THE LONGEST TUNNEL <i> by Alan Burgess (Grove Weidenfeld: $19.95; 288 pp.)</i>

Among the incredible stories that came out of World War II, one of the favorite types is prison-camp escape. “The Longest Tunnel” is the historical account of the story already recorded once in the “The Great Escape,” and immortalized (with some adjustments for drama) in the film of the same name. The first book was published very shortly after the war, however, and Alan Burgess began to put together a more detailed account after attending a Stalag Luft III reunion in 1986.

This is the gripping story of the tunnel called “Harry,” a 350-foot escape hatch that on the night of March 24, 1944, allowed 76 prisoners to slip out of a high-security German prisoner-of-war camp. Only three of the escapees made it safely to Allied lines; 23 were returned to the camp and 50 shot by the Gestapo. Burgess, a BBC producer from 1946 on, has, in his own words, “dramatized a whole series of such epic war stories,” and does so in this book with a sure hand on the facts and a storyteller’s sense of timing and suspense.