Bill Ash escaping activities. He ended the war as a flight lieutenant. In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film "The Great Escape"". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call the "cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it to jump
Winter in the Blood (film) Winter in the Blood (film) Winter in the Blood is a 2013 American film written and directed by brothers Alex Smith and Andrew J. Smith and produced by Native American author Sherman Alexie. The film was based on the debut novel "Winter in the Blood" (1974) by noted author James Welch, who was a leader of the Native American renaissance in literature. The film is set in Montana. In what has been called "a tale of simple, raw struggle and survival among a small-town Native American community," Virgil First Raise, a Native American, returns home after waking drunk in a