The Great Escape (film) The Great Escape (film) The Great Escape is a 1963 American World War II epic film that depicts an escape by British Commonwealth prisoners of war from a German POW camp. The film stars Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough and features James Donald, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, and Hannes Messemer. It was filmed in Panavision. The film is based on Paul Brickhill's 1950 book of the same name, a non-fiction first-hand account of the mass escape from Stalag Luft III in Sagan (now Żagań, Poland), in the province of Lower Silesia, Nazi Germany. A heavily fictionalised
The Great Escape (book) prisoners free. To avoid the disaster of "Tom", "Harry" was filled with sewage, sand, and sealed with cement. After the escape, the prisoners started digging another tunnel called "George", but this was abandoned when the camp was evacuated. On October 2, 2012, Penguin released "Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen" by author and journalist Simon Read. The book details the 50 murders that took place following the escape and the three-year manhunt by the Royal Air Force to bring the killers to justice. On January 27, 1951, NBC broadcast