Stories from the Stalags: Allied Airmen Behind the Wire in Ww2 (Bowman Martin W.)(Pevná vazba)

From 1942 until the end of the war in Europe, the aircraft of the RAF's Bomber Command and the United States 8th and 15th Air Forces provided twenty-four-hour round-the-clock' bombing of the Third Reich. Aircraft and crew casualties were heavy as bomber after bomber succumbed to flak and fighter defences. For those not killed outright by the Luftwaffe's onslaught, only baling out over hostile enemy territory could offer any hope of survival. But this generally meant solitary confinement, interrogation, indignities and even extreme hardship for the men who became known as Kriegies', a word derived from the German Kriegsgefangenen meaning prisoners of war'. Many months of incarceration, sometimes in appalling conditions, would become commonplace for those held in camps throughout Germany, Poland and the Greater Reich. Here, at first hand, are stories of some of those Allied bomber crewmen faced with sudden leaps into that dangerous unknown. For most, and particularly the injured, capture was immediate - imprisonment inevitable. For some evasion was possible, but rarely for long. For others taken prisoner, staying alive was uppermost in the minds of most and in many cases only the comradeship of fellow prisoners and, for some, thoughts of escape became a constant preoccupation. Never to be forgotten too are the conditions and suffering endured by many PoWs when, in the face of the relentless Soviet Army advance into Germany, the camps were hastily emptied and the prison
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