The Wooden Horse
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Wooden Horse
The Wooden Horse is a 1950 2nd World War film starring Leo Genn, Anthony Steel and David Tomlinson. It is based on the book of the same name by Eric Williams.
This true story, which few writers of fiction would have dared to try and get away with, is set in Stalag Luft III, the same POW camp where the 'real' Great Escape took place. The prisoners were faced with the problem of the accommodation huts being some distance from the perimeter fence. They came up with an ingenious way of digging a tunnel with its entrance located in the middle of an open area relatively near the perimeter fence and using a Vaulting Horse (constructed largely from plywood from Canadian Red Cross parcels) to cover the entrance. Each day they carried the horse out to the same spot, with a man hidden inside. Eventually, as the tunnel lengthened, two men were hidden inside. While a large group of men exercised using the horse, the two men dug the tunnel. At the end of the day they would conceal the tunnel entrance and hide inside the horse while it was carried back to their hut. They also had to devise a method of disposing of the earth coming out of the tunnel. For the final breakout, three men were carried in the horse: the last to replace the tunnel trap for the three in the tunnel.
Three men who did manage to escape made it to neutral Sweden.
The film was shot in a low-key style, fairly soon after the war, with a limited budget and a cast including many amateur actors. It tended to establish the important genre of British prisoner of war escape films. Some details were cut from Eric Williams' book, e.g. where the escaped POWs discussed the possibility of visiting potentially neutral "whorehouses" in Germany. (The idea was abandoned because of a fear that it might be a trap, not out of prudishness.)
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.