Hitler responded by ordering that recaptured prisoners be turned over to the Gestapo for execution. He presents the escape as a military operation intended to disrupt the German war effort. In a work complementing Paul Brickhill's classic, The Great Escape (LJ 9/1/50), ex-RAF flyer Burgess focuses less on the actual breakout of 76 Allied airmen from Stalag Luft II than on the escape's matrix and its consequences. Photos.Ĭopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
flyer and co-author with David Berman of My Story, has shaped an enthralling narrative that is also a tribute to human courage and resourcefulness. (Only three escapees achieved the "home run.") Burgess, former R.A.F.
He covers the fate of individual escapees and the story of how a small group of men from the RAF Special Investigation Branch tracked down former Gestapo personnel after the war and brought them to justice for the murder of the 50 airmen who were recaptured. With the help of interviews and newly uncovered German documents, Burgess here fills in the details of the planning and construction of the tunnel, the elaborate preparations for life on the run, the efforts of the camp administration to locate the tunnel and the escape itself on the night of March 23, 1944.
Readers of Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape will recall the story of the tunnel breakout of 76 Allied airmen from a German POW camp as one of the war's most suspenseful and dramatic episodes.
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