Break-Out!: Famous Prison Escapes

Break-Out!: Famous Prison Escapes Review

In 1940 German prisoner of war Hans Marschner managed to see his way out of Mountjoy, only to be recaptured; in 1943 a young girl eating breakfast was surprised by twenty-one men emerging in her coal shed from the tunnel that had brought them out of Derry prison; the 'Magnificent Seven' grabbed world headlines in 1972 when they swam to freedom from the prison ship The Maidstone; in 1973 an astonishing escape occurred at Mountjoy when three prisoners were picked up by helicopter from the exercise yard in broad daylight; in 1974 Kenneth Littlejohn escaped in strange circumstances from Mountjoy; and then there was the escape from the high-security Maze prison in 1983, involving an incredible thirty-eight prisoners!

Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison

Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison Review

During the winter of 1863-1864, 1,200 Union officers lived in squalor and semi-starvation in Richmond's Libby Prison, known as "The Bastille of the South." On February 9, 109 of those officers wriggled through a fifty-five-foot tunnel to freedom. After an all-out Rebel manhunt, survivors reached Washington, and their testimony spurred far-reaching investigations into the treatment of Union prisoners.

Libby Prison Breakout tells the largely unknown story of the most important escape of the Civil War from a Confederate prison, one that ultimately increased the North's and South's willingness to use prisoners in waging "total war."