Tom Wilson
RAF navigator who played the violin to drown out noise before the ‘Wooden Horse’ POW escape
TOM WILSON, who has died aged 97, was a British RAF officer who played the violin to cover the noise of sand dispersal during the celebrated Wooden Horse escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III, in which captured airmen were held during the Second World War.
He also played an important role in the successful breakout by Eric Williams, Mike Codner and Ollie Philpot, and later became a distinguished Warwickshire headmaster.
Thomas William Spencer Wilson was born in Birmingham on December 12 1920, the son of a senior research engineer. A precociously clever child, he was educated at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield, where he excelled in science and languages and became an enthusiastic violinist, a member of the corps and Sunday School teacher.
He won a scholarship to Birmingham University in 1939, and gained a degree in Electrical Engineering. In 1941 he joined the RAF, after rejecting pacifism because he already knew of the persecution of the German Jews. During his childhood he had played with the sons of several refugees being sheltered by Jewish family friends, the Kahns.
He became a navigator and initially flew in Beaufighters before joining 192 (Special Duties) Squadron, equipped with modified Wellington bombers whose role was to gather electronic intelligence (ELINT). In addition to his navigation duties, Wilson was a radar operator and was responsible for collecting intelligence on the Germans’ extensive air-defence radar and communications systems.
On May 26 1943 his Wellington was shot down over The Hague, and after parachuting down he was left unconscious beside a ditch, before being captured and taken to Stalag Luft III in Silesia, now part of Poland.
“The Entertainments Officer welcomed us,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Gentlemen, my job is to keep 1,500 officers here sane until the end of the war. If you can do anything at all in the entertainments field, it’s your duty to help.’” Wilson signed up for the prisoners’ orchestra and bought a battered violin, which he restored, “crushing almonds for oil to clean it”.
When Eric Williams and Mike Codner began tunnelling operations from beneath a wooden vaulting horse placed near the perimeter fence, Wilson joined the gymnastic sessions designed to allay German suspicions.
The tunnellers worked naked, excavating tons of the distinctive yellow sand and stuffing it into sacks sewn from cut-off trouser legs, before being lugged back into the barber’s shop inside the horse. To give them enough time to complete the tunnel, the exhausted vaulters often trained for four hours a day.
After Wilson tore his Achilles tendon in a crashing fall, he became a “dispersal stooge”, playing his violin and running choir practices in the barber shop to cover the sound of the sand that was being dumped underneath. He would play Handel sonatas from memory, until a fellowofficer stationed outside casually put on his hat – the pre-arranged signal that the coast was clear.
Wilson would nod to the vaulters, who then lifted several floorboards and upended the horse so that the filthy tunneller could wriggle down into the gap and disperse the sand under the hut, while the “choir” roared out sea shanties.
There was great rejoicing when on October 29 1943 Willams, Codner and Philpot escaped along the narrow, airless passage and melted into the surrounding woodland, carrying civilian clothes and forged documents.
Posing as foreign workers, all eventually arrived safely in neutral Sweden before returning to Britain after arguably the most successful escape of the war; unlike the Great Escape a few months later from a nearby compound, when Hitler had 50 prisoners shot, there were no reprisals or executions.
Wilson later wrote: “Although it was terrific that three men escaped, the main point was to keep the ferrets [guards trained to detect escapes] on the lookout, scrambling around under huts, not fighting on the Eastern front. I’m proud of the ingenuity everyone showed; making tunnel lamps from cooking oil and pyjama-cord wicks, using bed-boards to shore up the tunnel and making ink for forgeries, condensing smoke from burning cooking fat.”
As German opposition crumbled, Wilson and his fellow-officers were taken first to Nuremberg and then on a long forced march to Stalag VII-A at Moosburg in Bavaria, dodging Allied and German fire en route and bartering for scraps of food with cigarettes.
On April 29 1945, the camp, holding more than 100,000 prisoners, was liberated by General Patton and his American troops when a Sherman tank drove through the perimeter fence, but there were still no rations. Wilson and a group of officers escaped and drove the Kommandant’s herd of swine back inside. The famished troops made the most of the pigs.
Despite the privations he had suffered, however, Wilson never felt bitter towards his captors. In 1950 he married a young German, Gabriele Claessens, whom he had met two years earlier at the first international student seminar in Berlin.
To his father’s fury, he switched from engineering to teaching and took a Cambridge degree in Russian and German. He taught at the Royal Liberty School, Romford, then became headmaster of Coleshill Grammar School near Birmingham. He substituted Russian for Latin and always promoted languages as a path to international harmony, leading many groups of exchange students to Russia and Germany.
He retired in 1983 and became a Church of England reader, taking services at Coleshill and Maxstoke. Spry and mentally sharp despite increasing deafness, he continued his charitable work into his late 80s and remained a keen violinist. In March 2009, as one of the last survivors of the Wooden Horse escape effort, he revisited the site of Stalag Luft III and was reunited with a handful of fellow Pows, although no trace of the tunnel or the compound remained.
Tom Wilson is survived by his wife and two sons.