Product Description

As WW2 drew to a close, hundreds of thousands of British and American prisoners of war, held in camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, faced the prospect that they would never get home alive. In the depths of winter, their guards harried them on marches outof their camps and away from the armies advancing into the heart of Hitler's defeated Germany. Hundreds died from exhaustion, disease and starvation. THE LAST ESCAPE is told through the testimony of those heroic men, now in their seventies and eighties and telling their stories publicly for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25692 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
John Nichol is a former RAF flight lieutenant whose Tornado fighter was shot down on a mission over Iraq during the Gulf War. He was captured and became a prisoner of war. He is the bestselling author of TORNADO DOWN and five other novels. He livesin Hertfordshire. Tony Rennell is the author of LAST DAYS OF GLORY for Viking, and WHEN DADDY CAME HOME. He lives in London NW3.

Customer Reviews

Only 50 years ago!
Astonshing and humbling account of heroism, immaculately researchred. You can no longer consider McQueen and Pat Reid as the POWs of WW2. Considering that this was so recent our kids should know what happened, so that they can understand the origins of what is occurring on our continent today.

Read this book and count the number of times you shake your head in disbelief at how so many ordinary men dealt with the extremes of cruelty, bad luck and bloody ill-fortune.

Not only that it is just really, really good reading

The Last Escape
This book tells in graphic detail the horrors undergone by thousands of British, Commonwealth and American POW's in the prison camps and on forced marches as the Second World War ground to a close. As well as telling the hitherto untold story of their experiences, it also uses extracts from a number of their memoirs. The descriptions of theor forced marches and the hell they underwent leave nothing to the imagination, and the events after their liberation also show how unready the allied command was for dealing with the thousands of displaced POW's. The book is very well written and many of the descriptions bring a lump to your throat when you realise just how badly most of our POW' wre treated in the camps.

superb
This is a truly excellent book. It reveals how POWs braved shocking conditions with bravery and fortitude. It shows that most POWs rose to the challenge of captivity but the authors do not shy away from exposing ccowards and n'eer do wells. The authors also show how the Allied governments could have done more to help POWs but did not. Most Germans do not emerge with credit but some do. If there is a moral here in what is a many sided book it is this: being a POW is often as hard as being a combatant.