The One That Got Away (Pen & Sword Military Classics) - Softcover

From The Great Escape to The Colditz Story, readers have become familiar with the many stories of British wartime escapes. But what of German prisoners in British hands? Did they try as persistently as their British counterparts to escape? Did they bait their guards with similar ironic humour and with horseplay often carried to dangerous extremes? Were similar epics of courage and endurance enacted unknown to us on our own soil and on the surrounding seas? How were our prisoners fed, interrogated, guarded? In other words, how did we treat them? These questions are all answered in the first book to tell the full story of Franz von Werra, a Luftwaffe officer escaping in England, set against the background of our own familiar countryside, and with our own countrymen'police, soldiers, home guards, shepherds, bus conductors and booking clerks playing the unfamiliar roles of pursuer and sometimes unconscious abettor of one of the most ingenious and brazen of all escapers. Based on von Werra's own account, this exciting story provides a fascinating insight to the war from the German point of view.

James Leasor was educated at the City of London School and at Oriel College, Oxford. In the Second World War he was commissioned into the Royal Berkshire Regiment and posted to 1st Lincolns in Burma. He served for three and a half years in Burma and India. Later, on the staff of the Daily Express as feature writer and foreign correspondent, he wrote The One that Got Away in collaboration This is the story of the only German POW in the Second World War to escape from Allied hands. James Leasor then resigned from the Express and has since written many factual books and a number of novels, including the Dr Jason Love series which have been published in 19 countries. His books dealing with wartime episodes include Singapore- the Battle that Changed the World; Hess; The Uninvited Envoy, Green Beach- about a secret episode on the Dieppe raid; The Unknown Warior, dealing with anti-Nazi German nationals who served in a special unit in the British Army and Boarding Party which narrates an undercover exploit of the territorial unit, The Calcutta Light Horse. War at the Top describes the experiences of General Sir Leslie Hollis, RM, who was Senior Military Assistant Sectary to the War Office. Hollis, later Commandant General of the Royal Marines, first told James Leasor about William Doyle, The Marine From Mandalay