How This British POW Escaped by Building His Own Replacement

March 1942. Royal Navy Stoker Stanley Widdicombe is pulled from the freezing North Atlantic after a U-boat torpedo sinks HMS Charybdis. He's thrown into Marlag und Milag Nord—Germany's maximum-security camp for captured sailors.

The camp was built to be escape-proof. Double barbed-wire fences. Guard towers every 50 meters. Searchlights. Dogs. Armed patrols.

But the Germans made one critical mistake: they counted shapes, not faces.

During pre-dawn roll calls, guards counted silhouettes in the darkness—sixty bodies in sixty bunks. They never physically touched the prisoners. They trusted their numbers.

Stan exploited that trust.

For three months, he secretly built "George"—a life-sized dummy crafted from:
→ Papier-mâché molded into a human skull
→ Real human hair from the camp barber
→ Boot polish for skin tone
→ Carved wooden hands
→ Straw-stuffed sacks shaped like a sleeping body

On December 17, 1942, Stan dressed in a stolen German guard uniform, placed George in his bunk, and did the unthinkable: he walked straight out the front gate.

He nodded at the guards. Muttered "Kalte Nacht" (cold night). Showed forged papers. And disappeared into the German forest.

For 73 days, Stan crossed Nazi Germany, occupied France, and climbed the Pyrenees mountains in newspaper-lined boots. He dropped from 168 pounds to 119. His feet left bloody trails in the snow.

On February 27, 1943, he landed at RAF Hendon—one of only 11 Royal Navy POWs to successfully escape German captivity during the entire war.

This is the true story of the man who built his own replacement and walked to freedom.

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