Post
by DooKSucks » Thu Dec 30, 2021 11:31 am
Fun random fact: Steve McQueen's character in The Great Escape was largely based off of man from my hometown (Dortch Lewis). Lewis wouldn't talk about the war much but the local paper's longtime editor (who was the man's friend) finally got him to relent and do a Q&A after a viewing of the movie. Lewis said that the worst thing the Germans could do was place him in the "cooler" because those periods of isolation allowed for him to focus on his planning without disturbance...
Here is the man's NYT Obituary:
John D. Lewis, 84, Pilot in 'The Great Escape'
Aug. 13, 1999
John Dortch Lewis, whose exploits as a prisoner of war in Germany provided the basis for the character played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film ''The Great Escape,'' died of pancreatic cancer Sunday at his home in Goldsboro, N.C. He was 84.
Gene Price, a friend and the former editor of The Goldsboro News-Argus, described Mr. Lewis, a partner in an insurance agency, as a reclusive man who kept his wartime memories largely to himself. But several years ago Mr. Price prevailed on him to attend a showing of the film and answer questions.
In the film, directed by John Sturges, Mr. Lewis was transposed into an American flyer named Hilts, who single-mindedly keeps trying to escape from Stalag Luft No. 3, where the Germans held 600 Allied prisoners. Many spent a year secretly building three escape tunnels they called Tom, Dick and Harry.
In real life, Mr. Lewis crawled, climbed and conned his way out of the camp three times, only to be caught, returned and punished. He was successful on his fourth try.
''The night they showed the movie,'' Mr. Price recalled, ''John said they had Hollywooded his character a bit: he never rode a motorcycle out of the camp and he never had a baseball glove in there.''
When Mr. Lewis was asked what led him to keep trying to escape despite punishment, he answered, ''I just wanted to come home.''
And when Mr. Price asked him what role fear had played in his actions, his friend replied: ''None at all. I knew from the start that it would be a long war and that I probably wouldn't come out of it alive, so I just wanted to run up the best score that I could.''
According to his son, John Lewis Jr., Mr. Lewis started thinking of escape even before he was brought to Stalag Luft No. 3, in Polish Silesia.
His P-39 Bell Air Cobra had been shot down over North Africa and for several weeks Mr. Lewis avoided capture in the desert by darkening his skin with clay and wearing Arab dress. When he was caught and taken to the camp in 1943, he began scavenging items that might aid him in escaping, first using some items to make moonshine liquor.
As represented in the book from which the film was adapted, also called ''The Great Escape,'' most of the airmen were also preoccupied with escape. The author, Paul Brickhill of Australia, wrote from his experiences as a captured pilot.
Mr. Brickhill, who knew Mr. Lewis, described how the prisoners planned and built not only escape tunnels but also dummy passages intended to befuddle the Nazis. For their part, the Germans had a unit called ferrets who constantly kept probing for underground passages.
After one of Mr. Lewis' escapes, he was brought back to face the German commandant, who asked him to give his word that he would not try to escape again. If he promised that, the commandant said, after the war he would make Mr. Lewis the police commissioner of New York.
Mr. Lewis replied that he could not give such assurances and that, in any case, he was planning on becoming the Mayor of Berlin. He was sent to the isolation cells and put on a diet of bread and water.
On his final -- successful -- escape, Mr. Lewis, an accomplished hunter and outdsoorsman, bolted from a train carrying prisoners and made his way across much of Europe to the advancing Allied lines. This occurred during the last stages of the war, not long after the night when 76 British airmen escaped through the tunnel called Harry, the incident that is the central theme of the movie.
Of the 76 airmen who emerged on the other side of the barbed wire, only three made it to Britain. Within a few days, 50 were captured after an extensive Nazi manhunt and were shot to death on the orders of the high command. The rest were caught and returned to prison camps.
Mr. Lewis, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, had gone off to fight in World War II more than a year before the United States entered the conflict. He told his friend, Mr. Price, that he felt strongly that ''Hitler had to be stopped,'' and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
In the desperate months after France fell, he flew canvas-covered Hawker Hurricane fighters across the British Channel, and he flew in the raid on Dieppe in August of 1942, where Canadian forces suffered great casualties.
Soon after, on a mission over France, his plane was disabled by enemy fire. He managed to bring it back over the English Channel, where he crash-landed in the countryside. His Canadian superiors ordered him to stop flying because of his injuries but, eager for more adventure, he transferred to the United States Air Corps.
In addition to his son, Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Carolyn Stenhouse Lewis; two daughters, Millie Rostan, of Pinehurst, N.C., and Caroline Miles, of Pittsboro, N.C.; two sisters, Ellen O'Berry and Elizabeth Lewis, of Southern Pines, N.C., and nine grandchildren.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 13, 1999, Section A, Page 19 of the National edition with the headline: John D. Lewis, 84, Pilot in 'The Great Escape'.
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A UNC graduate...
I proudly took AFAM 040 at Carolina.
