Re: Monday answers
Gary Smyth
Stars to Dan and Alex. I'm not sure of Steven's response. I like Alex's thought about a glider launch for trivia 2, but no joy there.
Trivia 1.
The escort told the brothers to take the other brother�s machine. That way each brother could cut as quickly as possible. The �winner� cutting the 300 trees was therefore the winner of the prize because the other machine was then "slower". It was the slowest machine not the operator that counted for the victory. Dan's answer was based on an identical result but the back stories involved different locations and vehicles.
Trivia 2. This was my first question for trivia this week but I couldn't quite get it to work. For interested parties check out Stalag Luft III on wiki. Did you know that officers were paid (in camp script) as POWs?
Canadian Flight Lieutenant Gordon Miller tagged "Moose Miller", helped carry a (old style) wooden vaulting horse in and out each day under the German guns without faltering with the weight of two concealed diggers and a day's worth of earth.
The first successful escape from the Stalag occurred in October 1943 in the East Compound. Conjuring up a modern Trojan Horse, the POWs constructed a gymnastic vaulting horse largely from plywood from Red Cross parcels. The horse was of the trapezoidal old design and designed to conceal men, tools, and containers of dirt. Each day the horse was carried out to the same spot near the perimeter fence, and while prisoners conducted gymnastic exercises above, from under the horse a tunnel was dug. At the end of each working day, a wooden board was placed back over the tunnel entrance and re-covered with surface dirt. The gymnastics not only disguised the real purpose of the vaulting horse, but the activity kept the sound of the digging from being detected by the microphones in the dirt around the perimeter fence. For three months three prisoners, Lieutenant Michael Codner, Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams, and Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot, in shifts of one or two diggers at a time, dug over 100 feet (30 m) of tunnel using bowls for shovels and rods of metal to poke through the surface of the ground to create air holes. No shoring was used except near the entrance. On the evening of October 29, 1943,[3] Codner, Williams, and Philpot made their escape. Williams and Codner were able to reach the port of Stettin where they stowed away on a Danish ship and eventually returned to Britain. Philpot, posing as a Norwegian margarine manufacturer, was able to board a train to Danzig (now Gdansk), and from there stowed away on a Swedish ship headed for Stockholm, and from there repatriated to Britain. Accounts of this escape, long overshadowed by The Great Escape, were recorded in the book "Goon in the Block" (later retitled "The Wooden Horse") by Williams, the book "Stolen Journey" by Philpot, and the 1950 film "The Wooden Horse".
