The Wooden Horse

This is, quite simply, the greatest escape story of all time.

I’ve chosen this book because I’ve read it so often, at least five times, mostly when I was a teenager. It is brilliant storytelling, and it may just be the book that most got me hooked on World War 2 history.

It tells the story of a tunnel dug from under a vaulting horse in the middle of an exercise yard in a German POW camp. The original plan was for a mass escape of prisoners through the tunnel, but in the end, only three prisoners made it back… show more.

I love POW stories, and this one did not disappoint me. It was an exquisite story of bravery. The pace was slow at the beginning, but it had to be to allow the reader to understand the backstory. When the prison escape came, I was on the edge of my seat, and I stayed there. Would they make it, or would the Germans capture them? It has every ingredient a book needs to become a classic WW2 story. I recommend this book because of the way the author held the suspense all the way through. This really was a Great… show more.

In 1942, Williams, a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force, was shot down on a bombing mission over Germany. Taken prisoner, he was eventually sent to Stalag-Luft III, a high-security prison camp—considered escape-proof—in what is now Poland. Though The Wooden Horse, published in 1949, is sometimes described as a novel, it is a true-life account of his escape from the camp, with some names changed and some details lightly fictionalized. Working in secret and under constant surveillance, Williams and two fellow POWs constructed a 20th-century Trojan Horse that allowed them to tunnel out of camp under the noses of… show more.