Richard Harris was originally cast as Roger Bartlett, but dropped out because filming This Sporting Life was behind schedule and he was displeased with the diminished role of Big X after script changes had been made.
The Great Escape features an ensemble cast that includes legendary actors such as Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, and Richard Attenborough. But, despite their similar stature in Hollywood, not everyone got along on the set of the 1963 film.
Whilst the movie makes out that it was a small group of mainly American airmen who were part of the breakout, in fact over 600 prisoners were involved in the construction of the tunnels and whilst U.S. airmen did act as lookouts, they were all transferred to another camp months before the escape actually took place.
The Great Escape (1963) - Donald Pleasence as Blythe 'The Forger' - IMDb.
Flt Lt Colin Blythe RAF, "The Forger", was based on Tim Walenn and played by Donald Pleasence. Pleasence himself had served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He was shot down and spent a year in German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft I.
The Commandant of the prison camp is cashiered and taken away in disgrace, and replaced by another officer, punishment for the escape happening on his watch. At the same time, Hilts is returned to the camp.
July 4, 1915 – Gunther Plüschow escaped from a POW camp at Donington Park, Leicestershire, England, and made his way back to Germany. This was the only successful escape from Britain in either world war.
The great escape
Seventy-six prisoners got away, but the Gestapo recaptured and murdered fifty, including five Australians. Of the 76 escapees, only three reached Allied lines.
In the hours that followed, the Germans realized the full extent of the escape: 76 men had made it out in the largest escape attempt of the war.
Only three men successfully fled to safety—two Norwegians who stowed away on a freighter to Sweden and a Dutchman who made it to Gibraltar by rail and foot. A furious Adolf Hitler personally ordered the execution of 50 of the escapees as a warning to other prisoners.
The Great Escape plays as much like a heist as a prison break. For the most part, however, it's a broadly accurate retelling of how, in March 1944, 76 POWs tunnelled their way out of Stalag Luft III.
During the night of 24 March 1944, 76 airmen escaped from the Prisoner of War camp Stalag Luft III. Only three made it home and, of the remainder, 50 were murdered on Hitler's orders. Alan Bowgen explains what really happened in the so-called Great Escape, one of the Second World War's most infamous incidents.
Flight Lieutenant Paul Gordon Royle (17 January 1914 – 23 August 2015) was an Australian Royal Air Force pilot who was one of the last two survivors of the 76 men who were able to escape from the Stalag Luft III German prisoner-of-war camp in World War II in what became known as The Great Escape.
Like the fictional Sedgwick, Brickhill was an Australian prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III though his claustrophobia prevented the author from escaping with the others. After the murder of the 50, Brickhill was determined to chronicle the details of the mass escape.
Revealing mistakes
As they go by, the sidecar on the German motorcycle is on the wrong side of the bike. After the escape... throughout the train stations, towns, etc. there are only two Nazi flags (Swastikas) shown, one an armband and one on the side of a locomotive.
Between 1788 and 1868 more than 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Of these, about 7,000 arrived in 1833 alone. The convicts were transported as punishment for crimes committed in Britain and Ireland. In Australia their lives were hard as they helped build the young colony.
There is not much left of Stalag Luft III, as it was demolished after the war. The famous escape tunnels from "The Great Escape" are pointed out as memorial roads. Do you have more information about this location?
Australia lost 34,000 service personnel during World War II. Total battle casualties were 72,814. Over 31,000 Australian became prisoners-of-war. Of these more than 22,000 were captured by the Japanese; by August 1945 over one third of them had died in the appalling conditions of the prisoner-of-war camps.
The Soviet government kept roughly 1.5 million German POWs in forced-labor camps after the end of World War II through 1956. The POWs constituted the largest and longest held group of prisoners for any victor nation.
American POWs did escape from camps in North Vietnam, some of them from camps in Hanoi. At least five escaped twice from camps in North Vietnam, some from established camps, others from guards while en-route to Hanoi.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
Squadron Leader Dick Churchill, who has died aged 99, was the last survivor of the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III. From the time he was shot down and captured in September 1940, escape was never far from his thoughts.
Through his association with McQueen, Ekins began a career as a film stuntman. Ekins is best known as the actor who jumped the fence on a motorcycle in the 1963 film The Great Escape, and one of the stuntmen who drove the Ford Mustang 390 GT in the car chase scene in the 1968 film Bullitt.
Allied former prisoners at Stalag Luft III testified that he had followed the Geneva Conventions concerning the treatment of POWs and had won the respect of the senior prisoners. He was repatriated in 1947. He died in 1963 at the age of 82, less than two months before the film The Great Escape was released.