AIRMAN WAS PART OF HISTORY

Former PoW survived ‘Great Escape’

A Saskatchewan veteran who was believed to be one of the last living people involved in the 1944 “Great Escape” from the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp died this month at the age of 100.

William Leslie (Les) Kell was living on a farm near Canwood, roughly 170 kilometres north of Saskatoon, when he enlisted in the Armed Forces less than a month after his 24th birthday, says his daughter, Elaine Tochor.

It was the end of the Great Depression and Kell, like many of the province’s young men, was looking for work. Fighting in the Second World War seemed a good option.

After a year of training, Kell said goodbye to his girlfriend, Marion Odegaard, and made his way overseas to serve as a flight lieutenant.

He promised he would return home to marry her.

On one of his first missions, the bomber Kell was in was shot down over the North Sea. He and his crew spent two days in a dinghy before they were captured and taken to the Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp about 160 kilometres southeast of Berlin in what is now Poland.

He survived as a prisoner of war for nearly three years.

“Being a farm boy from Saskatchewan, he was resourceful,” Tochor said.

Kell helped his fellow prisoners as they built three large tunnels intended to be used for an unprecedented mass escape attempt — efforts immortalized in the 1963 movie The Great Escape.

When men disappeared down one of the tunnels on March 24, 1944, Kell wasn’t among them, however.

“He had chosen not to be on the list of people to leave the camp

He had chosen not to be on the list of people to leave the camp because he didn’t speak German.

because he didn’t speak German,” Tochor said.

It was a fortuitous choice. The tunnels’ builders had hoped to free about 220 men, but only 76 escaped. Most of them were captured and killed.

Kell was released when the war ended in May 1945, and almost immediately returned home to marry Odegaard.

The pair eventually moved to Outlook, where they raised four children.

Kell worked as a meat cutter in a local grocery store and later did work with the University of Saskatchewan’s department of agriculture.

Though Tochor doesn’t remember her dad talking much about the war while she was growing up, she said he became very open about it later in life and reconnected with other prisoners of war.

He worked with one of his granddaughters to write about his experience as a prisoner of war, which the family has self-published.

“It became an important history to want to retain for people,” Tochor said.

When Kell died on Aug. 11, he and Marion, who is 98, had been married 72 years.

Tochor says she still has the worn photo of her mother that her father carried in his pocket and drew strength from throughout the war.

“They have quite a love story,” Tochor said.