The two main differences for me were (a) the escape took place toward the end of March, when there was snow on the ground, and not in July or August; and (b) there were a lot of Americans in the camp, but they had been segregated from the British several weeks before the escape occurred.
IIRC, the only American left with the Brits was George Harsh, who had flown with the RAF as a volunteer before the US entered the war. I believe he was from Georgia, and there was no mention of him being a hot-shot motorcycle jock.
There was a TV documentary a few years back that purported to tell “the real story” of The Great Escape. They did mention a Steve McQueen–type American who was apparently a Big Man Around Camp, but I don’t recall his name. In any event, he couldn’t have been quartered with the British when the escape occurred.
They condensed a lot of real people into a few characters. The Americans ion the film had a lot more prominence than they did in the real camp – the Scrounger wasn’t American, nor was there anyone, really, like Steve McQueen’s character. There’s no way the “X” organization would have asked somebody to escape and deliberately be re-captured, as McQueen’s character was. getting out was hard enough in the first place, and they had plenty of information about the surrounding country, timetables, etc. from other sources. Their forger didn’t go blind, and didn’t try to steal a plane to get away (Two escapees DID start up a plane, but a pilot, thinking they had done it for him, took it, and they never got a chance to steal another. Oddly enough, Donald Pleasance, who played the Forger, actually HAD been a WWII POW. But not at Stalag Luft Drei.)
And Stalag Luft Drei wasn’t where they put “the bad apples”. That was Kolditz Strafelager, a much more difficult place to get out of (solid rock, so you couldn’t easily tunnel) Nevertheless, there were numerous escapes from there – incredibly outrageous ones, including one almost-escape using an airplane they built there. You can read about it in Pat Reid’s book, and there have been at least three films about that camp.
