Eric Ernest Williams (1911–1983)

In a POW camp, the Nazis have placed the huts far from the boundary so that any escape tunnel would have to be a long one. One British officer has the idea of starting a daily gynmastics routine using a vaulting horse: they can place it near the boundary and start a tunnel from under it. He and two others do escape the camp by this means and plan to make for neutral Sweden. To do that, they’ll not only have to move around without arousing any suspicions, but also find a stranger from a neutral or occupied country who’ll be willing and able to help them. (fonte: imdb)… (más)

The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams, Escape Alone by David Howarth, Return Ticket by Anthony Deane-Drummond,
Eric Williams MC (13 July 1911 – 24 December 1983) was an English writer and former Second World War RAF pilot and prisoner of war (POW) who wrote several books dealing with his escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, most famously in his 1949 novel The Wooden Horse, made into a 1950 movie of the same name.
Compellation of short escape stories from WWII: Downed aviators, resistance fighters etc. devising resourceful ways to escape captivity and then make it to freedom. Their plans, tools and escapes are smart, ingenious and fascinating. They travel trough occupied Europe by foot, trains, boats and even bicycles. Their adventures include jailbreaks, organized escape networks, help form brave citizens and sometimes just plain luck!
The stories in the book are true and absolutely riveting.… (más)

Williams himself was an escaper covered in his book, "The Wooden Horse". In this volume, he describes who escaped from prisons and life situations one might not necessarily consider a prison. He also has taken them from different eras.

The first episode covers an event in the American Civil War when three men escaped from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison in Georgia. Other examples of escapes in war time include Gunther Pluschow, a German aviator in WW I who flees England for Europe, Oluf Reed Olsen, a member of the Norwegian Underground who was captured while stealing equipment from a German plane on a German airfield and his escape to Britain to join the RAF and Oliver Philpot who escaped from the same tunnel author Williams used to escape Stalag-Luft III ( an escape you may read about in Williams book "The Wooden Horse".

Williams also includes escape stories from peace time by writers such as Antoine de Saint-Exupery (walk away from crash in the Libyan desert), Wilfred Grenfell (trapped on a frozen snow island in the Arctic), Igor Gouzenko (escape with secret documents from the Russian Embassy in Ottawa), Edward Whymper (escape from mountaineer accident), Sheilah Graham (escape from life as a British domestic to fame in Hollywood) and Jacques-Yves Cousteau (escape from under water disaster).… (más)