The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

      

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

      Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2019

      Cover design and illustration by Leo Nicholls

      Maps by Martin Brown

      The publishers have made every effort to credit the copyright holders of the material used in this book. If we have incorrectly credited your copyright material please contact us for correction in future editions.

      Patrick Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008309046

      Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008309060

      Version: 2019-04-05

       Dedication

      TO MARY JO, THOMAS AND MARTHA ROSE

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       List of Maps

       Preface

       Prologue: ‘Some Devils Got Him’

       1 A Question of Upbringing

2 Blooded

3 ‘In the Bag’

       4 The Escaping Club

       5 Home Run

       6 Room 900

       7 From Normandy to Nuremberg

       8 The Long March

       9 Darkest Hour

       10 ‘A Perfect Woman, Nobly Planned’

       11 The Arithmetic of Victory

       12 Warrior in a Dark Blue Suit

       13 ‘The Perfect Target’

       Epilogue: Hinton Waldrist

       Acknowledgements

       Notes

       Picture Section

       Index

       Also by Patrick Bishop

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       Maps

      The siege of Calais

      Plan of Colditz Castle

      AN’s unsuccessful and successful escapes through Germany, Poland and Switzerland

      Escape lines operated by Pat O’Leary and Comet in France and the Low Countries

      Arnhem showing Pegasus operations

       Preface

      Biography masquerades as history but is often a species of fiction. That is not necessarily the fault of the biographer. Establishing the external facts of a public life in modern, well-documented times is fairly straightforward. It is charting the inner landscape that is the problem. How can we know what someone really thought, what drove him or her to do this or that? Letters and diaries open a window on these