Most people think of the Wooden Horse as the famous Wooden Horse of Troy or the Trojan Horse, with which the ancient Greeks tricked the Trojans into bringing about their own downfall. Hidden inside an enormous wooden model of a horse were thirty Greek soldiers who after gaining access to the city, opened the gates to let in the rest of the Greek army who laid waste to the city and finally defeated the Trojans, ending a ten year siege-war.

Just as famous, and perhaps just as forgettable, is the other Wooden Horse with which its builders didn’t break into, but rather, broke out of a fortified complex.

This article is about the Wooden Horse of Stalag Luft III, the famous German prisoner-of-war camp for Allied airmen during the Second World War. It will detail how the horse was made and how it facilitated the escape of the three men who dug this tunnel to freedom. The facts and figures in this article are supplied chiefly by my first-edition copy of “The Wooden Horse”, written by the escaper Eric Williams in 1949.

Stalag Luft III – Sagan, Poland – 1943

RAF Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams was shot down over Germany in December of 1942. While in a POW camp, he met and became friends with Lt. Richard Michael Codner. When they escaped from the camp where they were captives, they were hunted down and recaptured. As a punishment, both men were sent to Stalag Luft III near the town of Sagan in Poland. Considered escape-proof, Stalag Luft III was the most secure Allied airman POW camp in all of German-occupied Europe. The security-measures in place meant that it was virtually impossible to get out. There was barbed wire, fences, watchtowers, searchlights, armed guards, microphones buried into the ground to listen for tunnelling and a dusty grey topsoil and an annoyingly pale yellow sandy subsoil that made tunnelling (but more importantly, disposing of the excavated sand) especially hard.

The problem with the Germans’ logic was that they built the most secure camp to house their most troublesome and escape-hungry POWs. To them, this made sense. To the Allies, it merely served as a challenge to find out just how escape-proof this camp really was. And they put the Germans to test countless times. Tunnels were being dug out of the camp on an almost around-the-clock basis. But the problem was that the tunnels had to be aggravatingly long before they were the slightest bit of use to the POWs as a means of escaping.

Between the prisoner sleeping-quarters (large huts or barracks built on stilts about a foot off the ground) and the perimeter fences, were several yards of open ground. And between the perimeter fences and the safety of the woods were even more stretches of barren, empty, treeless, stumpless, hillless and bumpless ground. Even digging from the huts nearest to the fences, tunnels were well over a hundred or more feet long before they reached the trees, and the soil that had to be excavated for such a long tunnel was a constant headache to the POW escape-committee, a group of POWs whose job it was to fund and assist all escape-attempts within the camp.

Overcoming an Obstacle

Williams and Codner were quick to realise the problems associated with tunnelling out of the camp, but the problem was that this was the only way to escape. When Williams saw how hard and long a struggle it would be to dig a conventional tunnel from a building to the edge of the outlying woods, he knew he had to come up with a solution. When Codner mentioned an attempt by POWs to dig a tunnel right out in the middle of the ‘No-Man’s Land’ between the huts and the fences by digging the hole with their hands and hiding the sand in their pockets and covering the hole with bed-slats and sand, Williams was inspired to try and find a way to disguise a tunnel’s trapdoor out in the open, in plain view of the guards while the tunnel was dug underneath. Codner considered the idea stupid, it was impossible to disguise a trapdoor thoroughly enough that the “Goons” (the German sentries) wouldn’t notice it at once. But Williams persisted that there had to be a way.

He struck on the idea when he thought of the vaulting-horses that they used to have in school gymnasiums. Such horses, used for gymnastics, were about three feet high and about two feet wide at the base, hollow inside and with solid sides. Prisoners could put the vaulting-horse in the middle of the space between the huts and the fence and vault over it all day long while inside the horse and under the ground, a prisoner (transported inside the horse) could dig a tunnel. At the end of each tunnelling session, the prisoner climbed out of the tunnel, attached bags full of sand to the underside of the horse and held onto the inside of the horse while men carried it away to a safe place where the sand could be dispersed. The trapdoor to the tunnel would be covered with excess sand and the grey topsoil could be sprinkled on top. This would make the ground under the horse (once it had been carried away) look completely untampered with.

This still from the 1950 film “The Wooden Horse” shows a faithful reproduction of the actual horse used in the 1943 prison-camp escape

The third man in the escape, Oliver Philpot, a Canadian RAF pilot, acted as the ‘behind-the-scenes’ man during the escape. While Williams and Codner did most of the digging, Philpot helped with disposing of the excavated sand and organising the horse and the vaulters necessary to create the illusion of harmless exercise, to fool the German guards. In return for all his help, Codner and Williams promised him a spot in the escape.

Digging the Tunnel

Digging of the tunnel did not start right away. For the first few weeks all the vaulting-horse was used for was…vaulting. It was necessary to vault over the horse every single day for several weeks so that the German guards would get used to the sight of it…so used to it that they would pay absolutely no attention to it when it came time to dig the tunnel underneath it. There was always at least one vaulter in the group who acted as a total klutz. He would foul up his jumps and knock the horse over…deliberately…to show the Germans that there was nothing hidden inside. The Germans themselves took no chances – Within the first few days of the horse being built and used, it was scrutinised minutely by the guards to make sure there was nothing abnormal about it…which there wasn’t. It was a vaulting horse and that was all that it was meant to be. To the Germans, at least.

Once the Germans had gotten used to the sight of the horse, it was time to start digging. The plan was simple.

On every vaulting day, a man (either Williams or Codner) would hide inside the horse, holding onto the framework inside while men carried the horse out of the hut where it was stored. To carry the horse, they had a pair of long shafts which could be slid through two pairs of holes on the sides of the horse. Apart from making the horse easier to carry, the four holes also served as air-holes inside the horse.

The area where the tunnel was to start was marked by two pits in the ground which were eventually created by the constant scraping and landing of the feet of the vaulters over several weeks. By putting the horse between these two dents in the sand, it was easy to correctly access the tunnel mouth every single time.

Working alternatively, it took Williams and Codner four days to sink the shaft for the tunnel. It was to be two feet and six inches square and five feet deep. The shaft and the start of the tunnel were shored up with bricks and planks of wood. The trapdoor was set eighteen inches below the surface and was covered by a foot and a half of topsoil. This would prevent any German guard who walked over the top of the shaft to hear any hollow echoes underneath.

The first seven feet of the tunnel itself was shored up with wooden bedboards all around: bottom, roof and sides. This was a necessary precaution: the initial few feet of the tunnel were directly below the landing-area of the vaulters. Without sufficient shoring, the constant force of men landing on top of the tunnel would cause it to collapse. This was the only part of the tunnel, with the exception of the shaft, that was shored up. Because the tunnel was so near the surface, the weight of the sand above was not so great that cave-ins would be a likely possibility.

The conditions in the tunnel were terrible. Fresh air was almost nonexistent. The men dug with trowels or crude spades fashioned from food-cans. Their only source of light came from candles. They often worked naked or stripped to their waists because of the warmth in the tunnel, but also to prevent the German guards from seeing yellow subsoil (a telltale sign of a tunnel-in-progress) on their clothing. The tunnel was also extremely cramped. It averaged only two and a half feet by two and a half feet, giving the men barely any room to move. At the end of forty feet (a distance that took them eight weeks to dig), the men had almost given up. The lack of fresh air in the tunnel was chronic and the physical toll on both the tunnellers and the vaulters who covered for them, was beginning to show.

Tunnelling was not without risks. Cave-ins were a serious and constant problem. In the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III (In 1944), tunnels that were thirty feet below the ground required solid wood shoring and supports all the way along the tunnel to prevent cave-ins. This tunnel, just five feet below the surface with barely any shoring at all, was in just as much danger of a cave-in as one that was six times deeper under ground.

Miraculously, though, cave-ins on this tunnel were few. In fact there was only one major one to speak of, when Codner was in the tunnel. Some of the roof gave way, burying him alive. The cave-in was so severe that the surface of the sand was broken, opening a hole into the tunnel. A vaulter jumping over the horse spotted the hole and deliberately tripped when he landed, falling over the hole and covering it with his body. He laid there, pretending he’d twisted his ankle, while below, Codner managed to scoop away the fallen sand and shore up the cave-in with planks taken from the tunnel-shaft.

Eventually, though, the exertion of the digging and the sheer fetid nature of the air in the tunnel began to seriously effect the mens’ health. Williams was suffering severely from exhaustion brought on by the strain of the work and the lack of fresh oxygen. He was so ill that he was confined to the camp hospital for nearly a week. Although the tunnel didn’t progress very far in the meantime, his convalesence did give him a chance to pump other patients in the hospital for news about the outside world and what his chances were for escape.

Preparing for Escape

Provided your tunnel wasn’t discovered and it didn’t collapse, getting out of a prisoner-of-war camp in German-occupied Europe was pretty easy. The real problem in escaping was the struggle that many prisoners faced after getting beyond the wire. To get across occupied Europe, anyone who wished to travel anywhere at any time at all, required a whole armful of passes, letters, certificates, passports, identification-cards and travel-permits. All these things had to be forged by forgers inside the prison-camp for use by the potential escapee.

Apart from the paperwork, prisoners also required civilian clothing. All prisoners were put into camps wearing their military uniforms. To make it through occupied Europe, they had to have civilian clothes so that they didn’t stand out as the enemy. Tailors inside the camp would churn out suits, waistcoats, overcoats, shirts, jackets, shorts, jumpers and any other article of clothing that might be needed to dress a prisoner-of-war up as an everyday civilian. They used everything from bedsheets, blankets, curtains and any old and discarded uniforms that they could find, to make new clothing.

Escaping prisoners also needed cover-stories. All potential escapees had to clear every stage of their escape-plan with the ‘Escape Committee’, the group of prisoners whose job it was to oversee all escape-attempts within the camp. This wasn’t just a formality – the Escape Committee had control over the forged papers, money, passports, stockpiles of clothing, food, equipment, maps and anything else that an escapee might need during his bid to freedom. But he could only get these if the plan that he had for his escape was considered feasible.

All three escapees, Eric Williams, Richard Codner and Oliver Philpot, had their cover-stories that they would be French labourers. To this end, they were supplied with money, tools, working-class outfits and work-permits and passports in French. When they escaped, Oliver would go his own way while Williams and Codner would go as a pair, Codner spoke fluent French and so was able to liase with any friendly French workmen that they might find and through them, contact any local resistance-movements.

The Breakout

With the distance between the tunnel mouth and the safety of the forest around the camp greatly reduced by their ingenuity, Williams, Codner and Philpot finished their tunnel at the end of October. At six o’clock at night on the 29th of October, 1943, the three men made their escape.

Codner had been left in the tunnel all day to dig the last few feet towards the safety of the woods. He survived in the dark with the help of a candle and a length of metal pipe, which he stuck up through the soil every few feet to create air-holes to ventiliate the tunnel and compensate for the increasingly oxygen-deprived air below the ground.

Shortly after five o’clock, Codner and Williams, together with a third man, were transported towards the tunnel inside the horse, where Codner and Williams made their way down, with the third man left above ground to seal the entrance of the tunnel and obliterate all evidence of its existence. The three escapees stayed below ground in the interim period, preparing for the escape by continuing to dig and handing each person their allotted escape-materials – food, money, equipment, necessary identity and travel-papers and their outfits of civilian clothing.

At six o’clock, the tunnel was broken open, safely within the cover of the forest and the three men climbed out. With the guards in the camp concentrating on the prisoners within the wire, they paid no attention to the three men who were making their getaway outside the wire.

The Escape

Oliver Philpot, the Canadian, headed off alone. He thought that having a partner would slow him up. Williams and Codner stuck together, travelling as a pair of French labourers. Codner spoke fluent French and this helped them bridge any language-barriers and gave them a chance of contacting any local resistance movements. Williams, who spoke nothing but English, was advised by the members of the Escape Committee to just play dumb, or at best, to merely say the words: “Ich bin auslander, nicht verstehen”, or: “I am a foreigner. I don’t understand”.

Williams and Codner travelled by train, hopping from city to city, heading northwest. They saw this as the best way to put as much distance between themselves and the camp and travelled by rail as far as the Polish port city of Stettin. Here, they managed to contact French labourers and dockworkers who were part of the local underground movement. After interrogation to ensure that they were who they claimed to be, the French agreed to try and help.

It took several days, but eventually, Williams and Codner managed to secure passage (that is to say, they would be smuggled aboard) a ship leaving Stettin for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. Although the two officers believed that this was a waste of time (Denmark being occupied by Germany), their contacts assured them that it would be easier to get to Sweden from Poland via Denmark than from Poland to Sweden directly, since the quantity of ship-traffic between Denmark and Sweden was much greater.

The journey was a very unplesant one. The ship was searched by S.S. officers with sniffer-dogs before it was allowed to leave port. The captain plied the Germans with schnapps to distract them from their work and peppered the dogs’ noses to prevent them from smelling his hidden ‘cargo’. To keep well out of the reach of the Germans, Williams and Codner were confined to the chain-locker in the ship’s bilge. Despite being provided with blankets, the journey was uncomfortable at best.

In Denmark, their initial plans for escaping to Sweden were foiled by resistance-activity. Acts of sabotage had caused an increase of guards around important parts of Copenhagen such as the docks, which made escape by a large ship impossible. Instead, Williams and Codner were taken to Sweden in a small fishing-boat by one of their resistance contacts.

By the next morning, the two men had reached the Swedish city of Goteburg where they managed to contact the British Consulate. To their surprise, Oliver Philpot had also made a successful escape to Goteburg, taking a train to Danzig and then a boat from there directly to Goteburg, beating his fellow escapees by a full week! After spending another week and a bit in Sweden, they were flown back to England and eventual safety.

Eric Williams died on Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1983. He was seventy-two.
Oliver Philpot died on the 6th of May, 1993. He was eighty.

Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to find any birth and death records of Flight Lt. Richard Michael Clinton Codner.

Left to Right: Richard M. Codner, Eric Williams, Oliver Philpot