Guy Walters – författare

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Poland for captured Allied airmen. Called Stalag Luft III, the camp soon came to contain some of the most inventive escapers ever known. They were led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, code-named 'Big X', who masterminded an attempt to smuggle hundreds of POWs down a tunnel built right under the noses of their guards.The escape would come to be immortalised in the famous film The Great Escape, in which the ingenuity and bravery of the men was rightly celebrated. The plan involved multiple tunnels, hundreds of forged documents, as well as specially made German uniforms and civilian clothing. In this book Guy Walters takes a fresh look at this remarkable event and asks the question, what was the true story, not the movie version? He also examines what the escape really achieved, and the nature of the man who led it.The Real Great Escape is the first account to draw on a newly-released cache of documents from Roger Bushell’s family, including letters from Bushell, that reveals much about this remarkable man, his life and experiences during the war, and the planning of the escape attempt that was to make him famous. The result is a compelling and authoritative re-evaluation of the most iconic escape story of the Second World War.

'A fascinating account of one of World War Two’s most seminal episodes, beautifully told.' Roger MoorehouseAdolf Hitler’s plan to break British morale during the months after the D-Day landings in June 1944 involved the invention and implementation of the world’s first rocket delivered warhead – the V1, or ‘Doodle Bug’ as it was christened by Londoners. Thousands were launched from their sites in the Low Countries against the British capital, killing 6,184 people and injuring 17,981.As the launch sites for the V1 were captured by Allied forces advancing through Belgium and into the Netherlands, a new, more terrifying rocket now hit London in mid-September, seemingly out of thin air – the V2. A streamlined rocket which stood as tall as a four-storey building, the V2 was highly advanced technology. Powered by a rocket engine burning a mix of alcohol-water and liquid oxygen, it blasted its way to the edge of space, before falling back to Earth at supersonic speed. Unlike the successes allied pilots and anti-aircraft crews had enjoyed shooting down the slower and more cumbersome V1, the V2 struck London almost undetected. It truly was Hitler’s terror weapon made devastatingly real, causing over 30,000 casualties and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, with the randomness of the strikes unnerving the British public even though their destructive capacity was less than the Blitz in 1940-41.But Winston Churchill’s intelligence chiefs of SOE had known of the weapon weeks before it first struck the mainland as the Nazi boffins (led by Werner Von Braun who would go onto fame with the US Apollo Missions in the 1960s) tested the V2 in Eastern Europe. Away from prying eyes. Or, so they thought. In Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, historian Guy Walters will reveal the true extent to how much we knew of this modern-day weapon and the operation by the Polish resistance to enable Britain and her allies to prepare for the day of reckoning.