The suspense and the excitement are so intoxicating in Paul Brickhill's 1950 novel The Great Escape that it is easy to forget what a frightening, life-and-death struggle its characters have undertaken. They are British and American prisoners of war in a Nazi stalag (or POW camp), determined to burrow their way to escape and make the dangerous dash for freedom across occupied Europe. Through the 1963 film adaptation, starring Steve McQueen, the story has become well-known. Brickhill's novel reflects more of the actual process of planning and executing the escape, the painstaking detail and the incredible will behind a remarkable act of heroism.
Led by a fearless Englishman named Roger Bushell, the inmates of Stalag Luft III, both British and American, come together to plan a mass escape from their Nazi captors. Their task is formidable, to dig their way out of the camp in a network of tunnels while creating themselves the papers, clothing and simulated weapons they will need to escape through occupied territory. The men face a bewildering number of reversals of fortune, starting over each time a little wiser about what it takes to outfox the Germans. They must not only evade the German officers who run the camp but also the "ferrets," who are constantly on guard for any suspicious activity. The whole wildly improbable mission requires the most sensitive coordination and complete trust in an enemy prison camp in the middle of a worldwide war -- any escape, it seems under these circumstances, would be a "great" escape.
Australian-born Paul Brickhill was himself a prisoner of war of the Germans, and he participated in just such a mass escape from a German stalag. Using fiction to heighten the drama, he creates in The Great Escape a gallery of memorable characters and carefully charts -- literally, at certain points, with drawings and maps -- their ingenuity, their success and failures, and their courageous hope. "One of the great true stories of the war, and one of the greatest escape narratives of all time," the San Francisco Chronicle wrote of The Great Escape. The Dallas Times-Herald noted that the novel "puts the average war book so far in the shadow it's not even funny."
Prison camp life would not have been so bad if:
(a) It weren't such an indefinite sentence. At times you couldn't say you wouldn't still be there (or worse) in ten years.
(b) The Germans didn't keep dropping hints that if they lost, Hitler was going to shoot you anyway, just to even the score.
(c) You could get enough food to fill your belly again. Just once.
So we spent a lot of time trying to escape. It is a melancholy fact that escape is much harder in real life than in the movies, where only the heavy and second lead are killed. This time, after huge success, death came to some heroes. Later on, it caught up with some villains.
You learn to escape the hard way. It took us three years to become proficient-from the first primitive tunnels to the deep, long ones with underground railways, workshops and air pumps, forgery and compass factories, and so on. Above all we learned how to "destroy" sand and to hide everything in our little compound from the Germans constantly searching us.
The British had a start on the Americans because they were there first. Then the Yanks joined us and took to the escape business like ducks to water.
One got used to living in a microscopic world where life lay in working patiently for that brooding genius, "Big X." I suppose it is romantic now. It wasn't then. Life was too real, grim and earnest.
They were all real-Rubberneck, the humorless and coldy efficient German; "Bix X," the South African; Walenn, that charming Englishman; Ker-Ramsay, the dour Scot; Harsh, the rambunctious Yank; Sage, another Yank, also rambunctious; Floody, the Canadian who looked consumptive (and still does); Cornish, the baby-faced Australian; Pohé, the dark Maori; Minskewitz, the Pole with the Uncle Sam whiskers; Staubo, the handsome Norwegian; and all the others, too numerous to mention, even in the narrative that follows. No one ever noticed a nationality tag.
The Germans tried to play off the British against the Americans and vice versa, and in the end they took the Americans away and segregated them in another compound. We got along too damn well together.
Of my own part in the show-little enough to say. I am a sort of Boswell, not a hero. I was a cog in the machine, boss of a gang of "stooges" guarding the forgers, who had to work in an exposed position by windows to get enough light. Walenn, the chief forger, and I invented the "cloak and dagger" stooging system that gave them warning. It was rather complicated, but it never let us down-and that was the main thing. It just meant being on the job all the time, but there was nothing else to do anyway.
And when I finally drew a privileged position for the actual escape, "Big X" debarred me and three or four others on grounds of claustrophobia, a correct, if infuriating, decision. A few weeks later I was deeply grateful.
The maps and drawings printed throughout the text are by Ley Kenyon and were made from sketches Kenyon did at the camp as a diversion from his regular work as one of Tim Walenn's star counterfeiters.
Since the war I've twice been back to Germany to dig deeper into the story, being lucky enough once to get into the forbidden Russian zone and fossick once more round the scene of the crime. After the hangman's job was done in 1948 I went through several thousand pages of unpublished reports, getting all the German side of the affair as well as a lot more of our own. And then I searched out the important survivors and filled in the few gaps left.
So here it is, as nearly the way it happened as I can make it.
Synopsis
Riveting, brilliantly paced, this is the true story of a mass breakout from a German POW camp by a group of American internees; a documentary of intricate planning, escape and survival. Basis of the famous 1963 film with Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, directed by John Sturges.
About the Creator
Though The Great Escape is a novel, its basic story is true, and the novel's author Paul Brickhill (1916-91) was a participant in it. Brickhill, an Australian, had flown missions against the Germans in Tunisia for the Royal Australian Air Force when he was shot down in 1943. Locked away and bored in Silesia in Luft Stalag III, he and his fellow prisoners concocted an escape plan -- a daring idea that would result in a mass escape from the Germans. Of the 76 officers who escaped, only three were successful; Hitler himself ordered the execution of 47 of the men who were recaptured. Still, the escape remains one of the great heroic stories of World War II.
A native of Melbourne, Brickhill had begun a career as a newspaper reporter at the Sydney Sun when war was declared in 1939. His instincts as a reporter stuck with him during his incarceration by the Germans, as he collected stories from his fellow prisoners that became the foundation for his later work. After the war, Brickhill sought to go back to newspapering, but quickly abandoned it to begin work on his first book, entitled Escape to Danger (1946), about his experiences in the POW camp. From this, he drew the story of The Great Escape, published four years later.
The following year, Brickhill published The Dam Busters, an acclaimed account of pinpoint bombing raids by the 617 Squadron, followed by an anthology of POW stories entitled Escape or Die (1952) and Reach for the Sky (1954) a biography of aviator Douglas Bader.
