Several months before the Great Escape, the senior British
officer in the Stalag Luft III camp asked fellow prisoner and
artist Ley Kenyon to create a visual document of "Harry," the
tunnel used the night of March 24, 1944, to make the break.
Kenyon obliged, rendering six drawings inside Harry's cramped
quarters. The drawings were sealed in a watertight container
fabricated from old milk tins and stored in "Dick," an
abandoned escape tunnel. When the advancing Russians neared
the camp in January 1945, the Germans hastily evacuated the
prisoners, who just managed to flood Dick in hopes of
deterring a search if the Germans discovered the tunnel. They
never did, and when the Russians seized control of the camp, a
British officer who had been too ill to evacuate earlier with
the other prisoners recovered the drawings and brought them to
England; they now reside in the Royal Air Force Museum in
London. In this slide show, view these hard-won sketches,
along with five others Kenyon made either before or after the
famous getaway. To launch the
slide show, click on
the image at left.—Peter Tyson
