That man who inspired Steve McQueen's, a top character in the Great Escape dies #CarryGobySeanKellz #FutureGroupNG via @myentertain9jar

HE was the model for Steve McQueen’s character in the classic movie but William Ash, who died this week, was remarkable for much more than that.

Steve McQueen in 1963 classic The Great Escape[UNITED ARTISTS]

If anyone was the real Steve McQueen character Virgil Hilts in the 1963 film The Great Escape it was the indomitable figure of William Ash. That was the conclusion of author Tim Carroll in his book The Dodger of Second World War hero Ash, who has died aged 96.
William Ash had a remarkable life filled with adventure and excitement. He flew Spitfires and was shot down over France. He narrowly escaped execution in one of the Nazis’ most notorious jails. He worked as a journalist and as a cub reporter saw the dead bodies of outlaws Bonnie and Clyde in their bullet-ridden car.
He gained two university degrees – including one from Oxford – and even co-formed a political party. And most famously of all the brave and irreverent Texan was a multiple escapee from German PoW camps throughout the war. 

Archive mugshot of Texan William Ash [PH]

Hilts the cooler king was an enjoyable but fictional character. Those of us who engaged in escapes sadly didn’t do so with the aid of a motorcycle.

Steve McQueen

Unlike many British officers held prisoner in the Stalag Luft III camp Ash did not come from a privileged background. Born into a lower middle-class family in Dallas in 1917 he worked in a succession of dead-end jobs when growing up, trying to save enough money to give himself a proper education.
In the Great Depression he became a “hobo” travelling from town to town by train looking for work. When the Second World War started Ash was determined to do his bit to fight the Nazis. The US was neutral at the time so he crossed over the border to sign up for the Canadian Air Force. In 1942 he was flying Spitfires but was shot down and forced to crash-land near Calais. With the help of a Frenchwoman and the Resistance he made it to Paris but was captured there by the Germans.
Ash’s first of many great escapes came ironically with German help when a Luftwaffe officer who feared reprisals from the Allies gained his release from Fresnes Prison in Paris where he had been tortured and was due to be executed. Ash was taken to the new Luftwafferun camp for captured air force officers: Stalag Luft III.
The camp was designed to be escape-proof, with the barracks raised off the ground to make it easier for guards to spot any tunnelling activity by PoWs.
Such precautions did not deter Ash. On his first attempt Ash and his friend Paddy Barthropp planned to escape via the shower drain. They were discovered and so began Ash’s first experience of the “cooler”: solitary confinement. Further attempts to escape followed, including one where (as portrayed in the Hollywood film version) Ash disguised himself as a Russian labourer.
He was sent to punishment camp Oflag XXIB in Schubin, in Poland, but it made little difference to him. “Although conditions were grim we felt that we had arrived in escapers’ paradise,” he recalled in his memoir Under The Wire. “The place was run by Wehrmacht units rather than the devil-we-knew Luftwaffe. These guards, some elderly, some invalided out of units on the eastern front and others simply trying to avoid any front whatsoever, had none of the Luftwaffe’s hard-earned expertise in stopping our escapes.”
Ash was one of 33 prisoners to escape from Oflag XXIB in a latrine tunnel. But all were recaptured and in March 1943 Ash was back in Stalag Luft III again.
He came up with another daring plan. A group of prisoners was due to be transported to a camp in Lithuania from which Ash believed it would be easier to escape. First though he had to somehow get over two 10ft-high barbed fences to reach another group of prisoners.
He arranged to swap identities with one of them, a New Zealander called Don Fair. While Ash’s friends distracted the guards he and Fair moved to their respective sides of the fence separating them. With the guards looking the other way Ash and Fair climbed over into noman’s land and swapped their papers – before each climbed back. Incredibly the men had managed to change places but, had the Germans seen, it is likely both would have been shot there and then.
Ash, using the identity of Don Fair, managed to escape from the Lithuanian camp and disguised as a peasant walked to the coast. He found a sailing boat in a boathouse and planned to go to neutral Sweden. The boat proved too heavy to move and so he asked some men digging in a fi eld to help him lift it. They ignored him, so then he mimed to them that he was an escaped US pilot trying to escape to Sweden. Unfortunately the men were German soldiers and Ash was captured again.
He was now in the hands of the Gestapo. His fingerprints were taken and the Germans realised their prisoner was a multiple escaper. He was locked up in a basement cell but then told to his relief that his planned trial was being postponed and that he was being sent back to Stalag Luft III.
“I knew it was a bit ironic to be so keen to get back to somewhere I had spent most of the past few years trying to get away from but the threat of imminent death always gives an interesting perspective of less imminent problems,” he wrote.

US star of The Great Escape - Steve McQueen (1930 - 1980) on the set of his film 'Le Mans' [GETTY]

 

Ash was put in the cooler again but when he came out of solitary confinement he had another chance to escape. There was a truck at the gates and the guard, having searched the back of it, had his back to him. Ash quickly climbed into the back but was discovered at the next set of gates. “This was possibly my shortest and most badly planned escape of all,” he admitted.
Ash was back in the cooler again when the real Great Escape took place. It was the biggest single breakout of the war, with 76 men escaping. But only three made it out of occupied Europe and 50 were executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler to discourage further escape attempts.
The Stalag Luft III Camp was taken away from the Luftwaffe and came under Gestapo and SS jurisdiction but that didn’t stop Ash planning more breakouts. His last and successful escape was in the dying days of the war when he had to endure a long and arduous march through snow in 1945. He was awarded the MBE for his escape exploits the following year.
After the war he became a close friend of Labour politician Tony Benn. He became increasingly involved in Left-wing politics and co-formed the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
When the film The Great Escape came out Ash modestly brushed off suggestions that the character played by Steve McQueen was modelled on him. “Hilts the cooler king was an enjoyable but fictional character. Those of us who engaged in escapes sadly didn’t do so with the aid of a motorcycle,” he said.
Those who knew William Ash however insist that — with the exception of the motorbike — he was every bit as daring as his screen alter ego.