The Longest Tunnel: The True Story of World War II's Great Escape Tunnel

by Alan Burgess

Book Overview

This is the real story behind The Great Escape of World War II popularized in the now-classic movie starring Steve McQueen and James Garner. First published in 1990 and based on sources not available... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555840337
• ISBN13: 9781555840334
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
• Length: 289 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Is Prophetic in a Sense

Burgess provides information that was unavailable to Paul Brickhill for his 1950 book on the Great Escape. Burgess provides fascinating photos from German sources, now also available online, of the goon towers of Stalag Luft III, Tom's trap, Harry from various angles, etc. Fascinating new details have also come to light. Consider, for instance, the depths of the tunnels. The POWs believed that placing the tunnels thirty feet down put them out of range of the microphone listening devices. It turns out that the devices still were able to pick up the sounds of the tunneling. The Germans thus knew that tunneling was going on, but were enraged at not being able to pinpoint the location of Tom for a long time and Harry up to the breakout of the 76. But the depth of the tunneling evidently made the signal diffuse enough to prevent the listeners from zeroing on the exact site of the tunnel. Burgess describes the three Polish engineer-pilots who were responsible for the design of the traps for Tom, Dick, and Harry. Each trap had to be completely different from any other so that the Germans could not make a generalization for subsequent searches if they found one or two of them. The challenges were considerable. The initial trapmaking was a noisy operation, requiring cover noise to be made by other POWs. The trap had to be invisible to German eyes yet capable of being closed and sealed in a few tens of seconds. Harry's trap was actually the one underneath a stove. Tom's trap was found by the Germans apparently by accident. A goon reportedly dropped a pipe at or near the trap, causing the fast-drying concrete mask to chip and thus give away the trap. Burgess goes into quite a bit of detail about Dick's trap and its ingenious construction under a shower drain, and suggests that Dick's trap may yet be found by some archeologists. Years later, this is exactly what has happened. In this way, Burgess has been proved prophetic. Burgess discusses in considerable detail the postwar search for the German criminals responsible for the murder of 50 of the 73 recaptured airmen. It is amazing how quickly suspected individuals informed on their colleagues once questioned. They kept justifying their action by referring to the Allied airmen as "terror-fliers". Burgess should have provided the proper context for this German propaganda. In fact, the very first "terror-fliers" were none other than the Germans themselves. Within hours of the beginning of World War II (the German-Soviet conquest of Poland in September-October 1939), German bombers were killing tens of thousands of Polish civilians (including those in marked hospitals) through indiscriminate bombing of unmistakable civilian targets!

The true story behind the movie "The Great escape"

The Longest Tunnel: The True Story Of World War II's Great Escape is an amazing historical chronicle of the true story behind the popular and classic World War II movie "The Great Escape", which is in turn based on the book "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill. Author Alan Burgess, a RAF flyer in WW II, draws upon sources that even Brickhill did not have access to, explaining how seventy-six allied POW's traveled through a 350-foot tunnel to make their mark on history. Exciting, highly readable, dramatic, and narrated in express detail.

Excellent reading

The Longest Tunnel, by Alan Burgess, was well worth reading. I found the book difficult to put down. His book is a well rounded story of the escape, its escapers, and the aftermath. Paul Brickhill's book, The Great Escape, goes into more detail of building the tunnel on a daily basis, but Burgess's book gives you a better overall look at what happened. Early in the book, there are a few chapters devoted to some of the major players; and it makes the book read somewhat disjointedly. Nevertheless, once one is past these short biographies, the book makes for compelling reading - especially his writing regarding the Gestapo pursuit and murder of the "terror flyers". Definitely a companion piece to Brickhill's book.

Best Book On the Great Escape I've Read Yet.

I learned about "The Great Escape" the way a lot of people did, I think: I watched the movie. While it's an entertaining film and one of my favorite WW II movies, when I discovered the events were true I knew I had to find out more. First I read Paul Brickhill's book on which the film is based and came away even more satisfied. Along the way I read "The Wooden Horse," which tells of ANOTHER escape attempt that happened at about the same time as the one depicted in Brickhill's book and the film.While these offered a myriad of details regarding the escape itself and the events leading up to it, "The Longest Tunnel" instead concentrates more on the days after the breakout, the Gestapo reaction, the horrifying aftermath, and finally the search for justice as those who murdered The Fifty are hunted down. This is what drew me to this book, and now my sojurn into this fascinating chapter of WW II history is complete. If you can find this book, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT.

The true story of "The Great Escape"

Ever see a movie that was great and then find out it was based on real events? I remember "The Great Escape" as one of those movies when I was a kid. So when I found "The Longest Tunnel" I had to buy it to see which parts I remembered about the movie really happened. In addition to the engineering effort in building the tunnel, this book is a great background reference on the POW's and their captors. Surprisingly, the events portrayed in the movie were fairly accurate. (Not the Steve McQueen bit with the motorcycle, though). Drawn from interviews of the survivors, camp and official military records, we get to see the follow up story of what happened after hostilities ended. Dedicated to the fifty who were murdered for their daring escape attempt, the story continues with the Allied forces investigative efforts to track down those responsible. The now famous defense of "just following orders" did not protect those in the chain of command