On August 30, 1942 - 'Zero Night' - 40 Allied officers staged the most audacious mass escape of World War II. Months of meticulous planning and secret training hung in the balance during three minutes of mayhem as the officers boldly stormed the huge double fences at Oflag Prison. Employing wooden ladders and bridges previously disguised as bookshelves, the highly coordinated effort succeeded and set 36 men free into the German countryside. Later known as the 'Warburg Wire Job', fellow prisoner and fighter ace Douglas Bader once described the attempt as 'the most brilliant escape conception of this war'.

The first author to tackle this remarkable story in detail, historian Mark Felton brilliantly evokes the suspense of the escape and the adventures of those escapees who managed to elude the Germans, as well as the courage of the civilians who risked their lives to help them in enemy territory. Fantastically intimate and told with a novelist's eye for drama and detail, this rip-roaring adventure is all the more thrilling because it really happened.

MARK FELTON has written over a dozen books on prisoners of war, Japanese war crimes and Nazi war criminals, and writes regularly for magazines such as Military History Monthly and World War II. His most recent book is China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom, 1839-1997. He has recently returned to the UK after having spent almost a decade teaching in Shanghai.

Prologue
1 Barbed Wire Horizon
2 Trial and Error
3 The Wire
4 Short Circuit
5 Diversions
6 'Big X'
7 Operation Timber
8 Practice Makes Perfect
9 The Road Less Travelled
10 Pack Up Your Troubles
11 Fifteen Yards to Freedom
12 Zero Night
12 'Another British Evacuation'
14 A Walk in the Woods
15 'Hande Hoch!'
16 The Bitter Road
17 Three Blind Mice
18 Comet Line
19 The Last Frontier
Epilogue