Colditz: The Definitive History
Henry Chancellor
Hodder & Stoughton £20, pp446

The story of Colditz Castle has long felt like it needed to mount a great escape of its own; it has been imprisoned for too long by the myths and legends created about it by the eponymous BBC television series which, over just 28 episodes, anchored primetime viewing throughout the Seventies. On the small screen, the German prison for Allied officers became a dark and dreadful place, endured only through the remarkable stoicism and camaraderie of the plucky British officers incarcerated within it. Their repeated attempts at escape, in the face of the immense physical and human barriers placed in their way, was nothing less than a mark of character.

Henry Chancellor's exceptionally readable new account of Colditz goes a long way to dispelling at least one of those myths: that, perched high on its hill, the castle was the ideal place in which to imprison officers set on escape. There is no doubt that, to those arriving at its gates for the first time, generally having been transferred from all the other camps from which they had previously escaped, it presented a fearsome and apparently unbeatable challenge. It had, after all, been chosen specifically for the job of holding those who could not be held elsewhere.

As Chancellor makes clear, the reality was rather different. Colditz was a castle of hundreds of rooms and, therefore, hundreds of doors behind which so much could be concealed. There were wall cavities and great stretches of attic space. There were crypts and cellars and dark nooks and crannies that the German officers charged with guarding it had never even seen. In short, it was a terrible building to use as a prison. For enterprising and bored Allied officers, who firmly believed it was their duty to cause mayhem, the possibilities for escape were apparently endless. Even its hilltop location was a bonus - it was much easier for an escaper who had made it over the walls to pick up speed on the downward slopes.

As a result, more than 300 escape attempts were made and Chancellor makes sure you are never more than a page away from one of them. Some, like the gymnast who simply leapt over the barbed wire, were solo affairs; others like the great tunnel dug from the Colditz wine cellar by the French officers, who naturally stopped to sample the bottles held there, were the work of dozens. Each escape is a deliciously taut little narrative, economically told.

Where this history falls flat is in its ability to tell us any more than the television drama about the psychological realities of life within the castle walls. The plucky, enterprising officers of the BBC1 programme, battling through despite the odds, remain merely plucky and enterprising. There is some material here on the psychiatric problems of incarceration but it is slight. Likewise, the issue of homosexuality within the confines of an all-male prison is dispatched within just a few paragraphs, as though it were too unspeakable to detain us. (Is it really likely that a bunch of banged-up ex-public-school boys weren't going at it like knives?)

It is true that much of the mythology surrounding Colditz was created in the first place by many of the officers who were held there, not least Major Pat Reid whose books, first published in the 1950s, gave so much to the television series, and it may have proved impossible to penetrate the steely reserve of those still living after so many years. But it is hard to believe that the psychodrama within the walls of Colditz Castle really was as undynamic as Chancellor's book suggests, or that the castle was occupied by so many certified stoics.

This book makes a claim through its subtitle to get beyond the shallow world that the television series portrayed and on the key issues of the emotional life of the men within, it fails. It matters little that Chancellor dismisses the 'definitive' tag in only the book's second paragraph by claiming no book can really live up to it. If he didn't feel comfortable with the subtitle, he shouldn't have let it go on the cover. Still, that lack of insight is hardly likely to trouble those who come to this text in search of derring-do: the text is fair sodden with it.