SIXTY years ago this week, Sergeant Pilot Richard Trundle was taken prisoner by the Germans after his aircraft was shot down at Wilhelmshaven, Holland.

The indomitable spirit of British prisoners of war shines through the paintings, cartoons and poems in a log book kept by the RAF pilot during his time in Stalag Luft III, the POW camp immortalised by the film, The Great Escape.

Mr Trundle, who now lives in Graham Road, Malvern, was on his 13th wartime operation when his plane was shot down.

He was just 20-years-old and had married four months earlier, on December 28, 1940.

It was to be four years before he saw his wife, Frances, again but they went on to have two daughters and celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.

A green hard-back log book, presented to prisoners by the YMCA, stayed with him through several POW camps and the long march back through Germany as the war drew to a close.

It is filled with photographs, drawings, paintings, poems and other writings by him and others.

They are sometimes nostalgic but mostly take a humorous look at camp life, from the search for bed bugs to the ingenious production of "hooch" using raisins from Red Cross parcels.

"I worked for Guinness in Glasgow and had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1938 because I wanted to learn to fly," he said.

"When war broke out I was still flying single-engine aircraft like the Tiger Moth but after completing my training I was posted to No 9 Squadron at RAF Honington, Suffolk."

When Mr Trundle was shot down, he was flying a Wellington Mark 1C with a crew of six, who all survived the crash.

His prison term began in a civil jail in Amsterdam, followed by a spell in a reception camp, Dulag Luft, where he was interrogated.

He spent a year in Stalag Luft I at Barth, on the Baltic coast, and was then taken by cattle truck to the newly completed Stalag Luft III, near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), where prisoners were given the YMCA log books.

Mr Trundle, who was promoted to Warrant Officer while he was there, remembers volunteering an idea to the escape committee.

"I thought someone might be smuggled out in a huge bundle of sheets being taken to the laundry. They thought it was worth trying," he said.

He was not allowed to go himself because he did not speak German, but in any case the attempt was not a success.

Stalag Luft III famously had three escape tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry.

Mr Trundle's log includes a drawing of Tom, which was discovered when a truck caused the roof to fall in, and a cartoon of prisoners creeping around the camp at night, disposing of excavated sand.

"One of my jobs was to carry a sock filled with sand from one of the tunnels, which trickled out as you walked," he said.

Mr Trundle was in the north compound, where 70 or 80 prisoners escaped through Harry. He made a painting of the memorial built by prisoners to commemorate the 50 escapees who died.

"They were rounded up and shot by Hitler's order. He was furious, because it was supposed to be a camp no-one could get out of," he said.

Mr Trundle recorded the names of all 50 in his log, which also contains a long list of the books he read while in captivity.

The third tunnel, Dick, was in his barracks, under a drain in the concrete floor of the wash house. It was never finished or discovered.

"In the deep winter of '45 they moved us out in thick snow because the Russians were striking at Breslau," he said. "Any secret stuff we had was hidden in Dick before we left, but I took my log book with me."

For part of the long march westwards to Bremen and liberation, the log was carried in an old pram, swapped for a bar of chocolate.