RAF airman who helped make passports for the ‘Great Escape’
Bill Dean, who died on 9 March, 2010, aged 87, was one of the famous band of POWs who inspired the film The Great Escape.
He joined the RAF in 1940 and completed 14 missions for Bomber Command before being shot down over Berlin in 1944.
At Stalag Luft 111 in Poland he helped Flight Lt Colin Blythe – known as ‘The Forger’ and portrayed in the film by Donald Pleasance – create fake passports for 200 servicemen selected for the escape.
Mr Dean didn’t take part in the escape and after the famous breakout he and the other remaining prisoners were made to march 2,000 miles to another camp south of Berlin.
Though conditions there were much harsher than Stalag Luft 111, towards the end of the year German guards abandoned their posts. Mr Dean lived with a German woman for several months before American troops arrived to send him home.
He stayed in the RAF and became a squadron leader with the City of Chester Squadron.
In 1956, he started his own luxury goods business. He lived in ...
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