Blame the Official Secrets Act, which British authorities demanded the escapers sign when they reached safety, apparently to protect the secrecy of their freedom route. More pointedly, blame the Cold War that settled on the world after World War II. It meant the West had little time for stories that gave credit to Josip Broz Tito and his communist Partisans, even if they were among the most successful resistance fighters of the war. Josip Broz Tito in May 1944. Tito rose to become president of communist Yugoslavia after the war: the wrong side of the Cold War ledger so far as the West was concerned.

No matter, apparently, that his Partisans had rescued across Yugoslavia an estimated 3500 Allied military personnel over 3½ years of World War II, including around 1800 members of American and British air crews shot down, and about 1200 POWs. The Flight of the Crow, however, remains the biggest single escape from a German POW prison. It is named after Ralph Churches, an Australian soldier nicknamed Crow because he was the only South Australian, or “crow-eater”, in his unit, and more romantically, because he dreamed of flight. Churches subsequently detailed his adventures and the escape in a book he called A Hundred Miles as the Crow Flies, which was self-published in 1996 and sold poorly. With the 75th anniversary approaching next year and the Slovenian government posting the picture of a crow every 50 metres along the old escape trail, the book is about to be re-released by Churches’ son. And finally, a British documentary crew has made a film called The Crow’s Flight. It is the first of a series called Great Escapes of WWII with Monty Halls: The Freedom Trails, and will be broadcast on Sunday at 5.30pm on SBS.

February 1945: Tito, second from right, with (from left) US General Lyman Lemnitzer and British Field Marshal Lord Alexander at the White Palace in Belgrade. The Cold War put an end to this alliance. Credit:Camera Press The documentary's makers have interviewed former Partisans, escapees and prison guards to ensure accuracy of a story that has been challenged from various quarters over the years. They even managed to track down the logbook kept by a British captain named Saggers, who was in charge of a secret airfield in Slovenia which recorded the names of all the British, Australian, New Zealand and French soldiers who flew out of Slovenia to Italy. The number, which has only now come to light, was 120 - more than even the 100 Churches had estimated. Churches, a mapmaker unfortunate enough to be attached to General Sir Thomas Blamey’s command headquarters during the disastrous Battle of Greece, was captured by Germans on May 6, 1941,while he and three others were trying to sail a dinghy to Crete. After a spell starving in a prison cage in Greece, where he contracted dysentery and malaria, he barely survived a four-day journey on a cattle train to Maribor, a few kilometres from Austria's border with Slovenia. He would spend the next three years as a prisoner of war in the Stalag 18D prison and its camps around Maribor, all the while preparing himself for escape. Ralph Churches, who became known as "The Crow".

Churches carefully learned the German language until he was fluent in colloquial Viennese German, and as the elected camp leader (Vertrauensmann, which literally means "confidence man", because his job was to represent his men to the Germans), he lulled his captors into a false sense of contentment by bribing them with luxuries such as coffee, cigarettes and chocolate gathered from his and his colleagues’ regular supply of Red Cross parcels. In his postwar life back in Australia, Churches took pleasure in the TV spoof of POW life, Hogan’s Heroes, because he recognised so many of his own experiences in it, says his son, Neil Churches, who lives in the Melbourne suburb of Kensington. Indeed, Ralph Churches built such a relationship with one of the camp’s kommandants, Unteroffizier (sergeant) Johan Gross, that he wrote he was reluctant to escape under Gross’ watch for fear the poor fellow would suffer dreadful punishment by his German superiors. Churches resolved to ensure this “kindly, decent, middle-aged family man” who’d “done everything he could to make our detention as decent and comfortable as he could” was spared. He took a punt, went to Gross and declared that he had spent eight months as camp kommandant, and that he should seek a transfer. “He looked at me hard through his thick-lensed glasses for some seconds,” Churches wrote. “I returned the look with the best poker face I could muster. At last he said ‘thank you Mr Camp Leader, I will do as you suggest’.”

The next kommandant was a disciplinarian and “screamer”, relieving Churches of any pangs of conscience over his fate. In later life, Ralph Churches - who had experienced an actual wartime POW camp - enjoyed watching Hogan's Heroes. As Churches plotted, a fellow POW, Englishman Les Laws from the Royal Engineers, had got in touch with a representative of Partisans operating in the hills beyond the POW work camps around Maribor. Each day men were taken by train to work sites, assigned - among other tasks - to the job of re-laying train tracks. Laws had talked the Germans into allowing him to supply the prisoners with water, which he fetched from a hillside cottage where he formed a relationship with a young Slovene woman. One day, he was approached by a Slovene man who offered to introduce him to a group of Partisans. Churches’ plan for a solo escape suddenly expanded to include Laws. Soon enough, two of their mates were also initiated into the secret. And then all eight in their hut were in on the plan.

Each day, Churches gathered Red Cross stores and smuggled them out to a growing getaway stash in the forest near the work site. On August 30, 1944, the little band of escapees - seven of them, as one of the mates couldn’t get away from his work gang - simply walked off the railway job site, led by a Partisan contact named Anton. Churches’ last act was to bribe a guard with cigarettes. Deep in the forest, they were met by armed guerillas and led through meadows to a village named Lovrenc, recently captured by the guerillas. Slivovitz was served and dancing ensued. They were, at least for the moment, gloriously free. Into this heady atmosphere Churches introduced a proposal to the Partisans. Would they be prepared to mount a raid to free all the other POWs on the work site outside Maribor? He estimated there were 80 men at one site and nine at another. The Partisans, apparently keen for the notoriety, agreed. They even agreed there would be no bloodshed unless necessary - Churches and his mates didn’t want old, harmless Austrian guards to be harmed.

Churches and Laws were told they had to accompany the fighters if the raid was to go ahead. And so, a few minutes after 8 o’clock on the morning of August 31, Churches, Laws and almost 100 Partisan guerillas ambushed guards, a scattering of civilians and all the POWs minutes after they’d alighted from the train that had brought them to the railway work site at a place called Ozbalt, almost 30 kilometres from Maribor. Without a shot being fired, the Partisans, Churches and Laws got away with more than 100 POWs in tow - British, French, 12 Australians and nine New Zealanders. Over the next two weeks, with German troops on their trail, the band - a column of around 200 at its peak - trudged up and down mountains, almost freezing at night, fording rivers and keeping to the shelter of forests to avoid German patrols and surveillance flights. Churches wore his Australian slouch hat every day. A picture of the escape march through Slovenia given to Ralph Churches years later by Karol Cholnik, latterly of Bacchus Marsh in Melbourne. Churches can be seen wearing his slouch hat and Cholnik is leading the column. Farmers and villagers sympathetic to the Partisans prepared stews in steaming coppers for the travellers at night. After a firefight between the Partisans and a German patrol, some of Churches’ and Laws’ comrades, fearing for their lives, wanted to return to prison. But on they went.

After two weeks and a journey of 285 kilometres, the escapees and their protectors reached Semic, a village almost on the border with Croatia which had become an outpost Allied base with an airstrip used by both the British and Americans and protected by Partisans. Five nights later, the entire band of escapees - 120 in all on the recent logbook evidence, plus a number of wounded Partisans - were taken out by four Dakota aircraft and delivered to freedom in Bari, Italy. It was September 18, 1944. Each man was offered a three-word telegram. Churches sent “ESCAPED SAFE WELL” to his wife, Ronte, who he’d married a few days before shipping out of Adelaide. Laws and Churches were debriefed by a colonel from the Intelligence Corps, who was clearly no fan of the Partisans, who demanded to know why, if the Partisans were so clever, hadn’t they got even more prisoners out? Laws and Churches protested, but the colonel continued: "I still say, a hundred mile as the crow flies. I can’t understand why more of our fellows aren’t doing it."

“I did my block,” Churches recalled later. “I said, ‘Maybe, sir, it’s because they’re not bloody crows.’ He bridled a bit and he went ‘Humph. Oh, of course, you’re the Australian, aren’t you?’” Churches kept his public silence until 1984, when he was released from the stricture of the Official Secrets Act at the request of the Yugoslavian government, which wanted to celebrate the story with a film. Ralph Churches with his service medals. By then, however, one of the former Partisans and a scout for the escapers, Karol Cholnik, who’d become a market gardener at Bacchus Marsh outside Melbourne, had tracked down Churches and presented him with a photograph taken during the Crow’s Flight. Cholnik was leading the band, and the third figure in the picture, wearing a slouch hat, was Ralph Churches. It was the first time Churches’ son, Neil, learned anything of the greatest escape. Ralph Churches, who became a highly successful insurance salesman and manager, died in 2014.