On the 14^th February 1994 , just a month before the 50^th Anniversary of the Great Escape, Squadron Leader F P McKenna OBE RAF, one of the principle investigators in the Stalag Luft III murder enquiry, died at the age of eighty-seven. His obituary appeared in both The Times and The Daily Telegraph. The then Squadron Leader Charles Hobgen, a former pilot and prisoner-of-war who was sent to Stalag Luft III shortly after the mass break-out recalled a conversation he had with McKenna while they served together in 1956 with No 24 RAF Police District in Cyprus. Relaxing over a drink in the mess, Hobgen sat spellbound whilst McKenna recounted in his quiet self effacing way the brief story of his tireless hunt for the men who had murdered fifty RAF officers in cold blood in 1944. Eventually, McKenna fell silent and Hobgen was able to ask him what had driven him on? What had given him the strength of purpose to overcome the many setbacks that harried him and his colleagues in what could so easily have been a hopeless cause? For a while McKenna sat silent contemplating the question but eventually his reply came. He spoke abruptly but at the same time with great sincerity, "Well, it hadn't anything to do with revenge; if we had allowed that kind of personal feeling to motivate us I doubt whether we would have enjoyed the success that became ours". He fell silent again and then quietly gave Hobgen the answer he sought, "Do you remember, as I do, that during our aircrew training we were made to understand that it was our duty to avoid capture if we were shot down and that if we were unfortunate enough to be captured it was our duty to escape?". Hobgen nodded in agreement and McKenna continued, "You know Charles, I've talked to lots of ex-prisoners like yourself and without exception they spoke of it being their duty to escape. Whatever has been said to the contrary since the end of the war they didn't see escaping as a sport and when they used the word 'duty' they did so with typical British reserve and a degree of embarrassment. Those murdered men were doing no more than what they accepted as being their duty and it seemed to me, and to the chaps working with me, that to be murdered in cold blood for doing one's honourable duty as a serviceman must always be unacceptable to any decent human being. We saw it as being our duty to find the miscreants and thereafter to bring them before a court of law". For a while the two men sat still without a word passing between them. McKenna was not a demonstrative man and Hobgen was to find out as he grew to know McKenna that he had no special facility for words. His stock in trade was sincerity, burnished by a deeply held sense of what was right and wrong, tempered by compassion. Undoubtedly, devout Christian beliefs sustained him greatly. When McKenna spoke of British justice there was no trace of the jingoist in his words. Rather he spoke as a policeman who saw it as his duty to uphold the law not to act as an avenging angel. Although at the time McKenna was wearing RAF uniform and was proud of the part he had played as a member of an aircrew in Bomber Command, he never forgot his calling as a civil policeman and then and there he asked Hobgen if he had ever heard the words that a constable is required to declare before a Justice of the Peace before he can take up his office. Hobgen had to admit that he wasn't familiar with the oath, whereupon McKenna, with barely a hesitation recited it;