Ex-utility exec was a slippery POW

Vogtle inspiration for McQueen in '63 movie 'The Great Escape'

Posted: Saturday, October 02, 2010

ATLANTA - Alvin Vogtle never raced a motorcycle toward a barbed-wire border when he was a prisoner of war in World War II.

Morris News Service
Morris News Service

Nor did Vogtle end the war like the film "The Great Escape" ended, with Nazi troops machine-gunning POWs who refused to stop plotting ever-more clever prison camp escapes.

However, Vogtle - the namesake of Plant Vogtle, the Georgia Power Co.'s huge nuclear power generator near Augusta - did have something in common with the 1963 film: Star Steve McQueen's character was modeled on the man who later became the president of the utility's parent company.

Vogtle's repeated escape attempts - including his successful trek to Switzerland - steeled him with the tenacity he would need to oversee the fits and starts of the giant nuclear plant that now bears his name.

Vogtle's postwar life included becoming president of the Southern Co., Georgia Power's parent, which earlier this year became the first utility in decades to propose building new nuclear-fired electric generators.

Georgia Power Co. employees got a lesson in Vogtle's enduring drive this week when his granddaughter, Katie Kirtley, presented the results of some of the research she's done for a book she plans to write about Vogtle's exploits during the war.

Many of the nuclear engineers who attended Kirtley's presentation were too young to have met Vogtle before he retired from the Southern Co. in 1983.

Kirtley herself was only 16 when he died in 1994.

That's the same age that Vogtle's son, Alvin W. Vogtle III, was in 1963 when "The Great Escape" premiered.

Produced and directed by John Sturges, the movie was released on July 4 and featured an all-star cast: Besides McQueen, the movie includes Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, James Garner and David McCallum.

The film dramatized the true story of POWs' continuing efforts to dig tunnels and flee an "escape-proof" prison camp, and won an Academy Award nomination for best picture. McQueen's character, Capt. Virgil Hilts, has tried to escape so often that the other prisoners use him as a diversion so the guards won't notice their energetic work on the tunnels.

In his final escape, McQueen steals a motorcycle but is captured when he finds it impossible to get past towering barbed-wire fences that mark the Swiss border.

While the movie injected plenty of imagination, it was accurate about one thing. Vogtle, like Hilts, spent a lot of time in solitary confinement - in "the cooler" as punishment for his escape attempts, Kirtley said.

Most friends in their hometown of Birmingham, Ala., already knew the story when the movie premiered because many of them had heard of his capture and received coded letters from him during the war.

Vogtle wasn't chosen to try to escape through the tunnels at Stalag Luff III, which probably saved his life because 50 of those caught were executed. He usually tried to escape with just one other POW, trying to cut through the fences, hiding in a garbage truck or jumping out of a train during transfer to another prison camp.

Vogtle attended the movie premier and dined with McQueen, who personally added the dramatic motorcycle scene because he liked to ride them and wanted to do the stunt.

But generally, Vogtle, like most war heroes, didn't talk much about his five escape attempts during his three years of captivity - though he would mention parts of the story to his son now and then.

"He told me years later, 'I didn't know why I did that. I must have been pretty young,' " Alvin III said.

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