The Great Escape

During the Second World War, Allied airmen held at Stalag Luft III spent months digging tunnels under the German POW camp. The plan was a mass escape. Paul Brickhill was one of the men involved in the planning, and he tells how they organised the digging, forged papers, made tools, and kept it hidden. Of the 76 men who got out, most were caught again, and many were killed. The book is about the plan, the people, and what happened after.

Brickhill is good on the practical side: how they dug the tunnels, what went wrong, and how the camp was run. You get a sense of the people as well as the plan. I had seen the film before reading it, and the book filled in a lot I did not know.