Plot
The somewhat fictionalised version of the true story is set in Stalag Luft III—the same POW camp where the real events depicted in the film The Great Escape took place—and involved Williams, Michael Codner, and Oliver Philpot, all inmates of the camp. In the book and film, the escapees are renamed "Flight Lieutenant Peter Howard", "Captain John Clinton", and "Phil".
The prisoners are faced with the problem of digging an escape tunnel despite the accommodation huts, within which the tunnel entrance could be concealed, being a considerable distance from the perimeter fence. They came up with an ingenious way of digging the tunnel with its entrance located in the middle of an open area relatively near the perimeter fence and using a vaulting horse (constructed largely from plywood from Canadian Red Cross parcels) to cover the entrance.
Recruiting fellow-prisoners to form a team of vaulters, each day they carry the horse out to the same spot, with a man hidden inside. The prisoners begin a gymnastic exercise using the vaulting horse, while the concealed man digs down below the horse. At the finish of the exercises, the digger places wooden boards, cut to fit the aperture, in the hole, and fills the space with sandbags and dry sand kept for the purpose - wet sand taken from below the surface would be darker and hence give away the activities.
Eventually, as the tunnel lengthens, two men are hidden inside the horse while a larger group of men exercised, the two men continuing the tunnel digging. At the end of the day, they again conceal the tunnel entrance and hide inside the horse while it is carried back to their hut. They also devise a method of disposing of the earth coming out of the tunnel. They recruit a third man, Phil, to assist them, with the promise that he will join the escape.
At the final breakout, Howard hides in the tunnel during an Appell (roll call), before three men are carried over in the horse: the third to replace the tunnel trap.
Howard and Clinton travel by train to the Baltic port of Lübeck; (in fact, they travelled via Frankfurt to Stettin). Phil elects to travel alone, posing as a Norwegian margarine manufacturer and travelling by train via Danzig (now Gdansk). He was the first to make it to neutral territory.
Howard and Clinton contact French workers and through them meet 'Sigmund', a Danish resistance worker who smuggles them onto a Swedish ship. They have to leave by rowing boat and arrive in Copenhagen, before being shipped to Sweden. There they meet Phil, who arrived earlier.
Some details from Williams' book were not used in the film, e.g. the escaped POWs discussing the possibility of visiting potentially neutral "whorehouses" in Germany. (The idea was abandoned because of fear that it might be a trap, not out of prudishness.)
Read more about this topic: The Wooden Horse
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)