A Gallant Company: The Men of the Great Escape

by Jonathan F. Vance

Book Overview

A GALLANT COMPANY goes beyond the bestselling Great Escape by Paul Brickhill and tells the only full and complete account of the dramatic escape of Allied airmen from Stalag Luft III in World War II... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0935553479
• ISBN13: 9780935553475
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Pacifica Press (CA)
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Some Novel Information about the Great Escape

Most of the information presented in this book is the same or very similar to that provided in 1950 by Paul Brickhill's classic book on the Great Escape. Among the novel information in this book is a greater emphasis on the biographies of the escapers as well as the postwar trials of the German criminals responsible for murdering 50 of the 73 recaptured escapes. Vance also discusses the problem of Harry turning out 20-30 feet short of the woods in somewhat greater detail than most if not all other books on the Great Escape. Interestingly, there was an earlier hint of this problem. While still digging the exit shaft, the tunnelers heard the sounds of trucks on the nearby road, and began to suspect that the exit shaft was too close to the road and thereby short of the woods. But a recheck of the computations failed to disclose any error in surveying. One wonders, then, why Harry came up short of the woods. Vance presents simple information that underscores the challenges of land surveying without proper equipment. It turns out that, when an exterior tree (with its necessary wide trunk) was forced to serve as the surveyors' transit, a small error in measured angle added up to a significant error in estimated distance. Perhaps this explains Harry's excessive shortness. There is a novel map of Sagan and the villages around it. Vance also provides detail about some of the blind spots in the wire (a fact that inspired the baseball-throwing escape attempt by Steve McQueen in the film). It turns out to be a problem of visual perspective: The goon towers were so far apart that the wire would bunch together when viewed from a distance at a steep angle. Ironically, increasing the platform size of the goon towers created new blind spots directly underneath the towers!

The Great Escape -Just Who Were the Fifty?

This book gives a background to each of the Fifty RAF and Allied officers who was murdered by the Gestapo on re-capture from Operation 200, post-war named The Great Escape. It is well researched and goes into great detail. At times it is rather poignant, especially when a survivor of Stalag Luft 3 visits the parents of one of the Fifty after the war. Jonathan Vance has a very readable style and it is an excellent book for people like me to want to know more about the central characters in a true war story, where they came from and what happened to them after the war, etc. All this is in this book. A Gallant Company: The Men of the Great Escape must be regarded as a companion book to Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape.

A great story, told well.

A welcome addition to the escape literature family. The focus is on the events within the Luft Stalag III itself, but there are quick sketches of the men's lives before the war, captures, and early escape attempts (althought this makes it sadder since one knows what's coming). The only weakness is a lack of footnotes, or bibliography.

Another excellent addition to the genre

For those who are fans of the "prison escape" genre, this book is an excellent addition to the growing number of books which cover that most famous of mass escapes, the March 1944 "great escape" from Stalag Luft III.If, like myself, you have read and loved Paul Brickhill's "The Great Escape", but found yourself wanting more and deeper information, this book is a goldmine. During the prelude and epilog sections of the Brickhill book, the reader is teased with brief glimpses of people, places and events which are relevent to the main story, but which are (necessarily) not examined in detail. Some examples include the many early escape attempts by some of the Great Escape principals, the other prison camps in the Luftwaffe system, and the stories of most of the actual escapers themselves. "A Gallant Company" addresses all these issues. The reader gets to know each and every remarkable man who went through that tunnel, what circumstances brought them into the war, what role they played in the escape organization, and their fate following the escape. Individually and collectively, their story is an extraordinary one. Jonathan Vance's telling of it is engrossing and highly readable.This is not a book for the reader who is unfamiliar with the basic story, however. I would strongly recommend a read through the Brickhill book first -- a rewarding experience in itself. (Note: please, don't assume that the movie version is enough to cover this ground! A *fine* film, but a highly fictionalized adaptation!).Taken together with "The Great Escape" and Arthur Durand's excellent "Stalag Luft III - The Secret Story", Jonathan Vance's "A Gallant Company" provides as complete a picture as any escape story fan could possibly want.A minor quibble - I couldn't locate a source or citations section in this book. Where did Vance's wealth of information come from? I assume from personal interviews with camp survivors and family members, and many of the same sources named in the Durand book.