Author's Note – This is a somewhat different take on the Hogan's Heroes that we all known and love. While attempting to work out a timeline for the show based on different cues and putting some thought into an offhand comment made by a professor in class, I couldn't help but wonder what the real history of Hogan's Heroes might be. This is my attempt to explain it.
Two disclaimers are necessary for this story. I make no claim to ownership for the episodes, characters, or ideas of Hogan's Heroes. And this is entirely a work of fiction, although I've attempted to write it as a non-fiction book would be written.
Three apologies are also necessary. Aside from passing references, none of the Hogan's Heroes characters will be making appearances, although other characters will be based off of them; Although I have a general story arc planned out, I have gaps in the middle that have to be researched to fill them in, and my time is limited, so updates will be sporadic and probably far between. And, finally, I do my own editing, so there may be continuity errors and other things to that nature that creep in, especially as I don't intend to exactly follow canon.
I suppose I'll end off with one request. Please review and let me know what you think. This isn't an idea that I've seen tried anywhere else, and I don't know how something like this will be received. Love it, hate it, confused by it: let me know, please.
Any comprehensive history of the Second World War is filled with statistics detailing such things as arms expenditures and gross casualty rates. What those statistics belie is the personal element. Each number listed in some bland table played a vital role in the lives and in the deaths of a generation of men and women. This book is not a comprehensive history of WWII, nor will it contain unnecessary statistics. It is not a social history, as is the current fad for historians. Instead, it is a personal history, the story of a group of men working to bring an end to the war.
At one point during the war, RAF Bomber Command calculated that for every one hundred airmen it sent out on active operations, only twenty-four would survive unscathed through to the ends of their tours. Of the remaining seventy-six men, three would be burned or otherwise seriously maimed; sixty would be killed, either out on operations or in training accidents; and the final thirteen would be shot down over enemy territory and somehow manage to survive the descent. Of those thirteen men, shot down somewhere in Occupied Europe, one would evade the Germans and perhaps manage to reach England again. The other twelve would find themselves guests of the Germans, incarcerated in prisoner of war camps.
Of the thousands of men shot down, captured, and put in POW camps, many would attempt to escape and return to active operations. Although the Geneva Convention only guaranteed the right of escape to officers, it was nonetheless a task set to by prisoners of all ranks. Only a small percentage of all these escape attempts would be 'home runs,' to use the prisoners' own terminology, or successful escape attempts. But small as the percentage of successful escapers was, there was an even smaller percentage of men who voluntarily chose to remain within their POW camps and work from there to end the war. These men were the members of the RAF Special Services Command.
The name itself is misleading. They often found themselves without an official commanding officer. Most of the men were not members of the RAF; a few of them were not even airmen. And none of them considered themselves special. But this group of men quietly worked from deep behind German lines to do whatever they could to confound the German war effort.
While most of the men coming in through the heavy gates into the barbed wire enclosures of POW camps allowed their thoughts to turn immediately to escape, the members of the Special Services Command managed to push these thoughts aside. Membership in the organization was voluntary; men could chose to leave at any time, provided they swore an oath to never reveal any details of the operation. Over the course of the war, the personnel changed several times but, to the credit of the men involved, not one of them asked for a transfer. Even some sixty years after the war has ended, not one of these men has stepped forward with information about the operation, until now.
Spectacular information has a tendency to diffuse through the filters set in place to keep it confined and make its way out into the world. The existence of the RAF Special Services Command is no exception. The tight-lipped secrecy of the men and the protection of the British Official Secrets Act, however, combined to keep the true facts of the operation nearly completely from public knowledge. Who, after all, would believe that the antics portrayed on the popular 1960s television comedy Hogan's Heroes had any basis at all in fact?