So I was re-watching The Great Escape, which is one of my favorites. There’s a scene I always found funny, in which Steve McQueen’s character (Hilts) is asked by the senior officers to explain his upcoming escape plan. Here it is.
He and his partner Ives are going to dig straight down a few feet, then burrow away while making occasional air holes. After laying this out Hilts hangs a supremely dumb look on his face and waits for their reaction. What I’m wondering is, did he really expect the plan to work, or did he just see it as a worthy project and a way to flip off the Germans?
I’ve read the Paul Brickhill book about the real escape, and I know the film compresses and fictionalizes a great deal (including inventing the Hilts character from nearly whole cloth). But taking the movie on its own as fiction, what do you think Hilts’ real motivation was?
I think he realized the mole scheme had little chance of working. But not yet knowing all the details about the tunneling project, and seeing that his new friend Ives needed a goal to work for, he saw it as a long-shot gamble worth taking. But while he seems completely guileless when he explains it, I think on some level he realizes how absurd it is. But he’s being as optimistic as he can, both for Ives and himself. Of course, in the very next scene we see them captured and filthy, being escorted into the cooler and Hilts seems completely unsurprised.
In my mind, it’s the digging down three feet part where it fails. That would take some time and they’d be seen, irrespective of the “blind spot” Hilts found by the wire. He must have known it wouldn’t work.
I could see somebody trying such a plan because there’s a slim possibility it might work,
If you’ve read Brickhill’s book, then you know the part where they said that, based on experience, you can’t pack dirt back into the same amount of space it took up when you excavated it. They must have known that the “mole” plan was doomed to only work for an extremely short distance. But if there was plan that the “blind spot” combined with the “mole” tactic worked well enough to get two guys out, it would have been worth it.
There’s also the psychological factor that they wouldn’t be starting from way back where the huts were and digging a very long distance past the wire. If you haven’t yet read it, have a look at Eric Williams’ book The Wooden Horse (or the movie of the same title based on the book), about another escape from the same camp – Stalag Luft III (although a different compound). The Wooden Horse of the title was a wooden “vaulting horse”, a piece of exercise equipment. The prisoners put it oiut in the yard every day and spent time vaultinbg over it. The secret was that the place they put it had a secret hatch for a tunnel – right out in the open ijn the yard. The hatch could be covered up with dirt and perfectly hidden. With that subterfuge, they had nowhere near as far yo dig. It worked, too. I believe this is mentioned in passing in Brickhill’s book.