ZERO NIGHT
The Untold Story of the World War Two's Most Daring Great Escape
Mark Felton
Penguin India; 299 pages; Rs 699
Readers of a certain age may remember The Great Escape, the sensational story of the breakout of 70-odd Allied airmen from a Nazi prison camp in 1944, in two ways. One, the 1963 movie with its stellar cast of a young Richard Attenborough and an even younger Charles Bronson (those fascinating wrinkles were yet to show) and the delectable Steve McQueen on the cusp of his fame. Two, the classic book by Paul Brickhill, on which the movie was loosely based (my dog-eared second-hand copy notes that Faber and Faber Ltd first published it in "mcmli", that is, 1951, though this edition with stills from the film was published in "mcmlxiii").
But all in all, the accepted wisdom all these decades has been that the elaborate tunnel gouged out under Stalag Luft III was by far the greatest escape of World War II, made more poignant by the fact that 50 of the escapees were caught and murdered by the Gestapo.
So the appearance of Zero Night in November this year, packaged as "The Untold Story of World War Two's Most Daring Great Escape" comes as a surprise. Could anything have been more daring than the tunnel under the wooden horse in Stalag Luft III? The escape of Allied officers from Oflag VI-B in Warburg, Germany, in 1942 would certainly have qualified, not least because the POWs escaped in plain sight, over the barbed wire. Known as the Warburg Wire Job, it attracted less publicity at the time because fewer men escaped and still fewer made it home.
Brickhill, a Royal Air Force pilot, wrote a first-hand account of the escape from Stalag Luft III because he was a POW there. He did not take part in the escape because he was claustrophobic. Mr Felton, writing six decades later, has relied on oral histories and written accounts left by several veterans of Oflag VI-B plus careful archival research in Britain and Germany.
To recount the story would be to give away the plot, with its complement of theatrics worthy of a movie: the false trails, the near discoveries, the intrepid Maquis (or Resistance guerrilla fighters, the name was derived from the scrubby terrain in southern France where they mostly operated), the beautiful, mysterious Andree De Jongh who ran the Comet Line, an escape route through Spain, and eluded Gestapo capture (they were looking for a man; they found it hard to believe that a mere woman could consistently outwit them).
There are some interesting asides. The camp's most distinguished inmate was Douglas Bader, the ace fighter pilot who lost both legs in the previous war. Bader described the Warburg Wire Job as "the most brilliant escape conception" of the war. He would have known: he was later transferred to Stalag Luft III. Among others was a 30-year-old Captain, the Earl of Houpetoun, son of Lord Linlithgow, then Viceroy of India.
Suffice it to say that Mr Felton has managed to sustain the drama even as he has to explain the details of an unbelievably audacious and complex escape plan. He establishes the atmospherics skilfully, so you're rooting for the escapees: the brutish prison guards, who were often the dregs of the Germany military and security apparatus, the vicious commandant, the bad food, insanitary conditions and the routine flouting of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.
Mr Felton has written a straightforward adventure story, which is undoubtedly the object of the exercise, and he's done it excellently. But in the 69 years since the end of World War II, it is worth wondering about this Commando Comic approach. No doubt the tone of Mr Felton's narrative is influenced by the oral histories of Allied veterans. Still, the almost caricature-like depiction of personalities is redolent of the stock narrative of World War II movies made by the British and the Americans. The Germans are uniformly boorish and unbelievably gullible. The Allied prisoners are always straight-up honourable men, iron-jawed in their resistance to German perfidies, much cleverer than their enemies and so on (it is no coincidence that the Allied heroes were played by the best-looking actors in Hollywood). Even allowing for the unalloyed evil of the Nazis, it is hard to believe this neat apportioning of evil in a POW camp where so many desperate human beings were living in close proximity.
This standard hero-versus-villain representation flows from the sanitised notion that World War II was a "Good War" that somehow cauterised the slaughter of World War I. It has also become the twisted moral justification for armed intervention in other country's conflicts, an outlook for which the world is paying today. That is why it is important to read Zero Night as a jolly good thriller and nothing more.
The Untold Story of the World War Two's Most Daring Great Escape
Mark Felton
Penguin India; 299 pages; Rs 699
Readers of a certain age may remember The Great Escape, the sensational story of the breakout of 70-odd Allied airmen from a Nazi prison camp in 1944, in two ways. One, the 1963 movie with its stellar cast of a young Richard Attenborough and an even younger Charles Bronson (those fascinating wrinkles were yet to show) and the delectable Steve McQueen on the cusp of his fame. Two, the classic book by Paul Brickhill, on which the movie was loosely based (my dog-eared second-hand copy notes that Faber and Faber Ltd first published it in "mcmli", that is, 1951, though this edition with stills from the film was published in "mcmlxiii").
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During World War II, thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) escaped Axis prison camps, as they felt duty-bound to do, by methods ranging from outright bribery to ingenious techniques and schemes. Most were caught and suffered long periods in solitary confinement for their pains (not that this deterred anyone). Some made it back to base, thanks to the Resistance and MI19, the military department set up partly for the purpose - one of the more famous accounts of these was Where the Hell Have You Been? by Tom Carver, the story of his father Richard's escaped from an Italian POW camp after being captured at the Battle of Al-Alamein. The title was inspired by the irate question posed to Richard Carver by his stepfather Bernard Montgomery when he staggered back to barracks.
But all in all, the accepted wisdom all these decades has been that the elaborate tunnel gouged out under Stalag Luft III was by far the greatest escape of World War II, made more poignant by the fact that 50 of the escapees were caught and murdered by the Gestapo.
So the appearance of Zero Night in November this year, packaged as "The Untold Story of World War Two's Most Daring Great Escape" comes as a surprise. Could anything have been more daring than the tunnel under the wooden horse in Stalag Luft III? The escape of Allied officers from Oflag VI-B in Warburg, Germany, in 1942 would certainly have qualified, not least because the POWs escaped in plain sight, over the barbed wire. Known as the Warburg Wire Job, it attracted less publicity at the time because fewer men escaped and still fewer made it home.
Brickhill, a Royal Air Force pilot, wrote a first-hand account of the escape from Stalag Luft III because he was a POW there. He did not take part in the escape because he was claustrophobic. Mr Felton, writing six decades later, has relied on oral histories and written accounts left by several veterans of Oflag VI-B plus careful archival research in Britain and Germany.
To recount the story would be to give away the plot, with its complement of theatrics worthy of a movie: the false trails, the near discoveries, the intrepid Maquis (or Resistance guerrilla fighters, the name was derived from the scrubby terrain in southern France where they mostly operated), the beautiful, mysterious Andree De Jongh who ran the Comet Line, an escape route through Spain, and eluded Gestapo capture (they were looking for a man; they found it hard to believe that a mere woman could consistently outwit them).
There are some interesting asides. The camp's most distinguished inmate was Douglas Bader, the ace fighter pilot who lost both legs in the previous war. Bader described the Warburg Wire Job as "the most brilliant escape conception" of the war. He would have known: he was later transferred to Stalag Luft III. Among others was a 30-year-old Captain, the Earl of Houpetoun, son of Lord Linlithgow, then Viceroy of India.
Suffice it to say that Mr Felton has managed to sustain the drama even as he has to explain the details of an unbelievably audacious and complex escape plan. He establishes the atmospherics skilfully, so you're rooting for the escapees: the brutish prison guards, who were often the dregs of the Germany military and security apparatus, the vicious commandant, the bad food, insanitary conditions and the routine flouting of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.
Mr Felton has written a straightforward adventure story, which is undoubtedly the object of the exercise, and he's done it excellently. But in the 69 years since the end of World War II, it is worth wondering about this Commando Comic approach. No doubt the tone of Mr Felton's narrative is influenced by the oral histories of Allied veterans. Still, the almost caricature-like depiction of personalities is redolent of the stock narrative of World War II movies made by the British and the Americans. The Germans are uniformly boorish and unbelievably gullible. The Allied prisoners are always straight-up honourable men, iron-jawed in their resistance to German perfidies, much cleverer than their enemies and so on (it is no coincidence that the Allied heroes were played by the best-looking actors in Hollywood). Even allowing for the unalloyed evil of the Nazis, it is hard to believe this neat apportioning of evil in a POW camp where so many desperate human beings were living in close proximity.
This standard hero-versus-villain representation flows from the sanitised notion that World War II was a "Good War" that somehow cauterised the slaughter of World War I. It has also become the twisted moral justification for armed intervention in other country's conflicts, an outlook for which the world is paying today. That is why it is important to read Zero Night as a jolly good thriller and nothing more.