This is the war story we all think we know . but don't. On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 336-foot-long tunnel and slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as The Great Escape. The intricate breakout, more than a year in the making, involved as many as 2,000 POWs, extraordinary co-ordination and a battle of wits inconceivable for the time. Within a few days of the escape, however, all but three of the escapees were recaptured; subsequently, on specific orders from Adolf Hitler, fifty were murdered, cremated and buried in a remote corner of the prison compound. What most casual readers, history buffs, moviegoers and even some of the veterans themselves don't readily acknowledge is that The Great Escape was in many ways a "made-in-Canada escape." As Ted Barris writes in his new book, The Great Escape: A Canadian Story , many of the principal planners, task leaders and key players, as well as some of those who actually got away that night were Canadian airmen -- trained in Canada, serving in RCAF bomber and fighter squadrons, shot down over Europe, imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, and ultimately participants in the actual Great Escape.

As he has done in his 16 previous books, Barris has assembled new research -- based on exclusive interviews, unearthed recordings, transcripts, as well as unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, and an assembly of photos, maps and drawings -- into a compelling firsthand account. The Great Escape: A Canadian Story offers a unique retelling of the story through first-hand recollections of the Canadians who experienced it.