The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Breakout of WWI

Description

In the winter trenches and flak-filled skies of World War I, captured soldiers and pilots narrowly avoided death only to find themselves imprisoned in Germany's archipelago of brutal POW camps. After several unsuccessful escapes, a group of Allied prisoners of Holzminden - Germany's land-locked Alcatraz- hatched the most elaborate escape plan yet known. With ingenious engineering, disguises, forgery and courage, their story would electrify Britain in some of its darkest hours of the war. Drawing on never-before-seen memoirs and letters, Neal Bascomb brings this little-known story narrative to life amid the despair of the trenches and the height of patriotic duty.

Neal Bascomb is the author of nine award-winning, national, and international bestselling adult books, including most recently the New York Times bestseller on the sabotage of the German atomic bomb program The Winter Fortress. He also chronicled the search for a Nazi war criminal in Hunting Eichmann and the story of Roger Bannister's four-minute-mile in The Perfect Mile. His work has been translated in over eighteen countries.

Fascinating - Daily Express It's riveting reading, but more than that, it's inspiring - Candice Millard, author of Hero of the Empire A remarkable piece of hidden history, told perfectly . . . brims with adventure, suspense, daring, and heroism - David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon Entertaining . . . very little is known about the escape artists of World War I, but Bascomb's suspenseful and well-researched book could change that - Daily Mail