The Second World War is passing from living memory into history. The number of living veterans, who are now in their 90s, is dwindling. Each one of their first-hand accounts is a precious limited resource, a distinct view on pivotal historical events and human endurance under extreme adversity. Luckily, Royal Air Force bomber pilot Peter Tunstall was able to chronicle his experience as a prisoner of war in Germany before he died at age 94 in 2013.
Tunstall was already an RAF officer by the time Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. He completed only a handful of bombing missions before he was forced to land on the German-occupied Dutch coast in August 1940. Though Tunstall spent the rest of the war as a POW, he never stopped trying to escape or, when that proved impossible, making life as difficult as possible for his captors. His first escape attempt involved an ingenious combination of disguise and distraction, a ruse later referred to by other British prisoners as "doing a Tunstall." The attempt failed only after a policeman in a German port city found Tunstall's cover story (a Swedish fisherman robbed of his identity papers) unconvincing.
Tunstall's attempts grew exponentially more complicated and daring until he was finally transferred to the "escape-proof" prison at Colditz Castle, where he earned the nickname "cooler king" for his many punitive stints in solitary confinement. Tunstall's story is often exhilarating and even funny, though the game he played had deadly consequences (using fake German uniforms nearly got him executed more than once). --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer