Heroism behind the gloss

The Great escape by Anton Gill (review, (pounds) 20)

EVERY Boxing Day one or other of the television networks screens John Sturges's 1963 movie The Great Escape. In it an assortment of American movie stars and British character actors play Allied prisoners of war who make monkeys of their guards before tunnelling their way out under the barbed wire.

Sturges's film is based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, a one-time RAF officer who was himself a prisoner in Stalag Luft III the camp from which the real great escape was made. As American war movies go it isn't a bad effort, even if Steve McQueen's escape attempt on a high-powered motorcycle (the actor was a keen biker) is totally ludicrous. So far, so conventional.

As the motorcycle episode suggests, Sturges made his movie with something of a light touch. It is classic Hollywood. History as entertainment. And as is usually the case, the truth is much more complex.

Behind the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III in 1944 is a tale that is heroic, certainly, but also grim, futile and ultimately tragic. The strands of that true story are carefully unpacked by Anton Gill in his new account of what is the most famous escape attempt in the history of second world war.

The bare facts are well enough known. In March 1944, 76 allied airmen tunnelled their way out of Stalag Luft III on the border with Poland and fanned out all across Europe. It was the biggest mass escape of the war and it infuriated Adolf Hitler. All but three of the escapees (two Norwegians and a Dutchman) were recaptured.

But instead of being dumped back into the Stalag and given a few weeks hard time (the usual punishment), 50 of the men were shot on Hitler's orders. The killings were a breach of the Geneva Convention which Germany had signed in 1929.

Gill has nothing but admiration for the courage and wit of the Allied escapers. They were young men longing to get back into the war. And his descriptions of the intricate POW infrastructure that went into creating Stalag Luft III's tunnels (codenamed George, Tom, Dick and Harry) make fascinating reading.

But he does not dismiss the Germans as simpletons. He makes it plain that a fierce cat-and-mouse game was played out between the wily Allied escape artists and the German anti-escape squads known as ferrets. It was a game the Allied airmen did not always win.

Stalag Luft III was run by the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and commanded by one Colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner-Wildau. According to Anton Gill the aristocratic von Lindeiner was a tolerant and decent man who did his best for the prisoners in his charge. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that many of the most dedicated Allied escapers respected their resourceful Luftwaffe antagonists.

But Gill's book is at its most gripping where he described the events after the mass escape. This is where the reality of Nazi Germany breaks through. Hitler, he writes, was so incensed by the escape that he called Goering and Himmler to his headquarters and demanded that every man recaptured be shot out of hand. Goering and Himmler tried to talk Hitler out of it (they feared a propaganda disaster) but the best they could do was talk down the number of airmen to be killed to 50.

Thousands of Germans - Gestapo, civilian police, home guard, regular troops, even the Waffen SS - were thrown into the task of rounding up the escaped POWs. Within a few weeks 73 of the 76 escapees were collared and marched into camps, jails and police stations all over Germany.

In one haunting passage Gill describes how the job of deciding which of the airmen should live and which should die was assigned to a Gestapo bureaucrat called Artur Nebe. Before being headquartered in Berlin, Nebe had commanded one of the loathsome Einsatzgruppen which had set out to cleanse Russia of hostile elements such as Jews, homosexuals and intellectuals.

But nothing is what it seems: Artur Nebe was also up to his neck in the July Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, something that almost cost him his life just a few months after the great escape.

But in March 1944 Nebe was playing the loyal Nazi. He made out a pile of index cards on which were written the details of each of the escapees. "He would take the first card," Nebe's assistant later recalled, "look at it, and he would say, for instance 'Oh, this man is still very young; he can stay alive'. He then looked at a second card and he would say 'This man is married but has no children. He will be one of them'. And so on, until Nebe had 50 cards with the 50 names needed to satisfy the Hitler order."

Gill makes the point that neither the Luftwaffe, the Wermacht or even the Waffen SS had anything to do with carrying out Hitler's order. It seems that Himmler's bureaucrats did not have the courage of their own brutality.

All of which renders even sillier the image of Steve McQueen playing wheelies on his motorbike while being chased by German numpties.

Copyright 2002
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