lagergeld was pooled for communal purchases. As British government policy was to deduct camp pay from the prisoners' military pay, the communal pool avoided the practice in other camps whereby American officers contributed to British canteen purchases. Stalag Luft III had the best-organised recreational program of any POW camp in Germany. Each compound had athletic fields and volleyball courts. The prisoners participated in basketball, softball, boxing, touch football, volleyball, table tennis and fencing, with leagues organised for most. A pool used to store water for firefighting, was occasionally available for swimming. As described by J. Frank Diggs, many amenities were made possible by Swedish lawyer Henry Söderberg, who was the YMCA representative to the area, and frequently brought to its camps not only sports equipment, and religious items supporting the work of chaplains, but also the wherewithal for each camp's band and orchestra, and well-equipped library. Stalag Luft III radio transmitter In an (unwitting?) homage to Stalag Luft III prisoner Howard Cundall, RAF, the fictional American Staff Sergeant Kinchloe of the 1960s' American TV parody (Colonel) Hogan's Heroes operates a clandestine radio transmitter (and receiver) from a POW camp ("Stalag 13") and is in contact with London. Howard Cundall volunteered to ride a night bombing mission to make "... radio and radar observations over France. Specialist observers from the Telecommunications Research Establishment had volunteered for the flights, and had received RAF commissions in case they were lost on operations. "This indeed happened to one of the first observers, Howard Cundall." Cundall and all crew bailed out "in the early hours of 4th November 1941, .... The loss of a crew would have been a serious enough matter, anyway, but Cundall knew a good deal about our own radar, ... and might thus be a valuable prisoner for the Germans to capture." All of the crew survived the bail out and were captured "except for the second pilot, who succeeded in escaping to Spain. This was fortunate because the Germans thought that they had captured a full crew, and therefore did not suspect the nature of Cundall's duties. While in Stalag Luft 3 he not only concealed his knowledge of our new radar devices, but built a radio transmitter with which he opened contact between camp and London, maintaining it even during the long march eastwards as the Germans pulled back the prisoners in the late stages of the war. In