Yellow Sands and Penguins: The Soil of “The Great Escape”

Abstract

To many people, knowledge of “The Great Escape”, in which 76 officers of the Allied air forces attempted to escape from a Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camp during the Second World War, is derived from the 1963 John Sturges Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. Sturges’ film (starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough) was in turn based on an account by ex-prisoner Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape (1951), a book that still holds today as perhaps the best account of the mass escape of March 1944. Central to the plot of both the book and the film is the context of escape from a high security prisoner of war camp built in 1942 to house air force prisoners shot down over the territories of the Third Reich and captured by the Wehrmacht. Accounts of prisoner of war escapes have been popular since the end of the First World War, and it is a fact that many of the escapers of the Second War were influenced by the published accounts of their forebears. Books such as The Tunnellers of Holzminden (Durnford, 1920) firmly established tunnelling as a viable means of escape from captivity, itself echoing similar escape attempts in earlier wars, such as the American Civil War of 1861-65. In most cases, the only other alternative to tunnelling was the use of daring and bluff—the act of walking through the gate, hiding in transports, or exploiting weaknesses in the barbed wire that universally surrounded POW camps (Crawley 1956). Tunnelling from POW camps required appropriate ground conditions, and with most combatants derived from volunteers and conscripted civilians, it is not surprising that amongst the men incarcerated there would be those who had experience of tunnelling. Lt. Jim Rogers of the Royal Engineers was one such man,