Anzac Guerrillas

The incredible true story of how a handful of escaped Australian soldiers became resistance fighters, double agents and spies during World War II, evading the Nazis and exposing a group of genocidal collaborators.

When the Germans took thousands of Allied prisoners during the catastrophic Greek campaign of 1941, a handful of Australian soldiers escaped from prison trains in occupied Yugoslavia. What awaited them was not passage home, but a brutal underground war where the fate of a nation was at stake.

The Greatest Escape - Neil Churches with Edmund Goldrick

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest prisoner of war escape in of the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy.

In August 1944, the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place - 105 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with the help of U.S. intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay.