ANTI-NAZI HECTOGRAPHER

The New York Times Obituaries Monday, February 25, 2002
Desmond Plunkett Dies at 86; Helped Plan Escape From Nazis
By Richard Goldstein

      Desmond Plunkett, a British flier in World War II who played a major role in the mass breakout from a German prisoner of war camp that was portrayed in the 1963 film "The Great Escape," died Feb. 14.  Mr. Plunkett, who lived in Storrington, England, was 86.

      On June 20, 1942, Flight Lieutenant's Plunkett's eighth day in a Royal Air Force squadron, his Stirling bomber was shot down over the Netherlands.  He was captured and taken to Stalag Luft III, a prison camp for Allied airmen 60 miles southeast of Frankfurt.

      Over the following months, he made at least four escape attempts before the mass breakout.  He buried himself at the bottom of a cart removing ash, only to have the coals set his pants on fire.  Guard dogs foiled his bid to flee through a tunnel.  He was caught trying to scale a wall with a ladder.  On his fourth attempt, he was part of a tunnel-digging operation that was thwarted when it ran into a sewage works.

      But after a year's work, the prisoners completed a 360-foot tunnel that ran 30 feet beneath the surface and emerged at the edge of a woods.

      While the digging went on, Flight Lieutenant Plunkett oversaw a 14-man team that designed scores of maps indicating escape routes toward France and neutral Switzerland and Sweden.  Through bribery of a guard, he obtained a large, detailed map of Europe that he broke down on a crude mimeograph that used gelatin, from Red Cross packages, that was poured into trays made from old food tins and "ink" from the crushed lead of indelible pencils.  The maps, along with forged identity papers also created by the Plunkett team and designed by another prisoner, Flight Lt. Gilbert Wallen, were given to prisoners as an escape kit.

      On the night of March 24, 1944, 76 prisoners, most of them British and Commonwealth-nation fliers, escaped through the tunnel, which the inmates called Harry.  The tunnel's less-successful predecessors had been called Tom and Dick.

      Flight Lieutenant Plunkett, who volunteered to be the 13th man through the tunnel because no one else wanted that spot, made it to a train.  But he was seized on April 8 at the Czech-Austrian border and was imprisoned again, first at a Gestapo jail, then at a P.O.W. camp in northern Germany.

      Seventy-three of the 76 escapees were eventually recaptured.  Fifty of them were shot to death by the Gestapo on Hitler's orders, a reprisal denounced by the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, as "cold-blooded act of butchery" in violation of the Geneva Conventions.  Mr. Plunkett survived because Hitler's quota of executions had been exhausted by time he was caught.

      Mr. Plunkett, a native of India, where his father was a civil engineer, worked as a sales manager for an aircraft company in India after the war, then flew commercially in Rhodesia before returning to England.  Two years ago, he wrote his memoirs, "The Man Who Would Not Die" (Pentland Press). 

      He is survived by his wife, Patricia; a son; and two daughters.  Seven of his fellow escapees still live, according to The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

      Mr. Plunkett and Flight Lieutenant Wallen, who was among the 50 escapees who were shot, were models for the character Colin Blythe, "the forger," played by Donald Pleasence in "The Great Escape."

      Reviewing the movie in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote: "Nobody is going to con me - at least not the director, John Sturges - into believing that the spirit of defiance in any prisoner-of-war camp anywhere was as arrogant, romantic and Rover Boyish as it is made to appear in the film."

      Mr. Plunkett also took a dim view of the movie, whose most famous scene is fiction - the escapee Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, leading the Germans on a motorcycle chase.

            "The Great Escape" was full of lies, Mr. Plunkett was quoted as telling The Argus newspaper of Brighton and Hove, England, in an interview last August.  "Perhaps 10 percent was true.  The rest was rubbish."