Today’s NYT has an interesting article about an attempt to unearth and recreate the tunnel system used in Stalag Luft III.
In an effort to establish more clearly how the escape was accomplished — and, in a sense, to reclaim the narrative of the breakout — British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians traveled into the pine forest outside Zagan last summer to unearth the secrets buried there for a television documentary by Wildfire Television in London that was broadcast in late 2011 in Britain. They were accompanied by modern-day Royal Air Force pilots, as well as veterans of wartime bombing raids, now in their 80s, who helped build the tunnels at the encampment known as Stalag Luft III.
It turns out that the team was unable to excavate “Harry”, but they did manage to dig down to “George”. They also constructed a new tunnel called “Roger”, “but in a trench just beneath the surface; anything deeper was deemed too dangerous”. (The original tunnels ran 30 feet below the surface.)
I am looking forward to this documentary showing up on PBS. (At least, I’m hoping it will show up on PBS instead of The Hitler History Channel.) I think this is a review of it from the Telegraph. Here’s a link to an older NOVA documentary. For any of my younger readers who are unfamiliar with the story, here’s the Wikipedia entry to use as a starting point. The Great Escape
is still in print and available from Amazon. And because I want to make things as easy for my readers as possible, here’s a link to the DVD
.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 7:56 am and is filed under Books, Clippings, Geek, Heroism, History, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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