| Summary: |
"On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 336-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as The Great Escape. The intricate breakout, more than a year in the making, involved as many as 2,000 POWs, extraordinary co-ordination and a battle of wits inconceivable for the time. Within a few days of the escape, however, all but three of the escapees were recaptured; subsequently, on specific orders from Adolf Hitler, fifty were murdered, cremated and buried in a remote corner of the prison compound. What most people and even some of the veterans themselves don't readily acknowledge is that The Great Escape was in many ways a "made-in-Canada" escape. Many of the principal planners, task leaders and key players, as well as some of those who actually got away that night were Canadian airmen--trained in Canada, serving in RCAF bomber and fighter squadrons, shot down over Europe, imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, and ultimately participants in the actual Great Escape"--Provided by publisher. |
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