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
The Great Escape (film) he escapes again, he will be shot. Bartlett remains defiant and immediately plans the greatest escape ever attempted, with tunnels to break out 250 prisoners. The POWs organise into teams. Flight Lieutenant Robert Hendley is "the scrounger" who finds needed materials, from a camera to clothes and identity cards. Australian Flying Officer Louis Sedgwick, "the manufacturer", makes tools like picks for digging and bellows for pumping air into the tunnels. Flight Lieutenants Danny Velinski and William "Willie" Dickes are "the tunnel kings" in charge of the digging. Flight Lieutenant Andrew MacDonald acts as intelligence provider and Bartlett's second-in-command. Lieutenant Commander