Post Description

There can't be many people who haven't seen the 1963 Hollywood film The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen - it was always on TV at Christmas. However, it was a highly glamorised version of how 76 Allied airmen really did escape from a PoW camp deep in Nazi Germany in 1944. This engrossing documentary tells the story of that audacious escape and its shocking consequences. Only three men made it back home, while 50 were caught and executed by the Gestapo in defiance of the Geneva Convention, which stated that attempted escape by PoWs was a disciplinary offence punishable by 30 days in solitary confinement. So appalling was this to postwar Britain that Frank McKenna, a former policeman, ended up spending years painstakingly tracking down the perpetrators in order to deliver "exemplary justice". The reconstructions are a shade overdone, but the interviews are both revealing and poignant. Escape survivor Alan Bryett, for instance, expresses sympathy for the Germans, who were only following orders, even though he's distressed to this day by what happened: "You expect one or two to be killed - that's part of the game. But to have 50 murdered¦" he says with tears in his eyes, "That's terrible. Terrible."

Resolution    : 624x352
Aspect Ratio  : 1.773
Framerate     : 25.000fps
Video Codec   : XviD
Video Bitrate : 793kbps
Audio         : 129kbps MP3 48000Hz
Duration      : 00:52:25