Entries
tagged as 'book'
I took a break from the blog to work on other formats for the book. I'm happy to announce that Canadian Escapades is now available as an ebook for Kindle! [Update: the link now points to Amazon for the Kindle edition.] Denis at Fifobooks let me know that our 2-column format would work fine on most ereaders, and did some of the format conversion and testing. As thanks, the ebook is available there exclusively at launch. We'll add other outlets soon. I would guess that Canadian Escapades is the first bilingual ebook with side-by-side alignment by sentence. If anyone has links and/or screenshots for other dual-language ebooks, please send them along. Pricing:
If you're stopping by for the first time, please check out the details on our home page, use the nav bar above for a preview, and see what you think of our video trailers and posters. If you have questions, please contact us. Bob Henderson also co-authored a book in 1993: German Prisoners of War in Canada and Their Artifacts, 1940-1948
Details from AirMuseum.ca:
There's a listing at Amazon but no copies available there or via AbeBooks. Chris Madsen is also the author of another book on the period: The Royal Navy and German Naval Disarmament 1942-1947.
Treatment of Allied POWs (at least those from the West) in German POW camps was largely professional. Here's the text of an excerpt (7:10-7:28) from the above interview with Walter Morison, a British former POW held at Sagan and then Colditz.
For more information about his escapes and daily camp life, see his book Flak and Ferrets: One Way to Colditz. (Enlisted men and those in larger camps probably had it rougher, especially in terms of food. Things also got considerably worse towards the end of the war -- and even in the immediate aftermath.) There were numerous successful Allied escapes from the (supposedly) high security POW "camp" in Colditz Castle (overlooking the town of Colditz in the German state of Saxony, which became part of East Germany after the war). Wikipedia covers the attempts with links to other details. Mario Bosch has a long list of Colditz books in his collection -- spanning several languages. One of the originals, Pat Reid's 1952 "Escape from Colditz" is available from Archive.org for those with an encryption key from the Library of Congress' National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. For the rest of us, Archive.org offers a free download (in several formats) of "Colditz: The German Side of the Story" (1962), an English translation of a book by Reinhold Eggers, the German Security Officer at Colditz. Paul Brickhill was born in Melbourne, Australia and began his career as a journalist at the Sydney Sun. He joined the war effort, trained as a pilot, was shot down in March 1943 and sent to Stalag Luft III. In addition to helping plan the famous escape, he put his writing skills to good use. In 1946, he first published Escape to Danger with fellow POW Conrad Norton, illustrated by Ley Kenyon. Here's a review:
His famous book came next
(Source: a reprint of the April 1991 obituary in The Guardian: "Inescapable fears of the wartime hero".) The Great Escape was published in 1950 or 1951, and was the primary source for the 1963 movie of the same name. Two of his later books were also made into movies:
David J. Carter's book "POW Behind Canadian Barbed Wire" is subtitled "Alien, Refugee and Prisoner of War Camps in Canada, 1914-1920 and 1939-1946". There are lots of details on his site. The book consists of 254 pages packed with information, plus 8 pages of glossy photos. The appendix has lists of the camps, a sample daily routine, a weekly list of rations for POWs, and more. Among countless other stories, here are some excerpts from page 80 regarding an escape from the Angler POW camp:
(Wikipedia has an overview of the escape.) You can order the book directly from Eagle Butte Press (in Canada but ships worldwide), or from Amazon -- including one seller in Montana that offers signed copies. (We'll start more active blogging soon. Meanwhile, here's a timely item that we came across.) Historian Allen Koop, author of Stark Decency: German POWs in a New England Village, will be telling the story of New Hampshire's only World War II prisoner of war camp this week in Norwich, VT. The event is part of the Vermont Humanities Council's Humanities Lecture Series called First Wednesdays. According to the Norwich Public Library's website:
title: Stark Decency: German POWs in a New England Village
speaker: Allen Koop
where: Norwich, VT
location: Norwich Congregational Church, 15 Church Street
date: Wednesday March 3, 2010
time: 7:00pm
cost: Free!
notes: Open to the public. For more information, call 802-649-1184.
(Update: changed the post title.) |