Jack Best; British POW Planned Glider Escape

Jack Best, 87, a British POW who helped build a glider for an audacious plan to escape from Germany’s Colditz prison during World War II. Best, a Royal Air Force pilot, was captured in 1941 after he was forced to ditch his plane when it ran out of fuel off the coast of Greece. He was held at Stalag Luft III but tunneled out with fellow prisoner Bill Goldfinch. They made it 125 miles to Szczecin, Poland, before being recaptured. Best was then sent to Colditz, a huge Saxon castle near Leipzig where the Germans put their most escape-prone Allied prisoners. German confidence that Colditz was secure proved unfounded: 35 of the 400 prisoners escaped before the end of the war. Best worked with Goldfinch and two other prisoners to build a glider with a 32-foot wingspan in an attic above the chapel. Their plan was to construct a catapult to launch the glider, powered by a bathtub full of concrete that was to be dropped 60 feet. The prisoners at Colditz were freed by Allied forces before the glider could be tried, but a reconstruction made for a television program last year proved that the craft could have flown. After the war, Best farmed in Kenya, but returned to Britain in the 1960s. On Saturday in London.