The movie was about a group of P.O.W.s and their attempt to escape a German prison camp, or Stalag that was created to hold the most troublesome inmates.
On the first day, within the first twenty minutes, two men tried to pass off as Russians who were allowed out of the camp to cut down trees while others hid in the trucks full of trees. None of them escaped, but it showed how witty, adventurous and desperate those men were. Another man, Capt. Hilts, one of three Americans at the camp, stepped across the warning wire where we had tossed his baseball to check out a blind spot between the guard towers. His feet were shot at and then he was sent to the cooler, an isolation cell, along with Ives ‘The Mole’, one of the men who attempted escape on…
So they had to create a system where when the security guard was furthest away, he would tug on a thirty-foot piece of rope to signal to the man it was clear to come out of the tunnel. At one point, there was an air raid and the lights in the tunnel went out, the ‘Tunnel Kings’, Danny and Willie, the men who were in charge of creating the tunnel were traveling through. Danny was surprisingly claustrophobic and held up the tunnel momentarily during the best time to sneak out-during the dark. It was going smoothly until one man fell on his package he was taking with him. The guards heard him and the tunnel was shut down.
The remaining hour of the movie consisted of the escapees finding different ways of transportation away from the camp, whether it be by train, foot, or even boat. The Gestapo went after the seventy-six prisoners and managed to capture sixty-one of them. Fifty of the acquired men were executed and eleven sent back to the prison camp. Right before this the men were told they were on their way back to camp and it was a long ways away so they were taking a break-were stretching their legs. Then Bartlett claimed that although they failed, he had never been…