Former AFA chief, POW known for courage, 'Great Escape'

Mourners on Wednesday remembered a former Air Force Academy superintendent and World War II fighter pilot who turned his life’s greatest shame — getting shot down and taken captive  — into a triumphant display of ingenuity and tenacity.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Albert Patton Clark, who died March 8 at 96, was credited with helping fellow prisoners in a Nazi prison camp orchestrate a daring escape attempt that inspired the 1963 film “The Great Escape.”

Although Clark considered his capture “the greatest failure of his life,” he used the episode to show his determination, persistence and courage, his daughter Carolyn Clark Miller said at his funeral.

“He felt fear and he overcame it,” Miller told about 200 mourners at the academy’s Cadet Chapel.

Clark was born to a military family at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii on Aug. 27, 1913, inheriting the same “Yes sir, no sir” discipline that he instilled in his children, Miller said.

He graduated from the Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. in 1936.

Then-Lt. Col. Clark was flying with a Royal Air Force unit over Abbeville, France, on July 29, 1942 when his Supermarine Spitfire took flak while Clark eluded four German fighters. He crash-landed the crippled plane near Cape Grisnez.

Clark was branded “the most dangerous man at Stalag Luft III” after he was moved to the Nazi prison camp in what is now Poland, former Air Force Academy archivist Duane J. Reed wrote in the foreward of Clark’s 2004 memoir that recounted his war experiences. He was the senior officer held captive alongside American and British pilots, and helped establish the camp’s secret ties to Allied agents.

Clark is credited with managing the production and hiding of supplies used for the escapes of 76 POWs through a network of tunnels. Seventy-three airmen were eventually recaptured and 50 were executed by the Germans, events that formed the basis for “The Great Escape.”

Clark also used a smuggled camera to document life in Stalag Luft III, capturing images that he later donated to the Air Force Academy.

He was freed in spring 1945. His postwar assignments included a four-year term as the academy’s sixth superintendent, from 1970 until his retirement in 1974.

Lt. Gen. Mike Gould, the current superintendent, praised Clark as a “visionary” who expanded the academy’s air field and helped direct its planning for the eventual integration of female cadets. Women were admitted to service academies four years after the academy’s plan was complete, Gould said..

Clark, who remained in Colorado Springs after his retirement, helped establish the Friends of the Cadet Library, and the materials he donated from his prisoner-of-war days formed the core of the academy’s special archives, Gould said.

“Gen. Clark has left his footprints all over the academy, and for that we are eternally grateful,” he said.

Clark’s wife, Carolyn, died in 2002, and his son, Albert P. Clark Jr., died in 2005. He is survived by his two daughters, Miller, of Alexandria, Va., and Mary Gannon Walker, of Kansas City, Mo., eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

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