Flight From Colditz

Colditz Castle was the only high-security prison of its kind in Germany. It was where the Germans placed the prisoners who had caused them the most problems – serial escapers. In theory putting all the bad eggs in one basket should have made it easier for the Germans to control, but in practice all they had done was create an escape university.

The castle was built on an outcrop of rock, with a sheer drop of 250 yards down to the River Mulde, and was 400 miles from any frontier not under German control, but this did not deter the prisoners. They began escape planning from almost the day they arrived – and continued to do so throughout the months and years that followed, becoming ever more daring and ingenious.

The men had tried everything they could think of to escape; from leaping over the fence in the exercise ground, burrowing under the stage, to disguising themselves as women, German officers and guards. It was whilst Flight Lieutenant L.J.E. ‘Bill’ Goldfinch was looking out of a window that the most bizarre idea of them all was conceived. It was the winter of 1943-1944 and it was snowing. As he stared out of the window he watched the snowflakes swirling upwards and over the roof of the castle – and it made him think.

Of course the very idea of building a glider in the highest-security prison in Germany was preposterous. Yet nothing, it seemed, was beyond their capabilities.

Every single item for the construction of the glider had to be stolen or made from whatever objects were in the castle – and all this had to be done under the noses of the highly-vigilant German guards. Altogether, 6,000 pieces of wood, each of a specific length and width, were manufactured, using hand-made tools or items ‘liberated’ from the canteen. There was also a complex lookout system which had forty men watching every movement made by the guards.

The glider was completed but, with the end of the war, it never flew from the top of the castle. Thus it was, that a TV company decided to recreate the Colditz glider using the prisoners’ original drawing and then release it from the top of the castle.

Flight from Colditz tells the story of how the original glider was built by the prisoners and of the audacious attempt to fly the replica from Colditz. This is an absorbing book packed with photographs and loaded with tension.

Before the war Bill had been a civil engineer in the Colonial Service and worked on the Gold Coast (now Ghana), before gaining employment with Salisbury City Council in Wiltshire. It was from the latter that he joined up