This is the true story behind The Great Escape, the classic World War II movie based on a book of the same title by Paul Brickhill. Using sources not available to Brickhill, Alan Burgess chronicles here details of the real escape, which prove to be even more gripping than those fictionalized on film. He describes the night of 24 March 1944, when seventy-six Allied POWs slid through a 350-foot tunnel and out of a high-security German prison camp into history. Within days fifty had been executed on Hitler's orders and twenty-three others captured and returned to the camp. Just three made it to Allied lines, and their harrowing stories of survival and postwar efforts to bring the Gestapo killers to justice make memorable reading