As per the title.... watched the Great escape over the holidays with my 20 year old daughter who was asking more questions than I could answer about POWs, prison camp s, escapes and the resistance. Please help with book titles for both of us. Thanks
The Last Escape by John Nichol & Tony Rennell is excellent.
More focused on the latter stages of the war, but brilliant none the less.
Mainly sourced from eye-witnesses, and interviewed by someone who was an aviator held captive himself.
The Great Escape is a fantastic book by Paul Brickhill (who also wrote the outstanding The Dambusters) - it's what the film was based on (with embellishments!), I'd start there. 🙂
No Picnic on Mount Kenya - three Italian POWs escape to climb the mountain overlooking their camp.
Another one of ww2 is The Wooden Horse.
The Colditz Story by Pat Reid.
A good read of camp life throughout the war is
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-39ers-Extraordinary-Experiences-Squadron/dp/1909166154
Escape or Die
It’s very old, and some bits are very harrowing, but it’s well worth a read
Dare to be Free by W.B (Sandy) Thomas
The superb book published decades after the war.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Highlander-Incredible-Survival-During/dp/0349122571
Think I mentioned it on the thread about WW2 from a German perspective but hunt out the Colditz book by Reinhold Eggers. He was the chief ferret who tried to hunt down the allied escape attempts before they happened. They disrupted many but he acknowledges that they was one attempt he only found out how they did it after reading Pat Reid’s book sometime after the war ended.
the Dieter Dengler book, can’t remember the title though.
the Herzog film is good too. ‘Little Dieter needs to fly’
The Real Great Escape by Guy Walters is very good.
Its almost forensic in detail. I listened to it as an Audiobook and it was very good.
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. Less a POW escape, more a special forces raid to free hundreds of prisoners from a Japanese POW camp in the Phillipines. Great book, need to read it again.
Slightly off tack, but if you can find Guy Martin's Great Escape on catch up (all4 maybe ?) then in between the motorbike bits then there's a lot of interesting historical pieces to watch (hidden maps in uniforms, visits to the tunnels etc.). There's input from Guy Walters who wrote The Real Great Escape also- which i bought on the back of watching this.
Remarkable stuff.
Sydney Smith - Wings Day:
Smith was the British commanding officer in the Great Escape camp, and is featured briefly in the film as the older officer with the walking stick.
Airey Neave - They Have Their Exits:
During World War II he was the first British prisoner-of-war to succeed in escaping from Oflag IV-C at Colditz Castle, and later worked for MI9.
These are ones I remember from my youth.
I found this quite a tough read but also incredible:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Years-Freedom-James-Rowe/dp/0345314603
Wow.Thanks STW, I knew you would deliver! Loads of great suggestions!
Just a tiny nugget - my uncle, who was shot down over Denmark, ended up in the same POW camp, Stalag Luft III. They arrived not long after 'the great escape' and he said that the guards were actually really gutted about the escapees who were lined up and shot.
Love And War In The Apennines by Eric Newby.
"Hailed as Newby's 'masterpiece', ‘Love and War in the Apennines’ is the gripping real-life story of Newby's imprisonment and escape from an Italian prison camp during World War II"
Though tbh the bulk of it is him hiding out in the mountains with depictions of Italian village life, and is as well-written as you'd expect from Newby. There's also a love story, which is unusual for a ww2 POW escape tale!
The Railway man for pow stuff in the Far East, quite a captivating book.
Just seen IRA Jailbreaks 1918-1921 on Amazon which might give a more holistic view on British military history
Welcome to the rabbit hole that is the history of the two world wars! I started by reading "birdsong' (a novel that flashes back to the trenches of WW1) and it opened up a massive interest in the subject. I have now read many accounts from WW1 and WW2 from an Allied perspective, Axis perspective, Concentration camp internees and guards, the Friekorps, the rise (and fall) of the Nazis, how each war started (and didn't actually really end). I am now on to reading about aerial warfare in WW2 but I have never read anything about POWs so I think this will be next on my list – thank you!
Not a book but have you seen Werner Herzog’s film ‘Rescue Dawn’ with Christian Bale? Bale portrays the unlikely-named real-life character Dieter Dengler, a German-American pilot who was shot down in the Vietnam War and sentenced to death in a prison camp.
Didn’t know what to expect but was blown away by the film. Harrowing, thrilling and fascinating in equal measure. Dengler was a character and a half. There must be a book. Thoroughly recommend the film.
*edit: @MrSmith, doh!
*doubledit: Book - ‘Hero Found’
Eric Williams, The Wooden Horse.
Covers life in the stalag and on the run. A great book.
What I find really interesting is that most of these stories are from officers who were not doing forced labour and who therefore had the opportunity and relative health to allow them to plan and execute escapes.
Life in the camps for those who weren't officers must have been very different and you don't hear a lot about it.
The Guy Walter book I remember being interesting about how the escaping officers were viewed by others as escaping crazy, and that wanting to escape wasn't really the most common viewpoint held by captives.
Can anyone recommend a book about non-officers?
Boldness be my Friend by Richard Pape.
It's a long time since I read it but Richard Pape was NCO aircrew and there is debate within the book about dissimilar treatment of officers and other ranks.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boldness-Friend-True-Stories-World/dp/0755316266
apologies for the link - I was looking for information on Franz Von Werra but found other German POWs of interest
Von Werra actually made it from Canada back to Germany
Pluschow I had not heard of before
https://www.****/news/article-1355540/Only-German-PoW-escape-Britain-make-home-world-war.html
All these books are worth a read. One of the best nuggets regarding escaping from POW camps comes from Peter Butterworth the Carry-On actor who escaped from Dulag Luft POW camp via a tunnel, and was one of the actual vaulters covering up for the prisoners escaping from Stalag Luft 3 Early in his career he auditioned for a role in the up coming Wooden Horse movie, confident that having actually been there, he'd stand a good chance of getting a role. he tells in his autobiography that being turned down on the basis of not "looking convincingly heroic enough or the sort who'd escape" felt almost like as bitter a blow as getting recaptured the first time...
i have been researching my wife's grandad and his brother for my father in law, tracing their military service, they were in the Royal Norfolk's, survived Dunkirk (one being madly injured in process) before being shipped out to Far East.
I ended up reading Survivor on the River Kwai by Reg Twigg as wife's great uncle is mentioned in it in passing. I then leant it to my father in law, but he couldn't finish it knowing what his father went through. His father had lifelong health problems due to treatment from Japanese and his brother was "mentally broken" and died in the late 50's.
Can anyone recommend a book about non-officers?
‘Hero Found’ is about two pilots and some civilians. IIRC they were all held and (mis)treated more or less equally by their VC captors.
Except for Martin, an Air Force helicopter pilot who had been shot down in North Vietnam nearly a year before, the other prisoners were civilians employed by Air America, a civilian airline owned by the Central Intelligence Agency. The civilians had been held by the Pathet Lao for over two and a half years when Dengler joined them.
"I had hoped to see other pilots. What I saw horrified me. The first one who came out was carrying his intestines around in his hands. One had no teeth - plagued by awful infections, he had begged the others to knock them out with a rock and a rusty nail in order to release pus from his gums". "They had been there for two and a half years," said Dengler. "I looked at them and it was just awful. I realized that was how I would look in six months. I had to escape."
Ironically and before he was handed over to the VC, Dengler had unsuccesfully escaped from the Pathet Lao and so
was hung upside down by his ankles with a nest of biting ants over his face until he lost consciousness, suspended in a freezing well at night so that if he fell asleep he might drown. On other occasions he was dragged through villages by a water buffalo, to the amusement of his guards, as they goaded the animal with a whip. He was asked by Pathet Lao officials to sign a document condemning the United States, but he refused and as a result he was tortured as tiny wedges of bamboo were inserted under his fingernails and into incisions on his body which grew and festered.
"They were always thinking of something new to do to me." Dengler recalled. "One guy made a rope tourniquet around my upper arm. He inserted a piece of wood, and twisted and twisted until my nerves cut against the bone. The hand was completely unusable for six months."
Just had a peep on the youtube and it seems that the aforementioned film is currently allegedly available (assumedly for review), in full. Or £3.49 on Prime Video.
Dengler fascinated me on account of his will to live, and (double-ironically) to then choose to die by his own hand in 2001 while he still had the choice/ability, before being ‘imprisoned’ again (by ALS). What a tragic and yet triumphant life. Unforgettable.
I picked up the wooden horse from a similar thread on here a few years ago, really enjoyed it.
The one that stands out for me is Empire of the Sun, JG Ballard. It's a Japanese camp and semi-autobiographical, truly stunning and haunting.
On the subject of the film / farce The Great Escape.
Even though Donald Pleasence had been in the RAF and a POW in world war 2, his attempts to retain at least some realism or respect for reality were ignored by the film makers.
Much like the film / musical Bridge over the river kwai makes no attempt to respect the truth.
Monty Halls TV series and book are worth looking at - Escaping Hitler, I seem to remember it being called. He looked at the escape routes through Europe that POWs were using - some interesting stuff in there. He was talking to a little old French woman who helped escapees, and she was saying that undercover Americans were always worryingly obvious, being well fed, big, and they walked, swaggered, in a way that no European ever would!
I ended up reading Survivor on the River Kwai by Reg Twigg as wife’s great uncle is mentioned in it in passing. I then leant it to my father in law, but he couldn’t finish it knowing what his father went through. His father had lifelong health problems due to treatment from Japanese and his brother was “mentally broken” and died in the late 50’s.
My great uncle was forced to work on the Burma railway. I think he died when I was young - I certainly didn't have a chance for a conversation with him.
"They have their exits" by airey neave was good. He escaped from colditz
There is a pod cast on ww2 escapes called "for you the war is over" which I enjoy. Sadly one of the 2 men who make it died during covid but it continues to produce interesting stuff.
‘The Naked Island’ by Russell Braddon gives an account of being a POW in Singapore and the Burma Railway. Not an easy read but very thought provoking. I read it as a young teenager partly because one of my Parents’ friends’ father had been a POW in the same camp at the same time as Braddon and I had had a couple of chats to him and wanted to find out more than he was willing to offer. I do know that he would never buy anything made in Japan.