G-ASEA (Dave)
It is also the case that the team hoped it would have been rather more interesting had proper access to Harry proved to have been possible.
Beaufighter VI (Pete)
It is certainly the case that the 1943 tunnellers were highly skilled and adept at what they turned their hand to, and despite the paucity of materials and equipment they had 24/7 x 365 to do and think about nothing else. Despite the outcome, ingenuity and determination won the day when it came to digging the tunnel. The 2011 team had only three weeks or so on site to work out where to dig, where to sink the shaft and to achieve very different goals to those set by the escapers. I think it a little unfair, to say the very least, to label the team as “experts” (your quotation marks) when they were certainly all leading experts (no quotation marks) in their fields; ie engineering, tunnelling, POW history and battlefield archaeology. The rather disappointing outcome (in respect of Harry) was not through any lack of planning, project design, team failure or lack of skill or of technical knowledge.
While I understand that finding the money would be the biggest issue, is there anything beyond that which would prevent a further effort from being made to get down to Harry at a later time?
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