‘Great Escape’ vet dies at 101
Paul Royle, who took part in the breakout in Germany, hated the Hollywood version.
Paul Royle, an Australian pilot who took part in a mass breakout from a German prisoner of war camp during World War II that is remembered as ‘the Great Escape,’ has died in his hometown of Perth. He was 101.
The escape was the subject of a 1963 Hollywood movie, “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen, a work of artistic license that Royle loathed. Royle died Aug. 23 at a Perth hospital after surgery on a hip fracture that he suffered in a fall in a nursing home three weeks ago, his son Gordon Royle said.
Paul Royle’s death leaves only one survivor of the 76 men who escaped from Stalag Luft III, in Sagan, 100 miles southeast of Berlin: 94year-old Dick Churchill of Britain, a former squadron leader, the son said.
The survivors had formed a sort of club and kept in contact through a newsletter called the “Sagan Select Subway Society.”
Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the tunnel escape in March 1944, Royle said he was no fan of the Hollywood interpretation of the story, which showed McQueen’s character making a dramatic attempt to outrun the Germans on a motorcycle.
“The movie I disliked intensely because there were no motorbikes,” Royle told Australian Broadcasting Corp., “and the Americans weren’t there.”
Gordon Royle said his father was angry that Hollywood would create an adventure out of soldiers doing often tedious and dangerous work in preparing for the escape.
“He felt the movie was a glamorization of the tedium and the drabness of the actuality,” Gordon Royle said.
“The idea that they got on a motorbike and soared over a barbed wire fence is far from the reality, which was darkness and cold and terror,” he said.
Only three of the escapees — two Norwegians and a Dane — made it home. Fifty others, from 12 nations, were shot dead when caught. The remaining 23, including Paul Royle, were sent back to the stalag or to other camps but survived the war.
Royle, who was a pilot in the Royal Air Force when he was shot down over France on May 17, 1940, said his contribution to the escape operation was to distribute dirt excavated from the 360-foot tunnel around the camp grounds. This was done by surreptitiously releasing the soil down his trouser legs in areas where the ground color vaguely matched.
He spent two days hiding in a snow-covered forest before he was recaptured.
Royle remained a prisoner until he was liberated by British troops from the Marlag und Milag Nord prison camp in Germany on May 2, 1945.
Royle was born in Perth on Jan. 17, 1914, left school at 14 and worked with his engineer father surveying airfields in Australia’s sparsely populated outback. In 1936 he enrolled in the Western Australian School of Mines to become a mine surveyor.
Recruited by the RAF, Royle relocated to England in February 1939 to train as a pilot officer.
Gordon Royle said he had no idea his father had been involved in the famous escape until he read his name in a book about the breakout in the mid-1970s.
“He was always looking forward. He never looked back. He wanted to focus on what was coming, not what had been,” Gordon Royle said.
The son said he found newspaper clipping and obituaries related to the escape among his father’s belongings. “He maintained an interest but hadn’t let it define him as a person,” Gordon Royle said. After the war Paul Royle worked in mining and engineering until he retired to Perth in 1980.
He is survived by his second wife, their two children and a sister. All four live in Perth. He is also survived by three British children from his first marriage. He had eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.