Qualla: Colditz Cock

Colditz Cock: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SKOMP46866, CC BY 3.0. The plan required a bathtub. Fill it with concrete, run a cable from it over a pulley to the nose of a glider parked on a runway of dining tables, push the tub off the castle roof, and the falling weight would drag two men to thirty miles an hour in sixty feet of table-top — fast enough, in theory, to carry them off the chapel roof, across the River Mulde sixty metres below, and into a meadow on the far bank. Everything about that sentence sounds like a joke. None of it was. The glider was real, built from bed slats and floorboards behind a false wall in the attic above the chapel at Oflag IV-C, and by April 1945 it was very nearly finished.

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Image: SKOMP46866 | CC BY 3.0

Colditz Cock: The Man Who Was Not a Pilot

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Radler59, CC BY-SA 3.0. The idea came from an officer with no aviation background at all. Lieutenant Tony Rolt, studying the castle the way prisoners study anything they are forced to look at every day, noticed that the ridge line of the chapel roof was completely hidden from the German guards' sightlin...

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Image: Radler59 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colditz Cock: Two Volumes in the Prison Library

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Wolf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bill Goldfinch and Jack Best led the build, and their most valuable find was not a tool but a book. The camp library held C.H. Latimer-Needham's two-volume *Aircraft Design*, which laid out the physics they needed and, crucially, included a detailed diagram of a wing section. Gol...

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Image: Michael Wolf | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colditz Cock: Bed Slats and Boiled Millet

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Z thomas, CC BY 3.0. More than thirty ribs had to be shaped, roughly a third of them structural compression ribs, and most came from bed slats. The wing spars were floorboards. Control wires were pulled from the electrical wiring of unused parts of the castle. The skin was blue-and-white checked cott...

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Image: Z thomas | CC BY 3.0

Colditz Cock: Flight Context

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Carson, Public domain. The chapel attic sits inside Colditz Castle at 51.131°N, 12.807°E, about 192 m above sea level on a spur above the Zwickauer Mulde in Saxony. The intended flight path ran from the chapel roof, on the river side of the castle, across the Mulde some 60 m below to the meadows on the far bank — a line of about 200 m that is easy to trace from 2,000–4,000 ft AGL, with the castle's pale walls above the wooded bend and the town's red roofs downstream. Leipzig/Halle (EDDP) lies roughly 50 km north-west, Leipzig–Altenburg (EDAC) to the south-west, Dresden (EDDC) about 65 km east. Morning valley fog along the Mulde is common in autumn; afternoon light favours the river-facing roofline.

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Image: Lee Carson | Public domain

Colditz Cock: Fifty-Five Years Late

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Carson, Public domain. Goldfinch had kept his drawings, and they turned out to be the thing that survived. A one-third scale model built from them was launched off the castle roof in 1993. Six years later Channel 4 commissioned a full-size replica, built by Southdown Aviation at Lasham Airfield, and in...

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Image: Lee Carson | Public domain