Nineteen year old Marine Corps Pvt. Theodore J. Miller who had become a famous face following being photographed being loaded back onto a landing craft after Eniewetok was killed on Ebon Atoll.
Today In Wyoming's History: March 24: 1944 76 Allied officers escaped Stalag Luft 3, which was later the topic of Paul Brickall's book "The Great Escape."
Seventy-six Royal Air Force POWs escaped from a single tunnel from Stalag Luft III in Silesia. Seventy-three would be recaptured, almost all fairly rapidly. Fifty of them were subsequently murdered after being recaptured.
The Gestapo undertook an investigation of the escape and Commandant von Lindeiner-Wildau, who had started off as an assistant to Göring, was removed and threatened with court-martial. He escaped prosecution by feigning mental illness. He ended up in command of an infantry unit and was wounded in the Battle of Berlin in 1945. He had, as commandant, followed the Geneva accords and did have the respect of the prisoners. He died in 1963 at age 82.
An effort to bring the guilty to justice following the war was undertaken. The man who selected the men to be killed, SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, did not survive the war as he was ironically executed as one of the members of the July 20 plot. Trials were held in 1947 and 1948, at which time the British government called off any future war crime prosecutions.
Stalag Luft III was a big camp and continued on after the event. It's the camp featured in the recent series Masters of the Air, and it's the camp where a coworker's father had been a prisoner. The murders of the POWs had a huge chilling effect on escapes, and attempts were much reduced after that.
The escape was massive, although it did not really tie up German resources in any significant way. It also had the effect of provoking what had long been feared, although only temporarily, which was a Gestapo insertion into the POW system. Air POWs were held by the Luftwaffe as a point of privilege.
The event had an outsized lasting impact on the British. The movie based on Brickall's book (which is an excellent book) has become, oddly, a Christmas routine in the United Kingdom.
The three men who successfully escaped were:
- Per Bergsland, Norwegian pilot of No. 332 Squadron RAF, the 44th escapee. He remained a pilot after the war, eventually becoming a commercial pilot and an airline executive.
- Jens Müller, Norwegian pilot of No. 331 Squadron RAF, the 43d escapee. He also remained a pilot and became an airline executive. His escape took him to Sweden with Bergsland.
- Bram van der Stok, Dutch pilot of No. 41 Squadron RAF, the 18th escapee. The most decorated pilot in Dutch history, he escaped through the Netherlands down the escape line through Spain and reentered combat before the end of the war.
It's of note that not one of the escapees who managed to get away were British.
It's also worth noting that the famous film fictionalized some elements for the audience. Luft Stalag III was a massive camp and prior to the escape the Germans had separated American POWs, who had been mixed with the British, from the British. There were no Americans in the escape at all.
Likewise, while the film correctly shows three men making good their escapes, two onto Sweden and one onto Spain, it condenses the timeline for the event and makes the Dutch pilot an Australian, and one of the Norwegian pilots a Pole.
In Italy, the Germans carried out the reprisal Ardeatine Massacre and killed 335 people in retaliation for a partisan attack in Rome the day prior.
The Germans surrounded the Jewish Greek town of Ioannina, which had been home to Greek Jews for 2,000 years, and marked the houses in the town by the religion of the home's occupants.
200 inmates of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland were shot.
Mieczysław Wolski and Janusz Wysocki were shot for assisting Jews in Poland.
In Rome, Ivanoe Bonomi resigned as president of the Comitato Centrale di Liberazione Nazionale due to internal problems the organization had amongst its internal factions. He would return to politics shortly, however.
The Germans prevailed in the Third Narva Offensive.
RAF Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade survived a fall of 18,000 feet without a parachute, his descent from his Lancaster arrested by pine trees and soft snow. Alkemade had knowingly jumped out of his stricken aircraft without a parachute as his plane was on fire, and the parachute with it.
Fighting continued on Bougainville.
And also in the Admiralities.
R. Lee Ermey, who started his adult career in 1961 as a Marine, and who was medically discharged in 1972, was born in Emporia, Kansas. He broke into movies while studying in the Philippines on the GI bill, with the role of the drill sergeant in The Boys In Company C, a film which was so close in plot to Full Metal Jacket, save for the fate of the DI, that the second film resulted in a lawsuit.
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1940s, 1944, Bougainville, German SS, Italian partisans, Italy, Monte Cassino, National Guard, Operation Strangle, Partisans, Personalities, Rome, Vermont National Guard, World War Two
