Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-290) and index.

A note on the text -- Prologue -- Barbed Wire Horizon -- Trial and Error -- The Wire -- Short Circuit -- Diversions -- "Big X" -- Operation Timber -- Practice Makes Perfect -- The Road Less Travelled -- Pack Up Your Troubles -- Fifteen Yards to Freedom -- Zero Night -- "Another British Evacuation" -- A Walk in the Woods -- "Hande hoch!" -- The Bitter Road -- Three Blind Mice -- Comet Line -- The Last Frontier -- Epilogue -- Maps.

"On August 30, 1942--Zero Night--40 Allied officers staged the most audacious mass escape of World War II. Months of meticulous planning and secret training hung in the balance during three minutes of mayhem as the officers boldly stormed the huge doublefences at Oflag Prison. Employing wooden ladders and bridges previously disguised as bookshelves, the highly coordinated effort succeeded and set 36 men free into the German countryside. Later known as the 'Warburg Wire Job', fellow prisoner and fighterace Douglas Bader once described the attempt as 'the most brilliant escape conception of this war'. The first author to tackle this remarkable story in detail, historian Mark Felton brilliantly evokes the suspense of the escape and the adventures of those escapees who managed to elude the Germans, as well as the courage of the civilians who risked their lives to help them in enemy territory. Fantastically intimate and told with a novelist's eye for drama and detail, this rip-roaring adventure is all the more thrilling because it really happened"--