Did the SBO have the authority over Roger (Big X) when it came to making decisions about the escape? If you remember the SBO was reserved about the number of escapees. Just curious who could have pulled rank on the tunneling & other decisions!
shareThe Senior British Officer played by James Donald was a Group Captain, a rank equivalent to a Colonel in the army. Being the highest ranked officer he would have had the final authority over everyone (including Bartlett) in the POW camp in the same way that he would in a combat operation.
So if it came to a crunch he could have ordered the Great Escape to have been halted but he chose not to and let it go ahead despite his personal misgivings.
Thanks. I thought as much! :)
shareThe SBO should have over-ruled Bartlett in my opinion. The escape was a luderous idea.
Trying to take hundreds of men out through the tunnel at one time then escape from Germany was a crazy idea. Barnett signed those mens death warrants.
On a side note, Richard Attenborough portrayed Barlett in the most annoying and egotistical way possible too. Really wasn't a fan of his character at all
Bartlett didn't sentence them to death - the Nazi authorities did. The shootings were part of the prosecution case against Goering at Nuremberg after the war, for example. It was a display of petulant cruelty by Nazis whose war effort was already under severe strain by early 1944, when the escapes happened. As 1944 drew on, Nazis encouraged the police not to interfere if German civilians lynched bailed-out Allied aircrew, and a number of shot-down fliers were lynched in 1944 and 1945 in this way. Significantly though, there had not been this kind of mass shooting of Western Allied POWs before following escape from a camp, and there were no more mass escapes after this because it was now all too clear that the Germans would carry out executions. "Bartlett as the villain" opinions ignore the fact that the Germans had not previously been so ruthless with escapes, and they also seem designed to whitewash Nazi behaviour in World War II.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."