Wally Floody Flight Lieutenant Wally Floody OBE ( born Clarke Wallace Chant Floody ) ( April 28 , 1918 – September 25 , 1989 ) was an imprisoned Second World War pilot who was instrumental in organizing and implementing the " Great Escape " from the German Stalag Luft III prisoner of war ( POW ) camp . Biography . Floody was born in Chatham , Ontario , and attended Northern Vocational School . In 1936 he headed north to work at the Preston East Dome Mines in Timmins , Ontario , as a mucker — shovelling the rock and mud into carts to be hauled up to the surface . At the onset of the war , Floody was working on a ranch in Alberta when he decided to return home to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force ( RCAF ) . He financed his trip back east by shovelling coal into the boiler of the locomotive for the entire trip back to Toronto . After learning that the RCAF was not quite ready for the huge influx of personnel , Wally and Betty married on May 24 , 1940 , and moved to Kirkland Lake , where Wally could go back to work in the mines . In 1940 , Floody and his wife were back in Toronto visiting family . Anxious to find out what was happening to his enlistment application , Floody checked with the recruiting office only to find his application was at the bottom of the pile . The reason : he was now married . After convincing the recruiting officer that " My wife backs me in this 100 % " , he was advised that the train was leaving for the BCATP air station in Brandon , Manitoba that evening . After a quick goodbye to his family Floody was on his way to becoming an operational pilot and flying with No . 401 Squadron . Operating from RAF Biggin Hill in England , his Spitfire was shot down in October 1941 over Saint - Omer , France , where he was met by two German soldiers . He was imprisoned at the POW camp Stalag Luft III at Sagan ( now Żagań , Poland ) . There he joined an organization named the X - Organization , the head of the organiztion named Roger Bushell , or Big - X put Wally in charge of digging tunnels and their camouflage , for the upcoming escape attempts by Commonwealth and European prisoners . However , in March 1944 , the German guards , always suspicious of escapes , caught the telltale sign of sand being dropped by one of the ' penguins ' out the bottom of his pant legs and immediately rounded up Wally and 19 others and transferred them to another camp in Belaria . The escape of 76 men went ahead on the moonless night of March 24 , 1944 . Eventually the Germans caught all but three prisoners , and to make an example of them to all the other prisoners , Hitler ordered the execution of 50 of the recaptured Allied officers under the excuse that they were shot while attempting escape . At the end of the war Floody gave evidence about conditions in POW camps at the Nuremberg Trials . On September 22 , 1946 , two days after Betty ' s and Wally ' s first son Brian was born , they received news that Wally had been awarded the honour Officer of the Order of the British Empire by King George VI ; the citation reading , in part , Returning to civilian life he became a businessman and co - founder of the Royal Canadian Air Force Prisoners of War Association . He died on September 25 , 1989 . Feature film involvement . In early 1962 , Floody received a phone call from director John Sturges . He told Floody he was planning to make a movie based on the book by Paul Brickhill , an Australian flyer and writer who , like Floody , had spent time at Stalag Luft III . After Sturges ' s assurance that the film was to be as accurate as theatrically possible but true to the efforts of those prisoners and the atmosphere of the camps , Floody agreed to be technical adviser on the 1963 feature film " The Great Escape " which was filmed on locations in Germany during the summer of 1962 . He is popularly considered the real - life counterpart to that film ' s fictional " Tunnel King " , Danny Velinski , played by Charles Bronson .