STALAG LUFT III SURVIVORS POWS GET THE CHANGE TO SAY GOODBYE THEY WERE YOUNG ONCE, WHEN WORLD WAS AT WAR.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

They looked like a couple of movie stars. Young and dashing with killer smiles and knockout good looks.

Picture James Garner and Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape" and you've got it -- with one very big difference.

Marshall Draper and Chuck Woehrle weren't acting.

They were a couple of U.S. Army Air Corps B-17 bombardiers shot down in separate raids during World WarII, captured by the Germans, and taken to Stalag Luft III near the Polish border after being beaten and interrogated.

They spent two years bunking together as POWs with their every waking moment dominated by two thoughts.

"No, one of them wasn't pinup girls," Chuck said Friday. "All we ever thought about was escape and food."

Chuck's 90 now, and Marshall's 88. Both men know this may be the last time they are able to see each other, and, well, Memorial Day weekend just seemed like the right time for a couple of old war buddies to say goodbye.

So Chuck, a widower, flew out from his home in St. Paul, Minn., on Thursday to see his pal in Woodland Hills.

Marshall has been living in the Valley for the past 50 years with his wife, Marion. On Friday, he and Chuck sat around the kitchen table covered with old pictures from the POW camps, military history books and articles written about their exploits, and talked about the days when they were young and dashing and looked like movie stars.

"Where'd all our hair go, Marshall?" Chuck asked, giving his old pal a hug.

Marshall was the first American airman taken in 1942 to Stalag Luft III, built to house mainly captured British RAF airmen.

It was there that 76 POWs -- mainly British -- dug three escape tunnels they called Tom, Dick and Harry.

Only Harry was completed before the Germans discovered the tunnels, but it was still 30feet short of what was needed for an undetected escape.

Fifty of the 76 POWs who were captured were shot and killed, 23 were beaten and returned to the camp. Only three made it home.

The movie "The Great Escape" was based on this Stalag camp and escape attempt.

"By the time the tunnel was ready, there were so many new American POWs coming into the camp that the Germans built a south wing and separated us from the English airmen who were in the north wing where the tunnels were," Chuck said.

But that didn't mean the Americans didn't continue to help the escape effort any way they could.

Many a night, Marshall would lie in his bottom bunk and stare at the one wooden slat left in the bottom of Chuck's upper bunk.

"We'd taken all the wooden slats but one out of the bunks and given them to the Brits to line the tunnels while they were digging," Marshall said.

"Whenever the goons (German guards) were gone, we'd help them with whatever we could," Chuck added. "We had worked out a system of when it was safe or when we had to close up shop and hide things so the goons wouldn't find them."

They made wine out of raisins, using tubing from a trombone slide to distill it. They made a makeshift radio that they hid in the wall so they could listen to BBC reports on how the war was going.

"Marshall was the brains of the camp," Chuck said. "He could make anything."

But even Chuck didn't know that his buddy also was a code writer, transmitting intelligence from inside the camp.

It all had been worked out beforehand by Marshall's superiors in case Marshall was captured. He was under strict orders to tell no one -- not even his bunkmates -- because the Germans often sent spies into the camps posing as American and British POWs.

"Under the Geneva Convention, a POW was allowed three letters and four postcards home per month," Marshall said.

"I began writing long, mushy love letters to my girlfriend, Hilda, who wrote me back. There was no Hilda. I was conveying information on strategic targets, aircraft equipment failures or malfunctions, information on the camp and requests for escape supplies.

"The last one I sent before the camp was evacuated was about a tank factory the Germans had hidden in a forest."

While Marshall wrote to Hilda, Chuck was cooking for the 10 POWs living in the same room. Only three are still living.

"The Germans gave us sauerkraut, bread and hot water to survive on," Chuck said. "Once in a while, we had rotten potatoes and smelly, spoiled cheese. The only way we survived was on Red Cross parcels. I'd cook the food we got from them on a small, wood-burning stove in the room. There was no kitchen."

It was colder than hell, the guys say, on the morning the guard rousted them from their bunks and told them they were being moved to another stalag.

"They were shouting that the Russians were coming and we had to leave," Chuck said. "Boxcars filled with horses pulled up on the train tracks. They let the horses out and put us in. They were filled with horse manure.

"We spent the next three days and two nights in them, stopping only for guys to relieve themselves. If you weren't fast enough, they'd shoot you and leave you there."

The men were taken to Stalag 7A in Bavaria, another hellhole, they said. It was early February 1945 -- three months until Gen. George Patton came and got his men back from the Germans.

Chuck and Marshall were standing next to a soldier from Scotland that glorious day when the swastika flag flying over the camp was lowered and the American flag was raised.

"Laddies," the Scot said. "I don't want to sound unpatriotic, but that's the bloodiest, finest flag I've ever seen."

Marshall came home, finished his college education and became a research chemist at Walter Reed Hospital. Chuck went home to Minnesota and began a career in the movie business there.

The men would see each other every 10 years at POW reunions, but Marshall, who's in a wheelchair now, hasn't been able to make the past couple.

It's been 15 years since they last saw each other.

Time's running out, the men know. This Memorial Day weekend seemed like a perfect time to say goodbye to an old friend.

"Hey, Marshall, you remember John Lindquist?" Chuck asked.

Marshall laughed. "Man, that guy could snore."

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

[phone]

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Chuck Woehrle, 90, and Marshall Draper, 88, bunkmates in the World WarII German stalag that the movie "The Great Escape" was based on, talk at Draper's home in Woodland Hills on Friday.

Tina Burch/Staff Photographer

(2) Marshall Draper, 88, bottom right, and Chuck Woehrle, 90, at his side, were movie-star handsome in WWII. The two, who spent two years bunking together as POWs in a German camp, reunited for Memorial Day.