The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page B

chance, the gray of Luftwaffe uniforms was almost identical with R.A.F. gray-blue, and Tommy Guest used old R.A.F. uniforms to cut out several unteroffizier’s uniforms. Six of his amateur tailors hand-sewed them.
    Muller made the little eagles that went on the lapels and the belt buckles by casting melted silver paper in soap molds, carving the eagles in the mold himself. The belt buckle was perfect. One of the contacts got his Goon to take off his tunic on a hot day while he drank his daily brew and Muller stealthily pressed the buckle into the soap to make his mold. Guest cut a bit off the tail of a terrible old shirt of Kirby-Green’s to make the color patches on the uniforms.
    Tim Walenn produced several beautifully forged gate passes (the originals had been brought in by a tame guard). The “unteroffiziers” would have to show the passes to get out of the camp with their party, and Walenn’s staff had hand-lettered them, working nonstop on the job for about a week. He took the passes to Roger.
    “Which is the real one?” he asked.
    Roger peered at them for a while. “They’re bloody good, Tim,” he said. “I don’t think I could pick them apart.”
    “As a matter of fact,” Tim said, “they’re all forgeries.”
    And the day it was all done and thirty-two men were getting their last briefings for the break, the German unteroffiziers came in without rifles. They all had pistols instead, in holsters on a belt. It was a new order. Unteroffiziers weren’t going to carry rifles any more, and there had to be an unteroffizier on the fake delousing party. An ordinary
Gefreiter
(private) wouldn’t be allowed to escort a party out of the gate.
    Roger really lost his temper this time, and for two days he was quite unbearable. Travis and Muller weren’t much better.
    One of Tommy Guest’s men had been a handbag maker in private life, and Roger put him to work making imitation pistol holsters out of cardboard. He marked the cardboard to give it a leathery grain and rubbed it with boot polish, and you couldn’t tell the result from a real holster. McIntosh made a couple of dummy pistol butts out of wood and fixed them so they peeped coyly out of the holster flaps.
    Roger planned the break in two phases. First, twenty-four men escorted by two “unteroffiziers” were to march out of the gate (they hoped) ostensibly bound for the delousing showers. Ten minutes after they were clear, Bob Van Der Stok, a Dutchman in the R.A.F. who spoke perfect German, was to march out a party of five senior officers for a “special conference” with the Kommandant.
    Roger, Wings Day, and the committee hand-picked the people to go, selecting men who’d been working hard for “X” and who’d been behind the wire for a couple of years or more. Roger himself toyed with the idea of going, but Wings and the others energetically talked him out of it. As Wings pointed out, there was a very fair chance of the alarm being given quite quickly, in which case many of them probably wouldn’t get very far, and if Roger was caught again so soon after the last time, he knew what to expect.
    “Wait till you can get out through ‘Tom,’” Day said. “You’ll be out of the area by train then before they wake up to it.”
    Roger reluctantly agreed, partly because he was banking so much on “Tom.” Floody wanted to go on the delousing party too, but Roger vetoed the idea, and they had a short, sharp argument. Arguments with Roger were often sharp and always short.
    “We need you for the tunnels,” he told Floody flatly.
    “God, I’m sick of tunnels,” Floody groaned. “I seem to spend my life down a stinking hole in the ground. I want a change.”
    “Look, Wally,” Roger said. “We’re just getting somewhere now, and everything’s going like a bomb. Don’t spoil it. We’ll get ‘Tom’ out in a couple of months, and then you can go for your life, but
not
now. You’re needed here.”
    “But I’d be back,” said Floody,