Alex Lees Dies
Posted by Slobokan @ 10:47 · 212 words · print
When the British and American airmen being held during World War II at Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war camp, were plotting a mass escape and tunneling under the prison wires, one problem was how to dispose of the tunnel dirt without detection. The ingenious solution was to load the dirt in tube-shaped sacks that prisoners wore inside their trousers when they went outdoors, releasing the dirt onto the camp grounds as they walked. The men who performed this duty, about 150 of them, were known as penguins.
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Alex Lees, a penguin, a Scotsman and one of the last remaining links to the escape from Stalag Luft III on March 24, 1944, died on April 22 at the Erskine veterans home in Bishopton, Scotland, near Glasgow. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by Scott Fraser, a spokesman for the Erskine Home, where Mr. Lees had lived since 2005. Elmer Bernstein’s jaunty march theme from “The Great Escape” was played at his funeral last Wednesday.
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His wife Isobel, whom he married in 1946, died in 2002. Their two children, Colin Lees and Patricia Gall, both of Cheshire, England, survive him, along with four grandchildren. He was joined at Erskine Home, by a fellow prisoner from Stalag Luft III, Jack Harrison, now 96.
Posted In: Obituaries
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