American combat pilot Col. Joseph Ryan (Sinatra) is shot down over Nazi-controlled Italy and joins U.S. and English WWII troops in a prison camp during the summer of 1943. Given the insulting nickname "Von Ryan" because he initially seems more concerned with surviving than escaping, the colonel eventually leads Allied prisoners, as their new top ranking officer, in a daredevil race for freedom by commandeering an entire German freight train bound...

"Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors"--

"Oflag 64, a World War II prisoner of war (POW) camp based in Schubin, Poland, was speculated to be one of the only POW camps set up exclusively for U.S. Army ground component officers. About 150 American officers lived in the camp in 1943, and by 1945, that number had expanded to 1,500. When the German commandant Colonel Fritz Schneider received orders to march all of his prisoners to west Germany to escape the Russians in January 1945, that number...

Lukacs’ contribution to WWII POW literature reconstructs an escape by Americans from the Japanese-occupied Philippines. From biographical introductions of the dozen Americans involved, dramas of their captures at Bataan and Corregidor, and ordeals of imprisonment and maltreatment, Lukacs launches into their breakout scheme and the nail-biting danger of putting it in motion. Ably declaiming the ensuing intrepid events, Lukacs readily evokes the high...