16535/1A TROWBRIDGE man who was a prisoner of war at the camp immortalised in the classic film The Great Escape has retraced his steps to freedom.

Ivor Harris, 84, a former Flight Lieutenant with the RAF, returned to Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland last week to commemorate 60 years since prisoners left the camp.

Mr Harris said: "I don't think any of us knew what to expect. It's hard to recall after 60 years quite what you felt at the time.

"We had a ceremony and the mayor of the town and a lot of local people attended. That was very emotional.

"The rest of the time was spent travelling around the area we had marched once we left the camp."

Mr Harris, of Cock Hill, House Court, was shot down in his Mustang over Boulogne, northern France, in May 1944, just days before the D-Day landings in Normandy.

After being interrogated for 28 days, the maximum allowed under the Geneva convention, Mr Harris ended up at the camp.

Stalag Luft III, 168km south east of Berlin, was the hub of the prison system and now famous for The Great Escape, which told the story of how more than 600 Allied POWs worked together to execute a break-out, from digging tunnels and faking passports to organising clothes to wear once they had escaped.

But of the 76 men who escaped the compound through a tunnel named Harry on March 24, 1944, 73 were recaptured.

Fifty were later shot on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Only three made it back to England.

Mr Harris said: "I arrived at the camp about three months after the escape and there was a self-imposed ban on escaping among prisoners as a consequence of the 50 Allied officers who were murdered by the Gestapo."

Mr Harris revealed that, despite the ban, he had been part of a group that continued tunnelling through an undiscovered route nicknamed George.

"Tom, Dick and Harry were the well-known tunnels but there was a fourth, George, which we were still digging for security purposes," he said.

A sense of uneasiness among prisoners had followed the killings and Mr Harris said the tunnel under the theatre was kept open in case prison guards began executing inmates.

On January 27, 1945,

prisoners were ordered to leave the camp to escape

the advancing Russians and marched 100 miles over

the next five days.

Finally liberated by the Russians in Berlin, Mr Harris returned to England exactly a year after being shot down, on May 28, 1945.

He said his emotional trip to Stalag Luft III last week was only his second visit since the war, after returning last year to pay tribute to the 50 murdered officers.

Mr Harris said during his trip, a school in Ilowa, 25 miles from the site of the former prison, asked his group permission to rename their school The School of Allied Airmen and Prisoners of War.

"The thing that moved us most was the visit to the school and the interest they showed. The Polish people have a very strong sense of tradition and culture," he said.