Extraordinary times. Extraordinary courage.Here, from the bestselling author of The Great Escape, are eight true and startling escape stories from the Second World War. The heroism of the servicemen who dared to defy their captors in this volume is matched only by that of the underground movements and ordinary civilians who helped the escapees in these stories of daring, invention and doggedness against the odds. From the account of the Spitfire pilot left for dead by an execution squad in Sicily to the story of the air gunner forced to blag his way across the Baltic, every one is an unputdownable classic. 'As long as there are prisons men will try to escape from them; and as long as there is an RAF it will bring to the problems of escape the qualities of high resource, pure cussedness and that indefinable, damnably annoying refusal to lie down when dead, of which all the stories in this book are such excellent - and, I think, such exciting - examples.' H.E. Bates