The Great Escape eBooks

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.

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."

The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill - Get eBooks