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.

Map on endpapers. Some copies "The Great Escape: The Untold Story".