Dodger

Product Description

The Dodger" is the long-awaited story of Johnny Dodge a wartime hero & a pivotal figure in the escapade immortalised in the legendary Hollywood film " The Great Escape". Of all the Allied prisoners who broke out of Hermann Gorings escape proof camp in the famous episode of March 1944 Johnny Dodge was the most intriguing. American-born Dodge was a cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill. When the Second World War broke out he volunteered for the Army but was quickly captured after the debacle of Dunkirk. He became a prisoner of war & an inveterate escapologist & troublemaker
- eventually becoming one of the ringleaders of the Great Escape. Surviving the murderous Gestapo he was thrown into a VIP compound of Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler
- but escaped once more. After recapture Johnny was spirited away by the SS to a meeting in Berlin with Hitlers interpreter who sent him on a clandestine mission to his cousin in Downing Street. His odyssey through the dying embers of the Third Reich to Switzerland & freedom in the company of a louche Nazi apparatchik is the last curious escapade in the story of Johnnys adventurous life. " The Dodger" draws upon Dodges voluminous private papers including photographs taken inside prison camps & letters home casting revealing new light on the myth of the Great Escape."