One of the last two survivors of the “Great Escape”, the daring prison breakout during the Second World War has died in a hospital in Perth.
Paul Royle was 101 years old when he died on Sunday at Hollywood Private Hospital, following surgery for a fractured hip.
He was one of more than 70 men who escaped from the German prisoner-of-war camp in Poland, Stalag Luft III in 1944, which was later immortalised in the 1963 film, starring Steve McQueen.
Mr Royle was unimpressed with the film because of its American influence, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in an interview last year: “The movie I disliked intensely because there were no motorbikes [at Stalag Luft 111] ... and the Americans weren’t there.”
“What was the leading man? Steve McQueen ... oh, he was all right.”
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He told the ABC that he did not think he had achieved anything extraordinary. “Oh, I don’t think so. Most people have extraordinary lives if they think of it,” he said.
“While we all hoped for the future we were lucky to get the future. We eventually defeated the Germans and that was that.”
Mr Royle was living in Hollywood Village, in Nedlands, a community offering care and independent living, when he fell.
His son Gordon Royle, a mathematics professor at the University of Western Australia, said his father was a remarkable man.
“Dad continued to live his life to the full. It was a fall that killed him in the end,” he said.
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A memorial service will be held at Karrakatta Cemetery on Wednesday.
A total of 76 men broke out of Stalag Luft III on a bitterly cold March night in 1944, digging a 10-metre-deep tunnel underneath the camp.
While three Allied prisoners made it to freedom, the rest of the men were quickly recaptured and 50 were shot dead on Hitler’s orders.
Mr Royle, a former RAF Flight Lieutenant was one of the lucky ones, having been spared execution. He later said it was “pure chance” that he survived.
The only living member of the legendary prison break is a British man, Dick Churchill, who is 94.
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In an interview in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Great Escape, Mr Royle said he still had vivid memories of emerging from the tunnel to a snowy landscape.
“It was very pleasant and all we saw was great heaps of snow and pine trees. There was snow everywhere, it was cold,” he said.
After making it through the tunnel, Mr Royle waited for his companion and the pair walked through the night before finding a place to sleep for the day in the bushes.
His freedom was short-lived however, lasting only a few hours. He and his companion were recaptured in a small village nearby and taken to a local jail in a German village.
“[It was a] dreadful place, a bit like Fremantle jail ... only worse,” he said.
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He was later sent back to Stalag Luft 111, where he met Paul Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot, who wrote the book The Great Escape.
Mr Royle spent nearly five years as a prisoner of war before returning to Australia and working in the Kalgoorlie mining industry.
He was the son of an architect and went looking for work in the north of Western Australia during the Great Depression. He eventually found work in a remote gold mine and later enrolled at Kalgoorlie’s School of Mining to train as an engineer.
When the Second World War broke out he volunteered to train as pilot when the RAF began recruiting in Australia and New Zealand.
He told the Birmingham Mail in 1998: “I came to England before the war in 1939 as one of 14 Australians recruited by the RAF.
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“We were given short service commissions and a little bit of training. The first place we were based was Desford near Leicestershire, then a training school near Hull.
“From there we were moved to Andover in Hampshire where we were given our flight training.”
The training soon turned into the real thing when Officer Royle joined the RAF’s 53 Squadron after war was declared on September 1, 1939.
The 26 year-old took to the skies in a Blenheim bomber – but disaster was looming.
“I was shot down on my first mission,” he recalled.
“It was our job to try to find the German troops in France. Of course there were so many Messerschmitt 109s around that we were soon in trouble.
“Everyone at that time was shot down. Very few people got more than one trip. The German planes were a lot better than ours, although the Blenheims were not too bad.
“I remember when we were shot down we were flying very low, I cannot remember how we landed but we were right at ground level.”
After the war ended, Mr Royle married an English woman and continued his mining studies in Britain before returning to Perth and embarking on a long career in senior mining positions.
In 2003 in an interview archived by the Imperial War Museum, Mr Royle said: “Of one thing I am absolutely convinced, fighting is no way to settle problems between nations. It’s absolutely futile.”