Three British prisoners at Stalag Luft III, one of the most secure Nazi POW camps in World War II, successfully escaped by hiding inside a wooden vaulting horse that concealed a man digging a 100-foot tunnel beneath the camp's perimeter. The escape required 114 days of careful planning and execution, with Michael Codner digging while hidden inside the horse, which was carried out daily to the exercise yard under the watch of armed guards. The prisoners used a metal soup bowl as a shovel and disposed of the yellow sand they dug by distributing it in small quantities throughout the camp. This escape, completed on October 29, 1943, was the only successful escape from the East Compound of Stalag Luft III during the entire war, with all three men eventually reaching safety in Sweden.
The POWs Who Escaped The Most Secure Nazi Prison Using a Wooden HorseAdded:
Stalag Luft III Eastern Germany A summer afternoon in 1943.
A wooden vaulting horse stands in the middle of the open exercise yard.
Around it, a dozen British prisoners are taking turns running and jumping over it.
They land hard on the sand.
They shout and laugh.
They look like men trying to stay fit in a prison camp.
The horse itself is unremarkable.
Plywood sides, a padded leather top, four wooden legs.
The kind of gymnastics equipment found in any school in Europe.
Inside the horse, curled into a tight ball, is a man.
His name is Michael Codner.
He is 22 years old.
He is a British Army Lieutenant captured in Tunisia 8 months earlier.
The space inside the horse is smaller than a coffin.
The temperature is over 38° C.
He is breathing through a small slit in the wood.
Below him is a hole.
Codner is digging a tunnel.
He is using a metal soup bowl as a shovel.
Every time the men above him land on the horse, the wooden frame shudders, dust falls into his eyes, and a few more grains of bright yellow sand are scraped from the wall of the shaft.
Less than 10 m away, a German guard is watching the prisoners exercise.
If the horse tips, if the guard sees a single grain of yellow sand on Codner's clothes when he comes back out, if the digger faints from heat or runs out of air, if the tunnel collapses while Codner is inside, any of these things will end with him being shot.
He has been doing this for 6 weeks already.
He will do it for another nine.
By the time he and his two partners are finished, they will have carved a 100-ft tunnel under the most heavily fortified prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany.
They will have done it in plain sight of armed guards, beneath seismographic microphones designed to detect any digging in the entire compound, and in a soil that the Germans had specifically chosen because they believed no one could tunnel through it without being caught.
This is the story of how three British prisoners walked out of an escape-proof prison by hiding inside a piece of gym equipment.
It is also the only successful escape from the East Compound of Stalag Luft III in the entire war.
Stalag Luft III opened in March 1942.
[music] It was located in the Lower Silesian Forest near the town of Sagan, [music] about 160 km southeast of Berlin.
The Germans had built it specifically to hold captured [music] Allied airmen.
The camp was administered by the Luftwaffe, and Hermann Göring himself >> [music] >> had taken a personal interest in the design.
The Luftwaffe had a problem.
Allied aircrew were the most experienced [music] and trained personnel in the British and American military.
Once [music] shot down and captured, they were also among the most determined to escape.
The Germans had [music] spent the early years of the war chasing escaped pilots back across Europe.
They wanted a [music] camp where escape was impossible.
They built it on the Sagan plain because of the soil.
The topsoil was a thin layer of gray dust.
Beneath it, less than a meter down, was a vein of bright yellow sand that [music] ran through the entire region.
The color was unmistakable.
If a prisoner dug a tunnel [music] and tried to dispose of the spoil on the surface, the yellow sand stand [music] out against the gray ground like spilled paint.
The guards in the watchtowers, known to the prisoners as goons, would see it from 100 m away.
The Germans took this advantage [music] and built a fortress around it.
The prisoner barracks were raised on stilts, so guards could walk underneath them and check for trapdoors in the floor.
The perimeter was a double fence of barbed wire set 15 m apart [music] with rolls of additional wire piled in the gap between them.
The fence was lit at night by floodlights mounted on watchtowers spaced every 100 m along the perimeter.
Each tower contained a machine gun and a searchlight.
Then, there were the microphones.
Buried in the ground around the perimeter [music] at a depth of around 2 m, the Germans had installed seismographs, [music] high-sensitivity vibration detectors designed to pick up the sound of [music] digging.
If a prisoner tried to drive a support beam into a tunnel wall, the impact would register on a panel [music] inside the guard barracks.
If a shovel struck a stone hard enough, the alarm would sound.
By the spring [music] of 1943, the camp had been operating for a year.
In that year, the Germans had detected [music] and destroyed more than 40 tunnel attempts.
No one had escaped [music] from the East Compound. No one had even come close.
The prisoners called it the escape-proof camp.
>> [music] >> Three of them disagreed.
Eric Williams was a Royal Air Force flight [music] lieutenant. He had been a navigator on a Stirling bomber that was shot down over the Netherlands in December 1942.
He had spent 4 days in winter ditches and farm [music] sheds before being captured.
By the time he reached Stalag Luft III, he was 32 years old and he had decided that he was not [music] going to spend the rest of the war as a prisoner.
Michael Codner was a British Army Lieutenant.
He was an artillery [music] officer, not an airman, but he had ended up at Stalag Luft III for a clerical error during his initial transfer.
He was 22 [music] years old.
He had been captured at Medjez el Bab in Tunisia in December 1942, almost the same [music] week as Williams.
He had been moved through three different camps in the months that followed, and he had attempted to escape from each one.
By the time he arrived at Sagan, the British military had begun describing him in official correspondence [music] as exceptionally difficult to hold.
Oliver Philpot [music] was an RAF flight lieutenant.
He had been shot down over the North Sea [music] in December 1941 in a Bristol Beaufort attempting to torpedo a German freighter. [music] He had spent two days in a rubber dinghy in freezing water before being picked up by a German vessel. [music] By the time he reached Stalag Luft III, he was the senior officer of the escape [music] committee in his hut.
Codner was the one who first thought of the horse.
He had been reading the story of the Trojan Horse in a copy of Homer that had been included in a Red Cross book parcel.
He sat with the book for several days thinking about the geometry of the camp.
The huts where the prisoners slept [music] were too far from the perimeter fence.
Any tunnel started from inside a hut >> [music] >> would have to be at least 150 m long to reach the wire.
A tunnel of that length in that soil [music] was almost impossible.
The seismographs would detect the digging long before the tunnel got close [music] to the fence.
But there was an open area in the East Compound, a flat stretch of [music] sand between the huts and the fence that the prisoners used as an exercise yard.
The yard was much closer to the wire.
A tunnel started from there would only need to be about 30 m long.
The yard was also completely [music] exposed.
There was no building to hide a tunnel entrance.
There was no shelter from the watchtowers. [music] It was the last place any of the German guards would expect a tunnel because it was the last place any [music] prisoner could plausibly hide one.
Codner approached Williams with the idea in May 1943.
>> [music] >> They went to Philpott, who was the escape coordinator for their hut, to register the scheme with the camp's escape committee.
Philpott's first reaction [music] was that the plan was insane.
He told them in writing later that he had given them a couple of days, >> [music] >> but the committee approved it.
They began work in early June.
The horse itself had to look exactly [music] like a regulation German vaulting horse.
The Germans were familiar with the equipment from their own military gymnastics programs.
>> [music] >> Anything unusual would have drawn attention immediately.
The frame was built from wooden bed slats stolen from the bunks of every man in their hut.
The men slept on collapsing mattresses [music] to disguise the missing slats.
The outer panels were cut from plywood taken [music] from Red Cross packing crates.
The padded top was stuffed with straw and covered with sailcloth made from sewn together mattress covers.
>> [snorts] >> The legs were reinforced with stolen metal brackets.
When it was finished, [music] the horse weighed nearly 70 kg.
Two men could just barely carry it.
With a third man inside, [music] it took four men to lift.
The first phase of the operation was just to get the Germans used to seeing [music] it.
For the first 3 weeks of June, every afternoon, the men carried the horse out to the same [music] spot in the yard.
They placed it down.
They vaulted over it for an hour [music] or two.
They picked it up. They carried it back inside.
There was no digging.
There was no tunnel.
There was just [music] exercise.
The Germans noticed it on the first day.
By the end of the first week, they had stopped paying attention.
By the end of the third week, the horse was part of the landscape. [music] On July 8th, 1943, the digging began.
Codner was first into the horse.
>> [music] >> Williams and the carrying party walked him out to the yard, set him down on the same patch [music] of sand they had used for the previous 23 days, and began the vaulting routine.
>> [music] >> Inside the horse, Codner used a soup bowl to scrape away the sand directly beneath him.
He carved a vertical shaft, working downward, hands cramping [music] in the dim light through the slits in the panels.
When the vaulting session ended after 2 hours, he had managed to dig about half a meter down.
He covered the hole with a wooden board.
He covered the board with loose sand, and brushed the surface smooth.
The carrying party lifted the horse with Codner still inside, [music] and walked it back to the hut.
The yellow sand he had dug came back with him.
The first problem they [music] had to solve was how to dispose of it.
Each session, Codner brought back roughly [music] 15 kilos of bright yellow sand.
They could not leave it in the yard.
They could not store it inside their hut without it being [music] discovered.
They stitched together long tubular bags made from the legs of trousers, with strings tied at [music] one end.
While Codner dug, he filled the bags.
The bags were then hung [music] from a wooden rail mounted inside the horse, just above his head.
When the horse was [music] carried back to the hut, the bags came back inside it.
From the hut, the sand was carried out in pockets and dispersed into the camp [music] gardens, into the latrines, and into the dust under the raised barracks.
It was distributed in such small quantities [music] that the changing color was almost invisible.
Through July, the shaft went down 4 m.
Then they began tunneling horizontally toward the fence.
The work conditions were extreme.
Inside the horse, >> [music] >> the temperature on a hot afternoon climbed past 40°C.
The digger lay on his stomach in the dark, breathing his own carbon dioxide, scraping [music] the tunnel face with a soup bowl.
The men vaulting above him landed every few seconds.
Each impact [music] sent a shower of dust and straw down through the gaps in the wooden frame.
Each vaulter weighed 70 or 80 kilos.
The horse shook continuously.
If the digger fainted from the heat, no one above ground would know.
He could die in the tunnel and [music] the carrying party would walk him back to the hut still inside the horse without realizing.
They built a system of signals.
The digger would knock once on the wood >> [music] >> to request water, twice to indicate he needed to come up, three times [music] for an emergency.
As the tunnel got longer, the air problem got worse.
The horizontal [music] shaft was less than half a meter in diameter.
The digger had to crawl on his stomach, dragging the bowl of sand behind him by a length of stolen rope.
The carbon [music] dioxide built up.
The digger would start to feel dizzy.
His vision would blur.
He would have to stop, lie still, and try not to pass out.
Codner came up with a solution.
He took a long, thin metal poker fashioned from a stolen rod and [music] used it to pierce through the roof of the tunnel and break the surface of the yard above.
The hole was the size of a pencil.
From a distance, it was invisible, but it allowed fresh air to flow into [music] the tunnel.
The risk was that a guard walking across the yard might step on it and see it.
None of them ever did.
They worked through July and into August.
The danger was constant.
The horse was carried out daily, and every day was a chance to be discovered.
There were close calls. [music] On one afternoon, a German guard, known among the prisoners as a ferret, [music] a specialist tasked with searching for tunnels, walked across the exercise [music] yard and stopped less than 2 m from the horse.
He stood there.
He lit a cigarette.
He smoked it slowly while watching the prisoners vault.
Codner was inside. He was holding a sack [music] of sand.
The trapdoor was open beneath him.
If the horse moved, the trapdoor would be visible from [music] where the guard was standing.
Codner stayed completely still.
He could hear the guard breathing. He could smell the cigarette smoke through the slits in the wood. [music] The vaulting party, knowing what was happening, vaulted harder and louder than they ever had before.
They shouted at [music] each other. They cheered fake landings. They created as much noise as possible.
The guard finished his cigarette. He flicked the butt away.
He walked off.
By September, [music] the tunnel had reached the fence line.
They were now under the wire.
By October, they were past it.
The plan was now to break the surface on the far side of the perimeter, in the strip of pine forest that ran alongside the camp.
The trees there would give them cover.
From the trees, [music] they could move to the railway line, and from there into the German civilian transport [music] network.
Williams chose the date, October 29th, 1943, a Friday, a new moon.
The forest would be in total darkness.
By that point, they had been digging for 114 days. [music] The escape itself required them to solve a final problem.
The horse could only conceal one man.
They needed to get all three men into the tunnel in daylight without the carrying party making a suspicious return trip with an empty [music] horse.
They did it in stages.
On the afternoon of October 29th, Codner and Philpott were carried out together.
Both were inside the horse. A tighter fit than usual, but possible.
Codner went down into the tunnel and stayed there.
He had spent the [music] entire afternoon digging the final vertical shaft toward the surface, working by candlelight, breathing through a metal pipe pushed up through the soil to make a temporary [music] air hole.
Philpott covered the trap door and was carried back to the hut inside the horse, which [music] now contained one man instead of two.
The horse was set down.
The carrying party returned to their barracks for the evening roll call.
After roll call, as the camp's lights began to come on, the carrying party brought the horse back out. This time with Williams and Philpott both inside it, plus a third man whose only job was to seal the entrance once they [music] were down.
All three escapers descended into the tunnel.
The third man covered the trap door with the wooden plank, swept sand over it until the surface looked undisturbed, climbed back into the horse, and was carried away. [music] Three British officers were now lying head to toe in a 100-ft tunnel under the Stalag Luft III perimeter, [music] waiting for it to get dark.
Just past 6:00, Codner pushed the metal pipe up through the last few centimeters [music] of soil.
He felt cool air.
He pulled the pipe back and widened the hole with his hands.
He poked his head out.
He was in the [music] forest.
The wire fence was behind him.
The watchtower was to his right.
The sentry path was just visible in the gloom, less than 10 m [music] away.
He waited for the sentry to turn his back, then he climbed out.
Williams followed, then Philpott.
>> [music] >> They covered the hole with leaves and pine needles. They crawled away from the fence on their stomachs, through the underbrush, until they were deep enough into the forest [music] to stand up.
They split apart almost immediately.
Williams [music] and Codner had decided to travel together, posing as French laborers transferring [music] between factories.
Their forged papers identified them as conscripted French workers, a common sight [music] in wartime Germany.
They walked through the night to Sagan railway station, bought tickets the next morning, and boarded a train heading north toward the port city [music] of Stettin on the Baltic coast.
Philpott was traveling alone.
His cover was more elaborate.
He was dressed in a tailored suit made from a converted naval uniform.
He carried a leather briefcase.
His forged papers identified him as [music] Jan Jorgensen, a Norwegian margarine manufacturer doing business in Germany.
The cover was deliberately mundane.
No one questions a margarine [music] salesman.
He bought a first-class ticket from Sagan to Frankfurt an der Oder.
He boarded the train.
He sat in a compartment with German officers.
He read a newspaper.
When the conductor came through [music] and asked for his papers, the conductor saw the Norwegian designation, returned the documents without a second glance, and moved on.
Philpott transferred trains in Frankfurt [music] and continued north, eventually reaching the port of Danzig.
There, posing as a Norwegian, he located a Swedish freighter named [music] Adlerlist that was loading cargo for Stockholm.
He waited for the right moment, slipped past the dock workers, and stowed away in the ship's coal [music] hold.
He was discovered by Swedish crewmen the next morning after the ship had cleared German waters.
They hid him until they reached Stockholm.
On November 4th, 6 days after [music] the escape, Philpott walked into the British legation in Stockholm.
Williams and Codner [music] had a harder journey.
They reached Stettin on October 30th, but spent 6 days searching for a Swedish ship without success.
>> [music] >> They slept in shipping crates. They went hungry.
They were stopped twice for paper checks and bluffed their way through both.
On the 6th day, [music] they made contact with a young Danish sailor in a dockside tavern.
The sailor, without asking [music] questions, smuggled them aboard a Swedish freighter.
They spent 2 days hidden in the chain locker of the ship, a small steel compartment in the bow that held the anchor chain.
The ship sailed to Copenhagen first.
From there, it crossed [music] to Sweden.
By November 7th, Williams and Codner were in Swedish soil. All three men were repatriated to Britain by mid-November.
When they arrived in London, the intelligence officers who debriefed them spent [music] the first hour trying to understand what they had done.
They asked the same questions repeatedly.
How had they bribed the guard?
Which member of the camp staff had been compromised? [music] What part of the wire had been cut?
Williams told them, more than once, that none of those things had happened.
They had built a wooden horse.
They had carried a man inside it.
They had dug for 114 [music] days using soup bowls.
The officers had difficulty believing him. It was the only successful escape from the East Compound of Stalag Luft III for the duration [music] of the war.
Five months later, in March 1944, a much larger escape was attempted from the camp's North [music] Compound.
76 men got out through three tunnels named [music] Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Of those 76, 73 were recaptured.
50 of the recaptured men were [music] executed by the Gestapo on Hitler's direct order.
That escape became [music] known as the Great Escape.
The Wooden Horse escape had no such ending.
All three men survived the war.
Eric Williams returned to active [music] service.
After the war, he wrote a memoir of the escape, first under the title Goon in the Block, and later as The Wooden Horse.
The book was made into a film in 1950.
[music] Oliver Philpot also wrote a memoir.
He returned to civilian life and became a businessman.
He died in 1993.
Michael Codner did not have as [music] long.
He returned to the British Army after the war and served in the Royal Artillery in Italy and on the Northwest Frontier.
In [music] 1948, he joined the Colonial Service and was posted to Malaya.
On March 25th, 1952, during the Malayan Emergency, he was killed in a guerrilla ambush while supervising the repair of a sabotaged water pipeline in Tanjong Malim.
He was 31 years old.
The vaulting horse he had built, the one that had hidden a man for 114 days, that had been lifted in and out of the East Compound a hundred times under [music] the eyes of armed guards, that had carried the only successful escapers out of the most secure camp in Nazi Germany, was destroyed by the Germans within hours of the escape [music] being discovered.
They smashed it apart with rifle butts.
They never figured out how it had been used.
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