page_title: Bram van der Stok
section_title: Capture, imprisonment and escape
hierarchical_section_title: Bram van der Stok / World War II / Capture, imprisonment and escape
caption_attribution_description: English: Model of the set used to film the movie "The Great Escape." It is a smaller version of one compound of Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland. Scene of the "Great Escape" by allied POWs in March 1944. Français&#160;: Maquette du Stalag, Stalag Luft III tiré de Image:Poland Zagan - museum.jpg. Correction lumiere &amp; rotation, masquage environnement.
context_page_description: Bram van der Stok, MBE, also known as Bob van der Stok, was a World War II fighter pilot and flying ace, and is the most decorated aviator in Dutch history.
  In March 1944, he broke out of Stalag Luft III – a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany – during the mass break-out known as "The Great Escape". After crossing much of occupied Europe, to reach neutral Spain, Van der Stok became one of only three out of the 76 escapees to reach Britain, along with two Norwegians, Per Bergsland and Jens Müller.
context_section_description: On 12 April 1942, during an operation code-named 'Circus 122' over occupied North France to attack the railway marshalling yard at Hazebrouck, van der Stok was shot down whilst flying Spitfire Vb BL595. He parachuted down safely at Saint-Omer in the Pas-de-Calais, but was immediately captured by a Wehrmacht patrol.
  He was subsequently incarcerated in the newly built Stalag Luft III where, with his medical training, he worked  in the prison's medical facility. Whilst at Stalag Luft III he made three escape attempts. The first was inadvertently spoiled by another prisoner who drew attention to the escaping van der Stok while retrieving a stolen German cap from the roof of a hut. The second attempt was thwarted when the German guards noticed that a forged pass he was using to get past them was out of date. His third attempt, on the night of 24–25 March 1944, was as a part of the mass break-out later known as "The Great Escape", in which he was the eighteenth of 76 prisoners to leave the escape tunnel.
  In his memoir he describes the moment he came out of the tunnel on 24 March, writing:  "Quickly, I climbed up to the surface and immediately found the rope . . . I felt no signal, so it was not safe yet. Then I felt three distinct tugs and slowly popped my head up. The nearest 'Goonbox' was at least 200 feet away; but, indeed, I was twenty feet from the edge of the woods."
  After the break-out, van der Stok travelled from Breslau train station to Dresden where he was stopped at several checkpoints, convincing the Germans that he was not one of the escapees. He then travelled to Utrecht through Oldenzaal and met up with a member of the Dutch underground, who briefed and equipped him for a bicycle trek to another safe house run by the Belgian Resistance. After arriving there, he was given the paperwork of a Belgian, and then travelled by train via Brussels and Paris to Toulouse, where the French Resistance put him with two American lieutenants, two other RAF pilots, a French officer and a Russian, and took the group across the Pyrenees to Lleida in Spain. The British consulate in Spain accepted the Allied escapees and, three months after the break-out of Stalag Luft III, van der Stok reached British Empire territory once again by arriving in Gibraltar on 8 July 1944. He was subsequently flown from Gibraltar to Whitchurch Airport in England on 11 July 1944.
  Back in England, van der Stok rejoined the RAF and was posted to No.41 Squadron flying the Spitfire MK.XII's, going on to fight in Operation Overlord - (10 days after D-Day) and the anti-V-1 fighter aircraft sweeps along the Low Countries coast. In his book War Pilot of Orange, he claims to have downed seven V-1 'Doodlebugs'. The following year, he took command of the Dutch RAF No.322 Squadron, based then on a temporary airstrip at Schijndel in the Netherlands, where, coming into contact with his family for the first time since he had left the Netherlands in 1940, he learned that his two brothers had been killed in concentration camps and his father had been partially blinded by the Gestapo.
caption: Stalag Luft III mockup.
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