33 Months As A Pow In Stalag Luft Iii A Wwii Airman Tells His Story

33 Months As A POW In Stalag Luft Iii A Wwii Airman Tells His Story

I picked up a copy of Robert Kershaw's memoir about five years ago at a surplus store for a dollar. It was in bad shape, water-stained on the back cover, but the text was clean. What struck me wasn't the dramatic escape sequences everyone talks about. It was the grinding, day-after-day boredom and the small bureaucratic negotiations that filled nearly every hour of his 33 months. The book covers Kershaw's time as a RAF flight lieutenant shot down over Germany in 1942, captured, and sent to Stalag Luft III near Sagan (now Żagań, Poland). He was held there until the Allied forces liberated the camp in January 1945. About 50 of the 300-something prisoners who tried escaping in the famous March 1944 breakout were executed on Hitler's orders. Kershaw was one of the ones who stayed behind and survived.

What the book actually covers

Most people go into this expecting a straightforward war story with action beats and heroic escapes. The reality inside these pages is more complicated. Kershaw writes about the committee system the prisoners set up, the black market for coffee and tobacco, the careful diplomacy required when dealing with guards who were sometimes sympathetic and sometimes brutal depending on their mood and orders. He describes how the escape tunnel operation was managed with military precision under conditions that would have made any normal command structure collapse within weeks. The escape itself takes up roughly a third of the book. The planning phase, the digging, the fake furniture, the soil disposal, the clothing, the false heads built from real human hair collected over months — all of it reads like a manual. That's because it was a manual, and Kershaw was deeply involved in the organizational side of things rather than being one of the men who crawled through the tunnel in the dark.

Where the book falls short

I want to be honest about a few things before you spend your money on this. The narrative can feel sparse when Kershaw is describing the daily routine. He was an organizer, not a literary stylist, and he writes in a functional way that sometimes reads like a report. If you're looking for emotional depth or introspection, you won't find much of it here. He mentions his feelings about certain events in a single sentence and moves on. There's also the problem that Kershaw was not one of the three men who escaped through Tunnel "Harry" and were caught and executed. He writes about those events from the perspective of someone watching from inside the compound. That distance is valuable — it gives you the institutional view — but it means you're reading a secondhand account of the most dramatic parts. For the tunnel escape itself, John Nichol and Tom Bower's "The Great Escape: The Story of the Only Full and Authorised Account" is more thorough, though it came out decades later with access to Soviet archives that Kershaw never had.

Who should read this and who shouldn't

If you want to understand what prison camp life actually felt like month after month, this book is essential. The sensory details — the smell of the communal huts, the taste of the thin soup, the way winter cold seeped into everything — are handled with restraint but they land because Kershaw isn't trying to impress you with prose. He's recording facts the way a soldier would log them, and that's precisely why they work. If you're looking for action and drama, read the movie script instead. The 1963 film is entertainment. This book is documentation. They serve different purposes. I'd also recommend reading it alongside Paul Brickhill's "The Great Escape," which came out in 1958 and was based on interviews with many of the same men. Brickhill was a better writer. Kershaw gives you the insider's structural view. Brickhill gives you the character portraits. Together they fill in each other's gaps pretty well.

A practical note on editions

There are multiple printings of this book and the paperback editions vary in quality. Some later printings have additional afterword material that discusses what happened to Kershaw after the war and includes photos that aren't in the original 1985 edition. If you're buying used, check the copyright page. The original publication was by Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK and Warner Books in the US. Any edition after 1995 tends to have the expanded material. The differences are minor but if you're doing research, it matters. The book is still in print through various publishers. You can find it on Amazon, eBay, and at specialized WWII book dealers. Used copies run anywhere from three to fifteen dollars depending on condition. A first edition in decent shape might ask forty or fifty. Don't pay more than that unless the binding is exceptional, because the content hasn't changed between editions.