> In March 1943, Canadian RAF officer Paul Brickhill was shot down over the Tunisian Desert in North Africa and captured by troops from German Field Marshall Rommel's Afrika Korps. He ended up in a prison camp southeast of Berlin near Sagan, Germany, called Stalag Luft III, carved out of a forest and secured with the latest precautions, including two nine-foot barbed wire fences, machine gun towers, and a fully armed German garrison. The camp was considered escape-proof by the Nazis, but Brickhill soon joined about 700 other Allied prisoners of war in executing a vast plan by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell to get 250 men out of the prison. Brickhill's job was to lead a group that guarded the forgers as they covertly reproduced the identity papers the escapees needed to make their way across Germany to safety; however, he was finally excluded from the breakout roster and forced to stay behind because of his claustrophobia. On the night of March 24, 1944, Bushell and 75 other officers, supplied with forged identity papers and civilian clothes, broke out of the camp through an elaborate tunnel. Bushell and 49 others were recaptured and murdered by the Gestapo. The rest, except for three officers who made it back to England, were returned to prison.

> After the war Brickhill returned to a fledgling writing career and spent four and a half years working on a novel based closely on his prison camp experiences. He returned to Germany twice for research, including reading thousands of pages of unpublished Gestapo reports and visiting the scene of the murder of the 50 officers with the permission of the Soviet occupation forces. He also conducted interviews with many of the survivors. Brickhill's novel was published by W.W. Norton & Company in August 1950 and became a hit, but satisfied that he had done his best to tell the story of his fallen comrades, he adamantly refused to sell the screen rights. He claimed it was not his story to sell and that the families of those slain during the escape attempt would prefer the wartime tragedy be forgotten. Brickhill's book was read with keen interest by John Sturges, a young director with a handful of minor feature films to his credit.

> In the summer of 1950, Sturges picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and began reading the serialization of Brickhill's book, The Great Escape. He was immediately fascinated. "It was the perfect embodiment of why our side won," he later said. "Here was the German military machine, the sparkling uniforms and the absolute obedience to orders. On the other side of the wire, there were men from every country, every background, makeup and language, doing everything they pleased. With no arbitrary rules, they formulated an organization which eventually clobbered the German machine." Brickhill responded well to Sturges's enthusiasm and sincere promises not to take liberties with the story. He agreed to sell Sturges the novel and become a partner in the venture.