Born in Edinburgh in 1919, Melville Forbes Carson was the son of a businessman who worked in Thailand.
He was training as a chartered accountant when the Second World War began in September 1939 and volunteered the day after hostilities broke out.
He trained as a pilot and was eventually posted to a bomber squadron.
Mr Carson was 22-years-old and on his 20th mission when he was shot down during a bombing raid over the German coast.
He opened the hazed-up canopy of the cockpit to help navigate over some islands shortly before the plane came under fire and crashed. The only survivor of the four-man Handley Page bomber crew, Carson often asked himself whether the plane crashed because it was shot down, or whether his error in leaving the canopy open played a part.
During the next three years when he was locked up at Stalag Luft III prison camp, he played lead violin in the camp's dance band and became leader of the camp orchestra, keeping lookout for guards while tunnel diggers hid soil underneath the raked seats – a tale immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape. German guards interrupted the escape on March 24, 1944, when they discovered a tunnel – codenamed "Harry" by the prisoners – and sounded the alarm.
Of the 76 who escaped, only three got away to freedom. The rest were recaptured and 50 of Mr Carson's fellow inmates were subsequently shot by the Gestapo on the orders of Hitler.
No 151 on the 200-strong escape list, the guards found the tunnel before Mr Carson's number came up.
He remained a prisoner in Stalag Luft III until the end of the war. He attended Gaelic lessons in the camp – the language used to discuss news received on a secret radio without suspicion from the English-speaking German guards.
After the war, he completed his chartered accountancy training in Edinburgh. He planned to emigrate to Canada, but on a trip there in 1947 he crossed the border into the United States and visited a centre for the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement, at Mackinac Island in Lake Michigan, where he met other war veterans.
Opening up to a former school friend he met there, he was finally able to unload the burden of his guilt over the death of his bomber crew.
Through working with the MRA, Carson was able to forgive his German captors, and he devoted his life to MRA's work of post-war reconciliation and forgiveness. As well as visiting Germany, he spent three years in India and Burma. He worked for the rest of his life as an accountant and musician – sending a message of change and reconciliation through a number of musical plays – with MRA in London and then for nine years in Washington DC from 1983.
Carson also met Elizabeth Law through their common involvement with MRA, and they were married in Edinburgh in June 1967.
The couple returned to Scotland in 1992, settling in Haddington.
He died in Edinburgh on July 11, having suffered a stroke.
The full article contains 540 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
