h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hollywood has already mangled so many films including Get Carter, and more recently The Italian Job. Let's hope it keeps it's hands off this one

Well, the Hollywood studios are rumoured to be reimagining The Colditz Story/ Escape from Colditz with an American cast escaping from the legendary POW camp- including a posible Tom Cruise(!) Ironic that only the Brits managed to escape from Colditz during the war.

Too bloody right. For too long now Hollywood has been plundering the past and what was once a gem is often repackaged as a glossy turd. If you need proof just look at The Avengers (ahh!) and Get Carter (get outa here). What was the name of that bloody awful film that had the Americans capturing the German Enigma code? When in fact it was the British. I'm sure there are a lot more examples of our Colonial friends re-writing history. Also why are us Brits always seen as villans or bumbling idiots in movies?

Or even seen to be cowardly.

There were never any more than six Yanks in Colditz and they arrived far too late in the war - late 1944 when the various senior officers wre starting to worry about the consequences of escaping (re. the death sentence passed on escapees from other camps and the machine-gunning of the fifty escapers from the stalag). With Germany begining to collapse from the inside and lots of SS troops being posted to the area - as well as local resentment at the bombing of Dresden and other nearby cities - it was thought any RAF or USAF escaper caught outside the camp would be lynched by angry German civvies. This restricted escape opportunities and endedup as a voluntary agreement not to make any more escaper attempts after Feb '45 - ther Colditz inmates then agreed to sit it out until liberation (which was provided by the Americans, incidentally)

So the few Americans in Colditz never really had the same range of chances that the "original" Brits, Poles, French, et c, had since day one, they arrived too late.