Australian Paul Royle, one of the only two remaining survivors from World War II’s daring “Great Escape” prison break, has died, aged 101, in a Perth hospital, his son said yesterday.
Gordon Royle told the Australian Broadcasting Corp his father passed away following a fall at a care facility.
“Dad continued to live his life to the full. It was a fall that killed him in the end,” he said, without specifying exactly when the veteran died.
Photo: AP
The only living survivor now is 94-year-old Briton Dick Churchill.
Royle was one of 76 men who tunneled out of German prison camp Stalag Luft III on a bitterly cold night in March 1944, an event immortalized in the 1960s film The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.
They dug three tunnels — codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry — although only Harry was used.
Just three men made it to safety from a camp the Nazis said was escape-proof. The rest were captured by the Gestapo and 50 of them executed on Hitler’s orders.
Perth man Royle was spared and in an interview with the ABC last year, the former Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant said he still had vivid memories of emerging from the tunnel to a snowy landscape.
“It was very pleasant and all we saw was great heaps of snow and pine trees. There was snow everywhere; it was cold,” he said, adding that he was not scared during the dash to freedom.
“You had other thoughts in your mind you see, you wanted to get out,” he said.
After making it through the tunnel, Royle waited for a companion and the pair walked through the night before finding a place to sleep for the day in the bushes.
However, their freedom was short-lived, with the two men recaptured in a small village nearby and taken to a local jail.
Royle was returned to the original camp. There he met Australian fighter pilot and writer Paul Brickhill, whose book The Great Escape told the story of the breakout.
Six hundred people were involved in preparing the tunnels over several months. Royle was tasked with disposing of the soil, pouring it into his longjohns then releasing it in the prison yard when guards were not watching.
In the film, screenwriters focused on the roles of US prisoners of war, with McQueen making a bid for freedom on a motorbike once through the tunnel, but the real escape was by British and other allied personnel, none being American.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS