Hero of famous wooden horse wartime escape dies at age of 97
THE RAF officer who played violin to mask the noise of tunnellers involved in the famed Wooden Horse PoW escape has died.
Tom Wilson, former headmaster at Coleshill Grammar School, in Warwickshire, passed away on November 23, just two weeks before his 98th birthday.
Born on December 12, 1920, the war hero was immortalised in the 1950 film The Wooden Horse, starring Leo Genn, David Tomlinson and Anthony Steel. The blockbuster told the true story of the daring October 1943 escape from Stalag Luft III, when prisoners used a gymnastic vaulting horse to mask their tunnel’s entrance.
Mr Wilson was the eldest of William and Florence Wilson’s five children. Florence, from New Zealand, was a piano teacher. William was head of research at the GEC factory, Witton.
The youngster attended Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, in Sutton Coldfield, and won a physics scholarship to the University of Birmingham, studying electrical engineering. His first job was as an apprentice at Nechells Power Station.
Mr Wilson’s father considered engineering so important to the war effort, he forbade his son from joining up and becoming “cannon fodder”. But when Mr Wilson’s friend, Bob Ayres, was reported missing from a reconnaissance flight over Brest, he defied his father and joined the RAF.
Mr Wilson had fond memories of local dances at his Aberystwyth training camp. He recalled: “On principle I always chose a partner from the ‘wall flowers’, a different one each dance. I reckoned that every girl who bought a ticket deserved a dance and did my best to supply the lack of partners – a lot of my comrades spent most of the evenings round the bar, not having learned to dance.”
He became a navigator on night fighters, then in modified Wellington bombers. He was given the covert mission of finding out how the Germans were managing to jam British electronic navigation systems.
On Mr Wilson’s 13th mission, in May 1943, his plane was shot down over the Hague, killing the pilot, while the rest of the crew parachuted down. Mr Wilson was discovered unconscious beside a canal by a group of local farmers who were sheltering a Dutch resistance fighter.
Unwilling to risk the life of the fugitive, Mr Wilson immediately agreed to be handed over to the Germans and was taken to Stalag Luft III in Silesia, now part of Poland. As officers, the 1,500 inmates were not required to do manual labour, but Mr Wilson was determined to keep up morale.
He said: “The Entertainments Officer came to welcome us and said, ‘Gentlemen, my job is to keep 1,500 officers here sane until the end of the war. If any of you can do anything at all in the entertainments’ field, it’s your duty to help’. I signed up as a violinist in the prisoners’ orchestra and bought a battered violin, which I then restored, crushing almonds to make oil to clean it.”
When pilot Eric Williams, a serial escape artist, devised a breakout based on the wooden horse of Troy, Tom volunteered as a vaulter while tunnelling operations began beneath the horse. He only began playing his violin to cover the sound of the sand being shifted after tearing an Achilles tendon vaulting over the horse.
When a section of the tunnel gave way, leaving a small hole in the surface of the prison yard, Mr Wilson played his violin as loudly as possible to mask the sound of desperate attempts to shore it up.
Three men, including Eric Williams, escaped through the tunnel.
Mr Wilson later recalled with pride the ingenuity and teamwork shown.
He said: “We even made ink for the forged documents by condensing the black smoke from burning cooking fat,” he wrote. “We improvised tunnel lamps from cans filled with cooking oil and used pyjamacord as wicks while bed-boards and stolen planks were used to shore up the tunnel’s sides and roof.”
With German defeat looming, Mr Wilson and his fellow officers were force-marched to Moosburg Camp in Bavaria. They bartered cigarettes for food to bolster their starvation rations.
On April 29, 1945, the men got their freedom when American troops drove a Sherman tank through the perimeter fence, but there were still no rations for the 100,000 prisoners.
So Mr Wilson and a group of officers broke out of the camp and drove the former Kommandant’s herd of pigs back inside. The starving troops fell on the animals, ripping them into pieces with their bare hands and wolfing down the meat.
The next day, they tracked down a small deer in the forest and drove it into camp. Mr Wilson remembered the incident vividly, later writing: “The poor animal was absolutely petrified. Then it lowered its antlers and charged the crowd. It, too, was torn into chops by the famished prisoners, though no portion came our way that time.”
On Civvy Street, Mr Wilson gained a double first in German and Russian at Pembroke College, Cambridge, then became a teacher at Romford’s Royal Liberty School.
He met his wife Gabriele Claessens, a German intellectual, in 1948 during an international student peace seminar in Berlin. The couple married two years later.
In 2009, Mr Wilson went back with fellow POWs to the site of Stalag Luft III for the 65th anniversary of the Great Escape, which was staged in 1944 at a nearby compound. This was considered less successful than the Wooden Horse escape as Hitler had subsequently ordered 50 prisoners to be shot as reprisals.
Mr Wilson noted the site of the camp was by then covered in trees, with no trace of the compound or the tunnel remaining.
In later life, he was a minister, chorister and charity worker at Coleshill church. He lived in Coventry Road, Coleshill, with wife Gabi, who survives him along with their two sons and three grandchildren.