21 Escapes Of Lt Alastair Cram

The remarkable story of Alastair Cram, the British soldier who escaped from prisoner-of-war camps not once, not twice, but over and over again. Escaping was the easy part . . .

The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram is a riveting account of a young soldier's indomitable refusal to accept imprisonment. Cram, a Scottish lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, was first taken prisoner in North Africa in November 1941. This marked the beginning of a long odyssey through ten different POW camps and three Gestapo prisons. He became a serial escapee, even being dubbed the Harry Houdini of the Second World War, and he would flee his captors more than twenty times, only to be re-captured after each attempt to escape. At last, in April 1945, with the end of the war mere days away, he was successful, escaping from a POW column near Nordhausen in Germany.

But it was the escape from Gavi, the 'Italian Colditz', that was the most dramatic. It was here that Alastair met David Stirling, the legendary founder of the SAS. Cram and Stirling - with a host of other equally brave and equally daring inmates - cooked up the plan for the 'Cistern Tunnel' escape, one of the most audacious but, until now, little-known mass escape attempts of the entire war.

Based on years of research and on Alastair Cram's own wartime diaries and letters, David M. Guss tells the story of Cram's extraordinary war. It is a story of courage in the face of terrible odds, and a testament to one man's absolute determination to be free.