(dramatic theme music) (narrator) In March 1944, 76 men tunneled out of a German prison camp in the greatest escape of the Second World War.

Their mission?

To cause mayhem in the heart of the Nazi Fatherland.

(woman) Each one of those men knew that they were risking their lives.

(narrator) Over three programs, we're using dramatic reconstruction, expert testimony...

The Great Escape was an act of war.

(narrator) ...and never-before-seen photographs and documents... (woman) I have here a letter written in code by my father.

(narrator) ...to tell the thrilling true story of ingenuity... (man) Forged documents had to look absolutely realistic.

(narrator) ...bravery... (man) If that collapses on me, I'm dead.

(dirt crumbling) (narrator) ...and atrocity.

(woman) They went too far.

Physical violence, threats of death.

♪ (gunshots) ♪ (narrator) This time, we reveal how the prisoners built three huge tunnels... (man) That's the original sand from the tunnel "Harry" right here.

(narrator) ...and prepared 200 men for escape.

His plan was breathtaking in its ambition and its scope.

(narrator) This is the true story of one of the most audacious breakouts of the Second World War.

♪ This is The Great Escape.

♪ (wind howling) (mellow music) March 1942.

(echoing clang) Deep in the forest on the eastern edge of Germany, a new prisoner-of-war camp had been built.

♪ (man) The camp we're looking at is Stalag Luft III, and the "Luft" in that means "Air."

So that gives you a clue as to what type of prisoners are being held-- they're airmen.

♪ The Army looked after Army prisoners and the Luftwaffe looked after downed air crew.

I mean, "looked after," you know, they held them prisoner, these people were captives.

♪ (narrator) The commandant in charge of the new camp was Luftwaffe colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner, a veteran of the First World War.

(Guy) He wasn't a fervent Nazi, and so his way of serving the Third Reich was to run a POW camp.

You're not dealing with a kind of commandant of Auschwitz or sort of an out-and-out bastard.

(tense music) ♪ (narrator) Lindeiner's first prisoners, most in their early 20s, arrived a few weeks later.

♪ They included pilots Tom Kirby-Green and Roy Langlois.

(Pippa) My father Roy and Tom Kirby-Green were one of the very, very first to arrive at Stalag Luft III.

So they knew each other right from the start and they quickly became very firm friends.

(propeller whirring) My father was flying Vickers Wellingtons on the night that he was shot down on the 5th of August, 1941.

(somber music) He spent several months in hiding, and then, in October '41 was when he was actually captured, eventually ending up in Stalag Luft III.

(tense music) (narrator) The RAF officers were housed in eight huge huts... ♪ ...each one divided into small bunk rooms.

♪ (Pippa) This is one of the huts that my father and Tom Kirby-Green shared, and the rest are the other six that shared the room.

Although it was very, very crowded, they never complained about anything.

In those sort of circumstances is often when you can form some very close bonds.

♪ (narrator) Both Kirby-Green and Langlois had been involved in escape organizations at their previous camp.

(grim music) But escaping from Stalag Luft III would be even more difficult.

♪ (Laurie-Anne) Stalag Luft III was designed and built for the purposes of housing prisoners who had a tendency to try and escape.

(gloomy music) ♪ (Charles) They insisted that all prisoner-of-war camps should have a double-barbed-wire fence, that they should have sentry towers spaced evenly around the perimeter of the camp.

(Peter) In addition to that, they had the goons themselves.

These are the guards patrolling it with dogs.

(barks) ♪ They built all of the huts right in the middle, further away from the wire.

The huts were built on stilts, so instead of the huts being directly on the ground, inviting the prisoners to tunnel straight out, they built them at least two feet above the ground.

♪ (Charles) And they also lowered microphones into the ground so that they could hear any sounds of tunneling.

(dramatic music) (Guy) You have a unit of military intelligence called the Abwehr who supplied the camp staff known as the "ferrets," so named because they were gonna ferret around looking for what was going on.

(narrator) But the biggest deterrent of all was the type of ground the camp was built on.

It was meant to be escape-proof because it's built on sand so you can't tunnel out of it because anybody's who tried to build a tunnel on a beach will know you can't tunnel out of sand.

♪ (wind howling) (tense music) ♪ (narrator) The camp was located near Sagan, at the very heart of the German Reich, which, in 1942, extended across much of Europe.

♪ Things had been going pretty well for Nazi Germany.

We've had the Blitzkrieg... (cannons firing) ...the fall of Poland, parts of Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries, and I think it had given them this huge amount of confidence.

(narrator) To make it home, an escaper would have to cross hundreds of miles of German-held territory to reach a neutral country such as Switzerland, Spain, or Sweden.

But all of this proved no deterrent to committed escapers like Tom Kirby-Green and Roy Langlois.

As soon as they arrived at the new camp, they both joined a secret escape organization.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Guy) The X Committee essentially was the committee within each camp that was there to organize escapes and to carry out intelligence work.

To have a crack at the enemy in some way was considered the right thing to do.

♪ And, of course, it was encouraged by the senior British officer in all the camps because it was an activity that kept these young, intelligent minds occupied.

♪ (narrator) With the team assembled, the escape committee would soon organize the first successful breakout from Stalag Luft III.

♪ (echoing clang) (dramatic orchestral music) (echoing clangs) ♪ Within a few weeks of arriving at Stalag Luft III, the POWs of X Committee were planning escapes.

♪ (kicking ball) All the more extraordinary because life for these air crew officers under their Luftwaffe guards was relatively pleasant.

(Laurie-Anne) The standards and the quality of life for prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III was probably far better than in many of the other prisoner-of-war camps.

(bright orchestral music) Both Germany and Britain were parties to the Geneva Convention.

♪ POWs were allowed to send and receive mail from home.

They were allowed to receive food parcels and packages from home and from the Red Cross.

♪ (Charles) They had sports equipment, they had a library.

They sometimes had film shows.

A theater was built, and then they were able to stage plays.

♪ So, life could be pretty good if you wanted to spend your entire life in a holiday camp.

(Guy) I think the analogy between somewhere like Stalag Luft III and a sort of minor boys' boarding school somewhere in a somewhat brutal part of Britain is absolutely perfect.

♪ You have a somewhat elderly camp staff who are looking after this somewhat boisterous group of privately educated young men.

It's a great myth of POWs that they all want to escape.

In fact, only a third of prisoners wanted to get involved in escape activities of any stripe at all.

♪ (tense orchestral music) ♪ (narrator) But at Stalag Luft III, those prisoners included the most committed and skillful escapers of the Second World War.

♪ And the mastermind behind the Great Escape wasn't even there yet.

He was on the run in occupied Europe.

Roger Bushell was colorful, charismatic, and perhaps complex as well.

And at the start of the war, he was given command of 92 Squadron.

(propellers whirring) ♪ They went into combat for the first time on May the 23rd, 1940, covering the retreat from Dunkirk.

(planes roaring) (gunfire) ♪ (Guy) Bushell's idea of a good war for Roger Bushell in his head is to shoot down a lot of Germans and then back home for tea, medals, and women.

Boy, was he an alpha male.

(planes roaring) (narrator) But on his very first day in combat, Roger Bushell was shot down in a dogfight.

(plane whirring) (soft piano music) (Simon) He managed to crash-land and get out of the plane.

He thought he was behind his own lines, and he sat down by a tree and lit a cigarette.

♪ And a few minutes later, a German motorcyclist came over and he was taken prisoner.

♪ (Guy) What Bushell's war is not meant to be about is being shot down on his first day of operations.

So this is a man who desperately wants to have a good war, and if he can't have a good war in the air, then, by gum, he's gonna want to have a good war on the ground or even under the ground.

(dark music) (narrator) By May 1942, Bushell had escaped twice.

The first time, he'd made it all the way to the Swiss border before being recaptured.

♪ The second time, he'd escaped from a train transporting him to a new camp, and he was still on the loose.

♪ For seven months, he'd been hiding with a family, the Zeithammels, in Nazi-occupied Prague, where he had an affair with the daughter, Blazena.

♪ (Simon) She wanted him to make a commitment to marry her after the war.

Bushell said no.

Well, Blazena, in her absolute desperation, went and sought solace with an old boyfriend, but he had joined one of the fascist groups and he'd become an informer.

The Gestapo moved quite quickly.

♪ (narrator) After capture, Bushell suffered weeks of terrifying, aggressive interrogation by the Gestapo.

For the Zeithammel family, it was far worse.

♪ (Simon) Blazena Zeithammel... her father and brother, along with about 60 other Czechs, many of them members of the resistance, were shot.

♪ Bushell found out about this, and it changed everything.

He'd seen the Nazis at first hand, and now the people who... had given him sanctuary were all dead.

♪ (chains rattling) (narrator) Up to this point, Bushell had only experienced humane treatment by his Luftwaffe guards, but now he'd seen the true dark heart of the Nazi regime.

♪ (door slams, echoes) (mellow music) (echoing clangs) While Bushell still languished in a Gestapo cell, at Stalag Luft III, the POWs were already digging tunnels and plotting their first escapes.

♪ (Guy) Escaping was, essentially, a sport.

You know, you weren't gonna die.

You were gonna run around Germany giving the Hun a run for his money.

You could make great plans and you could do something daring and exciting.

(narrator) In the summer of 1942, more than 60 tunnels were attempted.

They were crude and shallow, little more than rabbit holes.

All were quickly discovered by the ferrets, apart from one.

(digging) (tense music) The mole tunnel was completely insane.

♪ Basically, you start and you go down into the sand and you take the sand and you put it behind you, and you've only ever got enough space underground just for you, and that's it.

And you poke a little hole up through the top to get some air, but, boy, imagine staying underground for a couple days.

God, would you do that?

♪ (Charles) They could actually see the steam rising through the little trail of air holes that they had made and expected them to be discovered any moment.

♪ But they weren't.

So, when night fell, they dug the exit to the tunnel.

♪ And got clear of the camp.

They stole a boat.

Unfortunately, the owner of the boat reported it stolen, and they were discovered.

(chains rattling) ♪ The other spectacular escape that summer involved an Irishman called Toft and an American in the Eagle Squadron called Nichols in broad daylight under a series of elaborate diversions.

(dramatic music) Under cover of these diversions, Toft and Nichols jumped over the warning rail and lay against a fence and started cutting.

♪ (narrator) Using home-made wire cutters, they made it through both fences then onto a train to Berlin before eventually being caught.

♪ (Charles) When they got back to Stalag Luft III, the commandant was so impressed by their courage, he presented them with a bottle of whiskey.

♪ (echoing clangs) (wind howling) (tense music) ♪ (narrator) Roger Bushell arrived at Stalag Luft III after spending over three months in the hands of the Gestapo.

(Guy) Bushell walks into Stalag Luft III as a man on a mission.

This was a man who was there to escape.

♪ He was not there simply to sit around and see the war out.

The idea for Bushell that the war was over... hell no is the war over.

♪ (Simon) But there were personal reasons too.

He was in love.

He was in love with Lady Georgiana Mary Curzon, who he had nearly married in the mid-1930s.

She had rekindled that relationship through letters to him at Stalag Luft III, and I don't think there is any doubt that although Bushell was a military leader, he was also driven by great passions.

(lighter flicks) ♪ The Great Escape was a love story as well as a war story.

♪ (lighter closes, echoes) (narrator) But soon after Bushell's arrival, escape plans suffered a serious upset.

(dramatic music) One hundred POWs, including many of the most committed escapers, were moved to an army camp.

♪ So Bushell was given command and rebuilt the escape committee.

"Big X," as he was now known, took escape planning to a whole new level.

♪ (Simon) Bushell planned to put escape activity on an industrial footing, and his plan was breathtaking in its ambition and its scope.

♪ (Guy) Bushell's overriding idea and where he was absolutely right was to get rid of amateur hour.

This was gonna be a proper escape committee with proper, realistic escape attempts.

(narrator) Bushell announced they were going to build three massive tunnels simultaneously and get hundreds of POWs out on one night in the greatest escape in history.

♪ (Guy) He felt that by digging three tunnels, you were gonna call the Germans' bluff, that they may discover one and then think there's another, but they're never gonna think there's a third.

And so, this is the whole idea behind Tom, Dick, and Harry.

(narrator) Each tunnel would be nine meters deep so the noise of digging would not be picked up by the German microphones.

And they'd be up to 100 meters long to reach the cover of the forest.

(Guy) Bushell's plan in a nutshell was to try and create mayhem.

♪ He thought that by getting lots and lots and lots of men out, he would tie up German resources.

This was something really ambitious.

Why not really, you know, screw over the Germans?

Let's get lots of men out and let's create havoc.

Let's do this.

♪ (clangs) ♪ (echoing clang) (mellow music) (echoing clangs) ♪ (narrator) In the winter of 1942, the prisoners at Stalag Luft III began preparing the biggest and most elaborate escape of the Second World War.

American air crew had now started to arrive in large numbers, many joining the escape organization.

Everyone says, "Oh, there were no Americans on the Great Escape, and this is a terrible travesty of the truth," but actually, in the preparations for the escape, yes, Americans were involved.

(narrator) The RAF prisoners came from across the Commonwealth and also included air crew from occupied European countries.

It feels like it's a British story, but actually, only 50 percent of the escapers were British themselves.

(narrator) Most surprising was the assistance given by large numbers of Germans.

(Guy) I think the Great Escape is the greatest example of Anglo-German cooperation since the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert.

(narrator) This was largely because, in the winter of 1942, the war began to turn against the Germans.

♪ (cannon firing) (tank rumbling) (dramatic music) (gunfire) (Clare) In North Africa, the Second Battle of El Alamein is a decisive victory.

Churchill is absolutely delighted.

He famously says, "This is not the end.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

(explosions) (Lisa) In January 1943, the Wehrmacht capitulated to the Soviet Army at Stalingrad.

(Clare) It's a massive disaster for Nazi Germany.

This is the first time they have to publicly admit that they've lost a battle in the Second World War.

(Lisa) One hundred thousand Germans were killed on the battlefield or dying of cold and another hundred thousand taken as prisoners of war.

So it's very deflating for domestic morale inside Germany.

♪ (dreary music) ♪ (Simon) I think a lot more of the camp staff realized that victory was not necessarily inevitable, and they started to hedge their bets and help the prisoners in different ways.

♪ (Guy) The prisoners are actually, in many ways, wealthier than their guards.

The prisoners had about ten cigarettes a day equivalent, the guards had about two.

♪ If cigarettes are currency, then you've got the prisoners being five times richer than the guards.

Now, just cigarettes alone is enough to account for most of the corruption that goes on.

Also, the Allies have got Red Cross parcels coming in with all sorts of goodies, and the Germans look at this stuff and go, "Gosh, that's really quite nice."

The German guards' rations were very, very poor, very limited.

There were goodies like chocolate that could go a long way if you wanted a guard to give you something.

(narrator) Items essential for the escape, such as tools, cameras, and identity documents, were sourced from the guards, but bribery wasn't always needed.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Simon) There were a number of Germans in the camp who were anti-Nazi and willingly helped the prisoners and their cause, and they supplied Bushell with intelligence.

The most notable one was a man called Eberhard Hesse.

♪ Hesse did it for ideological reasons.

He disliked the Nazis.

He wanted an Allied victory.

♪ (narrator) A massive amount of intelligence was gathered from the guards.

♪ And it was all relayed back to MI9 in Britain.

(Helen) We've all heard of MI5 and MI6, but MI9 was set up in December 1939 to help Allied prisoners of war.

♪ MI9 communicated with prisoners of war in camps in Germany or Italy through coded letters.

♪ (Pippa) I have here a letter that is undoubtedly written in code by my father, Roy Langlois, to his sister in England.

I can tell that it is a very strange letter by its tone but also by its punctuation because he has put certain words like "Rothmanns," "Players," "500," "Guernsey," in inverted commas which is a very, very strange thing to do.

♪ (Helen) Prisoners would know that after a particular punctuation mark, that they were to use a particular letter, and also if a letter was signed and underlined, then that indicated that there was a secret, coded message in that letter.

(Simon) Hesse supplied information on the German secret weapons program at Peenemünde where they were developing the V-1s and V-2s, because Hesse's brother was a scientist who had connections with Peenemünde.

The prisoners were regarded second only to Bletchley Park, Enigma, on information inside Germany.

(narrator) The POWs were acting as spies inside Germany.

It was exceptionally dangerous because spies could be legally executed.

♪ (birds singing) (echoing clangs) Tunneling couldn't get underway until the spring of 1943 because the POWs had learned many of them were being transferred to a newly built compound.

(tense music) Within days of the move, sign-up sheets for "sports clubs" were pinned up in every hut, a code for escape activities... ♪ ...because hundreds of volunteers were now needed.

♪ (Simon) To set out to build three of these big tunnels, deeper than ever before, longer than ever before, bigger than ever before, was a serious engineering project.

♪ (narrator) The tunnel code-named "Tom" would head west from hut 123.

"Dick" would start in the washroom of neighboring hut 122, also heading west.

"Harry," running from hut 104, was the most ambitious.

Its entrance would be under the hut's stove and it would pass under the cooler isolation block before reaching the trees over 100 meters away.

(Hugh) If the huts are up on stilts, then it's not obvious how you can get into a tunnel without it being observed.

But they realized that the wood-burning stoves had to be put on pillars to take their weight.

(narrator) The foundations of the huts have survived in the forest.

The site of Stalag Luft III is now in modern-day Poland.

(Marek) All of the huts were made of wood, but all of them, they stood on the large, concrete foundations.

So you can see the main corridor right here, and the living rooms were on the left and on the right, and here you can see the large foundation.

So, they removed one of the stoves from here and they start-- they started digging right through the foundation.

(tense music) ♪ (narrator) Construction began on the 15th of April, 1943.

♪ The POWs used pickaxes and chisels... (clang) ...to laboriously chip through the solid concrete.

♪ (clang) The noise disguised by choir practices and craft workshops outside.

(clanging) ♪ Then, nine-meter vertical shafts had to be sunk through the sand below, which was easy to dig but hard to hide.

♪ (Peter) Peter Fanshawe, who was a naval aviator, came up with the idea of having trouser legs sewn up, and these could be worn down inside ordinary trousers, and they had pins in them, so you could pull the pins out with a piece of string, that would allow the sand to disperse which you could then kick into the ground.

♪ The prisoners did quite a lot of gardening there.

Men would turn up with the sand down their trousers.

These men were called "penguins" because they looked like they had a shuffling gait, and they would try and kick that sand into the gardens, or they might have football matches.

(kicking ball) And so this meant that, as the penguins moved around the camp, they were dispersing the sand on a regular basis.

(mellow music) ♪ (Marek) They used many different places to hide the soil, and one of them, actually, was the theater.

♪ They spread the soil underneath the floor of the theater.

So, in any place, you can stop, grab, dig, you can find some...

So, that's the original soil, the original sand from the tunnel "Harry" right here.

♪ (echoing clangs) (dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) It took six weeks to dig the vertical shafts of the three tunnels.

(shoveling) ♪ Now they could start burrowing outwards.

(coughing) (Guy) Conditions in the tunnel are absolutely horrific.

♪ You're digging away, you gotta pass all this spoil back to the chap behind you, and you're gonna be there for hours at a time.

They would also use animal fat lamps.

It's hot, it's claustrophobic, it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable.

♪ And the other problem is is because their rations were relatively meager, they're lacking in fiber, their bowels are very loose.

Often, they just couldn't help but just basically go to the loo exactly where they were.

(coughing) The tunnel was only about two, two and a half foot wide, which has got 30 foot of sand above you, and you're thinking, "Okay, if that collapses on me, I'm dead."

♪ (rumbling) (Hugh) They needed to shore up the tunnels to prevent collapse.

(dreary music) The material most plentifully at hand were the bed boards from their sleeping quarters.

(sawing) The story they told the Germans was, "Oh, it's so bleeding cold here.

You don't give us enough wood to burn, so we're burning these bed boards."

Now, the Germans bought this story, which was great, so that means they had a huge supply of bed boards.

Imagine that's a bed board with the corners cut out.

Now, if you want to put them together, you have to have some kind of, if you like, tongue-and-groove system like this.

So by the time you've got this all locked together, you can see you've got quite a strong structure.

♪ (dramatic music) (narrator) But tunneling was only one part of the operation.

A vast amount of equipment was needed to give the 200 escapers any chance of success.

♪ (Hugh) So, little factories were set up in different huts to make things.

The POWs, when they escaped, they would've needed documents which looked realistic, and these documents had official stamps on them, and they would use the heels of shoes, they would cut out the design of the stamp, and these stamps were really very, very good.

♪ (Guy) You've also gotta make sure that these people aren't just wearing their RAF uniform, for example, so what are they gonna wear?

So you have a whole industry producing everything your man on the run needs to equip him and give him the best chance of making a home run.

♪ (grim music) ♪ (narrator) To prevent the extensive escape operations being discovered, a network of lookouts known as "stooges" operated across the compound.

Best friends Roy Langlois and Tom Kirby-Green were key players in the security operation.

♪ (Colin Kirby-Green) Security mostly meant a couple of prisoners leaning up against a doorway somewhere pretending to chat to each other, but really they were looking out to keep a really close eye on the guards who were always snooping around.

♪ (narrator) Covert signals and knocks relayed warnings back to the huts.

♪ Factories were hurriedly closed down and tunnel entrances hidden.

♪ (Hugh) They would put the wood-burning stove back again and they would sit, having their cigarette, reading a book or newspaper.

(door creaking open) ♪ And if the Germans came in, everything would be perfectly normal.

I mean, boy, they were just so incredibly innovative.

(narrator) But, despite the precautions, the escape would soon face disaster.

♪ (echoing clang) (gloomy music) (echoing clangs) ♪ (match strikes) ♪ The POWs had been simultaneously digging the three escape tunnels for three months.

♪ They were all now over 20 meters long, but as the tunnels had grown longer, they'd faced two major problems.

The first was getting all the sand out.

♪ (wheels scraping) They'd overcome this with an ingenious trolley on tracks which could be pulled up and down the tunnel.

♪ The second problem was getting enough air in.

(deep breath) (Peter) If you have a long tunnel, the air is gonna get stale.

It's also incredibly hot, so although it might seem like the earth is gonna be clammy and wet and cold, it is actually incredibly hot with the bodies beneath there.

(Hugh) You needed to make sure that you had a supply of oxygen at the far end of the tunnel, but where are you gonna get that air from?

They came up with a really ingenious way of pumping the air down a tube made by linking up cans sent to the POWs in their Red Cross parcels.

♪ This was fantastic because, at the end of this tube, this lovely fresh air would be coming up, and it was a lifeline for these tunnelers.

(sighs) ♪ (Guy) This kind of big bellows would supply air all the way to the workface.

♪ (narrator) The pumping was done in a workspace at the bottom of the entrance shaft, with an intake pipe hidden near the hut's chimney.

(pumping) ♪ The tunnelers' conditions were also transformed when electric lights were installed... (electricity buzzing) ...using materials stolen from the huts and covertly wired into the camp's power supply.

♪ (bright music) The camp guards still had no idea an escape plan of extraordinary scale was underway.

It was events in the wider war beyond the wire that would upset that plan.

(gunfire) (Clare) In July 1943, Montgomery and Patton invade Sicily, and this, of course, decisively opens up the long-awaited second front in Europe.

(narrator) The land invasion was accompanied by a further increase in Allied bombing attacks on Germany.

(Lisa) City after city had been relentlessly bombed by the RAF and the USAAF.

(planes roaring) (Clare) As we have so many bombers coming over, we're also losing Allied air crews, and that is increasing the pressure inside the prisoner-of-war camps.

(narrator) The massive influx of downed air crews into Stalag Luft III forced the commandant to expand the camp.

The POWs learned of his plans in August 1943.

(Charles) They discovered that the Germans were building a new compound to the south of the camp to which all the Americans would be moved.

And the escape committee thought that it would be dreadful if the Americans missed out, so they decided to close work down on Harry and Dick and just concentrate on this one tunnel.

(rattling) (gloomy music) (echoing clangs) ♪ (narrator) With all efforts on Tom, the tunnel progressed twice as fast.

(digging) ♪ By September, it was 85 meters long and would be completed in a matter of days.

♪ (Peter) The prisoners were close to getting outside of the camp, very, very close indeed.

♪ (Simon) But they became careless.

(birds cawing) Glemnitz noticed a raise in garden levels.

He was the chief ferret, he was the one they feared.

He was really efficient.

He wasn't efficient in a malicious way.

He did his job, and I think they respected him for that.

♪ (Guy) They see a penguin, one of the POWs, who's got kick-bags of sand in his trousers, he's emptying sand mysteriously out of the bottom of his trousers.

They think, "All right, look, something's going on here."

♪ (narrator) In response, the ferrets intensified their searches.

♪ (Peter) One of the ferrets was taking soundings to see if there was any way in which there were kind of hollow spaces, and as he put a pole down, he chipped a piece off the slab which was the entranceway.

♪ (narrator) Tom was found on the 8th of September, 1943, with only a few feet left to dig.

♪ It was devastating, particularly for the Americans.

The discovery ended their great escape.

♪ (Simon) Roger Bushell, like all the prisoners, reacted badly to the discovery of Tom.

There was huge disappointment.

♪ It had a bad effect on morale.

♪ (narrator) In contrast, the German guards were delighted.

They couldn't believe the sophistication of the tunnel and proudly photographed themselves with their find.

♪ Little did they knew two other partly dug tunnels lay beneath their feet.

♪ This was far from the end of the Great Escape.

(digging) (dramatic music) Next time, we count down the final nerve-racking days and hours to the Great Escape itself... ♪ ...when a catalogue of disasters throw the daring plan into disarray... (Guy) He pokes his head out and he realizes that this tunnel is not in the woods.

♪ (narrator) ...and puts the lives of the escapers in jeopardy.

(gunshot) My father definitely feared for his life.

♪ (dramatic theme music) ♪