Wally Floody
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F/Lt Wally Floody (born Clarke Wallace Floody) (April 28, 1918 - September 25, 1989) was a Canadian mining engineer and Spitfire pilot in WWII. He was imprisoned at the POW camp Stalag Luft III where in the course of escape attempts by Commonwealth and European prisoners he was responsible for the tunnel traps and their camouflage. He was a technical advisor on the 1963 feature film The Great Escape and is popularly considered the real-life counterpart to that film's fictional "tunnel king" Danny Velinski, played by Charles Bronson. [1] [2]
Floody was born in Chatham, Ontario. Trained initially in mining he was commissioned into the RCAF as a pilot officer in 1941 and joined No. 401 Squadron). Operating from Biggin Hill airfield in England, his Spitfire was shot down in October 1941. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW in a number of different camps. He was transferred away from Stalag Luft III shortly before the escape attempt dramatized by the film The Great Escape. At the end of the war he gave evidence about conditions in POW camps at the Nuremberg Trials.
In civilian life he was a businessman and also a co-founder of the Royal Canadian Air Force Prisoners of War Association. He died on September 25, 1989.
