P. R. Reid (1910–1990)

Gripping, but also immensely uplifting by virtue of the wonderful tone and spirit the writer and his fellow prisoners of war display. Just as much as the details of the escape attempts from this high-security forbidding castle in the heart of World War 2 Germany, the delightful spirit of the escapers is the story here, a combination of cheery, nonchalant, resourceful phlegmatism, and it infuses every page of this memoir. The details, and the personalities, are fascinating too, and of course show more cover real and remarkable events not inventions, but it's the perky, joky, playful manner with which these young men operated that draws the reader's admiration, and I think made the book such a success. Reading this now, nearly half a century on, one understands clearly how Major Reid's style and story inspired a whole Colditz genre, in 1970s Britain at least: a hugely popular TV show, board game, and much playground banter, as I recall. show less

I read this as part of an anthology, so not this specific edition. I've read it twice and vastly preferred it the first time, I suppose because it was more exciting. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest either in POWs in WWII or in prison escape stories.

The first part of the book details how the author and narrator, Pat Reid, escaped from his POW camp only to be recaptured and sent to Colditz, a supposedly inescapable prison, being a castle built into a mountain, where officer show more POWs who had escaped from other camps were all penned in together. This part of the story was enjoyable but extremely tense because you know going in that the escape is doomed to failure. Once interned at Colditz, Reid became the 'escape officer' of the British prisoners, which meant that all escape attempts had to be run past him and he helped work out the plans and recommend men for the job and generally orchestrate the escapes without being able to escape himself.

The middle of the novel is far more anecdotal and as such quite difficult to just sit down and read because there's no real momentum or much structure to it. Various escape attempts are described, but never in complete detail, supposedly to give future prisoners a chance to use such ideas, which often left me quite confused about what he was talking about. The prisoners were all apparently incredibly skilled craftmen and built amazing contraptions and disguises from seemingly nothing, but again the details on how are very vague. There are dozens of characters, so we never really get to know anyone, it was all just a random list of names, we don't even get to know the narrator very well. Sprinkled throughout this section are various little amusing scenes, which I'm sure were absolutely hilarious at the time and in such a difficult situation, but generally fail to be particularly funny on the page - not helped I think by the way they are just randomly dropped in and then we move on, rather than it all being woven into an actual narrative. Sometimes a character would be mentioned in an amusing anecdote and then never again, which was frustrating as I wanted to know what happened to each man at the end of the war.

The final section is about after Reid steps down from being the escape officer so that he can actually try escaping himself. The book's finale is his own escape from Colditz halfway through the war, which again has more of a narrative to it and is therefore much more compulsively readable than the main part of the book. Slightly annoying that it ends basically by just saying 'now read the sequel'.

So I definitely think this book could have been improved by being written more like a novel than a memoir, but it is intriguing nonetheless. show less

A well written account of Prisoners of War through the ages. From Ancient times through to the Falklands War. Each chapter is concerned with a different aspect of the POW experience, capture, camp life, escape, etc. Within which are included stories from different wars and eras to highlight each aspect. Another thing that the authors highlight, the authors having been POW's themselves, is that numbers matter and the rules are only as good as conditions allow.

I had not read much on Colditz so this was a great introduction to the camp and it's prisoners. The prisoners sent here were the ones who persisted in trying to escape other camps. Unfortunately, Colditz was not inescapable either. It was so interesting reading about all the ways these prisoners devised to escape. Their ingenuity was awe inspiring.