Narrow Escapes of WWII

Seeking to hit back at Japan, Col. Jimmy Doolittle puts B-25 bombers on aircraft for a mission that the crews have little chance of surviving.

Unsung heroes: the battalion of black soldiers who were surrounded, down to their last ten rounds, and yet who helped win the Battle of the Bulge.

This is the dramatic story of how Crete was captured by the Germans and how Robert Laycock led a desperate rear guard action against crack German mountain troops.

With 60,000 German soldiers surrounded by the Russian army, this is the story of the heroic rearguard action that allowed thousands of troops to escape.

By Easter 1941, all that stands between Afrika Korps commander Erwin Rommel and Egypts Suez Canal is Tobruk. Australias Gen. Leslie Morshead and his defenders are ordered to hold the Libyan port for eight weeks while the defenses of Egypt can be strengthened. The "Rats of Tobruk" are convinced that if they fail, the war against Germany will be lost.

As the war enters its final months, the nearly 2 million Germans living in East Prussia flee an advancing Red Army no longer distinguishing between German soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of thousands make for the Baltic ports--the start of the single biggest evacuation of WWII.

With the Italians preparing to invade Egypt in the summer of 1940, the British armys Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) causes havoc far behind the front. But after an LRDG patrol is attacked, a tough New Zealander named Ron Moore leads the survivors barefoot through the desert, 300 miles from Allied lines.