William Franklin Ash MBE (30 November 1917 – 26 April 2014) was an American-born British writer, broadcaster and Marxist, who served as a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.
Ash was assigned to Embarkation Depot on 3 April 1941 for the voyage to England, where he completed a period with Operational Training Unit before joining No.
On one of these missions to attack Comines Power Station on 24 March 1942, flying Supermarine Spitfire Mark Vb (serial number "AB281") from RAF Hornchurch, Ash was one of three of the squadron's pilots shot down by Jagdgeschwader 26[5] he crash-landed at Vieille-Église, about 15 miles from Calais, and was smuggled by the French Resistance to Lille and onward to Paris.
In the spring of 1943, Flight Lieutenant Ash and 32 others escaped from Oflag XXI-B through the latrine tunnel with Harry Day and Peter Stevens.
For the next 21 months, when other ranks were being transferred from Sagan to Stalag Luft VI, Heydekrug, Ash changed his identity and accompanied them.
[citation needed] On one of these occasions the Luftwaffe successfully argued that they should have custody of Ash because he was an airman, thereby taking him from the Gestapo who had sentenced him to death.
In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film The Great Escape".
[8] Demobilised back in England at war's end, Ash discovered that the act of "taking the King's shilling" in 1939 had robbed him of his US citizenship and that he was now a stateless person.
Sent to India as the Corporation's main representative on the subcontinent, Ash was influenced by Nehru's brand of socialism, and by the time he returned to Britain in the late 1950s his politics had solidified into a hard-boiled Marxism.
He became involved in left-wing "street politics", including the post-war anti-fascist movement, but his late-blooming revolutionary tendencies eventually proved too much for the BBC, which fired him – though he managed to cling on to freelance employment in the radio drama department as a script reader.