When Freedom Calls

“Would I be able to steal a Messerschmitt 110? I anxiously pondered this difficult problem as I crouched in the German wheatfield in which I was hiding on the edge of a Luftwaffe night-fighter airfield.”

The flame that spurs prisoners of war to escape springs from varied sources.

For some of the Second-World-War prisoners whose stories are told in this book, the alternative to escape was death.

Others felt that confinement and boredom were destroying their minds and escape was the only method of staying sane.

In one of the eleven adventures Robert Jackson has chosen, the motive was love.

Most of the escapes take place in Occupied Europe or in the Far East and involve Allied soldiers or airmen, but The One That Got Away is the story of the Luftwaffe pilot Franz von Werra who escaped from Canada.

The Big Break-Out, set in Australia, describes one of the most terrifying mass escapes in history.

One of these stories even involves a man who broke in to another POW camp to escape the tyranny of his own.

All were desperate plans and yet, remarkably, many of them succeeded – including one strategy that involved trading supplies for a wheelbarrow.

Wherever the setting and whatever the reasons for the escape, the predominant theme of all the stories is courage — courage and the determination, when freedom calls, to attempt and often to achieve the impossible.

These are tales of hope and triumph, of sorrow and heartbreak.

They are stories of desperation and they are stories of brilliance.

When Freedom Calls is a well-researched and detailed collection of some of the most daring escape plans in history.

Praise for Robert Jackson

‘The descriptions of weaponry…are authentically detailed.’ - Publishers Weekly

'Takes you to the heart of the action.' - Tom Kasey, best-selling author of Cold Kill.

Robert Jackson was born in 1941 in the North Yorkshire village of Melsonby. A former pilot and navigation instructor, his active involvement with aviation lasted many years. Following his retirement from the RAFVR in 1977 as a squadron leader, he became a full-time aviation writer and aerospace correspondent and lectured extensively on strategic issues. He speaks five languages, including Russian, and has written more than forty nonfiction works on military affairs. He is also the author of the popular Yeoman and SAS fiction series.