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
