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 (book) prisoners free. To avoid the disaster of "Tom", "Harry" was filled with sewage, sand, and sealed with cement. After the escape, the prisoners started digging another tunnel called "George", but this was abandoned when the camp was evacuated. On October 2, 2012, Penguin released "Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen" by author and journalist Simon Read. The book details the 50 murders that took place following the escape and the three-year manhunt by the Royal Air Force to bring the killers to justice. On January 27, 1951, NBC broadcast