Paul Royle

“Edgar and myself were together when we were recaptured and behaved in the same manner,” Royle said in 2004. “There was no reason why one should live and not the other. Rationality did not come into it. I haven’t a clue as to why I wasn’t chosen.”

Heinrich Himmler, head of the the SS, issued an order declaring: “The increase of escapes by officer PoWs is a menace to internal security.” All recaptured officers were to be handed over to the Gestapo.

The 50 escapers who would be executed were chosen by SS-Gruppenführer Artur Nebe, head of the Kripo, the criminal police department. He was a career detective who had risen through the Nazi ranks and had commanded one of the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, in Russia. Whatever his criteria, Nebe examined the records of the escaped prisoners and is reported to have become agitated while selecting the condemned men. He probably decided their fates on March 27, 1944. No nationality was spared. Young and old perished. Some of the most troublesome prisoners survived. Nebe himself was executed later that year for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

After emerging from the escape tunnel known as “Harry” — Humphreys is thought to have been No 49 out of the tunnel and Royle No 50, but accounts differ — the two men left the camp with the rather unrealistic intention of reaching Switzerland. They were among the men known as “hardarsers” who would have to walk across country rather than catch trains. Temperatures were below freezing, with thick snow on the ground. “We walked south, and not north, and that was about as good as it got,” Royle said later.

The two men ate their escape rations within a couple of hours of leaving the camp and rested in a pine forest. They tried to sleep, then continued walking as darkness fell, but in the early hours of March 26, just 24 hours after the breakout, they were stopped while walking along the autobahn near the town of Tiefenfurt by members of the German home guard. They had walked 16 miles in the snow. Escorted to the village police station, they were put in a cell overnight and then handed over to the Gestapo in the town of Görlitz, 40 miles away, where they were interrogated. The two men faced very different fates.

Humphreys had been born in Poland but was British. He was shot down while flying a Bristol Blenheim over the Channel ports in December 1940. He had a young wife who lived in Oxford, and was last seen at Görlitz on March 31, 1944. He was cremated at Liegnitz (now Legnica) and his ashes returned to Stalag Luft III. His grave can be found in the old garrison cemetery in Poznan, Poland.

Royle’s interrogators threatened to kill him, but he was sent back to Sagan where he spent several weeks in the camp prison. He was one of 23 recaptured men who survived. Three prisoners succeeded in getting back to Britain.

Paul Royle had been shot down in a Blenheim while carrying out low-level reconnaissance in France in May 1940. He chose to remain with his badly wounded navigator and was captured. It was his first mission.

After being interviewed by Luftwaffe intelligence officers at an interrogation camp near Frankfurt, Royle was sent to Stalag Luft I at Barth on the Baltic. From the first days of his five years as a prisoner, Royle was at the heart of escape activity. He worked on several tunnels at Barth, but all of them were discovered. In early 1942, he was transferred to Stalag Luft III just outside Sagan, which is now known as Zagan in Poland.

The escape committee in the north compound of the camp, led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell — known as Big X and played by Richard Attenborough in the Hollywood film The Great Escape — decided to dig three sophisticated tunnels, which would be 30ft deep, 300ft long, with wood panelling, electric lighting and air conditioning.

The business of escape was put on an industrial footing. More than 600 prisoners were involved in the project, which aimed to get 200 men out of the camp. The escape committee recruited former miners and engineers to dig the tunnels, while other men forged documents and made civilian clothing, or took part in a sophisticated security operation. Paul Royle was one of the men known as “penguins” who disposed of the sand from the tunnels. “We used to put the legs of our long johns filled with dirt inside our pants,” said Royle. “We’d put a nail in the bottom and that was attached to a string leading to my pocket. When I found somewhere in the camp where the colour was the same as [the sand] in my pants, I pulled out the nail and shuffled it into the ground when the guards weren’t looking. That’s why we were called penguins.”

Tom was discovered after five months of digging; Dick was abandoned for storage; but Harry, which was dug under a stove through a concrete foundation in Hut 104, was completed in March 1944 when it reached the edge of the pine forest that surrounded the camp.

After his recapture, Royle spent a further year in Stalag Luft III. As the war neared its end in early 1945, the prisoners were marched westwards. Royle’s group eventually met troops of the British 2nd Army near Hamburg and were flown to England.

Paul Gordon Royle was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1914 and educated at Hale School. His father was an architect. Royle had intended to become a mining engineer, but was persuaded to join the RAF and arrived in London in early 1939 with 14 other Australian volunteers.

After the war, he studied at the Royal School of Mines in London — which included tunnelling — and married an Englishwoman, Georgina Forster-Knight. They had two sons and a daughter: Paul, who became an engineer and is retired in Nottingham; Margaret, who is a facilities officer with the Enviroment Agency in Shrewsbury, and Francis, who works in student support at Walthamstow College, London.

When the children were young, Royle returned to Australia to complete his studies at the School of Mines in Kalgoorlie, a rough gold-mining town, and then moved to a remote site in Tasmania to build a hydroelectric plant. Raising three children in such places proved too much for Georgina, who returned to Britain. The marriage was dissolved.

Royle met his second wife, Pamela Fortune (who was also English) while working on another dam-related project, in Aberystwyth in the Fifties. He spent most of the rest of his career working on civil engineering projects. Pamela had a PhD in zoology and was teaching at Aberystwyth university. They had two children: Gordon, who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Western Australia, and Lucy, who is an accountant.

He is survived by his second wife, who lived with him in a nursing home in Perth, and all his children.

Royle was determined to look forward not backward. His son Gordon only knew about his involvement in events at Stalag Luft III when he read the book The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill — another Australian who was also a prisoner at Sagan — when he was 12. “I asked him if he knew that some man with the same name as his was in the book only to be amazed when he told me that it was him.”

Not wanting his life to be defined by one event, Royle only started to write about his wartime experiences and give interviews after he was 80. He disliked the Hollywood film, which featured Steve McQueen making a memorable bid for freedom on a motorbike. “There were no motorbikes,” said Royle, “and the Americans weren’t there.”

In the wake of his death, just one of the 76 men who took part in the Great Escape remains alive. He is Richard Churchill, who is 95 and lives in Devon.

In retirement, Royle kept himself busy. He studied at the Claremont School of Art, graduating with a diploma in 1999. He was a proficient carpenter (who made all the furniture in the family home), and a fanatical bridge player. He attended keep-fit for seniors three times a week and continued driving until he was 99. All forms of theatre and film gave him much pleasure, and he had a particular fondness for coloured socks.

He lived life without any regard to his age — as if continually making the most of the extra time he had been given in March 1944. “While we all hoped for the future,” said Royle, “we were lucky to get the future.”

Paul Royle, wartime escaper and civil engineer, was born on January 17, 1914. He died on August 23, 2015, aged 101