Great Escaper
Louise WilliamsJohn Williams as a young man in 1937, received one of the 25 Short Service Commissions awarded each year to members of the Royal Australian Air Force. War clouds were gathering over Europe but to an 18 yea
- Author
- Louise Williams
- Publisher
- Allen & Unwin
- Price
- £18.99
- Published
- 2015
Great Escaper by Louise Williams
In 1937 John “Willy” Williams won one of just twenty-five Short Service Commissions offered annually to members of the Royal Australian Air Force. War clouds were gathering over Europe, but to an eighteen-year-old Australian the prospect of global conflict seemed remote. He planned to study medicine and spend his spare time surfing; by 1942 he was a squadron leader with 450 Squadron of the Desert Air Force, leading missions over Egypt and Libya.
On 31 October 1942 a flying accident involving one of his own aircraft brought him down. Captured and sent to Stalag Luft III in Poland, Williams became one of the seventy-six men who tunnelled out of the supposedly escape-proof camp in the breakout that would become known as “The Great Escape”. With a former school friend, Rusty Kierath, and two other POWs he reached Czechoslovakia before the Gestapo caught them. Enraged by the mass escape, Hitler ordered that fifty recaptured prisoners be executed. Williams, Kierath and their companions were taken deep into a forest near Most and shot. Williams was just twenty-four. Despite a war-crimes investigation, no one was ever brought to justice.
Williams’ niece Louise Williams has pieced together his life from childhood in Australia through combat operations, capture, escape and murder, filling in the missing details of his remarkable story.
ISBN 978-1-4456-5401-0. Allen & Unwin. £18.99