only to be recaptured the same night. In the spring of 1943, Flight Lieutenant Ash and 32 others escaped from Oflag XXI-B through the latrine tunnel with Harry Day and Peter Stevens. With a companion, he tried to reach Warsaw, but was recaptured four days later. Shortly afterwards, he was transferred to Stalag Luft III, Sagan, where he was an active member of the escape committee. For the next 21 months, when other ranks were being transferred from Sagan to Stalag Luft VI, Heydekrug, Ash changed his identity and accompanied them. Under his direction a tunnel was later made for a mass escape, but the tunnel was discovered when 10 prisoners had got away. Ash continued the attempt and eventually gained his freedom. He boarded a goods train for Kovno, but was discovered by station guards and returned to Sagan. His de-briefing after liberation from captivity in April 1945 records the places where he was imprisoned as Dulag Luft (Oberusel) for about three days in June 1942, then Stalag Luft III at Sagan from June to September 1942 Oflag XXI-B (Schubin), where he was held from September 1942 to April 1943, back to Stalag Luft III for April and May 1943, and then Stalag Luft VI (Heydekrug) from May to August 1943 before return to Stalag Luft III for the period August 1943 to January 1945 and finally the naval camp Marlag Milag Nord at Westertimke from January to April 1945. Ash was reportedly twice sentenced to death as a spy. On one of these occasions the Luftwaffe successfully argued that they should have custody of Ash because he was an airman, thereby taking him from the Gestapo who had sentenced him to death. On 17 May 1946, Ash was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his escaping activities. He ended the war as a flight lieutenant. In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film The Great Escape". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call "the cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it