry, was eventually selected for the attempt.
On the night of March 24, in the bitter Silesian winter, Harrison was 98th on the list of 200 PoWs who were lined up to crawl through Harry, surface from the tunnel outside the perimeter wire and get to the cover of the dense pine forests that surrounded Stalag Luft III. In the event 76 prisoners had made it through the tunnel when, as bad luck would have it, one of the guards outside the perimeter wire momentarily left the path he was supposed to be patrolling on sentry duty in order to attend to the wants of nature. He stumbled into the open exit hole and fired a warning shot into the air.
As pre-arranged, those who were still in the tunnel got out and returned to their huts, destroying all the documents that had been forged to give them cover for their attempt to get to coasts and frontiers. Only three of those who escaped from the camp made it back to the UK. Two Norwegians managed to get to the Baltic coast and thence by boat to neutral Sweden, while a Dutchman escaped through France and Spain. The remaining 73 were recaptured.
The Great Escape was to have a tragic sequel. Enraged by the audacity and scale of the attempt from one of the Reich’s most inaccessible PoW camps Hitler ordered, in defiance of the laws of war, that an example should be made of the Stalag Luft III escapers. Of those recaptured 50 were shot by the Gestapo on his orders, a crime depicted in the film The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasance.[Ed: one of the all-time great films. A favourite. But, Bronson gets mentioned and James Garner doesn't?]
Jack Harrison was born in 1912 and was teaching Latin at Dornoch Academy in Sutherland when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Called up into the RAF he was posted to Bomber Command after basic pilot training and commissioned as a flying officer. His aircraft was hit by flak on his first operation, an attack on the Dutch port of Den Helder in November 1942.
Harrison was forced to ditch in the sea off the Dutch coast and was captured by the Germans. After being held in a number of camps he was sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, one of Germany’s largest PoW facilities, holding almost 10,000 air force officers from the RAF, US Army Air Forces and other Allied air forces. During the preparation for the Great Escape Harrison, one of the camp’s gardeners, was among assistants to the plan’s mastermind, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, helping to dispose of dirt from the tunnels.
[That is a great scene in the film, when they bring the dirt out to the garden.]
The first 30 of those chosen to make the escape attempt were selected for their fluent German, which would give them the best chance of avoiding detection while attempting a “home run”. The next 70 had all worked on one or other of the tunnels and were acquainted with the conditions, and the last 100 were chosen out of a hat from 500 volunteers.
Harrison had acquired a working knowledge of German, though he was by no means fluent, and was to adopt the guise of a Hungarian electrician working for the German engineering company Siemens. He was in Block 104 waiting for the call to the tunnel when the remainder of the escape had to be aborted. He quickly burnt his forged identity papers and got out of the disguise he was to have escaped in. He remained at Stalag Luft II until the camp was evacuated as the Red Army drew near the eastern frontiers of the Reich.
When the war ended he returned to his wife, whom he had married in 1943, and resumed his teaching career, moving in 1958 to Rothsay where he was appointed director of education for the Isle of Bute. He retired in 1975.
His wife, Jean, predeceased him and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Jack Harrison, wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW, was born on December 18, 1912. He died on June 4, 2010, aged 97
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