LONDON - For Squadron Leader Bertram "Jimmy" James, waiting was the hard part.

One of 76 Allied airmen who broke out of a German prisoner of war camp in March 1944 - an event that inspired the 1963 film "The Great Escape" - James said the minutes waiting his turn to crawl through a narrow tunnel to freedom were full of "tremendous tension mixed with fear."

"Mainly, I was very excited," said James, 89, who gathered with other veterans Tuesday at London's Imperial War Museum to mark the 60th anniversary of the escape. "When you emerge into the snow and you're running away from the camp, there's a sense of exhilaration.

"We were on our way, we hoped, to freedom," he added. "That wasn't quite the case."

The March 24, 1944, escape from Stalag Luft III, a camp for Allied air force officers, is one of the best-known episodes of World War II. The film starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough recounts the daring plan and its tragic denouement - only three of the escapers made it to freedom; 73 were recaptured and 50 were shot, on Hitler's orders, as a warning to would-be escapers.

"They were selected by lot, taken out by the local Gestapo in ones and twos, taken along the Autobahn, invited to get out and relieve themselves and then shot in the back of the neck," said James, a bomber pilot shot down over the Dutch coast in June 1940. He was recaptured after escaping from Stalag Luft III and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

"We didn't know the Germans were going to shoot people; they had never done so previously," he said. "But it was war."

After the war, 21 Gestapo officers were tried by the British in connection with the executions; 14 were executed.

In Britain - where the film is a television staple - there remains an enduring fascination with the escape. At Tuesday's event, more than a dozen former prisoners of war mingled with a large press corps. Actor John Leyton, who played one of the escapers, was there along with other actors who had smaller roles in the film.

"The first part was good," James, one of only six survivors from the 76 escapers, said of the movie. "But a lot was Hollywood fantasy. There were no Americans in the escape."

Dozens of books detail the meticulous planning, expert craftsmanship and quiet daring that went into the plan.

Over almost a year, prisoners at the camp near Sagan in eastern Germany - now Zagan, Poland - excavated three tunnels 30 feet underground, shored up with bedboards and wired with stolen electrical wire. Other prisoners obtained maps and railway timetables and forged German identity documents for the escapers.

Tim Carroll, author of a recently published book, "The Great Escapers," said the breakout "distills all the reasons the Allies were fighting for freedom. The Germans offered them all sorts of inducements to give up, but they never gave in. That's why it's so iconic."

James, who made a dozen escape attempts in all, has a simpler explanation for the audacious plan.

"I think it was a habit," he said. "We had so much talent and experience together in one compound that there was no other option. We had to do something."