Whilst chatting over the evening meal, the Dodo suddenly tells me that Plock is the name of a town in Poland. And that it was in Plock that Airey Neave was captured by the Nazis after his escape from Torun (or Thorn in German) during the war and he was then sent to Colditz from where he escaped in a false German uniform - if I remember correctly it was his second attempt and it was at nightime (not that I was there 'if I remember correctly', but 'if I remember correctly' from that excellent BBC series of the 70s called Colditz - anyone else remember it?)


The Dodo knows everything and if he doesn't, he has a book on the shelf that has the answer! Very useful!

Long and rambling I know but a bottle of Sauvignan has found its way inside me and it's not yet 7.30pm.





I could be a millionaire - if I had the money..............................

*consults atlas*

Well, what do you know - so it is...

Not that far from where my grandfather comes from, too. I really ought to go back to Poland some time, although I'm not sure how I'll manage to resist the lure of the mountains in the South...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Don't ever doubt the Dodo - you never win! He really is a mind of useless information - I thought I knew a lot of rubbish until I met him!

My favourite piece of UI is the connection between Michelangelo's broken nose and the Henry VII tomb in Westminster Abbey - the same person did both!

He's plocking again - time to find the cheese!






I could be a millionaire - if I had the money.........................

I'm really impressed. Are there any more Dodos around where yours came from?



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Looking at my Atlas, I now realise that Belgium has a place called Landen...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Colditz happens to be an interest of mine, largely inspired though playing the 'Escape from colditz' board game a lot as a kid.
I've got Airey Neave's book 'They have their Exits'. According to the map in the front, he was held somewhere called Sochaczew.

He was captured in Itow and taken to Plock for interrogation. He was accused of being a spy for a while but was returned to his POW camp and then transferred to Colditz. He was involved in digging the Sick Bay tunnel which was discovered after his escape, wearing a German uniform

If I can get myself sufficiently organised & motivated (& torn away from the fforum for enough time...) then I'm going to write a 48-page "mini-book" about prisoners-of-war for the "GURPS" roleplaying game's WWII line. I put some suggestions about that general topic in a series of articles for an amateur magazine about roleplaying (it's called 'Alarums & Excursions'), and Steve Jackson (who created 'GURPS' & still runs the company that produces it) read those articles & liked them enough to tell the WWII line's editor to contact me. The contract hasn't actually been finalised yet, but the editor liked my suggested outline for the book: It's basically just a matter of converting both this & the sample page of text that I sent him into their formatting codes, so that he can get final approval from the boss...

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"Some days I diet..."

No - no more Dodos - that's why the name is so appropriate - his sort are almost extinct!

Simon: that is *so* cool. I've been playing GURPS for years and between us, me and my friends have loads of the supplements. Don't forget to mention "Chicken Run" in the filmography.

My POW book collection is:
The Colditz Story - P R Reid
The Latter Days at Colditz - P R Reid
Hostages At Colditz - G Romilly & M Alexander
Colditz - The German Story - Reinhold Eggers
They Have Their Exits - Airey Neave
Escape or Die - Authentic stories of the RAF Escaping Society -Paul Brickhill
The Great Escape -
The Tunnel - Eric Williams
The Wooden Horse - Eric Williams
Boldness be my Friend - Richard Pape

Any chance of seeing your articles/book ?

Do you remember that episode of Colditz where a POW feigns madness in order to be repatriated? Gave me nightmares for weeks, that did. Fine, fine performance from whoever it was, though.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Don't really remember the TV series. I have seen the movie on TV though.

Wish they'd repeat the series - it was excellent.

But all they repeat is rubbish.

There was a repeat of DAs Boot (six episodes, rather than the whole cut film) a little while back. Well worth seeing again...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Gosh, yes, Das Boot ... that was brilliant. Jurgen Prochnow (sp?) was ace in that. How about Edge of Darkness? Has that been repeated lately?



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

You can get Das Boot (the series) on video and DVD - excellent viewing. Edge of Darkness hasn't been repeated although there was talk about it being so when the lead actor died a couple of years ago (sorry, can't remember his name but can mentally picture him clearly).

Bought the Dodo the complete "The Great War" (all 17 hours of it) for Christmas - and then the BBC decide to repeat it for the first time since it was shown in the early 60s!

The BBC also refuse to repeat Dear John with Ralph Bates - so I bought it on Vid - so funny!

Still can't see what was so great about it...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Edge of Darkness - Bob Peck. A top actor and a great series. Would love to see it again and see if it's as good as I remember 20 years on. IIRC Joanne Whalley was rather good looking...

Bob Peck has (or had, hasn't he gone on to the great cinema in the sky?)got the most incredibly muscular legs. Watch him in Jurassic Park, his thighs practically get a credit to themselves. He keeps putting his foot up on chairs and stuff to show them off.

"yes, the raptor, natural hunter. Cop a load of these legs though, lovely aren't they?"

Skiffle _
I'm mainly relying on library books rather than my own collection (which is actually rather short on WWII material nowadays) as sources... Fortunately the local library system is not only well-stocked in the relevant section but also allow a person to borrow up to 20 items at a time. I've read most of the books that you listed, apart from 'Boldness Be My Friend' and maybe 'Escape or Die' (although of course I've read Brickhill's account of 'The Great Escape', and the library also had 'Escape from Germany' which was the Air Ministry's book about all of the escape attempts by RAF personnel) unless I saw that one years ago ... And maybe apart from 'Hostages At Colditz' too, unless I read it years ago, but that is quoted as one of the primary sources for several of the books that I DID find this time...). I haven't been able to obtain a copy of Neave's book from the library, but I remember reading it (and the sequel, about his work at MI9 which was the agency involved in helping escape & evasion attempts, too) at some point in the past. Other books that I've borrowed include_

'Colditz Recaptured' (a variety of individual POWs of various nationalities provide memoirs, collected & commented on by Eggers).
Colditz, The Full Story' (by P.R. Reid, written some years after his other books & drawing on a wider range of sources).
'Colditz: the Definitive History' (written [by somebody who wasn't an ex-POW] to accompany a recent TV documentary series, which I didn't watch; draws on various primary sources, including some private memoirs & some books that have only been published in foreign languages).
'Colditz Last Stop' by Major Jack Best (4 countries, 11 camps, 6 escapes)
'The Diggers of Colditz' (about Australian POWs).
'Love & War in the Appennines', by Eric Newby (captivity in Italian hands, & hiding in northern Italy _ behind the German lines _ later on...)
'Prisoner of Hope' (Memoirs of a British Army chaplain who worked in the camps that the Germans set up in Poland for British "Other Ranks")
An authorised history of MI9.
'10 Minutes to Buffalo' (a Lutwaffe pilot's memoirs about his escape attempts from camps in Britain & Canada).
'The March on London' (about German & Italian POWs in Britain in 1944: They planned a mass break-out to coincide with the Battle of the Bulge, when there would only have been barely over a Division of regular troops available here to defend the country against them!)
'Island of Barbed Wire' (about the internment of Axis nationals & British fascists on the Isle of Man)
'Renegades _ Hitler's Englishmen' (about German attempts to convert British POWs & civilian internees to the Nazi cause)
and also a couple of books about how Allied POWs suffered in Japanese hands, incuding one that's largely about the building of the Thailand-Burma railway.

Which edition of 'The Wooden Horse' do you have? Apparently the earlier ones included some fictional scenes which the author added to increase the book's dramatic content (& sales...), and because making it less factual helped him to get around official complaints of some kind about his writing a true book on the subject, but he subsequently removed these from at least one of the later versions.

Given the rather limited amount of space that I will have available to cover this entire topic (and to include roleplaying rules & suggestions) I'm not sure whether there will be a Cinematography section as well as a Bibliography, but I agree that if there is going to one then that GREAT movie 'Chicken Run' (whose writer[s]s had clearly done their homework...) certainly deserves inclusion.

Of course you can see my book: All that you have to do is wait until it's published and then either buy a copy or persuade a friend to do so... :-)
(I might get around to emailing the original articles to you before then, but they're currently scattered across a number of files & would need some editing work first... and I do have a number of other demands on my time, such as getting the book itself written. We'll have to see...)

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"Some days I diet, other days they serve lasagne."



Post Edited (04-29-03 19:42)

Simon: just checked my copy of 'The Wooden Horse'. It's the 1950 Reprint Society edition, which gives a first publication date of 1949

It has a preface by Eric Williams, stating that soon after returning from Germany in 1943, he wrote a book called 'Goon in the Block', which was the story of an airman who had been shot down, captured and escaped. As the war was still on, the story was 'fact thinly disguised as fiction'. When writiing 'The Wooden Horse' after the war, Williams used some of the material previously published in 'Goon in the Block'. I don't think 'The Wooden Horse' itself was changed in any subsequent editions.
It seems to be a case of two separate, but silmilar books, rather than two editions of one title.