Australia at the age of 100. He downplayed the significance of the escape and did not claim that he did anything extraordinary, saying: "While we all hoped for the future we were lucky to get the future. We eventually defeated the Germans and that was that." Royle died, aged 101, in August 2015. Dick Churchill was the last surviving of the 76 escapees before his death on 15 February 2019; then an RAF Squadron Leader, he was among the 23 not executed by the Nazis. Churchill, a Handley Page Hampden bomber pilot, was discovered after the escape hiding in a hay loft. In a 2014 interview at the age of 94, he said he was fairly certain that he had been spared execution because his captors thought he might be related to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Charles Clarke was an RAF officer who served as a bomb aimer. After his Lancaster bomber crashed, he was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III; arriving weeks before the Great Escape. He did not take part in the escape itself, but had helped to forge papers and acted as a "watcher". He later took part in the forced march, before being liberated. He remained in the RAF after the war, reaching the rank of Air Commodore. He returned to the camp in later life and helped build a replica of Hut 104 (where the Great Escape tunnel started). He also retraced the forced march on each anniversary. He died on 7 May 2019. Ben Guild was a radio operator on the aeroplane May Be, a B-25J Bombardier, which crashed on 6 February 1945 at Monte Brugnolo. He was captured and held at Stalag Luft III before he was transferred to Stalag XIII-D. Liberation in 1945 Just before midnight on 27 January 1945, with Soviet troops only away, the remaining 11,000 POWs were marched out of camp with the eventual destination of Spremberg. In freezing temperatures and of snow, 2,000 prisoners were assigned to clear the road ahead of the main group. After a march, the POWs arrived in Bad Muskau where they rested for 30 hours, before marching the remaining to Spremberg. On 31 January, the South Compound prisoners plus 200 men from the West Compound were sent by train to Stalag VII-A at Moosburg followed by the Centre compound prisoners on 7 February. Thirty-two prisoners escaped during the march to Moosburg